The colors were coming back into Lexi's world.  Ever since she'd started building the car, they'd been flashing back.  And they stayed longer and longer.  She could feel the texture of Rainier's wheel under her hands, could see the contrast of the gray hood against the green-brown winter fields they were driving past.  The scraped-raw, faded yellow stripes in the road seemed as bright as dandelions, as bright as sunflowers.  Every car she passed was a sparkling sculpture of color and texture, shining metal contrasting with dull salt spray, and they egged her on, always eager to see the next one.  She could smell leather, and gasoline where she'd spilled a bunch on herself.  It was wonderful, being alive like this.  Lexi wondered if it was just the vibration of Rainier's motion that was keeping her senses aligned, or if it was a sign that she was heading the right way.  Up the tunnel, so to speak.

Would the colors stay once Ren had his car?  If the world was going to go back to featureless grayscale, she wasn't sure she wanted to stay in it any more.  Lexi turned the thought over, tasted it sizzling in the back of her throat like a nose full of horseradish, and then put it away.

"Where are we going, Lexi?" Glen asked finally.  He had waited almost an hour longer than she thought he would.  "We're running out of turnpike."

"Don't be silly, there's another one in Pennsylvania.  And, we're taking this car to Ren."

"Do you mean, to his grave?"

She smiled.  "Did you figure that out, or did Molly?"

"Oh, she did," he said lightly.  He had no reason to lie.  Besides, he got the impression that to lie to one of them was to lie to both, in a manner of speaking, and Lexi had clearly known that Molly would catch on to where she was going at some point.  "So, isn't Warren buried on his family's estate?"

"That's the rumor."  Lexi's pace hadn't slackened, speed-wise.  Rainer was chatting along the last mile or so of the Ohio Turnpike at over 130, despite a sky that was becoming increasingly dark with snow-filled clouds.  The occasional knots of traffic they came upon were dispatched with the ease of a race driver cutting through lapped cars.

"I thought that you and the Packard family...didn't see eye to eye."

"You mean, they hate me?  Oh, I'm sure they do," she said in a singsong voice.

"So, how are you planning to get the car there?"

"I figured I'd roll up, tell them to open the gate, and drive in."  A startled Honda swept past on the right, looking as if it were going backwards as Lexi passed it at twice freeway speed.  "I considered asking nicely, but like you said, they hate me.  So I'll just be assertive."

"What's that mean?"  Glen wondered why he didn't feel more nervous.  The thought of taking the keys from her when they stopped for gas had only crossed his mind briefly.  Lexi had transformed herself in the past few days from a confused, grieving little eccentric into this bloodied yet cheerful creature who could calmly drive twice the speed limit through a state notorious for speed traps--in an unregistered, unplated car no less--and insist with a smile that the world would do whatever she asked.  And there was something confidence-inspiring about her.  Glen could almost believe that they weren't likely to die in a fiery wreck or in a hail of bullets as Lexi tried to crash the gates of one of the richest, most powerful families in the world.

She didn't answer his question.  They pulled up to the toll booth which signaled the end of the turnpike, and Lexi paid for herself and instructed the attendant to pay for the car behind her as well, handing her an extra ten dollars.  "You know what I like about you?" Lexi said as they accelerated away, cold wind blasting through the window.  "You're a bit like me.  Not enough like me that I have to hate you, of course, but you haven't asked the obvious question yet, and I like that."

"Which is?"

The window whooshed closed.  "Well, if I'm taking Rainier to Ren, what're we going to drive home?  It's an awfully long walk, you know?  But no, as far as I can tell that hasn't bothered you a bit.  And that's cool.  Molly, bless her crafty little heart, would be asking me that every five minutes till I wanted to choke her, as if asking over and over would convince me to go back and do something more sensible.  She thinks too far ahead.  She isn't very good at jumping off the cliff without worrying about what it'll sound like when you hit the rocks.  There's plenty of time to think about that on the way down, isn't there?"

Glen got a chill down his spine.  "That's...incredibly morbid."

She giggled.  "I know.  It's your cue that I'm willing to talk about Ren now, if you want."

"Really?  Can I--" he held up the microcassette recorder, which he'd turned off to save the battery.

"Sure."

"So...what do you want to tell me?"  It was occurring to Glen that although he had lots of things he wanted to ask her, all fodder for a personality piece (a sort of article he'd never written before), he wasn't sure where to start.

"Nope.  Not that easy.  You have to tell me stuff, too."

"About what?"

"Whatever I decide to ask about, same as you."

"I never dated Warren Packard," he said evasively.

"Then I'll ask about someone else.  Maybe we have some shared experiences."

His first impulse was to refuse.  No, it wasn't fair of him to ask her a bunch of prying question with the intention of publishing her answers and then not open up to her, but it was almost certain that everything he said to Lexi would be relayed to Molly, who was doubtless angry with him.  A woman scorned, et cetera, et cetera.

They approached the Pennsylvania Turnpike's entrance, giving Glen a few more moments to think about it.  Perhaps it wasn't an entirely bad thing.  Knowing they'd gossip about him, he could tell Lexi some of the things he hadn't been able to bring himself to reveal to Molly.

Maybe.  "Deal," he said.

She gave him another sly look.  "I want to know who you lost?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"At my house, when we first started talking.  I said a bunch of terrible things that were all true, and then you said you had lost someone you loved a lot.  And I want to know who it was, if I can ask without ripping open too many wounds."

