by Thomas Perry
One of the ghosts was a man she had never met. She kept remembering the newspaper picture of John Doe. The police artists had needed to touch it up so much that it was more a reconstruction than a photograph. A cop had found him three years ago sprawled among the rocks below River Road. He had five thousand dollars in cash sewn into his suit, a pair of eyeglasses with clear glass lenses, a brand-new hairpiece that didn’t match his own hair, and three bullet holes in his head. Jane had watched the newspapers for months, but the police had never learned who he had been or why he was running. Maybe he had not been trying to reach her; perhaps he was just heading for the Canadian border. But his death within a few miles of her house still haunted her.
On the third day in jail, one of the ghosts came to life. The guards had let Jane out into the exercise yard with the other prisoners and she had seen Ellery Robinson. Years ago Jane had taken Ellery Robinson’s sister Clarice out of the world to escape a boyfriend who was working his way up to killing her. Jane could remember Ellery’s eyes when she had tried to talk her into disappearing with her sister. Ellery had said, “No, thank you. He’s got nothing to do with me.” For the next few years Jane had often thought about those clear, innocent eyes. Ellery had waited a couple of days while Jane got Clarice far away, then killed the boyfriend. Later Jane had made quiet inquiries for Clarice and learned that Ellery’s life sentence meant she would serve four to six years.
After the six years, Jane had kept the memory quiet by imagining Ellery Robinson out of the state prison and living a tolerable life. But here she was, back in county jail. In that moment ten or twelve years ago when Jane had not thought of the right argument, not said the right words, not read the look in those eyes, Ellery Robinson’s life had slipped away. Jane looked at her once across the vast, hot blacktop yard, but if Ellery Robinson recognized her, no hint of it reached her face. After that, Jane had not gone out to the yard again. Instead she had sat on her bunk and thought about Timothy Phillips.
As she stepped into the airport terminal she had a sudden, hollow feeling in her stomach. She still had not freed herself of the urge to take Timmy with her. She had recognized the madness of the idea as soon as she had formulated it. The whole purpose of this trip had been to bring Timmy under the protection of the authorities. They weren’t going to let him disappear again easily. Even if she succeeded in getting him away, it might be exactly the wrong thing to do. It might make her feel as though she had not abandoned him, but Timmy would lose all that money, and with it, the protection. Maybe in ten years he would hate her for it—if he lived ten years. Jane had not even been good enough to keep Mona and Dennis alive. No, Timmy was better off where he was, with the cops and judges and social workers. She was tired, beaten. It was time to go home, stop interfering, and give the world a vacation from Jane Whitefield.
She walked to the counter and bought a ticket for New York City because it was the right direction and there were so many flights that she didn’t expect to have to wait long to get moving again. She used a credit card that said Margaret Cerillo. As the man at the counter finished clicking the keys of the computer and waited for the machine to print out the ticket, she noticed his eyes come up, rest on Jane’s face for an instant, and then move away too fast. Jane explained, “I had a little car accident yesterday. Some idiot took a wide left turn on La Cienega and plowed right into me.” The last time she had looked, the makeup had covered her injuries well enough, but with the heat and the hurry, the scrapes and bruises must be showing through.
“It must have been … painful,” said the man.
“Pretty bad,” said Jane. She took the ticket and credit card and walked up the escalator and through the row of metal detectors. She kept going along the concourse until she found an airport shop that had a big display of cosmetics. She selected an opaque foundation that matched her skin tone and some powder and eye shadow. When she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror at the top of a revolving display, she reached below it and picked out a pair of sunglasses with brown-tinted lenses. Then she took her purchases with her into the ladies’ room. Her face was still hot and tender from the punches she had taken, and her right hand was aching from the hard blows she had given the men in the hallway, but a little discomfort was better than being noticed.
She looked under the stalls and found she was alone. She was glad, because she wouldn’t have to pretend that what she was doing was easy. She leaned close to the mirror and dabbed on the foundation painfully. The result looked tolerable, but it stung for a few seconds. She stopped until the pain subsided a little, and had just begun to work on her eyes when she heard the door open and a pair of high heels cross the floor behind her. She had a pretty vivid black eye from the big guy with the yellow tie who had piled in at the end. It was hard to cover it and make both eyes look the same with a hand that hurt.
“Can I help you with that?”
Jane didn’t turn around, just moved her head a little to verify what she guessed about the woman behind her in the mirror. She wasn’t surprised that the woman was attractive. Makeup was a personal issue—not quite a secret, but almost—and you had to be pretty spectacular to have the nerve to tell somebody you could do her makeup better than she could. This one was tall—almost as tall as Jane—and almost as thin, but her face had that blushing china-figurine skin that women like her somehow kept into their forties. They were always blond, or became blond, like this one. Every last one of them had switched to tennis after their cheerleading coaches had put them out to pasture, but they must have played it at night, because their skin looked as though it had never seen sunlight.
Jane said, “No, thanks. I can handle the painting. It’s the repairs that are hard.”
“You don’t remember me, do you?” There was tension in the voice.
“No,” said Jane. “If I should, then you must be good at this. Maybe I should let you do my makeup after all.”
