Two Women

by Brian Freemantle

‘Where the fuck …?’ exploded Hanlan, hurling the newspaper away from him.

  ‘We did well to cover it for so long,’ said Barbara Donnelly, philosophically.

  ‘And where did it get us?’ demanded Hanlan. ‘Nowhere. Which is where we still are, no-fucking-where!’

  Twenty-Seven

  They were awake early, neither having properly slept. Alice said hi and Jane made a sound and there was the awkwardness of the previous night, after they’d both broken down and cried together. Alice needed to be sick and had to use her toothpaste-smeared finger to clean her teeth and her mouth afterwards. Turning from the basin she trod barefoot on a cockroach, which wasn’t crushed but whirled underfoot, and in jerking away Alice hit her stomach without any real force against the sink edge, tensing, motionless, for an internal injury pain that never came. She had to learn, Alice thought, happily: so very much to learn. The awareness stayed. She had to learn how to be a mother! To be a mother! It was going to be so marvellous.

  As she went back into the room Alice said: ‘I left you the toothpaste. You’ll have to use your finger. The water’s only tepid, even if you’re thinking of showering, which I wasn’t. And didn’t.’

  Jane made another sound that Alice didn’t make out to be a word. She was ready the moment Jane disappeared into the bathroom, letting herself out of the cabin to hurry to a parking-lot garbage can that had been overturned during the night by a forest scavenger, strewing its contents all around it. She very carefully threw the pharmacy sack holding the bright-blue proof of her pregnancy inside the upturned container.

  It was a grey day, relentless rain soaking down from lowering clouds. Everywhere was deserted, unmoving. Alice could hear the wetness hissing against the surrounding trees. She was anxious to get away, now that it was light. Away to a new existence, just her and John jr. The name was instantly adhesive. Absolutely right.

  She got back to the cabin before Jane emerged from the bathroom but when she did Jane said at once: ‘You’re wet. Where have you been?’

  ‘I thought I’d check the car. It’s raining.’

  ‘I guess that’s why you’re wet. And how’s the car?’ The tone was mocking.

  ‘OK.’ Alice hoped the car really was intact. ‘We’re going to call the FBI.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to go back to the cabin?’

  ‘I want to get us safe.’ She had a baby now, thought Alice: something – someone – far more precious and tangible than a photograph. She didn’t want to bounce for hours in a hard-sprung car back up a twisting mountain road. She’d ask the Bureau to get her case. Their son should know what his father looked like. She didn’t know how to fish. She’d have to learn, if she were going to teach him. So much to learn.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to go in yet,’ announced Jane.

  ‘I am!’ insisted Alice. ‘I’m through running.’

  ‘I want lawyers. Guarantees.’

  ‘We can get lawyers when we’re there, where no one can get to us.’ Jane was being sensible, objective, Alice acknowledged. But she didn’t want to wait any longer: risk anything further.

  ‘I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about my father and my husband and the firm. And me,’ listed Jane.

  ‘You’ve got lawyers: you spoke to them yesterday!’

  ‘Yesterday we hadn’t talked completely. I didn’t know what I know now.’

  ‘You know now you could be killed. Will be killed!’

  ‘I’m going to take proper advice. Go in to the FBI with lawyers, not bare-assed naked.’

  ‘What about the baby?’ demanded Alice, openly for the first time. ‘You’ve got the …’ She only just stopped short of calling it a boy. ‘… baby to think about now!’

  Jane matched the hesitation before saying: ‘It’s the baby I’m properly thinking about.’

  ‘I’m going in now!’

  There was another hesitation from Jane. ‘I already told you, you’re not involved.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Alice slowly, who belatedly did. Was there enough in the printouts to get her into a protection programme: to get an amnesty, or whatever the word was, for the deaths of three innocent people in England? Or did she really need Jane and whatever else it was John had hidden? ‘I could have gone in a long time ago. I stayed out to save you. For John.’

  ‘I’m grateful. Thanks.’ The mocking tone was still there.

