field of grass. Rose was on the northbound side.
A half mile of highway turned out to have a lot of garbage. There was a tire and tire shreds, two hubcaps, an alarm clock, and several hundred brightly colored advertising inserts that had lost their way. There were dirty napkins, half a paperback book, and a rotting T-shirt.
Rose filled a bag and rolled the tire over next to it, wondering how the tire had managed to get across the guardrail.
The sun was pleasantly warm and the road surprisingly interesting.
She glanced up now and then, checking out dragging mufflers or radios loud enough to be heard in the next county. She scrambled up the grassy hill to fetch Styrofoam or used Pampers, but mostly she stood in knee-high green grass, flecked here and there with early white daisies or poison ivy, reaching in for plastic water bottles and paper coffee cups.
This was the most unlikely after-school activity Rose Lymond ever expected to take up.
Every now and then, a vehicle strayed slightly out of its lane, its right tires running over the cut marks in the emergency lane designed to wake them up. The noise was shocking, like a sudden freight train, ending the instant the car corrected its wheels. Rose decided it was better not to look at the traffic. Sturdy as the protective metal fence was, Rose could not believe it would really hold back a truck going eighty miles an hour.
The wind rushed down the cupped valley, yanking the baseball cap from her head and lifting her blond hair. For a moment she felt beautiful, like a model in a shampoo commercial. She laughed out loud. Models hardly ever wore padded orange trash vests.
The laugh healed her a little. She straightened up, with such a crick in her spine she felt like Nannie.
So many cars coming so fast. Even now hundreds of them were probably rolling their windows down, preparing to chuck trash into her half mile. Way up ahead she could see a fellow worker on his hillside. The man south of her had not yet come over his hill but a dark SUV, like a square barrel on high tires, had paused in the emergency lane, blinkers on. Once she would have assumed the driver was checking his map. Now she knew he was getting rid of pizza crusts and old shoes.
Her grassy field came to an end, sloping down sharply to a narrow local road that passed beneath the Interstate. The road was so little used there wasn’t even a line painted down the middle. To reach the rest of her half mile, Rose would have to climb over the guardrail and walk on the overpass for a hundred feet. Oh, well, the emergency lane was designed so that fire engines and ambulances could pass on the right. There was plenty of room for one thin girl, even in a padded vest.
The lost baseball cap, tossed brutally in the wind tunnels of each passing car, came to rest in the center of the overpass. It huddled up against the cement curb along with lots of other trash.
The guardrail was nearly as high as her waist. Awkwardly she crossed over, lifting her spear so she didn’t put it through her foot. The cap was blowing around again. She hoped it wouldn’t be whisked out of reach. She heard the rumble of tires on the cut marks, but she was used to the racket now and turned without much interest.
A car was halfway out of its lane, hurtling forward on the diagonal across the emergency lane.
It was not braking.
It was going to hit the bridge.
It would hit Rose first.
Chrissie Klein had not had time for breakfast before she left for school, so she was having it after school. Chrissie was a big refined-sugar fan. She was having a Pop-Tart, a sight from which her mother had to be protected, as she did not approve of white sugar. As soon as she finished the Pop-Tart, Chrissie planned to have Froot Loops.
The Kleins had many phone lines: Chrissie’s, her mother’s office, her father’s office, the fax, and the dedicated Internet. When her own phone rang, Chrissie spoke into it with her mouth full, not worried because any friend