Murder Road

Eddie speeds towards Coldlake Falls, hoping the town has a hospital. April questions Rhonda, who will only say that a man is following them. Headlights appear in their rearview mirror, and as Eddie speeds up, so does the truck behind them. When Eddie sees a sign for Coldlake Falls, he turns rapidly. The truck goes past, continuing down the road.

At the hospital, Rhonda is taken into an exam room. April and Eddie are covered in her blood from carrying her inside. April worries that it looks like they hurt Rhonda and begins planning their escape. Before she can decide whether to act or not, the police arrive.

April’s childhood was traumatic, characterized by constant fear as her father physically abused her and her mother. When she was 12 years old, she and her mother left that life behind. Soon after, April began managing their life together. By 15, she learned to blend in with girls her age, even though she knew things they didn’t, like how to leave her current life at a moment’s notice and without a trace. By the time she was 18, she was alone and continued living in much the same way—staying anonymous, ready to leave her life at any time.

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, she got a job as a server in a bowling alley and rented a room in a house filled with kids her age. One February day, thinking she was alone in the house, she came out of her bedroom in her bra and jeans. She was startled to find a man in the hallway. It turned out that the man, Eddie Carter, was a friend of her roommates, recently returned from Iraq. He apologized for scaring her and then asked her out. She said yes, and by July, they were married. April is still amazed that she is married.

Now, at the hospital, they watch a police officer approach. Eddie tells her not to say anything about the truck that followed them. Officer Syed introduces himself, but before he can question them, two police detectives arrive—one in a rumpled suit and the other in a pristine tracksuit. April immediately recognizes the man in the tracksuit as dangerous. They send Syed away and tell April and Eddie that Rhonda has just died, making this a murder case.

The detectives introduce themselves—the one in the suit is Detective Beam, and the one in the tracksuit is Detective Quentin. When April asks to see their badges, Quentin becomes confrontational, asking what he’d find if he ran her name through the system. April reflects that “he’d find nothing. My mother had made sure of it, and so had I” (26).

Quentin tells them their car will be impounded and examined. The next day, he will take them out to the road where they found Rhonda so that they can walk him through the interaction. In the meantime, they take April and Eddie to a local bed-and-breakfast. The owner, Rose Jones, is rude and abrupt with them and the police alike. She mentions that she was married to a police officer before showing them to their room.

In bed, Eddie tells April that when the truck passed them, he saw a girl sitting in the pickup’s bed, staring at him. Eddie has post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from his military service in Iraq and sometimes has hallucinations. He doesn’t know if the girl was real.

April comments on how quickly the detectives arrived at the hospital, and they conclude that this must have happened before. Eddie remarks on how calm and collected April was when she saw that Rhonda Jean was bleeding, and she tells him that there are things other than war that prepare people for trauma. Although Eddie knows some of the truth of her history, he doesn’t know everything.

The next morning, April notices how cluttered Rose’s house is, filled with figurines and prominent pictures of Princess Diana. Two new officers pick them up to take them to the station, and one shares the local gossip that Rose killed her husband—a neighbor claims to have seen his body in the grass while Rose dug in the garden. The other officer says it isn’t true—Rose’s husband died of a heart attack. When they pass a police car going the other way, Eddie tells April that they are probably going to Rose’s to search their luggage.

April’s life changed the summer that she was 12 years old, and she thinks about the trauma every summer. Since then, she’d moved through life anonymously and invisibly until Eddie noticed her. On their fourth date, she’d told him some of what had happened to her. He reacted by kissing her hand. This tender moment merged with her memories of that earlier, traumatic summer, changing how she felt about the season.

The police car stops in a parking lot where Quentin and Beam are already parked along with Syed and his partner. Quentin spreads a map on the hood of his car, and together he and Eddie trace their route to the road they found Rhonda Jean on—Atticus Line. Eddie explains again that they were lost—he got off the interstate by accident. April hopes that Eddie follows her lead, as she is sure she has more experience with the police than he has.

