by Thomas Perry
Jane entered and Mattie closed the door and then hugged her. “I’m so pleased to see you’re back,” she said.
Mattie was being scrupulously patient, but Jane knew she must be going mad with worry. “He’s fine,” she whispered in Mattie’s ear. Then she added, “Let’s go out for a walk.”
Mattie nodded and led her to the back door through the small, neat kitchen. She looked out for a few seconds, stepped out, locked the door, and headed into the woods. They moved along in silence for a few minutes, hearing only the crickets raising the volume now that it was fully dark. Jane remembered this path from her childhood, but it was the first time she’d been in this section of woods since the fall when she’d left for college. She stopped for a few seconds and listened, but heard no change in the frequency of the crickets. She said softly, “Jimmy is well and safe. I left him with new clothes, plenty of cash, and a reliable used car in a nice small town a long way from here. He knows what he has to do to stay hidden while I look into things here.”
Mattie eyed her. “Ellen Dickerson told me you said he was okay a couple of days ago, but I didn’t know how much confidence to put in that. Things could have changed.”
“He would call me if they did.”
“You’re not going to say exactly where he is?”
Jane said, “I want you to be able to take a lie detector test and say you don’t know. And the time may come when somebody asks you under oath.”
Mattie smiled sadly, and her beautiful brown skin seemed to tighten. “And if I get tempted to go see my son, I can’t lead anybody to him.”
Jane frowned. “I’m sorry. But there are easy ways for anybody to track your car, or use the GPS on your cell phone, or half a dozen other things to track you. I can’t even be sure I know all the ways, so I can’t warn you about them.”
“I found a little gadget stuck to the bottom of my gas tank with a magnet two days ago.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I left it there,” said Mattie. “If I threw it away, I figure they’ll do something else next time that I don’t know about. And I don’t care if they track me to the market. If I want to sneak off, I’ll get rid of it then.”
“That’s right,” said Jane. “Maybe we should wait a few days until the battery gets weak and watch your car to see who comes to replace it. To tell you the truth, one of the reasons I came by was to see who was watching you these days.”
They walked along for a few more paces, and then Jane took Mattie’s hand and put a stack of bills into it. “Another reason was to give you this.”
“What’s the money for?”
“We needed to be sure you’re provided for.”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s important that I be able to tell Jimmy that I saw you and made sure. What he’s doing isn’t easy, and it helps if he’s not trying to check on you himself.”
“That phone call.”
“Yes,” said Jane. “He didn’t know what a bad idea it was. I’m hoping he won’t make a mistake like that again. Somebody was monitoring your phone, so they got his number and the cell tower where his signal was picked up and transmitted.”
“The police?”
“I think they were something else. They shot at us, and police wouldn’t do that at first sight.” The two women walked for a time, and then Jane said, “We should probably get back to your house. My nights are kind of busy right now. It’s when I can see people, but they can’t see me.”
“All right,” said Mattie. “It was really sweet of you to check on me and let me know what’s happening—that he’s all right.”
“I wish—” She stopped and stood perfectly still. “Hear it?”
Mattie was still too. “Cars.”
“They sound like they’re heading up your road.”
“Police?”
“I don’t think they’d come to ask questions at night without calling, and this sounds like two or three cars.”
“Who, then?”
“I’m wondering if the people who have been trying to kill Jimmy got tired of waiting for him to come to them,” Jane said. “Where’s your car?”
“It’s beside the house. Didn’t you see it?”
“I came through the woods from the cemetery by the council house.”
“The car’s on the other side, up the driveway.”
“You have the keys with you?”
Mattie held them up. “My house key is on the same ring.”
“This is going to be tricky. Give them to me, and you take these.” She handed Mattie her keys and took Mattie’s. “Stay in the woods off the trail for a few minutes, until you hear the cars leaving. Then go through the woods to the council house cemetery. You’ll find a blue VW Passat parked there. Take it. Drive to Rochester. There’s a big Hyatt Hotel on East Main Street by the Convention Center. Drive into the underground garage, take a ticket from the machine, and park. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
“But what if it’s only the police?”
“If it is the police, I’ll see them and come back here for you. If I don’t come back right away, go. Do you have your cell phone with you?”
“No. It’s in the kitchen.”
“Good. Leave it.”
Jane took a step off the path, but Mattie stopped her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” said Jane. “Positive. Listen for the cars, and I’ll see you later in Rochester.”
“See you.”
Jane melted into the woods. She moved swiftly at first, gliding between the tall trees toward the house. When she reached a thicket of saplings growing beside a stand of oaks, she crouched in the thicket and watched.
There were three cars, all of them big and dark, two of them SUVs with tinted side windows. A black sedan stopped just ahead of the intersection of Mattie’s road and Council House Road, where it could guard the crossroads without drawing much attention. The other two stopped at the Sanders house, one across the driveway, and the other in front of Mattie’s front door.
