Dance for the Dead

by Thomas Perry

  It was still dark when Jane bumped up off the road onto the smooth asphalt surface of a gas station and turned off the car’s engine. She heard Mary sit up in the back seat, so she turned around to watch her squinting and blinking at the lighted island, then reach up to run her fingers through her hair. Jane watched her slowly begin to remember. She was suddenly agitated. “Where are we? Why are we stopping?”

  Jane chose to answer the first question. “Miami, Oklahoma.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Jane was glad to hear the annoyance in Mary’s voice. It was a vital sign, like a pulse or a heartbeat. “This is it for now. It’s safe here.”

  At a little past nine A.M. they walked into the gift shop in the Inter-Tribal Council Building. The young woman who was cleaning the display case turned and smiled, then went back to her work. Jane waited until the woman sensed that she wanted to talk. She looked up from her work, let her eyes rest on Jane for a second, then said, “I’ll bet you’re here visiting relatives.”

  Mary smiled involuntarily.

  “Yes,” said Jane. She saw Mary’s face turn to hers in surprise. “I was hoping to catch Martha McCutcheon here.”

  “Oh, Seneca,” said the woman.

  “That’s right,” said Jane. She held out her hand. “Jane Whitefield.”

  The woman took it and smiled. “Rowena Cloud. Ottawa.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” said Jane. “Is Martha in the back?”

  “Martha hasn’t been well this week,” said Rowena Cloud. “She has arthritis bad in the winter, and it’s been bitter cold for a couple of days, so she might be in bed. She didn’t mention anything about going anyplace. If she’s not home, though, come on back. You can stay at our house. I can give you directions, and the key is over the door.”

  “Well, thank you,” said Jane warmly. “We’ll go see if she’s up to visitors.”

  As they walked down the street, Mary asked softly, “Are you really an Indian, or is that some kind of assumed identity too?”

  Jane looked at her, amused. “Think I could fool her?” She opened the car door and waited while Mary eased into the seat, then started the car and pulled out onto the road.

  “How did she know? You have blue eyes.”

  “This is Indian country. She’s seen about every kind of Indian there is, so she’s an expert. There are reservations all around us.”

  “Seneca?”

  “Some. The Iroquois all lived in New York State in the beginning. But there were some Seneca and Cayuga families who used to go into Ohio every fall to hunt. After the Revolutionary War they didn’t see any point in going home. They were on reservations at Lewistown and Sandusky until they got pushed out in 1831 and sent to Oklahoma.”

  “But this isn’t your hometown?”

  Jane shook her head. “Not me. My family stayed in New York.” She watched Mary closely. “Look, Mary. There are going to be a few things you see and hear that won’t make sense to you. Like that girl back there saying we could stay with her, when she had never laid eyes on us before.”

  “It did seem a little odd,” said Mary.

  “Smile a lot and ignore anything that seems unfamiliar. I didn’t want to bring you here, but we’ve run about as far as we can for now. Barraclough already knows I killed his men, and pretty soon he’ll know you took all his money and gave it to the government. He’s going to be searching, and this time he won’t let anything distract him. He wants us dead.”

  “I know that,” said Mary.

  “A few of the people here know me. Most of them don’t. A few are—in the way that we figure these things, not the way you’re used to—relatives. We need to get you to a doctor, and we need a place to rest. This is it.”

  They left the car parked on the road and walked along a path to the trailer park. It took Jane a few minutes of searching before she found the mobile home she remembered on the very edge of the lot. There was a small stenciled sign on the door that said “McCUTCHEON.” She knocked quietly and listened.

  The door of the mobile home opened and an old woman in a cardigan sweater and a flowered dress stood in the doorway three steps above them. Her long straight hair was thick and gray, tied back in a tight ponytail as though it belonged to a much younger woman, but her mouth was toothless and her jaws were clamped together so her chin nearly touched her nose. She said simply, “Hello.”

