FURNACE by Muriel Gray

Author:Muriel Gray [Gray, Muriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

22

“Son of a bitch.”

She leapt back and threw her arms out. The splash from the puddle had completely soaked the front of her sweatshirt, and she looked down with rage at the muddy mess. Then her green eyes flicked back up and followed the retreating Chevy Suburban that had unwittingly done the damage.

“Damned four-wheelers,” she muttered under her breath, letting a smile twitch at the sides of her mouth as she realized she was aping Josh.

Griffin held the base of her sweatshirt in two hands and wrung it out. Muddy brown water dripped onto the asphalt of the parking lot, and she sighed as she let the soggy material fall back against her body and walked across to the knapsack she had left leaning up against a fence.

Hitching wasn’t quite as easy as she’d planned. A ride from a trucker in the TA in Nashville had taken her only thirty miles until he kicked her out, and now she was all but stranded in this out-of-town mall parking lot in the ass end of nowhere. Not that she’d been sorry to get out of the truck. The guy had been nothing like Josh. He’d weighed in at about two hundred and eighty pounds and had smelled like a Salvation Army hostel. But worse: He’d eyeballed her as she climbed into the smelly cab, and only Mother Teresa might have believed his lascivious leer was well intentioned.

Thirty miles was plenty, both for Griffin to endure the smell of the dumb brute’s armpits and for the driver to realize his passenger wasn’t going to put out. They parted without a grunt of farewell.

And so she’d tried car drivers, but thus far without luck. She sat down heavily on her knapsack and rolled up the sleeves of her ruined sweatshirt. The sun was playing tricks, appearing intermittently from behind thick cloud to dry up rain that kept falling in violent sheets. It was steamy and growing hot, and Griffin was getting annoyed.

She looked down at the brooch, pinned at an angle to the thick material, and fingered it, making its dull metal glint in the sunshine. The driver might have been a cretin but he could read, and if he wanted to think she was called Elizabeth, then that was fine by her. It hadn’t occurred to her that it would be useful in that respect, but now it had become a tool of anonymity.

“You should be a whole lot prettier,” she said to the cheap grey metal and ran a well-manicured nail over its uneven surface.

The thought made her smile again, and her smile was still in place as the roar of a truck entering the lot made her look up. Of course she could just give in and make one call and someone would pick her up in a matter of hours. But that wasn’t how it was going to be. Not if she could help it. Another ride from a truck driver wasn’t an attractive prospect, but it was better than no ride at all.

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