The Impaler

Chapter 82

What are you going to do if he isn’t home? asked the voice in her head. Are you just going to sit in his driveway and wait for him like the desperate stalker you are?

“Shut up,” Cindy said. But another voice—a voice that sounded a lot like Amy Pratt’s—replied, Maybe I will.

The real question, said the first voice, is what are you going to do if your handsome soldier is home?

Cindy had no answer.

OCD stalker, chimed both voices in unison, and Cindy pumped up the volume on the radio. It was a Led Zeppelin song. Cindy couldn’t remember its name. All their titles have nothing to do with the lyrics, she thought, and began racking her brain for the answer. She became irritated when she couldn’t find it, but was nonetheless thankful that the voices in her head were finally silent.

Cindy took the back roads and turned onto Route 264 just outside town. She already knew the way to Edmund Lambert’s house—had unconsciously memorized the directions from all the time she spent staring down at his property on Google Earth. If she hurried, she figured she could make it in about half an hour.

But what would she do once she got there? And what was it about this Edmund Lambert that made her act so crazy; made her drive out, uninvited, to his house in the middle of nowhere so late at night?

Again, Cindy had no answer. Only a scene from an imaginary movie: a modern-day Gone with the Wind in which she saw herself rushing down a flight of stairs into Edmund Lambert’s arms—spinning kisses and rustling petticoats, then mad, passionate lovemaking on an Oriental rug as the music swelled around them.

The Led Zeppelin song fit perfectly.

Led Zeppelin? asked Amy Pratt in her head. Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler doing it to Led Zeppelin?

Impulsively, Cindy changed the station—old school hip-hop, Naughty By Nature’s “OPP.”

Cindy let out a laugh and pumped the volume louder. It had to be fate, she thought—Bradley Cox, the explosion, Scarlett O’Hara all at once a distant memory of a role she once played back in Greenville.

“You down with OCD?” Cindy sang. “Yeah, you know me!”

Oh yeah, Cindy Smith was beyond obsessed.