Dance for the Dead

by Thomas Perry

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Let’s see. We just left California, so that’s out. Texas is also out.”

  Jane concentrated on the mechanical details for the next few minutes. At Ann Arbor she took the Huron Street exit. She said, “When was the last time you slept?”

  “I slept maybe four hours last night. Jails never seem to quiet down until you start to smell breakfast.”

  “We’ll sleep now.”

  There was a motel just after the exit. Jane pulled into the lot and walked into the office by herself to rent a room. She opened the door with the key, locked the door, checked each of the windows, tossed the key on the table by the door, undressed, and lay down on the nearest bed without speaking. Mary Perkins had no choice but to imitate her. When she awoke, the sun was glaring through a crack between the curtains and Jane was sitting on the other bed reading a newspaper. Mary sat up and said, “What time is it?”

  “Ten. Checkout is twelve. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Mary Perkins rubbed her eyes. “I guess we’ll make it.” She smiled. “It’s not as though we had to pack, is it?”

  “No.”

  Mary Perkins swung her feet to the floor and stood up. She had been surprised to see that Jane was dressed, but the newspaper suddenly caught her attention. “You’ve been out.”

  “Yes,” said Jane, not looking up. Mary Perkins could see that she had circled some little boxes in the want ads. Jane also had set a medium-sized grocery bag on the table beside the key.

  “I never heard you,” said Mary on the way to the bathroom. “You must be the quietest person I ever met in my life.”

  “I figured you needed to sleep.”

  Mary examined the shower and found that the knobs were hot and the tub was wet. She thought about the woman in the other room. A lot of people could tiptoe around pretty well, just like little cats. But how did this one get everything else to be quiet—appliances and fixtures and things?

  Mary Perkins got the water to run warm and stepped under the spray. She felt good, she had to admit. Here she was in a clean room with a clear head a couple of thousand miles away from danger, and taking a shower. Once again whatever it was that had always kept the luck coming had not failed.

  But now that she was alert and not particularly frightened, she had time to think about that woman out there on the bed. What she sensed about Jane Whitefield was not comforting. No, the animal wasn’t a cat. Just because it looked like it had soft fur and the eyes were big and liquid and it didn’t make any noise at all didn’t mean it was cuddly and gentle. Mary was not the sort of person who lost fingers at zoos. Whatever this one was, it had that look because it happened to be the female of its species, not because it was something you wanted around the house.

  The person who had recognized Jane Whitefield in jail was a short black woman named Ellery Robinson. The word on Ellery Robinson was that she had been pulled in on a parole violation. That didn’t make her seem interesting until Mary learned that the conviction was for having killed a man in bed with an old-fashioned straight razor. She had served six or seven years of a life sentence in the California Institution for Women at Frontera, one of those places in the endless desert east of Los Angeles. She was in her fifties now, small and compact with a short, athletic body like a leathery teenager. She never spoke to anyone, having long ago lost interest in whatever other people gained from listening, and having gotten used to whatever it was they expelled by talking. But sometimes she still answered questions if they weren’t personal.

  Mary was in the mess hall one morning when another woman pointed out Jane Whitefield and asked Ellery Robinson if she knew anything about her. Ellery Robinson had actually turned her whole body around in the chow line to stare at her before she said, “She makes people disappear.” Then the conversation was over. Ellery Robinson turned back to eye the food on the warming tables. When a young woman down the line on her first day inside saw the same food and started crying, she looked at her too for a second, not revealing either sympathy or contempt, but as though she just wanted to see where the noise was coming from.

  Mary Perkins had come upon Ellery Robinson sitting in the sunshine in the yard, a headband around her forehead and the sleeves of her prison shirt rolled up to make it fit her child-sized frame. Mary Perkins smiled, but Ellery Robinson said only, “What do you want?”

  “I heard you know who that woman is that came in yesterday. Tall, black hair, thin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it true that she hides people?”

