Dance for the Dead

by Thomas Perry

  She poured in some more seed to give them something to think about, lifted the cage, put it in the back seat of the car, and covered it with a silk blouse from her suitcase.

  Jane drove to the county office building and wiped her face clean of the thick makeup she had been using to hide the bruises, then walked to the Department of Children’s Services. The people in the office were busy in a way that showed they had given up hope of ever doing all they were supposed to do but were keeping on in the belief that if they worked hard enough they would accomplish some part of it. There were two empty desks for each one that had a person behind it, so they moved from one to another picking up telephones and slipping files in and out of the piles like workers tending machines in a factory. She waited for a minute, then saw a woman hang up her telephone and pause to make a note in a file.

  Jane stepped forward. “Excuse me,” she said. “I need to leave something for Nina Coffey.”

  The woman’s eyes rolled up over the rim of her glasses and settled on Jane; her head, which was still bent over the papers on the desk, never moved. Jane could tell that her bruises had identified her as an abused mother. “How can I help you?”

  “It’s this teddy bear,” said Jane. “Timmy Phillips left it in my car.”

  The woman showed no recognition of the name. She snatched a gummed sticker out of the top drawer and put her pen to it. “Spell it,” she said.

  “P-H-I-L-L-I-P-S. I’d appreciate it if you got it to her, because it’s important to Timmy.” Jane handed the woman the small, worn brown teddy bear.

  The woman turned her sharp gaze through the glasses at the bear. “I can see that,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll give it to her.”

  “Thanks,” said Jane warmly.

  The telephone rang and the woman held up one finger to signal that Jane was to wait while she answered it, but Jane turned away. She heard the woman call, “Mrs. Phillips?” but she was out the door.

  Jane waited down the street from the parking garage. She had seen the row where the employees’ parking spaces were, and now she parked at the curb where she could watch them.

  It was not long before she saw the woman she had slight with red hair that was fading into a gray that muted it. Jane saw that she had the habit of holding her keys in one fist when she came out of the elevator, so she suspected that this was a woman whose profession had given her a clear-eyed view of the planet she was living on. In her other hand she held a hard-sided briefcase and a teddy bear.

  Jane waited for her to start her car, drive to the exit, and move off down the street before she pulled her own car out from among the others along the block. She followed Nina Coffey at a distance, and strung two other cars between them so she wouldn’t get too accustomed to the sight of Jane’s. Coffey turned expertly a couple of times, popped around a corner and then up onto a freeway ramp, and Jane was glad she had put the other cars between them so that she had time to follow in the unfamiliar city.

  She pushed into the traffic and over to the same lane that Coffey chose and stayed there, letting a couple of other cars slip in between them again. Coffey turned off the freeway in a hilly area that the signs said was in Pasadena, and Jane had to move closer. There seemed to be stoplights at every intersection, and Nina Coffey was an aggressive driver who had a knack for timing them. After the third one, Jane had to stop while Coffey diminished into the distance. She turned right, then left, then sped up five blocks of residential streets that had no lights, turned left, then right again to come out three blocks behind her.

  Finally Nina Coffey came to a street where she had to wait to make a left turn, and Jane caught up with her again. When Coffey stopped in front of a modest two-story house with a brick facade, Jane kept going. As she passed, she studied the car that blocked the driveway and knew it was the right house. The car was a full-sized Chevrolet painted a blue as monotonous as a police uniform.

  The authorities had done exactly as Jane had hoped they would. They were protecting Timmy from everybody, without distinction—the people who wanted him declared dead, the reporters, people who were sure to search the family tree to suddenly discover they were relatives—and without comment. They had put Timmy in the home of a cop while the mess around him was sorted out.

  She spent fifteen minutes driving around the neighborhood to look for signs that anyone else had found the house. She saw no parked cars with heads in them, no nearby houses with too many blinds drawn, and no male pedestrians between twenty and fifty. She came back out on Colorado Boulevard satisfied and drove up two streets before she found the place where she wanted to park her car.

  She had to climb over the fence at the back of the yard and crouch in the little cinderblock enclosure where the pool motor droned away and stare in the back window until she saw Timmy. She watched him eat his dinner in the kitchen with two other children, and then begin to climb the carpeted stairway to the second floor. Upstairs, a light went on for a few minutes and then went out. The other children weren’t much older than Timmy was but they were still downstairs. She supposed he was still living on Chicago time, where it was two hours later.

  The sun was low when Jane decided how she would do it. She walked quietly to the back of the house. In a moment she was up the fig tree and on the roof of the garage. She walked across it to a second-floor window of the house, tied a length of the jewelry wire into a loop, inserted it between the window and the sill, and slowly twirled it until she had it around the latch. She gave a sharp tug to open the latch, quietly slid the window up, and slipped into the upstairs hallway.

  When she opened the bedroom door Timmy was lying on his side looking at her, his coffee-with-cream eyes reflecting a glint of the light coming from the hallway, his child-blond hair already in unruly tufts from burrowing into the pillow. Somebody had bought him a new pair of pajamas with pictures of fighter planes in a dogfight all over them, and had at least looked at him closely enough to be sure they fit his long legs. He held the teddy bear on the sheet beside him. “Jane?” he said.

