Dance for the Dead jw-2

by Thomas Perry

  Mary came up behind her, breathing deeply but not in distress. Jane said, "How are you at climbing fences?"

  "Take a guess."

  "I'll help you," said Jane. "All we have to do is get to the top. We can walk down." She took Mary's arm and pointedly placed her hand on a chain link above her head. She began to climb, and Jane waited for the moment to come when she decided she couldn't do it.

  Mary stopped. "I don't think - "

  Jane reached up, put both hands on her thighs, and boosted her higher. "Do the work with your legs. Toes in the spaces, step up. Just use your hands to hold on. Step up. Good. Step up." She climbed up after her, and when Mary reached the intimidating part, where the packed snow was above the top of the fence, she said, "Step up," held on to the fence with one hand, and pushed Mary hard with the other so that she rolled up onto the mountain of snow.

  When Jane reached the top and flopped onto the snow she found Mary still lying there, breathing deeply and trying to get her heart to slow. Jane sat up for a second, then clucked down and burrowed into the snow. "Stay down," she said.

  A beam of light moved across the field. Jane could see it pass above their heads, lighting up thousands of tiny snowflakes that had been blown into the air by the wind. The police car was beside the ambulance, so the beam widened in the thousand feet of empty fields and became enormous, but it was still so bright that she could see the line of adhesive the tape had left on Mary's cheek.

  Mary asked, "Is it - "

  "Cops," said Jane. "In a minute they'll shut the light off. When they do, don't move."

  The light swept across the field, came back, continued around the horizon, and then went out. "Rest," said Jane. "Use this time to rest." They lay in the darkness and she listened. Suddenly the light came on again, swept over their heads, and shot back and forth around the field. She listened for the sound of the engine, but it didn't come. Finally the light went off. "Okay," said Jane. "Now we move." She sat up a little, slid down the hill, and waited while Mary followed.

  They hurried to the far side of the lot, where the gate to the street was, and stopped. This gate was locked with the same kind of padlock and chain as the first one. She looked up at the fence. It was as high as the first, but it had coils of barbed wire strung along the top. They couldn't go back because the police wouldn't leave until they had a tow truck hooked up to the ambulance. She looked around her. There were sure to be cutting tools in the low building at the side of the lot, but breaking in would be harder than getting over a fence, and at least the fence didn't have an alarm. There were trucks, tractors, and plows all over the place, but even if she managed to hot-wire one of them to crash the gate, the sound of the engine would bring the police car across the field in twenty seconds. Then her eyes sorted out the strange shapes at the other end of the yard.

  "All right," she said. "I hope you're strong, because I'll need your help."

  She ran to the corner of the little compound, past the swing sets stored for the winter and the playground merry-go-rounds and over to the slides. The first two had frames of welded steel pipes that made them too heavy. The third was made of thin fiberglass in the shape of a tube, and Jane could lift the end of it by herself. They dragged it to the fence, lifted it so that the ladder was on their side and the tube went over the barbed wire and out to the street. "Want to go first?" asked Jane.

  Mary climbed the ladder, slipped her legs into the tube, and flew out the other end onto the snow. Then Jane slid down and fell in the same spot. Mary was impatient to get away from the fence now, but Jane said, "If we don't move it, the cops will figure it out without having to get out of their car. Help me." They pushed the tube back over into the compound, then started down the street.

  "Where are we going?" asked Mary.

  "The university."

  They jogged the last mile in silence. Jane set the pace again and listened for Mary's footsteps. She glanced at her watch. It was after two a.m. now, and even close to the university there were no pedestrians. Twice she saw headlights far down the street and pulled Mary with her into the dark space between two houses until the car had passed. When they finally reached the university campus, Jane slowed to a walk. She heard Mary's footsteps hit hard for two or three more steps, and then they sounded softer and slower too.