  Jane had the right, Alice told herself yet again. ‘I’m going to call Hanlan to come here and get me.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You want a head start, to find somewhere to meet your people, you can have the car. I guess I don’t need it any more. Just some things that are in the trunk.’ For you, John. Everything’s for you and our son.

  Jane Carver stood regarding Alice for several moments. ‘OK.’

  ‘But I’d rather you stayed with me. That we went in together.’

  ‘I’m looking after myself now. It’s about time.’

  ‘Everything I told you was the truth. About John. And you.’

  ‘You keep telling me,’ said Jane.

  ‘I want you to understand.’

  ‘I do. Finally I understand it all.’

  ‘You do hate me, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ m learning.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That you hate me, I mean. And that you’re not waiting for them to come and get us.’

  ‘You want to get your stuff out of the car?’

  ‘You don’t have any money,’ said Alice, going into her satchel. ‘You’ll need money.’ Her hand came out clutching fifties, six of them.

  ‘Three hundred,’ accepted Jane. ‘It’s a loan.’

  Alice said: ‘You think we’re ever likely to meet again?’

  ‘I’ll get it to you.’

  They walked, unspeaking, through the drizzle to the back of the single-storey building. Jane started the engine and ran the wipers before popping the bonnet trunk for Alice to retrieve the canvas bag in which she’d packed the printouts. Despite the rain Alice didn’t move at once, watching the Volkswagen disappear, knowing it would be the last she’d ever see of it. The beginning of her new life, she guessed: everything of the old discarded, abandoned.

  Alice went back to the room and shook as much rain off her coat as she could and dialled reception, impatiently waiting what seemed an age for a reply. She thought she recognized the voice of the man who had booked them in the previous day. Before she could speak he said: ‘You owe for telephone calls,’ and Alice wondered how much he had listened in to the conversations.

  She said: ‘I’m coming to settle. I need some help. I think we got a little confused on the map yesterday. Where, exactly, are we here?’

  The man laughed. ‘Just two miles east of Long Valley, New Jersey.’

  Alice had never heard of it. ‘Where’s the nearest town of any size?’

  ‘That would be Morristown.’

  ‘I’ll be by in a minute, to settle the charges. Just one more call to make.’

  ‘I’ll be in the office.’

  ‘Where the hell are you two?’ exploded Hanlan, the moment Alice was connected.

  ‘In a truck-stop motel two miles east of a place called Long Valley, New Jersey. I don’t …’

  ‘Why’d you run?’

  ‘Come and get me. I’ll explain everything when you take me in.’

  There was a pause, of half awareness. ‘Where’s Jane?’

  ‘Gone. She won’t come in without her lawyers.’

  ‘Mary Mother of Christ!’ moaned Hanlan, who wasn’t Catholic.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Everything’s blown. In all the newspapers, on every television channel. Her picture’s everywhere!’

  ‘What about mine!’

  ‘Name. The picture’s bad.’

  ‘Jane’s got my car! It’s …’

  ‘I know what it is and I know the license. I’m frightened they do, too.’

  ‘They?’ There was a déjà vu about the question.
/>   ‘They got to the cabin before we did, yesterday.’

  ‘How? How’d they know?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll find her, in your car. You just stay …’

  ‘Like you wanted me to stay in the cabin yesterday, where I would have been trapped when they got there before you! Go kiss my ass, Gene. I’ll make my own way in, so no one knows where I’m coming from.’

  ‘Wait …’ tried Hanlan, but Alice didn’t.

  She stayed in the room until the man called from the desk to say the taxi she’d ordered had arrived and managed to remain expressionless looking at the photograph of Jane Carver that filled the TV screen behind the man as she paid the telephone bill. The one of her was bad, a blurred thumbnail from a feature she’d written more than a year before. There was a stills photograph of her vintage Volkswagen, too. The sound was mute, preventing her hearing the commentary.

  ‘You guys have a fight?’ asked the man, who definitely was the one who had booked them in.

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Guess it’s difficult?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Stop by the next time you’re passing, you hear?’

  ‘Bet on it,’ promised Alice.