The doors of the two vehicles opened and six men poured out, moving quickly onto the porch. All were wearing street clothes, and none displayed badges or identification. They didn’t call out or knock, just kicked in Mattie’s front door and stormed into the house, spreading immediately from room to room as they filled the building from bottom to top like a flood. The first man through each doorway had a pistol drawn.
Jane advanced to the rear of the house and then slipped around the corner to the garage side just before two men opened the back door and stepped onto the back porch. Jane dropped to her hands and knees to cross under the side windows and crawled to the front of Mattie’s brown Toyota Camry. She stayed low to slide into the driver’s seat with the keys already in her hand. She started the engine and slammed the door as she swung backward onto the front lawn.
The SUV in front of the driveway moved to block her in, but she drove across the lawn into the small garden Mattie kept, cutting through a row of squash and beans and onto the road.
The sound of her engine drew the attention of the men in the house, and she heard two shots, then one more, but didn’t hear or feel anything hit the car. Jane accelerated toward the intersection where she could see the big black car waiting. The driver started his engine and turned his headlights on, throwing a glare into Jane’s eyes as she approached.
Jane switched on her high beams as the other driver pulled his car away from the shoulder and tried to block the road. She kept speeding toward it, and she could see both men in the car duck down to prepare for the collision that was coming. She took that moment to veer to the left and off the road into a weedy field. As she bounced along she heard and felt the drag of the tall weeds against the undercarriage of the car
, then accelerated up and over the shoulder onto the road again. She switched off her lights just as she heard two more shots.
Jane knew that on this dark road she would see the glow of headlights in the intersection ahead if a car were coming to the other road, and she saw nothing, so she went into the turn without hitting her brakes. She accelerated out of the turn to keep control, and pushed Mattie’s Camry to higher speeds as she hurtled along in the dark. She had walked every one of these roads in childhood summers, so she drove them tonight by memory and feel and moonlight.
She knew the drivers of the two SUVs would have to wait for the six men in the house to pile into the vehicles before they attempted to pursue her. The lookout car’s headlights were beginning to light up the intersection far behind her now, so she spun into the next right turn blind, then took the next left and turned her lights on. At last she had a chance to look at the dashboard, which had lit up too. Mattie’s Camry had over a half tank of gas. Jane sent a silent thank-you to her. That would be enough.
At ninety miles an hour, Jane reached the Pembroke entrance to the New York State Thruway in a few minutes. She slowed, drove onto the westbound side, and stopped at the Pembroke rest stop. She coasted into the parking lot and parked between a tall pickup truck and a camper, got out, hurried to the back of the car, and went down on her side. She reached up under Mattie’s car, pulled the small black box off the gas tank, and examined it. The black plastic part of the box said FASTTRACK TRANSPONDER in raised letters. Jane walked briskly toward the building, scanning the lot.
She selected a tour bus with Ontario plates at the side of the rest stop building, reloading a line of tourists, most of them elderly and all of them speaking German. She went to the left side of the bus away from the doors and stared into the bus’s left side mirror. The driver wasn’t in his seat.
It took less than a second to squat, attach the little black transponder to a clean spot under the bus’s chassis so its magnet held it there, stand, and keep walking. She stepped into the building and stopped in the ladies’ room. When she came outside, the bus had already moved down the entrance ramp. She could see it far ahead, diminishing into the distance, probably toward a hotel so the tourists could go to sleep and get up early to visit Niagara Falls.
Jane returned to Mattie’s Camry, pulled out onto the thruway and took the exit at Depew, went on the cloverleaf over the thruway to the eastbound side, and drove toward Rochester. She took exit 46, I-390 to Rochester. All the time while she was driving she watched to be sure she had not been followed. She got off I-390 at the Greater Rochester International Airport, parked Mattie’s Camry in the long-term lot, walked to the terminal, and took a cab to the Hyatt Hotel on Main Street in Rochester.
At the hotel Jane went to her room, retrieved her small suitcase, wiped everything for prints, and stopped at the front desk to check out. Then she walked across the lobby to the elevator, took it to the first level of the underground garage, and found the Volkswagen Passat with Mattie sitting behind the wheel looking uncomfortable. When Mattie saw Jane walking toward her she smiled, opened the door, and got out. “You’d better drive. I don’t even know where we’re going.”
“Happy to,” Jane said. She reached inside, popped the trunk open, put her suitcase inside, and then closed the trunk and sat behind the wheel. She backed out, drove to I-390, and turned south.
“They weren’t police, huh?” Mattie said.
“No,” said Jane. “I’m pretty sure they were men who wanted to kidnap you to force Jimmy to come back.”
“Where are we going?”
“Hanover, New Hampshire.”
“What’s there?”
“Jimmy.”
18
Jane drove along Route 20 to the east, going steadily through small towns where the high school, town hall, and public library were yards from each other, all of them dark. There were long stretches of open farmland. She had been this way dozens of times, and each part was familiar to her, as were the many places where she could turn down a barely marked cross street and disappear. Mattie was silent for a time, and Jane concentrated on being sure that nobody was following. Then Mattie seemed to decide she had waited long enough to talk.
