by Thomas Perry
“It’s flattering to be the first name that came to mind, I guess,” Jake sighed. “What can I do?”
She turned her face to him. “Thanks, Jake.”
“What can I do?” he repeated.
“Not much more than this. We’ve got to stop at my old house, so it’s best if you just pull into your own garage. Dr. Dahlman, you may have heard, had a nine-millimeter bullet pass through him a couple of hours ago, so he’s not at the top of his game, but we can bring him in my kitchen door. We’ll only stay long enough to pick up some things I left there, and make arrangements for a car.”
Jake nodded, then drove the rest of the way home. He pulled his car all the way into his garage, then got out to help Dahlman to the driveway of the Whitefield house and up the back steps. Jane closed the door behind them and then turned on more lights.
As he helped Dahlman into the living room to sit on the couch, Jake said, “Don’t lean back just yet. There’s blood showing through your coat.”
He went into the bathroom, found a towel, folded it, and placed it between Dahlman and the throw pillow, then helped him lie down. He watched Dahlman’s eyes rise upward toward the staircase, so he knew Jane was climbing the stairs behind him.
Dahlman whispered, “She said you were just a family friend. Why are you doing this?”
Jake shook his head. “Lie still. Gather your strength.”
“Why are you helping me?” Dahlman insisted.
“They said on the news that you were a big doctor somewhere. Why did you kill somebody?”
“I didn’t.”
“Good,” said Jake. “Then from now on, that can be the reason.” He watched Dahlman close his eyes. In a few moments he seemed to be asleep. Jake heard the sound of a television set above his head, so he climbed the stairs. As he reached the top, he saw Jane moving up the hallway. “He seems to have dozed off.”
“Good,” she said. “He’s going to need some strength.” She walked into the master bedroom and Jake followed. As he watched her throwing things into the suitcase, it occurred to him that she had left an awful lot of Jane Whitefield in this house when she had become Mrs. McKinnon. She hesitated, took off her wedding ring, and quickly slipped it into a drawer.
Jane kept walking to closets, to dressers, to the suitcase on the bed, then turning to glance at the television set. She caught him watching her. “It’s the only way I have to keep an eye on the opposition. Sometimes at the beginning, before the police know much, the newspeople will put it all on the air. There’s a good chance this time, because they’re all at the hospital trying to scoop each other.”
Jake stared at the television set, but they had returned to their regular programming. Until the newspeople thought of something else to say, the Blue Jays were back to getting beaten in New York. He went to the window and pushed the curtain aside an inch.
“Not from there,” said Jane. “If you want to watch the street for me, do it from the room at the end of the hall, where it’s dark. What you’re looking for will be a car with too many lights or too few. It will pass once, then come back. Don’t move the curtain. You can see that much through it.”
Jake walked off down the hall to the empty bedroom and did as he was told. He had been skeptical of Jane’s instructions, but now he found he could see much better than he had expected. Through the curtain he could not only make out the sixty-watt lamp in Mrs. Oshinski’s front window across the street, but even the dim patch of light it threw on her front lawn. He could still hear Jane hurrying around in her room, and he felt he could almost see her.
On the day when he had first realized what it was that she had really been doing for a living from the time she was in college until a good ten years later, he had experienced something that had never before happened to him—he had been struck speechless.
Nothing that had come to his lips had been worthy of a thinking man. “Cut it out” had seemed closest, but it was too paltry to meet the scale of the situation. Here was the quiet, pretty, and studious young woman he had known since birth, occupying the house where he had come just about every day until he and her father had both gone off to war, and—no, it was more than that. This was the only house that Jake had ever been welcome to enter without knocking. And when he did, he was expected to smile and sit at the table while the older Mrs. Whitefield, Jane’s grandmother it was in those days, set something in front of him to eat. And here was this little girl, the product of all of those Whitefields, living under this roof while she engaged in the business of taking future murder victims—some of them with legal difficulties of their own—away from their troubles and making them disappear.
When Jane had finally agreed to marry Dr. Carey McKinnon, to Jake’s immense relief, she had appeared to consider herself the last of her fugitives to be taken out of the world. She had not needed to spend time thinking of a new name, because her new husband had a perfectly good one that had been around western New York for a couple of hundred years. She had not needed to do much of anything except start being Mrs. McKinnon instead of Jane Whitefield and let time do the rest. It had seemed to him that she had even begun to look different—the thick black hair hanging long and soft most of the time like a frame around her face, with just a subtle hint of an inward curl at the ends that hadn’t been there before. Even the face itself had begun to seem different to him. Maybe it was just that she considered that a married woman could afford to devote more time to makeup, but he had attributed it to a change in what was behind the face. It had actually struck him that she had lost that sharp, watchful look that had disconcerted him a few times over the years.
But now, after only a year of that, here she was back in this house packing a bag while a wounded murderer rested up on the couch downstairs. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. He knew for a fact that she had made a promise to Carey, and he could not imagine Jane breaking her word to her husband. That had been part of the new identity she had invented for herself—a woman who didn’t do things like that.