  Jane Carver did finally understand and believed she had everything thought out and balanced in her mind, although leaving the filthy motel and Alice Belling like that hadn’t been part of her overnight mental preparation. It was a spur-of-the-moment gesture, like hijacking the car the previous day. Irrational, without any positive intention. But she had one now, spur-of-the-moment or not, driving without particular direction back along the still deserted, rain-slicked road that had to be the way they’d come but along which, so far, she hadn’t recognized any landmarks.

  She had to have Burt Elliott and Geoffrey Davis with her when she met the FBI. Needed them with her before meeting the FBI, to talk everything through, maybe discuss it with other more specialized attorneys. Certainly go through in detail whatever it was John had hidden, to assess its importance. No, not its importance. Its potential illegality. That’s what had to be examined and assessed, how much and how badly it implicated her father and John and the firm to protect and save them as much as she could.

  A logging truck growled by in the opposite direction, spraying water and mud all over the Volkswagen and the splash of it startled Jane, as if waking her up. Why? she suddenly demanded of herself. There was every practical reason for trying to spare the firm, where according to Alice none of the partners had known what was going on. But what did she owe her father or John? They were the two men whom she’d totally loved and totally trusted and whom she’d believed loved and trusted her in return. The two men, these two strangers, whom she now accepted she’d known not at all. So why was she worrying about protecting them and their reputations? she asked herself again. Shouldn’t she hate and despise them, like she should hate and despise Alice Belling, for all their total deceits and all their total betrayals? How did you hate? Was it a feeling, a physical sensation, like a pain or an ache? Or a mental determination to hurt back, to cause as much pain and suffering as they caused you, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Jane didn’t know: didn’t think she wanted to know. Or did she? What did she want? The memory, she supposed. As many memories as she could conjure and keep.

  Abruptly Jane confronted the hardest, most scourging reality of all. John had loved another woman. Been happy with another woman, shared everything – more than with her – with another woman. Had he done with Alice Belling the special bedroom things he’d done with her? Practised with Alice Belling? Learned from her even? Was it as Alice Belling had tried to convince her, a bizarrely unthreatening ménage à trois of which she was always intended to remain the unwitting third part? Or would …? Jane didn’t let the question run because she wasn’t unwitting any more. A lot of questions she couldn’t answer. But a lot more that she could. Most important of all she knew how important she was to Alice’s protection, as Alice had been to hers. Into her mind, unprompted, echoed her own voice: It’s the baby I’m properly thinking about. But she wasn’t: not thinking properly at all.

  Jane waited for a widening of the still empty, early morning road to swing around into an almost complete U, only needing to reverse once, which she managed easily, without any grating of the gears. Very soon the traffic began picking up against her, although she wasn’t held up by slow-moving trucks, like yesterday. Jane hoped she would get back to the motel before the FBI. Persuade Alice to come with her, until she’d got hold of attorneys. That would be the way, convince Alice she needed the help and protection of lawyers more than that of the FBI, because of what had happened in England.

  It had been ridiculous, reacting as she had for the second time in less than twenty-four hours without fully thinking everything through. She didn’t any longer have the excuse of drugs. No excuse at all. She was on her own, unsupported. She needed the professional advice of lawyers, certainly, but hers had to be the decision how to use that advice, like it was her decision to go back as she was now. Nothing to do with hate for what Alice had done. Or gratitude for what Alice had done. It was simply how it had to be. What was right.

  This time Jane didn’t bother to conceal the car behind the motel, parking in fact in front of the overturned, garbage-strewn bin in which Alice had thrown her pharmacy bag. She strode directly past, without seeing it.

  ‘Come to make up?’ greeted the clerk.

  ‘She should still be here,’ insisted Jane, irritated with the man’s streetwise pretence. ‘She was being collected.’ Jane suddenly saw her own face, on a silent television screen behind the man. And then a picture of the sort of Volkswagen parked out in the lot and an unflattering, virtually unrecognizable picture of Alice.

  ‘Don’t know about that,’ said the man. ‘Asked me to call her a cab. Picked her up about fifteen minutes ago.’