“Where did you leave my car?”
“The long-term parking lot at the Rochester airport.” She reached into her pocket. “Here are your keys, while I’m thinking about it.” She placed them in Mattie’s hand.
“Why the airport?”
“A few reasons,” Jane said. “People fly out of an airport and sometimes don’t come back for a month or two, so your car won’t get towed before then. If the police find it, or the men who were trying to kidnap you find it, they’ll come to the conclusion that you drove it there and left town. They’ll waste valuable time finding out which flight you might have taken, and where it was going. The longer it takes for them to find the car, the more flights will have left Rochester. If they’re persistent, they’ll get lists of people on each of those flights, but they won’t see your name. They’ll try to figure out which names might be ones you could have used. You wouldn’t pretend to be George, but you might have been Nancy or Maria. Or since you probably didn’t plan this far in advance, they’ll try to investigate people who flew standby. If they’re imaginative, they’ll think of all kinds of other things to look for. All of it will keep them occupied. It will give them false hopes that will only result in disappointment and frustration and fatigue.”
“Goodness.”
“The best, of course, would be if the men who were after you would decide to sit in the parking lot and wait for you to come back, while the police did the same thing. They could hardly help bumping heads, and I know which heads I’d bet on.”
“You’re really good at this, aren’t you?”
“I hope so,” said Jane. She’d said too much. She prepared herself for the next few questions, dreading the prospect of lying to Mattie Sanders.
“Would you mind if I drove for a while?” Mattie said. “This much inactivity begins to get to me after a while. It makes me anxious. You could even get some sleep.”
“A good offer,” said Jane. “I’ll take it. Just stay on Route 20. It goes all the way to Kenmore Square in Boston.”
“We’re not going there, are we?”
“No. If you see Interstate Ninety-One north, take it. That should be in three hundred miles or so, and I’d better be up long before then.”
Jane pulled off the highway onto the shoulder and they traded places. She lay back in the passenger seat while Mattie adjusted the seat and mirrors, then pulled out onto the road. Jane pretended to be asleep for a few minutes while she watched the speedometer and the road with one eye. When she was satisfied that Mattie was still a competent driver, real sleep overtook her.
She woke when it was still dark, but she could tell that it would be morning before long. The window beside her felt cold, and there was a fog that had gathered in the bottoms of the valleys and put rainbow auras around the streetlamps they passed. There were already a few delivery trucks out unloading supplies of various sorts, and lights in a few house windows. She stretched, rubbed her eyes, and said, “How are you doing, Mattie?”
“Fine. It’s been a nice, easy trip with so little traffic.”
“I’m feeling rested. I’m ready to take over when you feel like it.”
“I’d like to stop for breakfast somewhere.”
They stopped at a diner in the next town. There were a surprising number of customers, most of them men who wore jeans or work uniforms, and sat at the counter. Jane and Mattie sat in a booth and ordered fried eggs, hash browns, and toast, but ate mostly in silence because they didn’t want to attract attention. After about twenty minutes a pair of police officers came in, a man and woman who were both about thirty years old and were hard to see as anything but a coupl
e. Jane and Mattie finished their food, paid in cash, and went back to their car. This time Jane took the wheel.
They crossed the Hudson into Massachusetts in the morning sunshine and drove north up Interstate 91 into New Hampshire, and then switched to Interstate 89 at Manchester. The rolling mountains of New Hampshire made Jane think of huge sleeping prehistoric creatures, their big rounded bodies covered over the centuries of sleep with windblown leaves, then humus, then trees. The fog had burned off while Jane and Mattie were still in New York State, and now the sky was a fresh, robin’s egg blue with small puffs of white cloud in rows like the letters of an unknown language. Every ten minutes Jane and Mattie seemed to cross a bridge over a dark river that ran out of the forest. There were several with signs that said, BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE THE ROAD, a warning that this was a different sort of country in the winter, and soon there were signs in swampy places that said MOOSE CROSSING.
Every town had its eighteenth-century churches and cemeteries, and a few had outlying margins of malls and discount stores and fast-food outlets. But most of the route was forest, and from the road Jane could see deep into shady spaces between white pine, maple, white oak and hickory, beech and birch trees. They got off at exit 18, and drove into Hanover on Route 120 past the hospital, into the center of town, and found themselves on the Dartmouth campus. There was no clear separation between the town and the college, only the realization at some point that the buildings had gotten bigger and fancier. In the center was a vast expanse of grass leading to a long brick building with a white steeple.
When they reached the apartment house where Jimmy Sanders was staying Jane parked the car and knocked on the door. She saw no movement, only felt a vague impression that the curtain had been disturbed. The door opened and Jimmy was visible a few feet back from the open door, where he would not be seen from the street.
When Mattie stepped in, she and Jimmy stood in silence and hugged each other for a few seconds while Jane closed the door and slipped the bolt. Jimmy said, “What are you doing here, Mom?” Then he turned to Jane. “This can’t be safe.”