Poison Flower

by Thomas Perry

  "All of your spots are my favorites."

  "After I finish my drink I may be in the mood to let you prove it."

  "There's nothing I'd like better."

  "Well, I should hope not."

  "But you've got to stop trying to change the subject. You're injured, and you look terrible. What happened"

  "I'll tell all."

  "How badly are you hurt"

  "I'm actually waiting for your opinion and dreading what it might be. It happened about two weeks ago, so I'm out of danger-not stoically bleeding to death or anything. But I've got some marks on me. There's one that will be at least big and ugly forever, and might even make me limp."

  "Okay," he said. "I'm about through waiting in suspense."

  "I've been dreading your seeing me, and being disgusted or something."

  "Hold on to your drink." He put an arm around her back and the other swung to the back of her knees. He scooped her up and carried her out of the kitchen, across the living room, and then to the stairway. He carried her upstairs to the bedroom and set her on her feet.

  "The service around here is slipping," she said. "I almost spilled my drink."

  "Disrobe, please."

  "You have some nerve."

  "This isn't funny. Do it."

  She took another sip and set her drink on his dresser, then turned and unbuttoned her blouse, and took it off. She looked into his eyes, and kept looking at them as he bent lower to examine her stomach and ribs.

  "Some bad bruises." He turned her around so he could see her back, and gently touched the skin a few times. "And what the hell Those are burns. How did you get burned"

  "They heated some skewers, the kind you might use for shish kebab. They were trying to make me tell them where Shelby was."

  "Somebody tortured you Tortured you Who did that to you"

  "Enemies of Shelby's, who didn't want him to escape." She felt his arms circle her waist to come around and undo her belt. Her slacks fell to her ankles and she stepped out of them. She reached for her drink and took another sip, then put it back on the dresser.

  "This is really something," he said. From the sound of his voice, he had gone to his knees behind her. He unwrapped the bandage on her thigh. "That's an exit wound. Who shot you" He turned her around again to look closely at the entrance wound in the front of her thigh.

  She looked down at him. "I can tell you he was no gentleman," she said.

  "Stop, Jane. I told you, this isn't striking me as funny."

  "Okay. One of the same men. They were pretending to be cops. When I realized they weren't, I tried to get away, so one of them shot me."

  "And who sewed you up and dressed this Some old mob doctor who doesn't report bullet wounds"

  "He was young. His nurse was his girlfriend. I almost won her over to my side, but she was smitten with him, and a little stupid. The doctor was kind of angry. It was as if he agreed to treat a gunshot, and only after he got there realized it was likely to get him in trouble-that it wasn't an accident, and the victim wasn't going to be grateful for his work and for not reporting it."

  "You probably already realized this, but he did a pretty good job. Good closure, no signs of infection, no indication there's anything inside. You were also very lucky. The bullet didn't hit bone or sever the femoral artery. It was a clean through-and-through shot. I'm sure he told you that. It's just a question of the muscle having time to heal now." He rewrapped the bandage. "I want you to tell me who did this."

  Jane stared at him. She could see he actually intended to go find the men who had hurt her. "You can't do anything to him, Carey. He's dead." She paused. "The other one is dead, too." She didn't take her eyes off Carey. She could see that she must not let Carey know that the third one, Wylie, was alive. He lowered his eyes and glowered at a spot on the floor.

  "You haven't told me what I want to know," she said.

  "What's that"

  "I guess it's, `Do you love me'"

  "This is a lousy time to ask that question. I'm damned furious at you for putting yourself in the position to have this happen to you. But that doesn't change the situation between us-either the bad parts or the good. I love you." He paused, as though he dreaded what was coming next. "Anything I'm not seeing Is this the extent of it"

  "Yes."

  He took a deep breath, irritated that he had to be more specific. "Were you sexually assaulted"

  "No. Maybe they would have, but they were very interested in finding Jim Shelby, and everything they did was intended to make me say where he was. Then I got away."

  "I guess you didn't tell them where he was."

