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too.
    The big woman bent down to Blakie, her hands on knees covered by her riding skirt. “Can I have my ice cream cone back, young fella?”
    Blake held it out. When she took it, he began to lick his fingers, which were covered with melting pistachio.
    “Thank you,” Carla told the horse-lady. “That was very kind of you.” Then, to Blake, “Let’s get you inside and cleaned up. After that you can have ice cream.”
    “I want what she’s having,” Blake said, and that made the horse-lady laugh some more.
    Johnny insisted that they eat their cones in a booth, because he didn’t want them decorating the Expedition with pistachio ice cream. When they finished and went out, the horse-lady was gone.
    Just one of those people you meet—occasionally nasty, more often nice, sometimes even terrific—along the road and never see again.
    Only here she was, or at least here her truck was, parked in the breakdown lane with traffic cones neatly placed behind her trailer. And Carla was right, the horse-lady had been nice to the kids. So thinking, Johnny Lussier made the worst—and last—decision of his life.
    He flipped his blinker and pulled onto the ramp as Carla had suggested, parking ahead of Doug Clayton’s Prius, which was still flashing its four-ways, and beside the muddy station wagon. He put the transmission in park but left the engine running.
    “I want to pet the horsie,” Blake said.
    “I also want to pet the horsie,” Rachel said in the haughty lady-of-the-manor tone of voice she had picked up God knew where. It drove Carla crazy, but she refused to say anything. If she did, Rache would use it all the more.
    “Not without the lady’s permission,” Johnny said. “You kids sit right where you are for now. You too, Carla.”
    “ Yes, master ,” Carla said in the zombie voice that always made the kids laugh.
    “Very funny, Easter bunny.”
    “The cab of her truck’s empty,” Carla said. “They all look empty. Do you think there was an accident?”
    “Don’t know, but nothing looks dinged up. Hang on a minute.”
    Johnny Lussier got out, went around the back of the Expedition he would never finish paying for, and walked to the cab of the Dodge Ram. Carla hadn’t seen the horse-lady, but he wanted to make sure she wasn’t lying on the seat, maybe trying to live through a heart attack. (A lifelong jogger, Johnny secretly believed a heart attack was waiting by age forty-five at the latest for anyone who weighed even five pounds over the target weight prescribed by Medicine.Net.)
    She wasn’t sprawled on the seat ( of course not, a woman that big Carla would have seen even lying down ), and she wasn’t in the trailer, either. Only the horse, who poked her head out and sniffed Johnny’s face.
    “Hello there . . .” For a moment the name didn’t come, then it did. “ . . . DeeDee. How’s the old feedbag hanging?”
    He patted her nose, then headed back up the ramp to investigate the other two vehicles. He saw there had been an accident of sorts, albeit a very tiny one. The station wagon had knocked over a few of the orange barrels blocking the ramp.
    Carla rolled down her window, a thing neither of the kids in back could do because of the lockout feature. “Any sign of her?”
    “Nope.”
    “Any sign of anyone ?”
    “Carl, give me a ch—” He saw the cell phones and the wedding ring lying beside the partially open door of the station wagon.
    “What?” Carla craned to see.
    “Just a sec.” The thought of telling her to lock the doors crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. They were on I-95 in broad daylight, for God’s sake. Cars passing every twenty or thirty seconds, sometimes two or three in a line.
    He bent down and picked up the phones, one in each hand. He turned to Carla, and thus did not see the car door opening wider, like a mouth.
    “Carla, I think there’s blood on this one.” He held up Doug Clayton’s cracked phone.
    “Mom?” Rachel asked. “Who’s in that dirty