The woman whispered, “I was in the county jail when you were.”
Jane turned to look at the woman more closely, this time with a sense that she ought to be watching her hands, not her face. “Well, congratulations on getting out.”
Jane waited for her to leave, but the woman just smiled nervously and waited too. “Thanks.”
Jane decided that she could do the finishing touches in another ladies’ room or even on the plane. “Well, I’ve got a plane to catch.”
“No, you don’t. It doesn’t leave for an hour. Four-nineteen to New York. I’m on it too. My name is Mary Perkins.”
“Are you following me?”
“I was hoping to do better than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s not much to talk about when you’re in jail. There was a girl who had been in court when you were arrested. There was a rumor you had hidden somebody. That sounded interesting, so I asked around to find somebody who could introduce us, but sure enough, all of a sudden they were letting you go under another name. How you managed that I don’t want to know.”
“You don’t?”
“No. I want you to do it for me.”
“Why?”
“When I got arrested there were some men following me. That was thirty days ago. I just saw two of them here.”
“Why do they want you?”
The woman gave her a look that was at once pleading and frustrated. “Please, I don’t have time to tell you my life story and you don’t have time to listen to it right now. I have to get out of Los Angeles now—today—only they’re already here, and it can’t be a coincidence. They’re looking for me.”
“But who are you?”
“The short answer is that I’m a woman who needs to disappear and has the money to pay whatever it is you usually get for your services.”
Jane felt exhausted and defeated. Her head, face, hands, and wrists were throbbing and weak. She looked at the woman who called herself Mary Perkins, and the sight of her face made Jane tired. She had said almost nothing, but Jane was alrea
dy picking up signs in her eyes and mouth that she had lied about something. She was genuinely afraid, so she probably wasn’t just some sort of bait placed in the airport by the people Jane had fought outside the courtroom. But if men were following her at all, they were undoubtedly policemen. Jane thought, No. Not now. I’m not up to this. Aloud, she said, “Sorry.”
“Please,” said the woman. “How much do you want?”
“Nothing. You have the wrong person. Mistaken identity.”
Mary Perkins looked into Jane’s eyes, and Jane could see that she was remembering that Jane was injured. “Oh,” the woman said softly. “I understand.” She turned and walked toward the door.
As she opened the door, Jane said, “Good luck.” Mary Perkins didn’t seem to hear her.
Jane looked at her face in the mirror. The bruises were covered, but the thick makeup felt like a mask. When she put the glasses on, they reminded her that the side of her nose had been scraped by the buttons on the big guy’s sleeve when he missed with the first swing.
She walked out to the concourse and strolled along it with the crowds until she was near Gate 72. She saw the woman sitting there pretending to read a magazine. If she was being hunted, it was a stupid thing to do. Jane walked closer to the television set where they posted flight information. Mary Perkins’s eyes focused on Jane, and then flicked to her left. Jane appreciated not being stared at, but then the eyes came back to her, widened emphatically, and flicked again to the left. Jane stopped for a moment, opened her purse, turned her head a little as though she were looking for something and studied the two men to Mary Perkins’s left. If they were hunters they were doing a fairly good job of keeping Mary Perkins penned in and panicky. The short one was sitting quietly reading a newspaper about fifty feet from Mary Perkins, and the big one was pretending to look out the big window at the activity on the dark runway. She could see he was watching the reflection instead, but that wasn’t unusual. Her eyes moved down to the briefcase at his feet. It was familiar, the kind they sold in the gift shop where she had bought the makeup.
The smaller man had no carry-on luggage. He sat quietly with his newspaper, not looking directly at Mary Perkins. He had to be the cut-off man, the one she wasn’t supposed to notice at all until the other man came for her and she bolted. They couldn’t be cops, or they would already have her. She had already bought her ticket, and a plane ticket was proof of intent to flee.
Jane felt spent and hopeless. She admitted to herself that if she got home safely she would find herself tomorrow going to a newsstand and picking up a Los Angeles Times and the New York papers to look for a story about a woman’s body being found in a field. These two were going to follow Mary Perkins until, inevitably, she found herself alone.
Jane walked back down the concourse, raising her eyes to look at the television monitors where the departing flights were posted, never raising her head and never slowing down. By the time she had passed the third monitor she had made her selection. There was a Southwestern Airlines flight leaving for Las Vegas five minutes after the flight to New York. She went down the escalator, walked to the ticket counter and paid cash for two tickets to Las Vegas for Monica Weissman and Betty Weissman. Then she returned to the gate where Mary Perkins was waiting. She sat down a few seats from her, counted to five hundred, then stood up again.
She walked close to Mary Perkins on the way to the ladies’ room. As she did, she waggled her hand behind her back, away from the two watchers.
She waited inside the ladies’ room in front of the mirror until Mary Perkins came in. “Did you check any luggage onto the plane for New York?”
“I don’t have any,” said Mary Perkins. “As soon as I got out I came here.”
“Good,” said Jane. “When we get out of here, stay close but don’t look at me. You never saw me before. One of those guys will be standing between you and the exits. The other one will have moved to a place where he can see his buddy signal him.” She handed Mary Perkins the ticket for Las Vegas.