  "No, he's still alive and relatively well." She frowned. "You still didn't really give me my answer."

  "About what"

  She put her hands on his shoulders. "Look at me. Do you think I'm ugly now"

  "No. You're beautiful. I'm just upset at what you put yourself through. And I'm really angry. You don't have the right to marry somebody and then, whenever a stranger knocks on your door, run off and act like some kind of amateur police force. You told me that crap was over years ago."

  "Yes, I did," she said. "I thought it was. But then one day somebody comes to your door and says, `My brother, who is innocent, is about to be murdered in prison.' You have only two choices. All you can be is the person who decided to keep him alive, or the person who decided not to. For the rest of your life, that's who you'll be. I decided I would be the one who did."

  "No matter what it cost." He looked at her from head to toe. "Well, as I said, you're lucky this time. What you were apparently most worried about didn't happen. Your body is still beautiful and healthy, and with time, you'll be about the same as before."

  "Thanks, Doc," she said. Then she waited for a few seconds, looked down at herself and then at him. "Are you even just a little bit turned on"

  He nodded, but grudgingly.

  She unhooked her bra, shrugged it off, slipped her panties down and stepped out of them. "Then I'd hate to have all this nakedness and hard liquor go to waste."

  He frowned. "I'm sorry, Jane. I don't think this is a good time." He walked to the door, then turned. "Let's get a night's sleep, and then talk in the morning." He walked down the hall.

  After a few more seconds she heard him go down the staircase. There were the familiar sounds of Carey checking the locks on the doors and setting the alarm. She showered, brushed her teeth, and got into bed with the light on. She waited an hour for him to come back upstairs, but when she heard his tread coming back up, he went to one of the other bedrooms. She turned off the light and went to sleep.

  Later, when the night was at its darkest and the birds in the trees outside the old stone house had not yet begun the predawn chirping, she was aware of him. He was standing in the doorway, silent and motionless. She said, "If you're staring at me, you must have eyes like a cat."

  "I'm looking. Can't see you, though. You had sort of an intriguing idea before."

  "I thought you said it wasn't the right time."

  "It wasn't."

  "And now it is"

  "If the offer is still open."

  "Always," she said.

  14.

  Jane had been at home for ten days. She spent her evenings and nights with Carey at home in the big old stone McKinnon house in Amherst, New York. To her it was a bit like a honeymoon, a vacation from reality that had turned into a lazy enjoyment of the man she had married. This was not what she had intended in coming home, but she had felt that way the minute she had been in the kitchen with him the first night.

  She knew the strength of her reaction to him and this taste of life was partly caused by the fact that she had never expected to be here again. After a few days with Wylie, Maloney, and Gorman, she had relinquished any thought of seeing Carey again. She had become like the old-time warriors, the Grandfathers. All she had hoped for was a chance to fight her enemies at the end-to snatch one of the tools of torture or an unguarded weapon and stab or slash un
til they overpowered and killed her. After she had become used to that idea and then escaped, even feeling the warmth of sunlight on her face had become a complex and delicious sensation. She had resigned herself to death, and now to be home again with her tall, strong husband was enough to make her feel as though she must be dreaming.

  The days, from the time when Carey left at six in the morning for the hospital until late afternoon, she spent trying to speed her recovery. Carey had begun rubbing Neosporin on her burns and scrapes as soon as she had come home. There had been no need by then for any antiseptic effect, but the stuff seemed to help prevent scars. She did her series of tai chi positions, and she could feel herself stretching farther and becoming more flexible. After that she left the house and went for long walks, lengthening her stride a bit each day and raising the rhythm of her steps to go faster. She lifted light weights to strengthen her upper body, but most of the time she concentrated on her right leg. When she was not exercising it she was resting. She took special care to eat well and get lots of protein and take vitamins, and to get plenty of sleep.

