by Thomas Perry
Jane stopped at a pay telephone and dialed her own number. She heard the telephone ring four times and then heard her own voice. “Hello. Please leave a message at—” Jane quickly punched in her two-digit code, then heard the machine rewind. It seemed to be taking a long time. Then there were a couple of clicks and Carey McKinnon’s voice.
“Jane? It’s Carey. I know you’re probably calling in for messages, and this is the only way I have to reach you. I’m sorry I had to go back to the hospital the other night. Give me a call when you can—at home or the hospital or my office. If I’m in surgery or something, leave me a number where I can reach you.” The machine’s computer voice said, “Tuesday, ten-fifteen A.M.”
Carey’s voice came on again. “Hi, Jane. Just me again. It’s been a few days and you still haven’t called me. Am I imagining that you said you would? I’m in my usual haunts.” “Saturday,” said the machine, “two thirty-six P.M.”
The next one said, “I’m beginning to think you’re mad at me or something. If you are, please call me up and yell at me. Two weeks is a long time to sit around wondering.” “Friday, six fifty-two P.M.”
Jane hung up the telephone and then dialed Carey’s number. When his machine came on, she said, “Hi, Carey. It’s me. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you. This job has turned out to be just awful. I’m trying to help a woman make her business profitable, and her business is promoting products all over the country. I’ve been in more airports than … a couple more than my suitcase has anyway. I always seem to be strapped into an airplane seat when you’re home, and then we have to sit down and run figures for the next meeting the minute we’re in a hotel, and get to the meeting by breakfast time. Enough whining. I’m not mad at you. I’ll call you when I’m home.” She caught herself before she said “I love you” because he had never said it to her, but then she felt foolish for being petty. She changed it into “I miss you,” then hung up. She tested the sound of it in her mind and decided it was true, as far as it went. She did miss him.
There had been two or three friends in college who had known that she had a knack for hiding people, but Carey McKinnon had not been one of them. Each year thereafter it would have been harder to tell him, but that was not why she had avoided it. She had been saving him for herself. She needed to keep home a safe place where she could talk to people who cared about her and forget that the next day she might have to take a fugitive out of the world. But she had planted a lie that had grown thick enough to choke her. Now that he had asked her to marry him, she could barely stand to talk to his answering machine.
As she stepped off the curb, she realized that the only solution she had thought of was to perpetuate the lie—tell him the profession she was quitting was the consulting business—and not admit to him that she was not the person he thought he knew. She would only be doing what she had taught dozens of other people to do—pick the life you want and lie fifty times a day to get it—so she felt ashamed that the prospect seemed so empty and hopeless to her.
Then she recognized that she was thinking about it as though she had decided to marry Carey. She had not decided. The time to decide about marriage was when you had reason to assume you would be alive on your wedding day.
Jane took a bus back to Ann Arbor and got off at the university. She did not begin the walk down Huron Street back to the apartment until after midnight. She had taken a longer time than necessary to give Mary Perkins a day alone. The more time Mary had to think, the better she would be.
As Jane walked up Huron in the cold, still air, listening to her feet crunching the snow, she began to hear another sound, far off behind her. It started low and quickly moved up an octave a second until she recognized it as a siren. She walked along, listening to it grow louder and closer, until she heard it pass her on a parallel street. A minute later, she heard another set of sirens coming toward her from somewhere ahead and to her right.
She watched the intersections ahead and saw the blinking lights of a fire engine swing around a corner and head out Huron Street. After another block she began to smell the smoke in the air. It was a thin, hanging haze like the smoke from somebody’s fireplace in the windless night. She began to walk faster, and at the next corner she turned down a side street. It was a two-alarm fire so far, and there was no point in walking into the middle of a lot of firemen and policemen after midnight carrying shopping bags. At the first corner she turned right along the street behind Huron and hurried on.