  “Hello, Timmy,” she whispered. “Can’t sleep?”

  “I’m tired, but it’s still light, and I keep thinking about them. Mona and Dennis.”

  “I thought you might want to go to their funeral.”

  “I did want to, but they said I couldn’t.”

  “So we’ll have our own.”

  The shadows of the trees at the edge of the vast cemetery were already merging into the dusk, but the sky to the west had a reddish glow. Jane had sent two big displays of white roses in case she and Timmy arrived after dark, but the flowers weren’t necessary. It was still light enough to find the two fresh graves on the hillside.

  The bodies of Dennis and Mona would be shipped to London and Washington for burial, but Jane had searched the funeral notices in the newspaper and found a pair of brothers who had been killed in a car accident and had been buried today. As they walked up the hill Timmy said, “What are we going to do?”

  Jane shrugged. “We can only do what we know. The kind of funeral I know best is the kind my family did for my father, my mother, and my grandparents.”

  They stopped at the head of the graves. Jane said, “One thing we always did was to have close friends or relatives say something to them.”

  “How?”

  “Just talk to them.”

  Timmy looked down at the two mounds of dirt for a moment, then said, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then I’ll go first,” Jane said. “Dennis and Mona? We’re here to say goodbye to you, and to tell you that there are people who know and understand who you were and what you did. We saw it. You spent your lives protecting and caring for people who needed help: little children, and people who were going to court and didn’t have anybody to speak for them. You died fighting enemies you knew were bigger and stronger, trying to give us time. We’re here because we want you to see that we’re okay. You won.” She nudged Timmy. “Ready to say something?”

  Timmy said
, “Mona, I’ll … I’ll miss you. It’s lonely here. I didn’t know you weren’t coming back. I would have said something …” His voice trailed off.

  “What would you have said?” asked Jane.

  “I … guess … ‘I love you.’ ”

  “That’s good.”

  “And I would have thanked her. But I can’t now. It’s too late.”

  “You just did,” said Jane. “Those are the two things that had to be said.”

  Jane knelt on the grass and used her hands to dig a hole in the soft mound of earth over the first grave. Then she reached into her purse.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Well, the Old People believed that after somebody died, he had to make a long trip to a place where he would be happy all the time. They figured it took a long time to get there, so they tried to give him presents that would make the trip easier. Weapons, food, that kind of thing.”

  She held up a new Mont Blanc fountain pen and said, “This is like the one Dennis carried in his briefcase, but the police have that. We’ll let it stand for the weapon.” She pulled out a credit card and put it beside the pen. “This is the way people travel now.”

  At the other grave she dug a second hole and placed a credit card and four granola bars in the bottom.

  “What’s that?” asked Timmy.

  “Mona wasn’t the sort of person who thought much of weapons. She loved to feed people, so she would like this better.” Jane stood and brushed the dirt off her hands. “Now cover them up.”

  As Timmy worked to pack the dirt over the little holes, Jane went to the car and brought back the birdcage.

  “What’s in there?”

  She took the blouse off the cage and the scrub jays glared around them suspiciously, the white streaks above their shining black eyes looking like raised eyebrows.

  “Birds!” said Timmy.

  “The Old People did this, so maybe it works.” She spoke to the birds. “Mr. and Mrs. Bird, we have the souls here of two very brave and noble people. They had a lot of reasons why they must have wanted to run away from danger, because they loved each other very much, just like you do. But they did the hard thing instead. I want you to carry them up to Hawenneyugeh. Will you do it?”

  The birds jumped back and forth on the perches calling “Check-check-check,” uneasy about the low level of the sun.

  Jane said, “Mona, it’s time to go. Have a short trip. You did your work well. You were a wonderful woman.” She grasped the female scrub jay gently, holding her on her back and stroking her breast feathers as she stood over the grave, then tossed her into the sky. She fluttered about and then flew fifty feet to light on a limb of a magnolia tree.

  Jane reached into the cage again and caught the male. “Dennis,” she said, “you were a great fighter. Now I wish you peace. Mona is waiting.”

  The scrub jay flew up and joined the female on the branch of the magnolia. They looked down at Jane and Timmy for a few seconds as though they wanted to be sure there was no plan afoot to molest them further, then flew off to the west toward either the setting sun or the college campus.

  “Goodbye,” said Timmy. He waved as the birds flew, and kept waving long after they were invisible.

  “Ready to go now?”

  “I guess so.”

  They walked back to the car in silence, got inside, and coasted down the hill and out of the cemetery.

  “Do you think they heard us?” asked Timmy.

  “There’s no way to know,” said Jane. “The Old People will tell you that they do. What I think is that it doesn’t really matter. Funerals aren’t for the dead.”

  “They’re not?”

  “They’re for us, the ones who have to go on.”

  “You did all this for me, didn’t you?”