  On the eleventh morning when Carey left, she took a bus to Rochester, New York, and bought a used car at a big car dealership. It was a gray four-year-old Honda with low mileage. She bought it under the name Emily Westerveldt, an identity she had built with many others, but had seldom used. When she got her car back to Amherst, she had it washed and waxed at the car wash on Niagara Falls Boulevard, and then drove it to her regular mechanic. She asked if he could check it over for a friend of hers. He glanced at it and said, "I'll take a look at it."

  "Thanks," she said. She knew he would take care of it, even if it meant he had to drive across the county for parts.

  "Pick it up after four."

  When she picked it up, she filled it with gas and then stopped to buy the things she carried when she was on the road-a case of bottled water, bags of nuts, trail mix, dried fruit. Then she drove the car to her old house in Deganawida, put it in the garage, and went inside to make other preparations.

  This was the house that her grandfather and his friends had built, the house where her father had been born, and where Jane had lived until she'd gone off to college, then returned to after graduation, and stayed in through the death of her mother. She had lived here until she had married Carey. She had kept it since then, partly because she couldn't sell it to some unsuspecting stranger who might wake up in the middle of the night to hear an unfortunate runner knocking on the door for help-or to hear someone worse coming in a window.

  There were still things hidden in the house. For a few years she had stopped thinking of them as the tools of her profession, and had begun to think of them as precautions, like the fire extinguishers in the kitchen and the upstairs hallway in Amherst. She went down the cellar stairs gingerly, trying not to put too much weight on her wounded thigh. She walked to the far end, near her father's old workbench, took the stepladder, and carried it back to the area beside the old coal-burning furnace that had been left here when the oil furnace was installed when she was a child.

  She climbed to one of the old, round heating ducts, disconnected two sections, and reached inside. There was a box that contained four pistols, all of them loaded, and boxes of extra ammunition. There was a metal cash box full of money. There was another in the back. When she opened it she found, carefully wrapped in plastic, pieces of identification. Some were for a woman who looked like Jane, and some for a man who looked like Carey, but who had names that weren't McKinnon. There were birth certificates, passports, driver's licenses, and credit cards.

  Jane took some stacks of money, and then a Beretta nine-millimeter pistol like the one she had taken from Maloney, and a spare magazine. She set them on the ladder and then fitted the two sections of heating duct back together so they looked as though they hadn't been touched since the 1940s, moved the ladder back beside the workbench, and climbed back up the stairs.

  When she came into the kitchen, she partially dismantled the gun, wiped the parts with a soft rag damp with gun oil, reassembled it, and then put it into her purse. She called a taxi to meet her three blocks away and took it home to Amherst; there, she hid the gun and the money in one of the spare rooms on the second floor with a small suitcase she had selected.

  On the twelfth day she went to visit the Jo-Ge-Oh, the little people. They were very small, but they looked very much like the Senecas. They had been around for longer than the Senecas, but they had such a peculiar relationship with time that it was difficult to make assertions about it. They preferred to live in places where Seneca villages had been, either because those were simply the best sites in New York state-always near water and close to ground that was fertile and tillable-or because being close to full-size human beings scared off the animals that tended to trouble and annoy anyone their size. Raccoons, possums, skunks, and squirrels were particularly bothersome. For that reason the little people prized fingernail and toenail clippings, which they scattered around their settlements to give off a scent of big people. They were also extremely fond of the sort of tobacco that the Senecas favored, grown in western New York and Ontario, and mixed with a few shavings of sumac.

  Jane had often visited them near the site of a large village that had once been along the Genesee River in Rochester. She usually approached the spot from Maplewood Avenue and climbed down the rocky sides of the chasm to the pebbly shore. But today, Jane didn't relish a climb, so she selected another place closer to home. She drove to the Niagara River, and then along River Road to the South Grand Island Bridge. She went over the east river and across the nine-mile-long island to a spot near the northern tip, then drove south along the river road. When she reached the right spot she parked and got out of the car, then walked along the eastern shore of the island to the site of an old, long-vanished hotel called Riverhaven. It was directly across the river from the old ferry landing in the city of Deganawida, and boats had landed here before the bridges were built at either end of the island. But the human occupation was much older than that.

