1472210727 by Sheila O'Flanagan

Author:Sheila O'Flanagan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2015-07-01T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Steffie couldn’t decide if her blurry vision was due to the tears that were continually welling up in her eyes, the rain beating against the windscreen of the car, or the fact that she’d been drinking champagne earlier. In her frenzied dash out of the house, she’d forgotten about the alcohol, and even though she’d switched to cranberry juice later, she was uncomfortably aware that it would be better not to be driving at all. Which meant that she should really turn around and go home. But even if she wanted to, turning around in the narrow country road was impossible. She remembered a garage further up the road that would be a better place to stop. With a bit of luck she could get some hot coffee there and drink a gallon of it before … Well, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do or where she wanted to go yet. Maybe she’d be in a better frame of mind to figure that out after the coffee.

She sniffed a couple of times and rubbed the back of her neck. Her eyes were hot and stinging and her head ached. The rain drummed even harder against the windscreen and Steffie had to squint to see through it. Then she shrieked in disbelief as a dark shape shot across the road in front of the car. She yanked the steering wheel to avoid what she supposed was a fox or a cat (and hoped wasn’t a ghoul or a murderer) and felt the Citroën skid on the surface water. With an increasing sense of horror, she realised that she wasn’t in control any more and that she was heading for the ditch on the opposite side of the road. She tried desperately to correct the skid but the wheels had lost traction, and despite her turning into it as she once remembered being told to do, the car wasn’t responding. She couldn’t believe that she was about to crash. Yet there was nothing she could do to stop it. The Citroën hit the grass verge with a jolt and for a second she thought that everything was going to be all right because the impact hadn’t been forceful enough to deploy the airbags. But then she felt the ground give way beneath her as the vehicle toppled slowly and inexorably into the ditch, taking her with it.

Her seat belt kept her anchored in her seat, although her head bumped sharply against the driver’s door window when the car tilted sideways, stunning her for a moment. When her vision cleared, she could see the hedgerows and grass of the ditch through the window. She could also see that the ditch, normally dry, was full of water, which was already trickling into the footwell of the car. She felt a rising sense of panic as she scrabbled frantically at her seat belt without managing to release it. She recalled again her childhood fantasy of pretending to be a drowning princess, lying in water with her hair spread out, about to be rescued.

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