When she was still two blocks from the big old house where Mary lived, she could see the sky suddenly begin to glow. She dropped her bags and broke into a run. It must be the house. As she ran up the quiet residential street, she began to see other people coming out of apartments and houses and walking toward the fire.
When Jane turned back onto Huron, she could see the trucks lined up in front of Mary’s house. The coats of the firemen were glowing, their wet helmets reflecting the flames that were now coming out of the lower windows and licking up the wooden clapboards toward the upper floor.
Jane forced herself to slow her pace to a fast walk, looking carefully at every human shape illuminated by the fire. She tried to recognize one that might be Mary, already almost certain that she would not see her. The fire didn’t make sense unless they had made a mistake and killed her. They had set a fire not because it would fool a coroner—Farrell, the training officer, would have taught them that much—but because fire got rid of fingerprints and fibers, and because water and firemen’s boots obliterated footprints.
She moved into the curious crowd and began to study the faces of the people who had gathered in a big circle around the fire. She wasn’t looking for Mary anymore; she was looking for any face that she had seen before.
She heard the loud blip-blip of another siren and saw another set of lights sweep around the corner and stop at the curb thirty feet behind a fire truck. The new vehicle was an ambulance. Jane moved toward it, weaving her way between spectators who were so intent on the fire that they seemed to be unaware of her passing.
She edged closer to the ambulance and watched the two paramedics haul their collapsible stretcher out the back and rush, not to Mary’s house but up the other side of the hedge to the lawn of the house next door. Jane felt a tiny resurgence of hope that she could not suppress. Maybe that was where the firemen had taken the victims—out of their way and out of danger—and if the paramedics were in a hurry, they must believe they had a patient waiting for them, not a corpse.
Jane followed the paramedics. They hurried up the lawn until they reached a pair of firemen in gas masks who were kneeling over somebody lying prone on the snow beyond the hedge. One of the firemen had an oxygen tank on his back like a scuba diver, and he was holding the mask over the face of the person on the ground. Jane held her breath as the four men slid the victim onto the stretcher. When they lifted it to unfold the legs, she let her breath out in disappointment. The person on the stretcher was wearing a black rubber turnout coat and high boots. One of the firemen must have collapsed from the smoke.
She turned away and looked at the house. The top floor had caught now, and she could see the flames eating their way through the inner walls. In a few minutes the roof would collapse into Mary Perkins’s apartment and the killers would have accomplished what Barraclough’s training officer had taught them to do when things went wrong.
She watched the firemen straining to hold the hoses steady while they sprayed enormous streams of water into the upper windows. She glanced at a couple of firemen coming around the house carrying long pike poles. Their faces had dark, grimy smoke stains around the eyes and on the foreheads where their masks had not covered, their coats and pants glistened with water and dripped on the snow as they trotted toward their truck. She whirled around in time to see the four men pushing the stretcher toward the back of the ambulance. The injured fireman’s turnout coat wasn’t wet. He had been in there long enough to succumb to the smoke, but he didn’t have a drop on him. The two fir
emen who had been kneeling over him were dry too.
Jane moved quickly in a diagonal path toward the ambulance, keeping her eyes on the stretcher. They had the tie-down restraints strapped over a blanket they’d draped over the turnout coat, and the mask still over the face. She couldn’t see the hair because they had a pillow under the head and their bodies shielded it from view. As they reached the lighted street she stared hard at the side of the blanket, where a couple of the victim’s fingers protruded an inch. The red, whirling light from the fire truck just ahead passed across them and glinted off a set of tapered, polished fingernails. It was Mary Perkins.
Jane stepped around the front of the ambulance, slipped into the driver’s door, and crouched on the floor. She heard the back doors open, the sliding of the metal wheels of the stretcher, and then the back doors slammed. She climbed into the seat, threw the transmission into gear, stepped on the gas pedal, and veered away from the curb to avoid the fire engine parked thirty feet ahead.
Then she straightened her wheels and roared down the block. She glanced in the rearview mirror. The four men took a couple of steps after her, then seemed to see the futility of it and stopped in the street. Before she turned the corner at the first traffic signal she looked again, but she couldn’t see them anymore.