But Jake had spent enough time in this part of the country and enough time in this very house to know that there were deeper issues involved. The Whitefields had always been very old-fashioned people.
And although the Whitefields and all of the Senecas Jake had ever met were scrupulously law-abiding, they made no secret that the impulse had not come from anything as recent as what a bunch of immigrants in Albany or Washington had voted. The laws simply happened to coincide pretty well with how the Senecas believed a person should behave anyway. The Whitefields were not shy in their judgments of human behavior, but they were traditionalists, and the founders of Seneca culture had not felt the need to include institutions like jails. The old-time Senecas had been in favor of revenge—famous for it. But they didn’t feel that it was society’s place to punish people: not that a person might not deserve it, but that, whoever you were, punishing somebody else simply wasn’t in your job description.
Punishment was a matter that would be taken care of later—not by God, exactly, but close enough. The Senecas believed that the universe wasn’t governed by one benevolent deity. There were twin brothers, grandsons of the first human being, a woman who had fallen from the sky. One twin was good, and when he was referred to in English he was called the Creator. The other was perverse, and one of his names was the Punisher. The European innovation of building jails and using manacles to restrain people seemed to them to be an unwise decision to redundantly build a small and rather amateurish Hell on earth.
As of tonight, Jake was beginning to suspect that he was seeing a new phase of things. He had always felt—no, hoped—that what Jane had done with the first part of her life was an instance of youthful optimism and high spirits taken to an extreme. But what if it was more than that? What if it was an expression not only of what she thought was right, but of who she was and had reason to believe her female ancestors had been, going back to Sky Woman? Jake was familiar with the idea that marriage reformed people—more in second-h
and testimony than with his own eyes. But those stories were always that some guy stuck to his promise to stop doing something he knew damned well from the beginning was wrong. Jake couldn’t think of an instance where a woman had saved her marriage by sticking to a promise to stop doing what she believed was right—not consistently and in a sustained way.
“What do you see?” Her voice startled him, and he turned to see her in the doorway.
“Nothing I couldn’t have seen a week ago, if I had looked.”
“Good.”
“Why are you doing this?”
She stood absolutely still. He could see the silhouette of her thin, too small body, her long black hair combed back and tied in a tight ponytail, and it occurred to him that he had not seen her wear it that way since she had gotten married. She spoke quietly. “Carey asked me to.”
Jake’s mind seemed to him to choke for a second, then to start again, like an engine that needed to be taken out and run at high speed to burn off the deposits. “Why?” he said.
“Because if I hide him for a while, then we think the police will find that he’s innocent. If we let him wait in jail, we think the police will find him dead in his cell.”
She looked at him as though she were waiting in case something else needed to be said, but Jake couldn’t imagine what it could be. She turned and disappeared in the direction of the staircase. Jake stared out at the empty street he had been staring at for seventy years. Carey was an educated man and a skilled surgeon, and that was why the whole world had agreed to put “Doctor” in front of his name. But he seemed to have taken a look at this situation and missed the important part.
Carey McKinnon had—by a series of circumstances that, when you analyzed them, came down to luck—been given a beautiful young woman who had the intellect, the courage, and the determination to do virtually anything, but who for reasons that were probably more biological than logical had decided to be his wife. What Dr. Carey McKinnon had seen fit to ask her for was that she go back on the promise he had extracted from her to stop putting herself in danger. Whoever this Dr. Dahlman was, Jake found himself silently praying that he was worth it—not to society, or some other word for a bunch of strangers, but to Carey McKinnon.
5
Carey McKinnon tried to think the way his wife would, and found it impossible. His brain wasn’t as quick as Jane’s was, and he had no experience at her kind of deception. He was reduced to trying to remember what she had told him to do. He had a difficult time bringing it all back.
Since she had left him he had been concentrating on the specific tasks that he had needed to perform to get Dahlman through the surgery. It had been one of the most nerve-racking procedures he had ever done: trying to be sure that he left no bits of metal or bone in the shoulder, that he sutured the torn muscular tissue and vessels properly without injuring tendons or nerves—so that one of the finest surgeons alive could heal and continue to perform surgery on other people. Every second, while his hands had been working, he had been aware that those eyes were open and staring into the overhead mirror: the eyes of his old teacher, evaluating, scrutinizing every move his fingers made.
Now he had to be certain that no policeman or reporter could ask him any questions. Certain parts of the job were obvious. He could not walk out the rear door of the hospital and stroll to his car in the parking lot. What he really needed was to disappear and reappear somewhere else.
Time was going by, and the longer he waited, the more likely it was that someone would begin to look for him. He put on his sport coat, walked to the fire stairwell, and descended to the first floor. He stepped into the unoccupied break room for the radiologists, walked past the coffee machine, opened the door to the little patio, and slipped onto the lawn.