  Ellery Robinson closed one eye and tilted her head up to look at Mary Perkins. “Why aren’t you talking to her?”

  “I thought I’d better find out what I could first.”

  Ellery Robinson abruptly lost interest in Mary Perkins. She seemed determined to end the conversation, so everything came out quickly in a monotone. “I heard that if a person is in trouble—not the kind of trouble where the cops take them to court, but the kind where the cops find their head in a Dumpster—the person could do worse than see her.”

  Mary Perkins stared at Ellery Robinson, but her face revealed nothing. “You sure nobody made her up?”

  Ellery Robinson nodded in the direction of the cellblock. “There she is.”

  “If you know her, why haven’t you talked to her?”

  For the first time Ellery Robinson’s facial muscles moved a little, but it wasn’t a smile. “I don’t have that kind of trouble. If you do, go meet her yourself.”

  Mary Perkins looked uncomfortable. “This is all new to me. It’s the first time I’ve been arrested.”

  “No, it isn’t.” It wasn’t an accusation. There was no trace of reproof or irony. There was nothing behind it at all. Then she seemed to acknowledge that her words were what had made Mary Perkins take a step backward. “Lots of bad girls in here. You aren’t the worst.” She closed her eyes and moved to the side a little so she would be in the full sun again and Mary’s shadow would be gone.

  Now Mary stood in the shower in Michigan, feeling safe. She had begun to relax when she sensed something had changed again. She tensed and swung around to see the shape outside the shower curtain.

  “Dry off,” said Jane, “but leave your hair wet.”

  Mary turned off the water, snatched a towel off the rack, pulled it inside the curtain with her, and turned away to dry herself. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why leave my hair wet?”

  Jane reached into the paper bag and pulled out a box with a picture of a fashion model on it. “We’ll dry it after it’s dyed.”

  “Dyed? What if I don’t want it dyed?”

  “Then don’t dye it,” said Jane. “You’ve got easy ways to stay lost, and hard ways. Changing the color of your hair is one of the easy ways.”

  Mary glared at the model on the box. Whatever color her hair had been when the picture was taken, an artist had painted it over a hedgehog brown. “That color?”

  Jane set the box on the sink just under the mirror. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I’ve just always been blond.”

  Jane’s eyes lifted to glance at her in the mirror, and then Mary saw them move to the picture on the box. She said nothing, but Mary saw what she was comparing the color on the box to. She angrily snatched another towel off the rack, wrapped it around her and tucked it under her arm like a sarong. “I meant I’ve always felt blond. I’ve been blond for a long time.”

  Jane didn’t turn to face her. “We’ve got less than two hours before checkout time. If you want to look different, the time to do it is before you rent an apartment, not later, after everybody has seen you already. I’ll be out there. Think it over.”

  Mary sat on the edge of the tub and stared at the mirror. It was just high enough so that all she could see of herself was the glowing blond hair at the crown of her head. It was bright, shiny, almost metallic when it was wet like this. She walked to the door and called, “Okay, let’s get it ove
r with.”

  Jane came back in, slipped on rubber gloves, pulled a chair up next to the sink, and went to work on Mary’s hair. The acrid smells and the mess on the counter were all familiar to Mary, but it had been years since she had endured them outside of a hairdresser’s shop.

  Jane worked in silence and with extreme care, glancing at her watch every few minutes. Then it was over, and she was brushing Mary’s hair out.

  Mary said, “You’ve done this quite a bit, haven’t you?”

  “Sure,” Jane said. “If you do all of the easy things, the hard ones work better. Dyeing your hair, buying new clothes, using glasses to change the way your eyes look—those are easy. You can do all of them in a day, and none of them has any risk. If you think about what you’re trying to accomplish, you can do it as well as I can.”

  “What am I trying to accomplish?”

