People say you can tell a story by following the miles on a map. I don’t think that’s true. Some stories don’t move in straight lines. Some appear where they’re needed. Some wait in parking lots, or behind record-shop glass, or on the shoulder of a desert road until the moment a person finally slows down enough to see them. I’ve spent years slowing down in all the wrong places, but I’m not ready to stop running.

Anyway, some stories come in crimson.

Like the motel key.

The owner of a roadside motel in upstate New York told me he’d seen the crimson Cadillac only once in his life. A man checked in close to midnight but didn’t give a name, just the initials “J.S.”, and a handful of crisp bills. He took Room 3, stayed until dawn, and returned the key silently in the drop box.

Nothing strange there. Except the key vanished.

A week later it turned up in the glovebox of a stranded woman’s sedan: same brass tag, same room number, same initials on the guest log. The woman swore she’d never been within fifty miles of the motel. She said the car just broke down on the highway, and the tow truck dropped her there by coincidence. And yet when the motel owner asked for her name for the paperwork, she said:

“Janet Sutherland.”
J.S.

She spent the night in Room 3 and dreamed of someone she’d lost long ago.

​By morning, the crimson Cadillac was gone.

​

The LP came next.

A record-shop owner in Philadelphia let me listen to it in the back room. It was a dusty vinyl with no sleeve, no label, only a handwritten note on the edge: For J. // Play when ready.

He swore the handwriting belonged to his uncle, a jazz musician who’d died in 1998.
When the owner dropped the needle, the air in the room changed. The crackle softened.

The old turntable stopped humming. The melody was slow, wistful, full of late-night smoke and something like longing. It floated out and everything else inside the shop seemed to pause to hear it breathe.

The owner told me that when he stepped outside afterward, he saw a crimson Cadillac parked across the street. Windows fogged slightly, as though someone had been inside listening too. He never saw anyone get in or out. A customer who’d been in the shop that day later called me. She said she bought a record she didn’t remember choosing. Inside the sleeve was a note in her father’s handwriting. He’d died in 2007.

“He used to hum that exact song,” she whispered. “The one on the LP. I don’t know how that’s possible.”
I didn’t know either.

But when I played the LP again, I could’ve sworn—quiet under the melody—a second sound drifted through.

An engine idling.

​

The girl’s story arrived on a cracked cassette.

She’d left a group home in Sacramento at seventeen with a stolen file and a letter from a rehab clinic in Tonopah. Her mother’s signature—Lorraine—curled at the bottom.

She walked until her feet split.
She refused rides.
She refused help.

But the desert doesn’t negotiate. On the fourth day, sand swept across the highway like a curtain drawing down, and she realised she wasn’t going to outrun the storm. That’s when she saw it, the crimson Cadillac, parked with the driver’s door open, glowing against the dune-lit dark.

She didn’t steal it. She only climbed inside to escape the sand. But the car started itself. The radio locked to a country song about a woman named Lorraine. The wheel resisted whenever she tried to turn it away from the direction it had chosen.

It carried her straight to a small trailer outside Tonopah.
Her mother’s handwriting covered the walls.

You could stay angry your whole life, she said on the tape. Or you could get in the car when it came for you.

​

And then there was a mechanic in Missouri.

He saw the Cadillac three times across three decades. Three owners, same car. A scratch he’d made with his own wrench in 2003 still gleamed under the paint in 2022. The alternator bolts had the same notch he’d given them years earlier.

The car didn’t age.

​

He said he found a message engraved beneath the driver’s seat the last time. Don’t follow the car. Let it follow you.

He added his own note behind the rearview mirror before the owner drove off.
Something about not being alone. Something about moving forward.

He didn’t tell me what he wrote exactly. But he smiled when he said it. By then I’d noticed something in all their stories: none of them were running toward someone. They were running from the moment they’d have to face what they’d lost. The Cadillac didn’t save them; it caught up with them.

​

I’ve never seen the Cadillac myself. Not yet.

But I keep the letters and tapes and keys in a shoebox under my bed. And sometimes, late at night, when the streets are quiet and the wind shifts exactly right, I think I hear an engine in the distance; smooth, steady, certain.

Maybe one night it’ll pull up outside my window.

And if it does… if that crimson paint catches the streetlamp just so, if the door swings open like a gentle invitation, I think I finally understand what it’s been trying to show me. It never comes for the lost. It comes only for the ones ready to stop running.

And I am.