  Jane spoke to her in Seneca. “My name is Jane Whitefield, Grandmother. Do you remember me?”

  The old woman squinted, smiled happily, then said in English, “Just a minute.” She went away and came back with her false teeth in. “I remember you, Granddaughter,” she said in Seneca. “I’m glad to see you again.”

  Jane said in English, “This is a friend of mine, Mary Perkins.”

  The old woman scrutinized Mary in mock disapproval. “Not another anthropologist.”

  “No,” said Jane. “She’s only a safecracker.”

  Martha laughed happily. “Dah-joh.” She repeated it in English, stepping back to make way. “Come in. I’m having trouble with the lock on this door. Maybe you’re the one to fix it.”

  Jane and Mary climbed the wooden steps into the tiny, neat kitchen. Mary could see that the television set was on in the living room, but Martha seemed to notice it at the same time. She reached into her sweater pocket, pulled out the remote control, aimed it carefully, and killed the machine. She said, “Sit down, sit down. I’ll get you something.”

  Mary drew a breath to say “We just ate,” but Jane touched her arm and gave her head a single shake.

  Corn bread, honey, and strawberry and blueberry preserves appeared so suddenly and with so little preparation that Mary instantly perceived that this was another of the things that she must simply smile at and not question.

  Jane and Martha walked out among the dry, frost-flecked flower stalks in the garden and spoke to one another in Seneca. “What happened to her?”

  Jane had come here because it was the only place she could think of in this part of the country where she could trust people absolutely, but when the question came she could not relinquish her old habits. She quickly manufactured a story, but when she looked into the old lady’s eyes to begin, they seemed already to have penetrated the lie. Telling it would be a waste of time. “She was kidnapped. She had money that wasn’t hers. Some men wanted it. They tortured her. She hasn’t said so yet, but they raped her.”

  “Did the police catch them?”

  Jane shook her head. “We couldn’t even call the police. She’s done too much. She’d end up in jail and the men would find her there and make sure she never got out.”

  “What’s a Nundawaono girl got to do with that kind of business?”

  Jane looked into her eyes. “It’s what I do. Fugitives come to me and I guide them out of the world.”

  “Why?”

  Jane laughed a sad little chuckle. “Because if I didn’t, they would give me bad dreams.”

  “I’ll bet a lot of them do anyway,” said Martha. She looked at Jane with her bright old eyes and shook her head. “People like me—the old longhouse people who believe in the visions of Handsome Lake—we’re always saying the young have forgotten everything. So the one day I stay home from work my own great-grandmother comes to my door. I should learn to shut up. Now I have to help you take care of her, don’t I?”

  Jane said, “You’re a clan mother. You must have learned enough in all those years to make a decision by yourself.”

  “Has she been to a doctor?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to call a doctor friend of mine and have him use his connections to get us one who won’t call the police when she walks in.”

  “I know one who will see her today. Leave her to me,” said Martha.

  A few days later, Mary opened the trailer door and walked outside to find Martha standing alone in the weeds. The old woman was already looking at her, as though she had been watching the door and waiting for it to open. “Come on,”
she said, and began to walk.

  Mary Perkins caught up with her. “Where are we going?”

  “No place. I’ve been walking like this for seventy-five years, and if I stop doing it, I’ll stiffen up and die.”

  They walked along in silence for a time. Every few minutes Mary found that her steps had started to move toward the highway without her thinking about it, and she had to correct her course. Martha showed no interest in the road. She kept walking straight through the weeds. After a time Mary noticed that Martha’s dress was hemmed precisely a half inch above the weeds so that it didn’t get caught in brambles or pick up seeds. “How about you?” the old woman asked. “Have you decided yet?”

  “Decided what?”

  “To die.”

  Mary walked a long time. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s already happened and I missed it. I don’t know exactly when. I was beyond noticing things by the time Jane came. After that I concentrated on staying upright long enough to do something I had promised myself to do. That’s over now, but nothing has come to take its place.”

