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  • Rescue
  • Jan Pendleton (bio)

The woman’s head was tilted back, her mouth slightly open as if she were sleeping. Her long pale arms came from a sleeveless dress that looked a deep burgundy red. It was dark and hard to see, just the headlights shining through the bushes and the moon coming hazily through the fog. Jensie McGrath had slid down the slope on her backside and was standing next to the passenger-side window, taking in the woman and the man sitting next to her, both of them dressed nicely, the woman in her shiny dress with a fine powder of glass coating the folded-over neckline that was really two sashes pinned together with a brooch. The man wore a suit; his slick dark head was twisted to one side, resting on the woman’s shoulder. It took Jensie a minute to see the blood running down the woman’s arm, a thin streak that collected in the palm of her hand turned upward in her lap as if she’d held it there for that purpose. My cup runneth over, Jensie thought as she looked at the thick pulpy blood rising over the woman’s thumb and running onto the gearshift panel and down into the place between the seats. She wondered how long the couple had been there, and how long it took a body to drain of its fluids. “A bunch of fish water,” Jensie’s mother Viola had told her when she was small. “That’s all people are made of, a bunch of fishy water.”

“Hullo?” Jensie said, hoping no one would answer. She didn’t want to hear the voices of strangers who looked dead or nearly dead, and she thought of yanking her way back up through the bushes to the road where she’d left her VW Bug running, the lights turned on so she could get in and drive off in a second. She’d been on her way home from visiting her sister on the Bayside Peninsula, glad they’d watched a Sandra Dee movie instead of Psycho or Diabolique, when she saw the lights coming through the trees. There were wrecks on the summit, people getting drunk at Brock’s and driving crazy along the winding curves. Jensie’s mother was dating the bartender at Brock’s, and Jensie thought of driving to the lodge and finding her sitting at the bar where she spent most of her time, her big white purse slung over her shoulder. But it was Sunday and close to midnight. Brock’s would be closed. Nothing but a bunch of dead people, Viola said about the locals who lived on the mountain. Jensie and her mother hadn’t lived on King’s Mountain all that long. Viola liked moving; she liked packing their things and unpacking them in someone else’s house, sleeping in someone else’s bedroom, drinking coffee in someone else’s kitchen.

Jensie thought of driving home and calling the police but she hated facing the pitch black cabin, nothing around but strings of snotty white fog coming [End Page 31] through the redwoods, and the sort of silence that gets up in your ears and makes them ring. She would have to park with her headlights shining on the front of the house so she could let herself in, shaking the way she did while she poked her key around the lock, sure somebody would jump out of the bushes and rape her. Once inside, she would run from room to room turning on all the lights and looking in the closets and under the beds to make sure none of her mother’s boyfriends was hiding there. Nothing like that had happened yet, but Jensie thought it might now that she was older and had a figure.

She would lie on top of her bed waiting for Viola’s Studebaker to pull sloppily into the driveway (Jensie’s mother always took her car when she went on dates), her fender brushing against the juniper and grabbing chunks of it with her rearview mirror. She would come to a fudging stop, edging forward a little, then...

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