What the hell was she doing out here at a time like this?
I eased my foot down onto the brake pedal, and the car slowed to a stop. I looked out the window at the woman. She cut a pitiful figure: shoulders slumped, head down, all while the rain poured down on her in heavy sheets.
I rolled down the window.
“Looking for a ride?” I asked.
She lifted her head, and nodded. I undid my seatbelt with a click, leaned over and opened the passenger’s side door. She climbed inside and brushed her soaking wet hair out of her face. She was beautiful.
“Where you headed?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said quietly, “to hell I guess.”
I laughed at the perceived joke, but my laughter died when I saw the grave expression her face.
“Well,” I said. “I can get you as far as Los Angeles. I guess that’s about as close to hell as you can get without dying.”
Her face eased into a wry smile.
“Okay,” she said. “Los Angeles it is.”
I smiled at her and hit the gas. Silence settled over us as we drove, and the rain came down heavier and heavier. Even with the wipers on full speed, it was impossible to see through the endless gray curtain of water.
“So what brings you out here in weather like this?” I finally said.
She looked a bit startled as she stared out the truck’s windshield.
“Oh,” she said, “I hate the rain.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a good thing I found you when I did. This area is prone to flash floods, you know.”
A convulsive shiver shook her entire body. I cranked up the heat.
“Hey, not to sound like a pervert, but shouldn’t you get out of those wet clothes? I have some spare dry ones in the back, and I won’t watch you change, I promise.”
“Okay,” she said. She pulled her coat and shirt off right then, before reaching in the back and grabbing an old T-shirt I kept as a spare in the back.
“Oh my god,” I said.
Now that her coat was off I could see her neck. A thick, purple bruise encircled it. She looked like she had been strangled.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Do you need medical attention?”
“Ambulances don’t come out here,” she said. “Same for police. It’s too remote.”
“Er, right,” I said. This woman was starting to make me uncomfortable, and our conversation once again faded into silence. It was a few minutes before she spoke again, right as the car was about to crest a large hill.
“Stop the car,” she said.
I slowed, but didn’t stop.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Stop the car.”
“I can’t do that,” I said, “I’m on a tight schedule, you know? And besides, I can’t just leave you out here in this weather.”
She turned to me. The look on her face was totally blank as she seized the wheel and pulled. The truck jerked to the right, and tires squealed as I slammed on the brakes. I jerked the wheel back but it was no good, the truck slammed into the guard rail, shearing off a post and plunging into slushy mud.
“God damn it!” I yelled. “What the hell is wrong with—what the hell?”
The woman had disappeared. I squinted out the window into the shifting gray canvas of rain.
Had she somehow fallen out while the car was skidding?
I looked at her seatbelt, still buckled. This was too weird for me. I hit the gas, but the truck’s wheels only spun. I was stuck. I pulled out my phone and called the police to let them know where I was, but they said they couldn’t reach me until weather conditions improved.
I resigned myself to waiting, flipped on the radio and took a nap.
I awoke to a knock on my window. I opened my eyes to see a policeman, motioning for me to roll down the window. I obliged.
“Well,” he said in a thick Southern drawl. “Believe it or not you might just be the luckiest son of a gun on the planet.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on out, I’ll show you.”
I did as I was told, and the two of us walked to the top of the hill. Lying in the middle of the road below, lodged in a massive swell of mud, was a rock about half the size of my truck.
“You come over that hill,” said the policeman, “I reckon you never would have seen it in the rain. It’s a lucky thing you lost control when you did, otherwise, well…”
He looked at me pointedly.
“But I didn’t lose control,” I said. “This woman I picked up–a hitchhiker–she jerked the wheel and sent me into the mud.”
“That right?” he said. “Where’d she go?”
“She, uh, disappeared.”
A peculiar expression stole over his face.
“Remember what she looked like?”
“Er, yeah,” I said. “Black hair, blue eyes, and…”
“And what?”
“A bruise around her neck. It was a bad one.”
The policeman nodded and sighed.
“Looks like you ran into Maggie. She’s the local legend round here.”
“Legend?”
The officer nodded, and explained.
Apparently Maggie was a single mother who had locked her daughter in her room, in order to keep the girl from running off with an abusive boyfriend. She went off to work, and left her daughter, taking the key with her. It rained hard that day, and the house was flooded. The daughter couldn’t get out, and drowned.
Maggie was inconsolable—she hanged herself a week later. Her note said that she was going to hell to atone for her sins.
But she didn’t go to hell. According to the legend, she stayed on earth to atone by saving wayward travelers from the same fate her daughter had suffered.
I supposed I might have bumped my head in the crash, that Maggie might have been nothing more than a hallucination—except for one thing. When I went back to my truck, the shirt and jacket she had been wearing were sitting there still, soaking wet, on my passenger seat.
I still have them.