  Jane walked on, studying the buildings for a long time. Finally she pointed to a long four-story building. The name on the facade was Helen Mileham Hall. Jane stopped a hundred feet away. "That wouldn't be a bad place to get out of the cold."

  Mary Perkins said, "What is it?" She was so exhausted that her voice sounded almost detached.

  "I think it's a women's dormitory," said Jane.

  "It's the middle of the night. Won't it be locked?"

  "Of course," said Jane. She wished she hadn't mentioned the cold. They were both heated from their run, but the night air was already beginning to dry the sweat on her face and leave it numb. The front door was out of the question. It led into a reception area that looked like a hotel lobby. She could see that there was an intercom and some kind of electronic locking system on the glass door. She supposed she had been in the last generation of coeds who had curfews, so probably there was no old bat to take the names of girls who came in late, but the world had gotten more dangerous for women since then, so they would have something worse, like an old bat in a guard's uniform with a .357 Magnum strapped to her hip. She walked around the building once looking for the fire doors while Mary waited. Then she heard the sound of the dryer.

  As Jane walked toward it she walked into her memory. When a girl was eighteen and away from home for the first time, nights like this came now and again. The term papers and the laundry had piled up at about the same rate, and it was a Friday night near the end of the fall semester. The music and the shouting in the dorm had died out, but she wasn't ready to lie in the dark yet because even though morning would come with nauseating punctuality in a few hours, she was still eighteen and restless. She would convince herself that what she was doing was eminently practical. She could use all the laundry machines at once if she had enough quarters, and the silence and the solitude would make the term paper better.

  The girl was sitting across from the dryers with her feet on a chair, underlining passages in a textbook. The laundry room was hot and humid from the washers and dryers, and she had the door propped open to let the steamy air out.

  Jane hurried to the corner of the building and beckoned to Mary. Then she moved to the wall of the building, stepped close to the door, and looked at it. There was a crash bar that pulled a dead bolt out of a hole in the floor, and there was a standard spring latch that fit into the jamb. She opened her purse, pulled six dimes out of her wallet, and leaned behind the door to reach out and slide them into the hole in the floor. Then she came over to Mary and whispered. "What did you do with the tape they put over your mouth?"

  "What?" whispered Mary.

  "I didn't see you throw it away. Where is it?"

  Mary said, "I don't know. I guess I..." She reached into her pocket. "Here it is." It was in a wad.

  Jane took it, stepped far back from the door and away from the light, came back to the doorjamb, and stuffed it into the hole where the latch would go when the door shut. Then she beckoned to Mary and they both went across the dormitory lawn to sit on a curb and wait.

  In fifteen minutes the girl's dryers stopped and she folded her clothes, kicked the doorstop up, and closed the door slowly and quietly. It was almost three in the morning and she didn't need a couple of hundred neighbors waking up angry.

  Jane waited a few minutes longer before she opened the door, pulled the adhesive tape out of the doorjamb, dug the dimes out of the hole, and pulled Mary inside. She shut the door, and they made their way up the back stairs to the second floor, away from the public areas to the long corridors lined with students' rooms. Jane walked quietly through the halls of the dormitory, looking at the doors of all of the rooms. At each corner she stopped and lis
tened for other footsteps, but she heard none. Finally she stopped at a door where there was a folded note taped at eye level. She pulled it off carefully and read it.

  Cindy - Your mother called like eight times!!! I told her you were in the library. Call her as soon as you get back from Columbus.

  Lauren

  Jane slipped the Catherine Snowdon credit card between the doorknob and the jamb until she found the plunger, then bowed it a little to push the plunger aside and open the door. Before she closed it behind Mary she put the note back. Cindy was going to need time to prepare a comforting story for her mother.

  Jane felt for the single bed by the wall, pulled the thick blanket off it and draped it over the rod behind the curtains so that no light would escape, then turned the switch on. She went to the closet and studied the clothes for a moment, then started taking things out. "She's about your height, but she wears her tops big." She tossed a sweater on the bed. "Put it on." She took off her own blouse and slipped another sweater over her head. Then she glanced at Marys rubber boots. "Those aren't going to help us either. Try some of hers."