  “For you and for me.” She drove on for a few seconds, then admitted, “But mostly for you. For somebody your age you’ve seen a lot of heartache. Some of it you don’t remember already, but you’ll remember this. I wanted to be sure you remember it right.”

  “What should I remember?”

  “That you got to live when there were still heroes. Real heroes that feel scared and bleed, and that’s the part that gets left out of the books. That’s a privilege. Nobody has to read you a story. You saw it.”

  “I wish they hadn’t done it,” said Timmy.

  “Me too.”

  Timmy started to cry. At first it was just a welling of tears, but Jane knew the rest of the tears that he had been too exhausted to cry were behind them. She drove to the freeway and kept going beyond Pasadena into bare and unfamiliar hills. After half an hour Timmy stopped crying, and Jane drove until he spoke again. “What’s going to happen? They’re all gone.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that, because some very smart people are spending all their time taking care of it. Judge Kramer said the court would study your story, learn all they can about you, and appoint somebody to take care of you.”

  “Will it be you?”

  “No,” she said. “It will be a family. Somebody like the people you’re staying with now. Are they nice?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Jane let out a breath before she realized she had been holding it. “Well, I’ve got to get you back there so you can get some sleep.”

  “Will I see you?”

  “Probably not for a long time.”

  She drove back to Pasadena and parked behind the street where the policeman and his family lived. She climbed to the top of the fence, lifted Timmy and lowered him to the lawn. She could see that the other two children were still watching television downstairs. She led him to the tree, hoisted him to her back, and climbed. When they walked to the open window, Timmy was seized with a panic. “I don’t want you to leave.”

  “I have to, Timmy,” she said.

  “But what am I going to do? I mean after you’re gone.”

  Jane hesitated, then accepted the fact that she had to try. “Go to school. Make friends. Play games. Try to grow up strong and decent and healthy. That’s plenty to do for now.” She helped him in the window and sat on his bed while he put on his pajamas.

  “But what happens after that? What will I be then?”

  “I think that’s why it takes so much time to grow up. You don’t really make a decision; you just find out when the time comes.”

  “What would you do?”

  Jane shook her head and smiled sadly. “I’m not a good one to ask.”

  “Who is?”

  Jane had an urge to tell him everything she knew, because this would be the last time. No words came into her mind that were of any use, but she had to push him in the right direction. “Well, when I was in college I knew a boy who was in a position sort of like yours. He didn’t know what to do, but he knew that if he wasn’t careful, he would be lazy and wasteful and selfish.”

  “What did he decide?”

  “He decided to become a doctor. It was the hardest thing he could think of to be, so he knew that would force him to study. And when he had done enough studying, he would know how to do something worthwhile. At the time I thought he was being very sensible. I still can’t find anything wrong with the idea.”

  “Is he a doctor now?”

  “As it happens, he is, but that isn’t the point. The real reward was that he got to be the kind of person he wanted to be. It doesn’t matter whether he ended up a doctor or something else. He had decided to try. That made him special.”

  There were noises. She heard the first complaints from little voices downstairs. The children were being sent to bed.

  “I’ve got to go now or I’ll get caught,” she said. She leaned down and kissed his cheek. “Sleep well, Timmy. Remember that people have loved you before and others will love you again, because you’re worth it.”

  As she slipped out the window she heard a whisper. “Jane?”

  “Yes?” She stopped and leaned on the sill.

  “Thanks for the bear. I knew it was from y
ou.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “Are you one of the people? The ones who love me?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Sure.”

  She drifted across the garage roof like a shadow, and seemed to Timmy to fly down the tree without moving a leaf. He watched the back fence, but even in the light of the moon he didn’t see her go over it. After listening for a few minutes, he fell asleep.

  Jane returned the car to the airport rental lot and caught the shuttle bus to the terminal. As she stepped off, she smiled perfunctorily at the efficient skycap offering to check her luggage through to her destination and shook her head. She didn’t have luggage and she didn’t have a destination. She had made a stop at a Salvation Army office on the way to the airport and disposed of the clothes that had remained in her suitcase that weren’t torn or bloodstained, and then had donated the suitcase too. She had known that she would never wear any of the clothes again because they would have reminded her of all that had happened.

  She had spent her three days in the county jail ruminating on failure, and her nights remembering the faces of dead people. She should have been quick-witted enough to save Mona and Dennis. There had to be some better way to stop a court case. If nothing else had come to mind, she should have called in a bomb threat to make the police evacuate the courthouse, then arrived during the confusion and attached Timmy and Mona to a squad of policemen. She had not thought clearly because she was so busy trying to get Timmy to the building on time; she had not seen the ambush because she was too busy dragging her clients into it.

  In the nighttime, after a day of reliving her failure in her mind, gripped by the shock over and over again as each of her mistakes was repeated, old ghosts crept into her cell. The one she knew best was Harry the gambler. She had hidden him, then made the mistake of believing that the man who had been his friend would not also be his killer. Harry had visited her so often over the years that he had almost become part of her.