Quentin has done background checks and was surprised to find very little on April—only a driver’s license. She can tell that he suspects that there is more to her past. Eddie points out that their marriage and honeymoon reservations are verifiable, and it would be ridiculous to arrange all that just to kill a girl and take her to the hospital.

Quentin drives them out to Atticus Line, and they point out where they picked up Rhonda Jean. April remembers seeing a light in the trees that night, but she doesn’t mention it. While the police question Eddie, April walks around the area. The road feels strange and abandoned, and she wonders why Rhonda Jean was there in the middle of the night.

Syed approaches April and warns her not to make Quentin angry. He also tells her that most locals avoid Atticus Line, which leads to a private home called Hunter Beach. The owner allows kids to camp there for free, and as a result, there are often hitchhikers along Atticus Line. Since Rhonda Jean wasn’t a local, he guesses that she was either going to or leaving Hunter Beach.

April sees Quentin watching her while Eddie talks to Beam. As she and Syed walk back to the cars in the July heat, she wonders why Rhonda was wearing a jacket. Just then, she feels a blast of cold and then becomes so dizzy that she crouches down. Peeking out of the leaves at her feet, she sees a faded cloth flower and a card that says, “In memory of Katharine O’Conner. March 2, 1993” (53).

Quentin and Beam take April and Eddie to the police station for questioning. They are interviewed separately, and neither of them says anything about the truck. Afterward, the police leave them at Rose’s house, where lunch is waiting for them. April believes that she is bad luck and feels bad for dragging Eddie into something. He reminds her that until he was adopted at the age of six, he’d had bad luck, too.

After they eat, Eddie goes for a run and April finds a novel to read: Flowers in the Attic. She falls asleep, and when she wakes up, Rose is sitting beside the bed watching her. She asks if they have heard the gossip that she murdered her husband, Robbie. When April says yes, Rose tells her that the officers are jealous because Robbie was the best cop on the force, but never got promoted because he was Black. She offers to make dinner for April and Eddie, and April asks if this means that Rose doesn’t believe they murdered Rhonda Jean. Rose replies that she’s not sure about April, but Eddie couldn’t kill anyone. Rose wants to know what happened with Rhonda Jean, and April agrees to tell her if Rose shares information about the town, and especially the police.

Rose tells April that people won’t like her because she is too pretty. April changes the subject and asks about Katharine O’Connor. Rose tells her that Katharine was a hitchhiker from Hunter Beach who was strangled several years ago. April tells Rose everything she told the police, but Rose can tell she is holding back. Finally, April admits they think someone was following them but doesn’t give Rose specifics. Rose tells them they should investigate Rhonda Jean’s death to get ahead of the police, and she offers to lend them Robbie’s old car.

Rose gives them directions to Hunter Beach and comments that even if the police went there, the kids living there wouldn’t tell them the truth, but they might talk to Eddie and April. Eddie is hesitant about trusting Rose, but April points out that they need help—whoever was following them might be coming after them. Eddie tells her that he saw a man in Rose’s backyard and is worried it was a hallucination.

At Hunter Beach, they see only one vehicle—an old van. Down by the beach, they find a cabin surrounded by tents, and April and Eddie approach some kids sitting around a firepit. Eddie asks if one of them owns the place, and they laugh. April realizes that he is playing dumb to get information and plays along. When they ask about Rhonda Jean, she can tell from the kids’ reactions that the police haven’t been there. They go into the house, whose posters and sagging furniture remind April of many places she’s lived before.

They tell the kids about Rhonda Jean’s murder, and one of the girls, Gretchen, begins to cry. They tell April and Eddie that Rhonda was only there a few weeks and had left home because of her father’s abuse. Rhonda left Hunter Beach late one night, hoping to sleep at the bus station until morning. Gretchen says that Todd, the owner of the old van, should’ve given her a ride, but he replies that no one saw her leave. Gretchen says the Lost Girl got her and tells them the local story about a “girl haunting Atticus Line, killing hitchhikers” (79). April remembers the blast of cold air before she found Katharine O’Connor’s memorial on Atticus Line. Finally, one of the boys, Mitchell, admits that he saw Rhonda Jean leave that night.