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Death is a familiar presence. After this long, anything would be.
Death hangs over the blocky little car on the highway. It trails like smoke from the motel miles and miles down the road.
In the car a young lady is clutching the wheel, eyes dark, brows furrowed, hair in curls. If the things go the way they like to go, the young lady will meet a very angry man in the motel miles down the road, and she will drive her blocky little car no more.
Betty drifts down the road and makes herself seen. Maybe she can help.
The blocky car rolls slowly to a stop. Nothing happens for a while, then the window slides down.
"Need a lift?" the young lady asks.
She has a low voice, and her brows are still knit together, but she's not angry. Confused. Cautious maybe.
Betty looks into the stubborn dark eyes and decides to risk the reverse approach.
"Yes, please, dear! Can you take me to the Old Pines motel?"
Betty would add something about payment, but she wants neither to lie, nor to drive the girl away.
The silence lingers a moment too long.
"Sure. Take the back seat."
The angry man at the Old Pines motel is not the one that came after Betty. That one was long dead — small mercy.
He never went to jail, no matter how hard Betty tried to lead the police to him. Young women disappeared into the misty forest, one by one, year after year, and were never found again.
Betty knew, saw him at work, so Betty joined the bones of those girls — odd woman out, grey-haired and old.
The man at the motel is not the one who did her in, but the earth never runs out of angry men.
The young lady — Amanda (she did not appreciate being called Mandy, not at all) — plays some terribly modern music in her car, all squeaks and screeches and static. She glances at Betty through the rearview mirror, but does not offer to turn it down.
"No offence, but you don't seem like hitchhiking type," Amanda says, not even trying to hide her suspicion.
Betty chuckles and shakes her head. She was not when she died, grew out of it, had a blocky little car of her own.
"Curious places life takes us, doesn't it?" she responds
"Sure does."
They're quiet again.
The forest is as beautiful as ever. Tall evergreens dressed in fog, trees stretching for miles. Betty loved to walk among the trees, to rest her palms on moss-covered trunks, to listen to jays and blackbirds.
Even from the road it is gorgeous. Hazy wall of dark green rushing past, wet dark grey of the road under the wheels. Betty doesn't feel much, but she still remembers the cool air on her skin and the smell of the pines.
Her bones rest by a cold fresh creek somewhere south from here, lost in the grass. She doesn't care to visit.
They're almost all the way to the motel, and Betty hopes her plan works. It has worked before, but maybe Amanda is hard to scare.
The dim sign flickers in the window, and Betty puts a hand on Amanda's shoulder. The living don't like when she's close, and the girl flinches away from her touch.
"Goodnight, dear," Betty whispers and dissolves into the air.
She watches from outside. Crosses ghostly fingers.
The car screeches to a halt, stops with a jerk on an empty highway. Then it speeds up and drives past the Old Pines and the angry man inside.
Betty lingers around the motel for the night. No one dies. The angry man drives off in the morning.
It's not often that Betty gets to save someone — thankfully, it's not often that she needs to. Yet she's still roaming the woods, watching the road, drifting in and out of motels and gas stations, looking out for dark clouds of death looming over the people. They say ghosts have unfinished business, but maybe they each have a purpose instead. Maybe Betty is here to save people from her own grim fate, however few she can manage.
Not that she minds.