  Martha walked along in the weeds. The cold made the dry stalks snap as her feet pushed them aside to touch the snow. “Each time I walk through here it’s different. In four months this will all be wildflowers. Tiny white ones, lots of blue and gold and pink, all mixed together. There are about four hundred acres here that nobody has farmed since I was a kid, and the flowers grow like crazy.”

  “I’d like to see that,” said Mary.

  “Then you’re not dead yet.”

  Mary walked stiffly, not paying much attention to the rattling stalks of the weeds. “Maybe that wasn’t me. It’s been so long since I used my real name that it doesn’t sound like me anymore. Maybe Jane didn’t tell you, but that’s why this happened.”

  “Whatever you did, what was done to you wasn’t the punishment. It was only something else that happened. Now something else will happen.”

  “That’s my problem. It’s not that I don’t know what will happen, or that I’m afraid. I can’t even think of anything that I would like to happen.”

  “Maybe you need some help. You could spend the rest of your life going to see psychiatrists.”

  “I take it you don’t approve.”

  “It’s okay with me. Some people like drugs, and I think a lot of them just like getting dressed up and having a place to go where they’re expected at a certain time.”

  “Right now I can’t see any difference between that and anything else that people do.”

  “Maybe Mary Perkins got so torn up that she isn’t worth much anymore. Maybe you didn’t like her much to begin with. Forgive her, because you know that she’s suffered. Love her, because you traveled together and shared secrets. Then end her life and bury her.”

  “Kill myself?”

  “Unless you still want to see the wildflowers.”

  Mary studied her carefully. “You made that up about the wildflowers, didn’t you?”

  Martha nodded. “Of course I did. This is all thistle and buffalo grass. I’d like to see some wildflowers, though. Most winters I find that’s all that’s necessary.”

  Jane waited until Martha McCutcheon had gone to work at the store, then sat beside Mary on the steps of the trailer.

  “I didn’t ask you to talk much about what happened because I didn’t want to upset you,” Jane began. “Now I need to.”

  Mary’s voice was tense, but she said, “Okay.”

  “They probably asked you a lot of questions—things that didn’t seem to make any sense, right?”

  “Yes. It was the older one, most of the time. It was like he was trying to see if I was telling the truth. Where did we meet the guy to get a ride in Ann Arbor? What did we eat—”

  “Names,” Jane interrupted. “Did he ask you about the names we used when we were running?”

  “Well, yes.” She seemed to sense she had made a terrible mistake. “I told them. I was so scared, so tired—”

  “It’s okay,” Jane said. “It’s okay. Just think back. Are there any names you know that you left out?”

  “No.”

  Jane nodded and stood up. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I just needed to know.”

  The “older one” must be Farrell. He had waited until she had reached the lowest point and then asked her all of the questions. The answers would have given Barraclough what he needed now. Barraclough could take something as trivial as the room number of a hotel on a particular date, approach the right clerk in the right way, and get the name Jane had used and her credit card number. If the hotel happened to be one that bought its security from Intercontinental, then they would give it to him without any fuss. Whenever Barraclough wanted to, he could be Intercontinental Security Services.

  Jane spent the next few days watching the horizon. The flat, empty fields on all sides should have made her feel safer, but the endless sameness induced a panicky agoraphobia in her. She would sit at Martha McCutcheon’s kitchen table for fifteen minutes at a time, staring into the west down the highway, then move to another window to gaze to the south across the winter-bare fields.

  On the fourth night she heard a noise and sat up in bed, not waking up, just awake. From the other wall of the trailer Martha McCutcheon whispered, “It’s the wind.” After a moment she said in Seneca, “Have you thought about what you were going to do if it weren’t?”