  Jane looked at her in the mirror impatiently. “You put in a lot of time trying to be Mary Perkins. You had it all worked out. Just do it in reverse. For the time being, you have nothing in common with Mary Perkins. She liked Las Vegas. You hate it; the lights give you a headache and everybody on the street looks like a zombie to you. Mary Perkins made businessmen think about her and remember her. Lose everything you did to accomplish that. Be the one who doesn’t catch their eye. That’s easy to do, and if you don’t do at least that much, you’re finished. Anybody who wants to find you can knock on doors and show your picture.”

  Mary Perkins studied her reflection. The effect wasn’t as bad as she had expected. The woman who stared back at her wasn’t dowdy or mousy. She was mildly, quietly attractive, and with a little makeup she could be made better than that. What she looked most like was a woman who had never existed; she looked like a grown-up version of Lily Smith. “All right,” she said. “What do we change next?”

  “That will have to do for now. Come on.”

  Checking out consisted of sitting in the car while Jane went into the motel office and set the key on the counter. When she returned, she started the car and said, “All right. Now we start getting into the hard parts. Do you have identification in any name besides Mary Perkins?”

  “Lila Samuels,” said Mary.

  “Throw her away with Mary Perkins. You’ve been in county jail. Although you haven’t exactly said so, you’ve been investigated, and probably arrested more than once. The authorities know your aliases, and so can anybody else who wants to.”

  Mary Perkins said, “I’ve got to be somebody.”

  “I’ve got some papers with me that you can use. Your name is Donna Kester. You’re thirty-five.”

  Mary Perkins stared at her. “You have fake I.D. with you? But you were arrested too. They went through your purse.”

  Jane pulled the car out of the parking lot and drove up the street. “It wasn’t in my purse.” Jane had brought the papers for Mona and kept them taped under the dashboard of each car they had used while traveling across the country. After Dennis had wrecked the last car, she had gone to the lot where it had been towed and found the papers untouched. “You can be Donna Kester without worrying about anything for a while.”

  They looked at three different apartments before they found the right one. It was in a building in the middle of a large modern apartment complex on Huron Street that seemed to contain a high proportion of single people, but it was far enough from the University of Michigan campus to be vacant. The fact that Donna Kester had a credit card was enough to get her a lease that began in two days. The fact that she had no local employer only confirmed her story that she had just gotten to town.

  That afternoon Jane checked them into another motel at the edge of Ann Arbor, past the place where Huron Street crossed Route 94 and became Liberty Road. Jane sat in the motel room on the twin bed across from Mary. It was dusk, and the cold wind was beginning to blow outside to announce that the short fall days were fading into winter nights here. The tree branches that scraped and rattled the gutters of the building were bare, and the wet pavement of the parking lot outside the window would be frosted by morning.

  Jane said, “This is a good place to be. There are about thirty-five thousand students here, just about all of them strangers. Figure five thousand faculty, all from other places. Most of them are married, so they’re really ten thousand, and another five thousand staff. Most of those people just returned here for fall semester. You’re one of fifty thousand people who just got to town in a community with a year-round population that can’t be much over a hundred thousand.”

  “Are you trying to sell me a condo?” asked Mary.

  “No,” said Jane. “I’m trying to teach you something. If you’re going to be a fugitive you’d better get good at it. I’ve heard a couple of versions of who isn’t chasing you, but not who is. It doesn’t matter. This isn’t the sort of place where they’ll look first. That’s the best you can do in choosing a place to be invisible. There are always about five likely places to look for anybody. If you’re stupid, you’ll be in one. Once you move beyond those, every place is about as likely as any other, so the odds of finding you drop dramatically.”

  “Where would you look? You said five places.”

  “I haven’t studied Mary Perkins as thoroughly as they have. You’ve been to Las Vegas and liked it. You’d be too smart to go back, and Reno’s too close, so I might try looking in Atlantic City. You said you had worked in Texas and California, so people know you. But that leaves lots of cities in between that would appeal to Mary Perkins: I’d try Scottsdale, Sedona, Santa Fe. You like to be around money and sunshine.” As she watched Mary, she could see that the list was making her frightened. “The fifth place is somewhere in the South.”

