The drive from Merritt Island to Orlando is usually a peaceful one, something I look forward to, a time to think through my checklists of things to do for the day before I get to the office. I started out at 5 a.m. this morning because it was going to be a long day with the auditors. I wanted to make sure I had my ducks in a row. There were going to be questions about the vendor situation, and I wanted to be sure I had my answers down pat. They already suspected the fraud, and it was up to me to convince them that they were mistaken about the whole thing. I was going to need all my powers of concentration and persuasion to make this problem go away.
The road was still dark, with the sun just starting to break over the horizon, and I was lost in thought. Smoke from the recent muck fires obscured what visibility there was. So when I took my eyes off the road for a second to scan my blackberry for any early e-mails, I didn’t see the Scion parked in the middle of the road—at least not until the last minute. I slammed on the brakes, swerved to the side, and nearly rolled my SUV into the ditch trying to avoid the collision. Having escaped death by mere fractions of an inch, I sat for a moment gripping the steering wheel and trying to breathe. And then I let loose with a barrage of profanity the likes of which hadn’t escaped my lips since my football days at the University of Florida.
I jumped out of my car and ran up to the offending vehicle, intending to pulverize what I expected to be some drunken college kid who had fallen asleep after a night of carousing. But there was no one in the car. The driver’s window was open, the keys were in the ignition, there was a purse on the passenger seat, and what looked like half a ton of music equipment in the back. So where was the driver? No one in their right mind would leave all that sitting in the middle of the road where anyone could come along and take it. I reached gingerly into the purse and pulled out the wallet, looking for some form of identification. As I flipped out the driver’s license to take a look, I felt the shock of recognition. Alyss B. Reisling was the name on the card, but that wasn’t the name I knew her by all those years ago. And there was no mistaking that face—I had never met anyone else in my life who had that strange way of crinkling her eyes, that mocking twist to the corners of her mouth. It was Alyss all right. But what had happened to her? And what was her car doing parked in the middle of a road through the Florida swamp?
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