Glen nodded, surprised she had remembered that conversation, considering how drugged-up she'd been at the time.  "A girlfriend."  He sighed.  Okay, so it was out there.  "Her name was Jewel."

The timbre of Glen's voice was rusty, as if he weren't even used to saying the name.  Lexi wondered how long it had been since he'd even thought about this girl.  She wanted to know more, wanted to know if Jewel had something to do with his giving Molly the brush-off, but she just let things flow.  If their roles were reversed, that was how she'd have wanted him to be.  "What did she do?"

Glen blinked.  He had been expecting a completely different question.  "I'm sorry?"

"What did she do?  For a living?  For a hobby?  To pass the time?"

"Oh."  He relaxed.  "She was a photographer."

"Cool!"

He smiled a little.  "She was obsessive about it.  Carried cameras everywhere she went.  I swear we had the most complete photographic record of a relationship possible--she caught every little thing that happened, whether it was between us, around us, behind us, whatever.  She could snap a picture of something before it even happened."

Lexi let him talk, an unconscious smile on her face.

"I'm not exaggerating, either.  She had this awful photo that she won an award for, of a man stepping into the path of a truck.  Jewel caught him just before he was hit.  The look on his face...you can tell he's just realized.  I always asked her why she didn't yell and warn the man."

"But she never answered."

"Nope."

"Don't tell me she displayed this picture?"

"No, it was in an album.  But it wasn't the only one.  She had a sixth sense for it.  You know what's really ironic?"  He turned in the seat so he was half facing her.  That wasn't an easy task, considering Rainier's deep racing-style bucket seats.

"What?"

"I only ever had one picture of her.  She hated having her picture taken.  Jewel would literally rip the film out of your camera if she caught you trying to shoot her."

"How long were you together?"

"Nope, it's my turn again."

Lexi conceded with a wave, her eyes forward.  "Go 'head."

"Okay, list all of your shocking tragedies at once, Warren-related or not, so that I don't get blindsided again, would you?  I don't want any repeats of what happened when we talked last time."

She laughed.

"No, I'm not joking.  Since we left your house, you've been so cheerful and energetic that it's too easy to think you've never had a down day in your life, which I know isn't true, especially since you've been covered in blood for three days."  He stopped, catching the look on her face which was part frown, part smile.  "What's wrong?"

"I guess no one ever really asked before, that way.  I mean, my friends know, of course.  Ren knew.  But the journalists were always more interested in him than in me.  You know, favorite son of a rich family and all that.  Me, they found out I wasn't from old money, and it was like that was enough."  Rainier danced from one lane to the other, passing a truck.

"Did that bother you, Warren getting the spotlight?"

"Neh!  Not a shred!" she said honestly.  "Neither of us needed the attention.  We had each other.  Everything else was just set pieces and background music."

Glen smiled, imagining that in print.  "What about now?"

"Now..."  She shrugged, and the car seemed to shrug with her.  "If I tell you everything, what will I have left to shock you with?  You're asking a lot here, Glen."  She was smiling, though.  "You're more than just a boring old reporter.  I like you.  I might not tell Connie Chung these things.  But when I'm done, I'm going to ask you a hard question too, okay?"

His chest tightened in anticipation.  "All right.  Now let's hear it, Behind the Music style."

"Brace yourself."  Lexi dropped a gear and the omnipresent burble of Rainier became a throaty roar.  Snowflakes began to tumble from the sky.  "It's funny you ask me, because I was born," she pointed to the left, "not too far that way, in Ellwood City, to be specific.  It's where I was hatched, and where my mom and sister died, six years apart, in a freak auto accident and a messy suicide, respectively.  I got to see both.

"Right after Alison died, my father and I picked up and moved spontaneously to Michigan--remind me to tell you about that some time, too, we literally threw everything we wanted in that truck you saw at the garage and drove for two or three days on whatever back road we came to next, until we found a place and Dad decided we would live there.  Anyway, at the end of that first summer in Wayne, I flipped out.  A lifetime's worth of grief all at once, or something.  It was a sort of preteen nervous breakdown.  We got along a lot better after it though, Bert and I."

"Bert is your father?"

"Yes.  When I was seventeen, I was assaulted by my friend Cygnet's father, but that wasn't particularly traumatic, just surprising.  Then there was the rape thing, with Darron, which kind of was traumatic, as were the five weeks he spent actively trying to kill me and Ren.  You probably know about the Sleeping Giant hillclimb wreck."

Glen did.  Lexi had been competing in a hillclimb race, which consisted of individually timed runs up a twisty mountain road.  Lexi had been the tenth car up the course, right after Ren, when an unauthorized vehicle had pulled out onto the closed road.  There had been no chance to warn Lexi, and she had come around a fast, blind curve to find a minivan driving blithely along in the opposite direction.  The resulting collision had crushed her Porsche like a beer can and shaved the top of the minivan off from the headlights down.  The five people in the van had been killed, and Lexi now had a metal rod where much of her right tibia had been.

"And since that crash, the only tragedies have been my dad dying and, you know, Ren.  And Ian stealing my cars."

"I'm sorry."

"That's so cute of you.  For what?"

Her honestly curious tone made him smile in spite of his sympathy.  "For all the things that have happened to you."

"Do you know that you have the longest eyelashes I've ever seen?"

"Was that the difficult question you were going to ask me?"

"Don't get cocky," she warned with a giggle.