  Within a few minutes they were both dressed in Cindy's clothes. There was one short fall coat and one University of Michigan jacket. It was reversible, so Jane pulled it inside out and put it on. There were places where she could still pass as a college girl, but a college was not one of them. She counted a thousand dollars out of her purse and set it on the desk. "Sorry, Cindy," she wrote on Cindy's pad. "I needed clothes." She turned to Mary. "You look good, considering. Let's go."

  Jane led Mary out through the laundry room, then found the Student Union by walking toward the center of the campus. The Ride Board was something she remembered from her college days, and she found it in a big hallway off the entrance. There were index cards posted in long lines on a cork bulletin board. She ignored the "Ride Wanted" cards and looked closely at the "Going to..." cards. Most of them offered rides for Thursday night or Friday, so they were obsolete already. She selected one that said, "Going to Ohio State. Leaving for Columbus Saturday 5:00 a.m. Return after game. Share driving and gas. Doug," and gave a phone number. She glanced at her watch. It was four a.m. now. If Doug wasn't an idiot he was at least awake. She walked to the pay phone across the hall and dialed the number.

  At five o'clock the car pulled up in front of the Student Union. Doug was big and smiled easily. He was the sort of boy who would shortly flesh out and play a lot of golf. His two passengers were a surprise to him. While he was driving from his room to the campus he had planned to say he was glad that they had turned up at the last minute because he loved company. He also liked making a road trip without having to pay all of the expenses himself, but better than either, he liked women. He liked looking at them and hearing their voices and smelling the scents that hung in the air around them. When he saw the two women walking down the steps of the Student Union he thought that this was turning out to be a very fortunate day. But when they got into the car and the light came on he realized that they were old. They weren't old like somebody's mother, but they were still too old to be any more interested in Doug than his female professors were.

  Near the ramp for the 23 Expressway at Geddes Avenue, Doug started to signal for a turn into the all-night gas station, but the dark one said, "Can we stop for gas later? There's nobody on the road now and we can make good time. Later on we'll be dying to stop."

  Doug could live with that. The gauge said they had half a tank, so it didn't really matter. But for a second it seemed to him that she had some other reason for not wanting to stop until she was out of Ann Arbor. It was as though her husband was cruising around looking for her or something. They didn't stop until Toledo, and then the dark one insisted on paying for the gas and driving the next hundred miles.

  It turned out that the one in the back was a graduate student in the business school. She had worked for ten years and then decided to go back. She was asleep most of the time. The dark one was a lot more talkative. She was a friend of the graduate student, and had talked her into going down for the game. Maybe she wasn't really that talkative, because afterward he couldn't remember learning anything else about her in the four-hour drive. Maybe she had just prompted Doug to talk and smiled a lot.

  When they were on the outskirts of Columbus, the dark one announced that they still had to go scrounge tickets to the game, because she had talked Alene into coming at the last minute on a whim. She had him drop them off on the Ohio State campus so they could check the bulletin boards for offers of unused tickets.

  Doug hated to relinquish the fantasy he had been developing for four hours, revising and refining it at each turn in the long road. He had envisioned himself ending up in a hotel in Columbus with the two older women, celebrating Michigan's victory on a king-sized bed. But he had not been able to invent any plausible set of circumstances that might lead to the fulfillment of this fantasy, nor could he imagine how one went about proposing such a thing. He left them with a regret that hung about him until later in the day, when he met a girl named Michele who called herself Micki with an i. She had seen him on the Ohio State campus with the two older women and convinced herself that there was a melancholy sophistication about him. He did not think about the two older women again until Sunday night, when he was driving back to Michigan with Micki. It had occurred to him that they might not have been able to get tickets to the game, but he would not have guessed that instead they had bought airline tickets from Columbus to Boston under assumed names and disappeared during the stopover in Cleveland.

