“My daughter is on that bus.” I grabbed her arm. “We have to go. We have to.”
I started up the road, stumbling on the uneven gravel.
“Catherine, wait. She could be hurt. She could be dying. Catherine, it’s over a mile uphill. We can’t—”
“I don’t care.” Tears streamed down my face. “She’s my daughter.”
I made it maybe 50 yards before my lungs gave out. I bent over, gasping, hands on my knees. Doris caught up to me.
“Listen to me. Running up this mountain won’t help her. The police will be here in minutes. The ambulances.”
“I can’t just stand here.”
“Then we flag down a car.”
I looked at her, my vision blurred with tears. “What?”
“There’s another vehicle coming.” Doris pointed down the highway. In the distance, I could see headlights approaching. “We flag them down. They can drive us up.”
We moved back to the shoulder. The vehicle grew closer—a pickup truck, dark blue, muddy from mountain roads. I stepped into the road, waving my arms. For a horrible moment, I thought it would pass us by.
Then brake lights flared red. The truck slowed, stopped.
A man leaned out the driver’s window—maybe 45, beard, flannel shirt.
“You ladies okay? There’s been an accident.”
Doris moved to the passenger side. “Up ahead. A bus. Can you take us there?”
The man’s expression shifted from confusion to alarm. “A bus? Jesus. Get in.”
I climbed into the back seat. Doris took the front. The truck smelled like coffee and sawdust.
“Name’s Jim,” the man said, already accelerating. “What happened?”
“The brakes failed,” Doris said. “Twenty-four people on board.”
“Christ.” Jim’s hands tightened on the wheel. “You see it happen?”
“We heard it.”
The truck climbed the grade, engine growling. I pressed my face to the window, searching the road ahead.
Please let her be okay. Please let her be alive. Please.
But even as I prayed, another thought crept in—dark, unwelcome.
She wanted you dead. She planned this. She was willing to kill you for money.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to push the thoughts away. She was still my daughter. No matter what she’d done, she was still my daughter.
“There,” Jim said, breaking through my thoughts.
I looked up. Through the windshield, I could see the bus tilted at a steep angle, half-buried in a gravel embankment on the right side of the road. And beyond it, 50 yards ahead, a hairpin curve.
Beyond the curve, the road dropped away into nothing.
Jim slowed the truck.
“Holy hell… if that bus had reached that turn.”
“It didn’t,” Doris said quietly.
We pulled onto the narrow shoulder. I threw open the door before Jim had fully stopped, my boots hitting gravel.
And that’s when I saw it.
A silver sedan parked about 50 yards beyond the bus, engine running, exhaust curling in the cold air. Tinted windows.
I couldn’t see who was inside, but I knew that car—or I thought I did.
My heart hammered against my ribs.
Marcus.
Then the sedan’s brake lights flared. It began to reverse slowly, deliberately, turned, and disappeared around the bend.
“Did you see that?” I asked Doris.
She was already looking at the bus, at the people climbing out. “See what?”
“The car. The silver—”
But when I turned back, it was gone.
Maybe I’d imagined it. Maybe my mind was playing tricks.
Or maybe it had been real.
I didn’t know.
And somehow, that was worse.
Jim had driven us up the mountain in less than five minutes. The pickup’s engine growled as it climbed the grade.
“Frank’s a good driver,” Jim said. “Frank Dawson. If anyone can stop a runaway bus, it’s him.”
Now standing at the crash site, I prayed Jim was right.
People were climbing out of the emergency exit at the rear of the bus. A construction worker in an orange vest helped an elderly woman down. A young mother clutched a little boy to her chest—he couldn’t have been more than six. Two men in denim jackets steadied each other, limping.
Frank Dawson, the driver, stood near the front, his hands braced on his knees. A thin line of blood trickled from a cut on his forehead. His shirt was soaked with sweat.
“Everyone okay?” Doris called out as we approached.
Frank looked up. His face was gray. “We’re alive. I don’t know how, but we’re alive.”
Jim was already on his radio. “Yeah, Charlie. I’m on Highway 11, just past mile marker 42. Bus accident. We need ambulances. Multiple injuries. Doesn’t look life-threatening, but yeah. Yeah, they’re on the way. Good.”
I barely heard him.
I was scanning faces, searching.
The construction crew. The elderly couple. The mother and child. A teenager. A man holding his wrist at an odd angle.
And then I saw her.
Rachel.
She stood at the edge of the group, half-hidden behind two men. Her hair hung in tangles around her face. Her jacket was torn at the shoulder. Her hands hung limp at her sides.
But it was her expression that stopped me cold—white, empty, staring at me.
For a moment, we just looked at each other—mother and daughter—across 20 yards of gravel and wreckage.
She didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
She just stared.
And I realized she was looking at me the way you’d look at a ghost.
Because I wasn’t supposed to be here.
I was supposed to be on that bus—supposed to be injured, supposed to be dead.
But I was standing here alive, whole, and she knew.
She knew that I knew.
Rachel’s mouth moved. I couldn’t hear the words, but I could read her lips.
No. No. No.
Her legs gave out. She collapsed onto the gravel, her hands pressed to her face, sobbing.
Doris’s hand found my shoulder. “Catherine… she did this.”
My voice didn’t sound like my own. “My daughter did this.”
“I know.”
“She tried to kill me.”
“I know.”
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