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like a drumbeat on the roof of the car.
    He felt a touch on his arm, but gentle as it was, he twitched nervously. “ Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asked softly, the words barely audible over the rain. “Are you sick? Is that it? Do you have some sort of—”
    “Not that I know of.”
    Another long silence fell. She gently stroked his arm. “I know your parents died young.” Her voice was strained. “I know you’ve never wanted to talk about them.”
    “It’s not—”
    She pushed on. “All you’ve ever said is that they’re both dead, but you never said how they died.”
    “They just died,” Carl said, more sharply than he intended. The uneasiness he’d felt so often since Sunday night was growing again, with the strange almost-queasiness. Like waking from one of those—
    “Was it something … hereditary?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you, I’ve been short of sleep this week.”
    “But why? There’s always a reason.”
    He was silent, rounding a wide curve. Ahead, the hills would become steeper, more heavily wooded, the curves sharper and almost continuous. He yawned. A wave of sleepiness came over him, and the road flickered and shifted beneath the headlights.
    “Carl! Watch out!”
    He felt the tires hit the gravel beside the road, realized he was dangerously close to the ditch, yanked the steering wheel over. The rear wheels drifted. He was fighting the steering wheel, sliding, almost across the road. Finally he got straightened out, in the left lane. Shuddering, weak with relief, he steered into the right lane and slowed. The rain had picked up again.
    “You better let me drive,” Shelly said, swallowing nervously. “Before you kill us both.”
    “Might not be a bad idea, you driving,” he mumbled, heart pounding, arms trembling as he pulled onto the berm. “Here, you slide over and I’ll get out and go around.” Bracing himself against the cold rain, Carl shoved the door open with his shoulder and climbed out. A sudden tingle, not from the rain, caught at him as he crossed through the headlight beams. A prickling tingle that touched every part of him like an electrical charge.
    Lightning about to strike? He’d read somewhere that the accumulating charge in the air could raise the hair on your arms.
    Scared, he hurried to fold himself into the passenger’s seat and shut the door. With the bench-style seat forward for Shelly to drive, his knees barely cleared the dash. He felt the warmth where she had been sitting. He looked toward her, saw that she was watching him, as if reluctant to put the car in motion. Or reluctant to give up her prying questions.
    Her pale brown eyes looked dark in the dim light reflected into the car.
    “You know, Carl,” she said hesitantly, “this past week I’ve realized something. My brother’s a jerk most of the time, but even a jerk is right once in a while. I really don’t know much about you. You never talk about anything that happened before you moved here.”
    Swearing silently, because he had no idea how to reassure her, Carl slumped in his seat. Whatever he said now, her brother Mike would insist he’d made it up.
    “You can talk to me, you know that,” she went on. “Why do you keep shutting me out this way?”
    He sighed. “I don’t mean to.”
    “I thought you loved me. You said you loved me.”
    “I do, Shelly.” Did he? “It’s just that I—” The tingle came again.
    Not just his skin. This time it formed inside him, first in his chest then through his stomach and into his legs, pushing out into his arms and hands, as if his heart had suddenly begun pumping not his own warm blood but some icy, alien solution that was trying to freeze him from the inside out. This couldn’t be a prelude to lightning. Could it?
    ***

Chapter 6
    “Mike thinks you must have been in jail,” Shelly said. “You weren’t, were you, Carl?”
    “Jail? Huh?” Hadn’t Harry implied that? And then he’d made a crack