  Mary Perkins looked like a woman who had paid to have her palm read and heard that she had no life line. “Where?”

  “You have just a trace of a southern accent. Since I know you’ve been arrested, I’d check the arrest record to find the city where you were born. That’s always the fifth place.”

  Mary looked at Jane with an expression that was meant to be intrigued puzzlement, but the surface never set properly; her face only formed itself into pie-faced hurt. “Why is that?”

  Jane’s eyes were tired and sad. “I don’t know. Some people will tell you it’s because they know the territory better than a stranger could, but they say that even if every inch of the place was bulldozed and rebuilt the day they left. Some of them say it’s because they can get help from friends and relatives, but half the time they don’t ask for it when they’re there. They go there even if everybody they ever knew is dead and buried.”

  “You’re telling me what you don’t believe. What do you believe makes them go back?”

  “I’m telling you I don’t think the people who do it know why. Maybe it’s just some feeling that people have because we’re animals too. You go to ground where you once felt most safe, and that’s wherever your mother was.” She watched Mary Perkins for a moment. “It’s a lousy instinct, and it will get you killed.”

  “So what now?”

  “This is a place where nobody is searching for you. You look a little different, and if you work at it you can change more. You have identification as Donna Kester that should hold up. The credit cards are real. You’ll get the bills. The driver’s license is from New York, but it’s good too. Somebody actually took the road test. You can get a new one here with the old one and the birth certificate. That’s real too.” A man Jane knew had found a job in a small-town courthouse and added forty or fifty birth records that hadn’t been there before. He sold about one name a year, so the odds were good that nobody would catch one and start looking into the rest.

  Mary Perkins looked increasingly alarmed. “How long do we have to stay here?”

  “It’s up to you. If you want my advice, I’ll give it to you. Spend your time around the university, where there are crowds of strangers of every description and all the thugs wear helmets and shoulder pads. Buy yourself a long, warm coat with a high collar
and wear a hat and scarf.”

  “You’re telling me you’re cutting me loose, aren’t you?” said Mary Perkins with growing anxiety. “I thought you were going to protect me and get me settled.”

  Jane framed her words carefully, making an effort to keep the frustration out of her voice. “You came to me in trouble, with two men on your back. I got you out of that trouble because you asked me to and I didn’t think you could do it yourself. Now you’re reasonably safe if you want to be. That’s as far as I go with you.”

  “It’s because you think I can’t pay, right? Well, I can. I’ve got money with me, and I can get more when it’s safe to travel. Enough to make it worth your time, anyway.”

  “Keep it,” said Jane. She picked up her purse and the keys to the car. “The more you have, the longer it will be before you do something foolish.” She walked to the door, stopped, and added, “Take care.”

  “I have a right to know why.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Jane. She stepped outside, closed the door, and walked across the cold lot to the car. She started it and drove around the block and past the motel twice. When she was certain that nobody was watching the motel and nobody had followed the car, she continued straight to Route 94 and headed east toward the junction with 23 to Ohio.

  When Jane reached Toledo she swung east across the vast flat lake country toward home. In the morning when she passed into the southwestern tip of New York, she felt as though she had left enemy territory. Three hours later, she drove the rented car to the Rochester airport and turned it in at the lot to make it look as though the driver had continued east on a plane. Then she took a commuter flight seventy miles west to the Buffalo airport, where she had left her own car.

  She drove up the Youngmann Expressway to Delaware Avenue and turned north into the city of Deganawida in the late afternoon. The sun had already moved to a position in the west where its feeble glow did little to blunt the bite of the wind off the Niagara River. She drove onto Main Street near the old cemetery that had filled up before the Spanish-American War, took the shortcut along the railroad tracks and down Erie to Ogden Street, then turned again to her block. The house was one of a hundred or more narrow two-story wooden buildings placed beside the street that ran the length of the city from one creek to the next one, two miles away.