“You don’t know how to handle curves. Too herky-jerky. That’s why I was feeling sick.”

“Really? What if the time comes where we need to drive really fast, Caleb?”

“Get in!”

“What?”

Caleb fired up the van and Annabelle had to hustle around and jump in before he roared off. He accelerated so fast she tumbled into the backseat.

“What the hell are you doing?” she cried out as she struggled back up.

“When the time comes, I’m your wheelman.”

She managed to clamber into the front seat and quickly buckled up as he took one curve and then the next at almost sixty miles an hour. When she glanced over she noted how professionally he was maneuvering the steering wheel and then realized how smoothly the bulky van, which was clearly not designed for this sort of terrain, was handling the road.

“Caleb, how are you doing that?”

“I can drive, okay? You should have seen me at a guy named Tyler Reinke’s house. I took the Nova airborne.”

“I can see that you can drive. But how?”

He sighed. “Why do you think I kept that crappy Nova all these years?”

“I don’t know. I just thought you were either cheap or had no taste. Or both.”

“Well, I am cheap, but I actually do have taste. No, it was about my father.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My dad was a stock car driver.”

“No way!”

“After he retired from racing he worked on a NASCAR pit crew for Richard Petty.”

“King Richard?”

Caleb nodded. “I was his protégé.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You were Richard Petty’s protégé? Get out of here.”

“Annabelle, I started racing Go-Karts when I was six. Then I moved up to dirt track racing, and then on to ARCA where I was the top rookie. After that I finished number one in the Late Model Sportsman Series, which is like the junior circuit for NASCAR. I was just about ready to launch my career in the big leagues with Petty’s help. I was going to be the number two driver on Billy Nelson’s Chevy team out of Charlotte. They’d won the Winston Cup three years in a row and Bobby Mallard, their number one driver and a four-time Daytona 500 winner, was going to be my mentor. It was all set up, and then it all went to hell.”

“What happened?”

“I was doing a qualifying lap at Darlington. Some call it the ‘paper clip’ because it’s shaped like one. Others refer to it as the ‘Lady in Black.’ That’s what it was for me.”

“Why, what happened?”