One moonless Friday night in October, a man and a woman on a Harley came roaring up Illinois 440 with Spalding behind them and Colby City a few miles ahead. They passed the Christmas tree farm, they passed the hog market, they made the quick little S-curve without incident even though they’d never been on this road before. They passed the place where Teddy Mason had driven his car through a guardrail and died horribly about 40 years earlier, and somewhere around that stretch—just shy of the Frederickson place—is where the woman in back, 32-year-old Lynn Harms of Peoria, bumped her cell phone against her knee and let it out of her grip. She mentioned this in the form of a shriek into the ear of the man in front, 36-year-old Charlie Reed of East Peoria, who didn’t understand at first.
“I said I dropped the phone!”
“You dropped the phone?”
“Yes! Dropped it! It’s not in my hand!”
Charlie did not know exactly how much distance he had wasted by making her repeat that the phone was dropped. He hoped Lynn wouldn’t mention it but also planned to claim that he started slowing down on the first shriek.
“That’s goddamn incredible,” he said, doing a slow U-turn. “How far back was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what were we passing when you dropped it?”
“Trees and darkness.”
“Do you know what’s in that phone?”
“Are you serious right now?”
“I’m just saying we’re in deep shit if anyone else finds that phone.”
“Yeah, maybe you should have stopped the bike as soon as I said something.”
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