  “Always,” Jane whispered. She stood up, put on her coat, and walked outside the trailer into the field and away from the lights of the trailer park. She sat in the weeds in the dark and listened to the wind. It was cold and wild, coming across the plain in sputtering gusts and eddies. She had a scared feeling that it carried something that she couldn’t quite hear. It might be something that she would have been able to identify if the air had been calm, and it might be something she should not have been near enough to hear at all, something the wind had brought from far away.

  Either way it was the same sound. It was car doors slamming, men’s feet trampling the stiff, frozen weeds, the metallic clicks as shotgun slides pumped and pistol magazines locked into place. She looked up into the sky and tried to discern the constellation of the loon that the old runners had used to navigate as they moved along the Waagwenneyu at night, but it was hidden behind trailing clouds.

  When she looked back at the little camp, she could see it through Barraclough’s eyes. It would not be hard to find the right trailer, with the shiny new car she had rented in Dallas parked beside it. Ordinary .38 ammunition would pierce the trailer wall. A rifle round in a big-game caliber could go through both walls and kill somebody behind the trailer from three hundred yards out. There was nothing in the flat, empty country that was big enough to hide a running woman.

  In the morning Jane went with Martha on her walk. After a time, Martha said, “You’re leaving today, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want something first, don’t you?”

  “It might not be safe here much longer. I want you to drive up north with her.”

  “Where?”

  “Nundawaonoga.” It was the Seneca word for the western half of New York State. It was like saying “Home.” Jane added, “No planes, no buses, no credit cards.” She held out a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. “This will pay for a car.”

  Martha walked along in silence for a time, then took the money and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket. “There are people up there I haven’t seen in ten years. They’ll be very glad to see me.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother.”

  Martha held Jane in the corner of her eye. “Why aren’t you going with us?”

  Jane shook her head. “He’s not looking for her now. He’s looking for me.”

  Farrell paced back and forth in front of the television monitor, the heels of his polished shoes clicking on the old hardwood floor of the Enterprise Development office. “Take another look at her.” The picture on the monitor was dim and grainy. The sound had been erased. T
he woman had been caught in a telephoto lens standing on the edge of a freeway beside Barraclough. Every few seconds a car or truck would flash past in the foreground, shrunk by the lens to look smaller than the people beyond it. The woman was Jane. “Look at the shape of her face, the way she moves. Forget her hair and clothes. She’ll change those. Study the things that don’t change.”

  After ten seconds, the picture vanished in a wash of bright, popping static, and then the tape began to rewind. Farrell turned to his audience of young men. They were sitting on desks, leaning against walls, some even crouched on the floor near the screen. Assembled like this, they were an unprepossessing bunch, but he knew something about each of them that made him feel confident. During his years as a cop, Farrell had become very good at spotting a certain kind of young man early. “This is the only picture we have of her at the moment, but when we find something that’s a little clearer, we’ll try to work up some still shots for you. Let’s run the tape again.”

  As Farrell reached for the PLAY button he could hear the heavy footsteps on the stairs. He straightened as the door swung open and Barraclough walked in. Few of Farrell’s trainees had ever seen Barraclough before, but they had just watched the tape, so none of them wondered who he was. Barraclough’s empty gray eyes swept the crowd of young men. When a few of the trainees fidgeted involuntarily to correct their posture, the motion seemed to attract Barraclough’s gaze to them. He stared, made some secret assessment, and moved on.

  The tailored navy blue blazer and gray pants Barraclough wore had the simplicity and precise lines of a uniform. He turned away from the young men, slipped off the coat and tossed it onto Farrell’s desk as a simple gesture to make it clear that this place was his, and turned back to them in his starched, Marine-creased white shirt. Strapped under his left arm was a Browning nine-millimeter automatic in a worn shoulder holster, carried muzzle-upward so it could be drawn with little movement. Attached to the strap under the left arm was an extra ammunition clip. The young men could see that this was not the gleaming, compact sidearm of a successful security executive. It was the weapon of a man who had been in gunfights with people who were now dead.