She drove fast for five blocks, letting the siren clear the way for her, and then turned into a smaller street, flipped off the flashing lights and siren, and went faster.
“Mary!” she called. There was no answer. It occurred to her that the gas in the fireman’s tank had probably not been oxygen. It could as easily have been medical anesthetic. If it was, Mary was about as likely to die as recover. Jane drove on for another minute, then pulled the van to a stop in the lot behind a school. She ran to the back of the ambulance, opened the door, climbed inside, and looked down at Mary. She could see that her eyes were wide open, and then they blinked.
“You’re alive after all,” said Jane. She pulled at the oxygen mask and saw that it was held by a piece of elastic behind the head, so she slipped it up and off. There was a wide strip of adhesive tape across Mary’s mouth. She undid the top straps on the stretcher.
Mary quickly sat up and fumbled to free her own feet. She was sobbing and shaking, and kicking at the strap so hard that her own hands couldn’t hold on to it. Jane undid that strap too. “You’d better take the tape off your own mouth,” she said.
Mary clawed at it and gave a little cry of pain as she tore it off. “They trapped me!” she sobbed. “There was no other way out.” She shook the heavy turnout coat off, and Jane could see they had slipped it over the jacket she had put on to escape the fire. “There was smoke, and they banged on the door, and they looked like firemen. One of them gave me an oxygen mask, and—”
“I know,” said Jane. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Can’t you just keep going?” Mary looked at the driver’s seat, willing Jane into it.
“No. We’re already pushing our luck. They’ll be looking for the ambulance. I assume it’s stolen, so the police will be too.” She pulled Mary to her feet, pushed her out the back door, and said, “Run with me.”
Mary stood against the ambulance. She took a step in the fireman’s boots, her beige pants bloused over the tops just below her knees, then stopped and pulled her jacket around her. “I can’t.”
“Try,” said Jane simply. She slung her purse across her chest and started off across the lot at a slow, easy trot. After a few steps she heard Mary running too.
Jane jogged onto the broad back lawn of the school. It seemed to be a high school because all of the athletic fields were full-sized and elaborate, with wooden bleachers beside them. The grass under the snow was level and clear, with no chance of any unseen obstacles. Even better, there were tracks on it where she could place her feet. When she was in the open away from the building she could feel the wind blowing tiny particles of snow against her cheeks. Now was the time to set a quick pace, before some cop arrived to find the ambulance. She waited until she thought Mary Perkins was warm and loose, then lengthened her strides a bit. The playing fields were an advantage because she could lead them out a quarter of a mile away on a street far from the path of the ambulance. But while they were out here they would be the only black spots on an ocean of empty white snow.
She looked over her shoulder at Mary and saw that she interpreted the look as permission to slow down. Jane turned ahead again and quickly worked her way up to a comfortable lope. She listened to Mary’s footsteps and timed her breathing. She was not used to running, but she seemed to be doing it.
When Jane reached the goalpost at the end of the football field, she stopped and ran in place until Mary caught up. She said, “We’ll be able to walk as soon as we reach cover,” and started off again. This time it seemed to be a soccer field because it was longer. She could discern what was at the end of the school property now. There was a high chain-link fence, and beyond it some tall, leafless trees. She ran ahead to look for the gate.
She found it in a few seconds, but it had a thick chain and a serious padlock on it. She looked back to see Mary struggling to catch up. She could see that there were tracks all over the field. Unless kids had changed a lot since she was in high school they would never walk an extra quarter mile just to get around a fence. She moved along the fence and saw the answer. There was a city parking lot beyond the fence, filled with plows, dump trucks, tractors, and a forage harvester parked beside a building that looked like a warehouse. The parking lot was empty of cars, but it was clear of snow because they had used the plows to push an enormous pile of snow up against the fence nearly to its top eight feet up.
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 ducked 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.