She looked down at the ticket. “Las Vegas? How does this change anything?”
“Just listen. When it’s time to board, one of them will go to a telephone to tell somebody at the other end that you’re on the plane. It’s a five-hour flight with a stop in Chicago, and that gives them time to do everything but dig your grave before we get there. The other will sit tight until the last minute.”
“But what are we going to do? What’s the plan?”
Jane looked at her wearily. “The plan is to go to Las Vegas and make them think you’ve gone to New York. Now give me about the time it takes to sing the national anthem before you come out. Then go sit where you sat before.”
Jane swung the door open. Instead of looking toward the waiting area, she glanced behind her for the one watching the exit. The man with the paper was loitering a few yards away at the water fountain. She turned and saw that the other one had taken a seat where he could watch his friend. There was a certain comfort in seeing that they were predictable.
Jane sat a few yards behind the man with the briefcase and studied him. He couldn’t be armed with anything worse than a pocketknife. Three inches or less, if she remembered the regulation correctly. They weren’t going to do anything in an airport anyway. People you didn’t know wouldn’t commit suicide to kill you. These were hired help for somebody.
The woman at the boarding desk was joined by a second woman, who said something to her. Then the one who had given Jane her boarding pass picked up a microphone and cooed into it, “Flight 419 for New York is now ready for boarding.” People all over the waiting area stood up. “Will those passengers with small children, or who need help boarding, please come to the gate now.…”
That invitation seemed to apply to no one, so as the woman went on—“Passengers in rows one through ten may board now”—the taller man walked to the row of telephones beside the men’s room.
Mary Perkins stirred, but Jane gave her head a little shake and picked up a newspaper someone had left on a seat near her. The woman went on calling out rows of seats, then said, “Passengers in the remaining seats may board now.” Still Jane sat and stared at the newspaper. There were four minutes left. When there were three minutes, she closed the newspaper and began to walk toward the gate.
In her peripheral vision she saw Mary Perkins stand up and follow, then saw the taller man hurriedly punch some numbers into the telephone. Jane stopped to glance up at the clock on the wall, and saw the smaller man walking along behind Mary Perkins. The man at the telephone had hung up, and he walked straight to the gate, handed the woman his ticket, and entered the tunnel. Jane walked a few feet past the last set of seats in the waiting area slowly, letting Mary Perkins catch up with her. At the last second, she turned to her.
“Why, Mary,” she said. “It is you.”
Mary Perkins stopped and stared at her in genuine shock. “Well … yes.”
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
The man who had been following Mary Perkins stopped too, standing almost behind them. Jane seemed to notice him for the first time. “Oh, don’t mind us. Go ahead.” She pulled Mary Perkins aside. “It’s me, Margaret Cerillo. I thought I recognized you before, but I wasn’t sure …”
The man hesitated. He obviously had orders to follow Mary Perkins onto the airplane, but he also had been instructed to be sure he wasn’t caught doing it. He could think of no reason to stand and wait for these two women while they talked, so he stepped forward, handed his ticket to the woman at the door, and stepped past her into the boarding tunnel.
Jane moved Mary Perkins away from the gate casually. “Slowly, now, and keep talking,” Jane whispered. “You seem to be worth a lot of expense.”
“I guess they think I am,” said Mary Perkins.
“If you have something they want, you’ll never have a better time to come up with it. We can go right into the plane and make a deal. The lights are on and everybody’s been through metal detectors. There’s
no chance of other people we can’t see.”
“If I had anything to buy them off with, what would I need you for?”
Jane stopped and looked at her. “I’ll still help you shake them afterward in case there are hard feelings.”
“Thanks, but I can’t get rid of them that way.”
“What did you do?”
Mary Perkins turned to look at Jane, leaning away from her as though she had just noticed her there and found it displeasing. “Why do you assume I did something?”
“I know you did. If you didn’t, what would you need me for?”
Jane began to walk again. Any woman whose claim to trust was that she had picked up some gossip in the L.A. county jail didn’t inspire much confidence, and this one struck her as a person who had done some lying professionally. But Jane could see no indication of what she was lying about. She was being followed by two men who had not taken the sorts of steps that anybody would take if they wanted to stop her from jumping bail or catch her doing something illegal. They had seen her waiting for a flight to a distant state, and they had gotten aboard. The local cops couldn’t do that, the F.B.I. wouldn’t be prepared to do it on impulse, and if none of them had stopped her from leaving the county jail, then they didn’t know of any reason to keep her there.
Jane had to admit to herself that the only possibility that accounted for the way these men were behaving was that they wanted to keep her in sight until there weren’t any witnesses. “A little faster now,” she said. “We’ve got a plane to catch.”
They started across the waiting area and Jane caught a peculiar movement in the edge of her vision. A man sitting at the far end of the waiting area stood up, and two men who had been conferring quietly at a table in the coffee shop did the same. It wasn’t that any of them would have seemed ominous alone. It was the fact that their movements coincided with Jane’s and Mary’s starting to walk fast. “Did you hear them announce a flight just now?”