Carey walked briskly along the side of the building to the street, then took the long way around the block until he came to his office building. He supposed it was smarter to go in the back door from the parking lot than the front door, so he kept going until he reached it. He could see that the usual collection of cheapskates had parked their cars in his lot so they didn’t have to tip the valet-parking attendants at the restaurants down the street. That reminded him that he hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and he was hungry. Hours and hours ago he had hatched some plan to take Jane to a restaurant. It might as well have been years ago.
Then he noticed that the third car from the end was Jane’s. He stopped, paralyzed with alarm. He had assumed that she would be driving Dahlman out in her car. He looked at his watch. He had finished the operation nearly an hour ago, and Jane had been waiting for the first chance to slip him out. What if it had never come? He turned and started to walk back toward the hospital, then stopped. If he went back, he might be putting her in danger. If he found her, what could he do to help her?
He squeezed his eyes shut. What would she want? What had she said? Every minute that Carey stayed out of sight now would buy her another minute before anyone knew Dahlman was missing. That could last, at most, another hour or two if he didn’t panic and rush back there.
Carey turned and walked slowly and reluctantly up the side street away from the hospital and away from the restaurants. The best he could do would be to go kill some time. There was a movie theater not far from here. The Rialto. He would watch a movie, eat dinner, and then come back. Later tonight there would be lots of questions, but he didn’t have to face them yet.
Where was Jane? He tried to summon a picture of her driving off somewhere with Dahlman, but since he had just found her car parked behind his office, the picture wouldn’t coalesce. He tried to imagine her on an airplane, but he was fairly certain Dahlman would not have been up to that—not the flying, but fighting the crowds and keeping himself from attracting attention during the long walks in an airport.
It occurred to Carey that he really had no idea what Jane would do in this situation. For the decade after he had met her in college they had simply been friends. They saw each other maybe once a month until the year before they were married. At that time he would not have guessed that she was doing anything secret and dangerous and illegal. He had not guessed until the night when she had told him. And she had initiated that conversation only to warn him that marrying her could put him in danger too. After that she had not talked about her old clients—told him the tricks she had used to make them invisible or throw off their pursuers. He had no clear, specific knowledge of how it was done. It was just something she used to do, and talking about it had made both of them uncomfortable.
Jane walked down the wooden steps to the cellar. The damp, musty air seemed to her like the house’s breath. The house was a relic of the days when cellars were made of mortared stone and the beams under the floors were rounded logs with the bark stripped off. The coal furnace had been replaced by an oil furnace before she was born, and above the corner where the coal bin had sat there were still old ducts that led up to floor registers that had long ago been blocked off. She took the stepladder to one of them, pushed two sections apart, removed the small metal box hidden inside, and set it on the top step of the ladder. She took out a handful of cards and folded papers and shuffled through them.
In the past two years the only fake identification papers she had obtained were in matched sets, with her picture on one and Carey’s on the other. There were some very good ones in the collection, as well as a few that wouldn’t be ripe for some time. A good identity needed signs of a long history, with a real birth certificate and Social Security card, a couple of renewals on the licenses, visa stamps on the passports, and small but regular charges on each of the credit cards going back a couple of years.
Jane went past the recent identities, the ones she had made for a couple on the run. They were a part of her dowry that Carey didn’t know about, and that she hoped he would never need to see. When she had retired from being a guide, she had known that people who were running would still come to her for a while, and there would still be people whose business it was to chase them. Some o
f the chasers might have heard of Jane or seen a little of her work, and would like the chance to get her into a small, quiet place somewhere and ask her questions until she died.
She found four identities for men who had birth dates in the 1930s, took four sets of cards she had made for herself, and then reached deeper into the heating duct to take out ten thousand dollars in cash. She put the box back into the heating duct, joined the two halves again, and carried the stepladder to the other end of the cellar to leave it with the tools and paintbrushes.
When she returned to her room she found Jake sitting on the bed watching television. He looked up when she entered. “There was just another news bulletin, but they didn’t say anything about him being gone. They don’t seem to know.”
“Good,” said Jane. “Do you think you have any clothes that you don’t care if you ever see again?”
“Yes. All of them. I’ll go put some in a suitcase.”
“Nothing bright-colored, nothing new. You may not have noticed, but men over retirement age seem to have a lot of clothes of an earlier vintage.”
“Yep,” he said. “We’re all timing it to wear them out at the moment of death so everything comes out even.”
When Jake returned to the house with the suitcase, Jane had Dahlman sitting up on the living room couch and she was just finishing putting new gauze and adhesive tape on his shoulder and back.
Jake opened the suitcase so she could look into it. “Nothing to get him a lot of invitations, but nothing with blood on it, either.”
Jane quickly fingered through the suitcase. “These are perfect. Thanks.” She pulled out a plain tan shirt, slipped it onto Dahlman, and buttoned it quickly. She had taken the necktie off him by loosening the loop, so now she slipped it over his head again and tightened it, then helped him to his feet. “We’d better get going.”
Jake followed her into the kitchen and watched her turning off lights and checking windows. “I’d like to go with you.”