  Jane felt numb, as she’d remembered feeling when they were pumping all the drugs into her. ‘You know where she’s going?’ she asked, grateful for the steadiness of her own voice.

  The clerk shook his head. ‘Didn’t say. Morristown probably: she asked about the nearest town of any size.’

  ‘How do I get to Morristown?’

  ‘Make a right as you leave here, left at the first junction. Straight run from there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jane, already turning away.

  ‘Hey!’ stopped the man. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

  Jane shook her head, without looking back. ‘I’ve got the sort of face people think they’ve seen before.’

  Jane left the truck stop too fast, sounding the tyre on the wet road with her too sharp turn and cutting back at once. Alice’s change of mind about waiting for the FBI had to do with whatever the mute newscast had been reporting. What? It didn’t matter. Everything was different now. She was identified, her face on television screens. Marked. Most marked of all by the car she was driving. Driving where? Wherever Morristown was, where she could dump the car, hide somewhere – another motel or hotel, she supposed – and call someone to come and get her, like Alice had been so desperate for the FBI to come to get her. Burt Elliott? Or Geoffrey Davis? Whoever she could reach the quicker. She’d be able to watch a newscast in an hotel. Maybe understand better. She needed a restroom. Not desperately but she needed one. She could wait until she’d dumped the identifying Volkswagen. Definitely a restroom would be necessary before she called the lawyers. There’d be mirrors there, too.

  Jane saw the Morristown turn at the junction and took it, without screaming the tyres this time. There were a lot more cars on the road and she was glad of the grey, concealing drizzle and hoped it, and the mud from that earlier passing lumber truck, would have hidden the colour of the car – maybe covered the plates, which had been printed alongside the TV picture. A positive description, she decided. Surely the FBI hadn’t issued a kidnap alert, after what she’d told Gene Hanlan? But they hadn’t waited at the cabin. No reason, then, why he should have believed
her: obviously thought she was talking under duress, along with everyone else she’d spoken with.

  The town began to build up ahead of her, a place planned with care, with trees alongside the approach roads and some parks, to her immediate right. The rush-hour traffic was really heavy now, slowing her, and there were people on the sidewalk. She needed a parking lot, filling up with other cars, where she could lose the Volkswagen. She came to a junction and stopped behind a black Buick, a set of lights against them. And looked to her left. There was a Marriott, two blocks down. But before that, a far closer police blue and white, at the side of the road, the driver turned away from her talking to the observer, who was directly facing her. Jane jerked her head around, in the opposite direction, her concentration entirely upon the lights, still at red. Come on! Come on! She was ready to go at amber but the Buick didn’t move, even at green. She held back from using the horn, nervous of attracting attention. Come on, for God’s sake move! It did, at last, Jane too close behind, swerving out at the first gap to get by, eyes more on the rear-view mirror than the road ahead. Nothing. She let out the pent-up breath, feeling more relief at the mall to her right, the K-Mart and JC Penny and Safeway neons blinking invitingly at her, the car park already more than half full, the build-up greater conveniently close to the stores. Jane found the perfect gap, between a high-sided U-Haul van and a station wagon, a separating wall in front of her concealing the vehicle from three directions.

  She went into the complex through the JC Penny entrance, remembering to keep her head down, and found the toilets on the ground floor. She chose the washbasin in the corner, with a wall to her right, and felt more relief at how she looked. She remembered the photograph that had been shown on TV being taken, in a professionally lighted studio, her make-up and hair – longer then than it was now – flawless for a portrait for her father’s sixtieth birthday. She was sure she didn’t now look anything like she did in the photograph. What was visible in the mirror of her borrowed shirt and jacket really did look as if it had been slept in and her hair was squashed under Alice’s woollen cap. Her face was shiny, without even lipstick, and Jane decided that all she needed was a stolen supermarket trolley to be the perfect bag lady. Good for moving around a crowded store. She hoped it wasn’t so bag-lady convincing as to get her refused refuge at the Marriott she’d isolated a little more than two blocks away. She had Alice’s $300 flash – deposit – if a problem arose.