  21

  Mary lay on her bed in the motel room and listened to the airplanes passing overhead. She had already unconsciously perceived their rhythm. They would growl along for four minutes somewhere far beyond the eastern end of the building, then roar overhead and into nothingness. There would be a pause of forty-five seconds before she heard the next one growling and muttering at the starting line.

  Mary was tired of waiting for the question. She turned her head to look at Jane. "It was the medical records," she said.

  Jane was sitting at the round table under the hideous hanging lamp sorting small items she had taken from her purse. There was a lot of cash, and cards that seemed to have been taped to the lining in rows. "What medical records?" She didn't look up.

  "You were the one who made me think of it. I wanted to do it the way you would. I went to a doctor in Ann Arbor. I asked for the form people send to their old doctors to get their records forwarded. I signed it and changed the doctor's address so they would send it to me."

  "Why did you do that?" asked Jane. "Do you have some condition that needs to be watched?"

  Mary Perkins shook her head. "It just seemed like the right thing to do - to have them. Now, before something happened. I was going to change my name on them and bring them to the new doctor on the first visit. I couldn't think of a reason why a woman my age wouldn't have records somewhere, and I knew I could never make some up. And they're confidential; they're supposed to be protected."

  Jane sighed. "They are. The address where they're sent isn't."

  "Oh. But how did Barraclough's people get it?"

  "There are a lot of ways. You pose as Mary Perkins's probation officer and ask. Or you get a person hired to work in the office so she can watch for the right piece of paper to come in the mail. They might have wanted a copy of your records anyway to see if you had a condition that meant you had to keep seeing one of fifteen specialists in the country, or needed a particular kind of surgery or something. They could even do the same thing you did: send a note from a real doctor requesting the records. The old doctor's secretary would say they'd already been sent to such and such an address. I don't know, and it doesn't matter very much. Did you get them?"

  "Get what?"

  "The medical records."

  "Oh. Sure." She looked uncomfortable. "They got burned up."

  "Good." Jane went back to her sorting. "It's one more avenue Barraclough had that he doesn't have anymore
."

  Mary's voice began in a quiet tone that was low-pitched and tense, as though she were flexing her throat muscles to keep her vocal cords from tightening. "They started the fire while I was asleep in the house, you know. They didn't do it so nobody would know they had been there. They made me come out to them because they were dressed like firemen who were there to save me. I couldn't see their faces, just the masks and helmets and raincoats."

  "I know," said Jane.

  "I'm not trying to tell you what happened," said Mary Perkins. "I'm trying to tell you what happened to me." She said more softly, "To me." She stared at Jane's face for a reaction, and what she saw told her Jane was waiting. "I'm new at this," she said again. "For you it's like herding cattle around. It's not just taking care of them; it's making sure they don't stampede off a cliff or eat poison or drink so much water that their stomachs rupture."

  "There's nothing to be ashamed of," said Jane. "They had you. It wasn't something you imagined."

  "They do that too. They talk softly to the cattle and say, 'Come on, girl. It's okay.' But it's not exactly true and it's not exactly for the cow's benefit." Mary took a deep breath. "I'm not used to being the only one who doesn't know things, and I'm not used to this way of looking at the world. I guess I should have had enough imagination to figure out what it was like. I once knew some people slightly who were supposed to be very tough, but I never saw any of them actually do anything. I keep looking back and wondering how I ever got from being eighteen and smart and pretty all the way to being twice that and having men I never saw before burning me out of a house."

  Jane shrugged. "You told me how it happened."

  "No," said Mary Perkins. "No, I didn't. I told you what happened to some savings and loan companies. Not what happened to me."

  Jane stopped sorting and began to string together credit cards and licenses with strips of adhesive tape. She did not dare look at Mary for fear there would be something in her eyes that gave Mary permission to stop talking.