  This was a place that had been full of activity since long before the Senecas took the land by conquering the Wenros and Eries in the early seventeenth century. It was the site of one of the very few deposits of flint in the western part of the state, and it had been visited by Native people since the end of the last ice age. Jane walked the shore for a while, and then spoke. "Jo-Ge-Oh!" she called softly. "It's me, Jane Whitefield. I'm Nundawaono, and I've been away. I didn't want to leave again without visiting you."

  The Jo-Ge-Oh were known for taking in people who were in terrible trouble and hiding them from their enemies. They would conduct such people to their settlements and let them stay until they were safe. Often the person would think he had been with them for a week or a month, and then come back to the full-size world and discover that many years had passed. His enemies would be long dead and forgotten. Jane had admired the Jo-Ge-Oh and felt close to them since she was a little girl.

  "Jo-Ge-Oh! Little people! I've brought you some presents." She opened a foil package that the clerk in the store at the Tuscarora reservation had sold her. "Here's some tobacco. I hope it's good and strong." She made small piles of it on the rocks along the shore. "Here are some clippings from my fingers and toes. I hope it keeps the pests away." She took out a plastic sandwich bag and scattered the clippings around her.

  She spoke to the little people in the Seneca language. "I came to thank you for helping me get home alive and be with my husband." Her speech was in keeping with Seneca practice, which was to thank supernatural beings for whatever they had given, but not to ask for anything. In English she said, "Thanks, little guys." After a few minutes of listening to the silence and watching the flow of the beautiful blue river, she turned and went back to her car. Tomorrow would be the thirteenth day.

  That evening Jane had dinner ready early, and made sure she and Carey were in bed at shortly after ten. They began by making love slowly and gently, and then lay still for a time, hold
ing hands. Then Carey moved again and loomed above her, kissing her hard, and she realized that she didn't have to tell him because he had already seen something-the overnight bag she'd packed, maybe-or just sensed the return of the melancholy she always had before she had to leave him. They began again, turning to each other wildly and passionately, as though it would be the last time in their lives and they were saying good-bye to everything that they loved and wanted.

  Jane awoke at five a.m. as she had awoken many times, lying with her head on Carey's chest, feeling the rise and fall of his strong respiration, her long black hair spread over him like a blanket. She raised her head slightly and looked at him. His eyes were open, and he was looking at her.

  "Good." She put her hands on the sides of his face, and gave him a long, gentle kiss. "One more chance to get that baby started. I'll be gone when you get home tonight."

  15.

  An hour after Carey left for the hospital, Jane locked the door of the big old stone house in Amherst, walked to the driveway, and got into her cab. She took it to Deganawida, walked to her house, opened the garage, and started the used Honda she had bought.

  She stopped at a large sporting goods outlet in Niagara Falls and bought a Remington 1200 shotgun and twenty-five double-ought shells. When the man asked her what she wanted that kind for, she said, "Home defense." She bought a gun cleaning kit and a box of rubber gloves; a large, razor-sharp folding knife; a short-handled spade; and a hatchet. She stopped at an electronics store and bought four pay-as-you-go untraceable cell phones with cash.

  In another few hours of driving east she was past Syracuse and making the turn onto Interstate 81, heading north to Watertown. From there Route 3 took her east on a winding road into the Adirondacks, and she drove the rest of the day to reach Lake Placid, where she checked into a hotel and slept.

  It was mid-afternoon the next day, after she had read the rental listings in the papers and had spent hours combing the area around Lake Placid, when she found the house she wanted. Jane walked the property, climbed on the woodpile outside and looked in the windows, and then walked in the woods nearby. She found the trails: one a game trail that went only as far as a tiny clearing with weeds that had been flattened by deer as a resting place; and the other a man trail, bare of vegetation, that led two hundred feet or so to a small, dark Adirondack lake.