by Thomas Perry
Jane turned and walked back to the car. She sat down in the seat, pulled the safety belt across her chest, and fastened it. She put the car into gear and began to make a wide turn toward the entrance.
“Jay-nee …” It was a soft, female voice, like a song just above a whisper. It made the hair on the back of Jane’s neck stand.
Jane’s foot hit the brake and the car jerked to a stop. She whirled in her seat to look behind her, and what she saw made her breath catch in her throat.
The woman’s face was illuminated in the glow of the single street lamp. It looked supernaturally pale under the long, black hair, but the red lips were set in the same amused, knowing smile that Jane remembered. “Jay-nee,” came the voice again. Then came the horrible, mocking laugh. Jane could see the big, square-looking .45 pistol held just above the woman’s lap with the muzzle aimed at the center of Jane’s backrest. They both knew the car seat wouldn’t stop the bullet.
The voice rose to a normal volume. “Say something.”
Jane said, “Everybody around here seems to come back from the dead. First Quinn, now you.”
The woman looked irritated. “Not exactly. I’m not Christie anymore. Quinn and I figured you must be dead, so I died too, only the death I came back from was yours.”
Jane said, “You’re supposed to be me? That’s why you grew your hair long and dyed it. You’re Jane?”
Christie shrugged. “I was the only one who had the qualifications. I got rich at it. Did you?” She seemed to enjoy the thought for a moment, then said, “You surprised me tonight, though.”
“By staying alive.”
Christie nodded. “I knew you were coming. I sent Quinn in to do Sid, so you could be Little Red Riding Hood, and Quinn could be the wolf. I spent the evening driving around, waiting for a rental car like this to appear in the neighborhood.”
“Why?”
“If the one who came out of the house was Quinn, great. If Sid came out, still okay: I could make him believe anything—that I was Quinn’s prisoner or something. But if the one who came back was you.… What could I do?”
“Christie,” said Jane. “You don’t have to—”
“I’m not,” Christie interrupted. “I’m sick of the whole business. Without Quinn or Sid, it’s too much trouble. I wanted to let you know. Drive back to the dark part of the lot and park. When you get there, I’ll get out and you drive off. I’ll be watching until you’re out of sight, so don’t do anything strange. Don’t even look back.”
Jane turned the car and drove in the direction of the river. Christie was lying. There was no reason in the world for Christie to do anything now except pull the trigger. Jane pressed her foot down on the gas pedal a little harder. The car was moving faster now, slowly gaining speed. She had not turned the headlights on when Christie had appeared, and she didn’t turn them on now, in the hope that Christie would not notice just how fast the car was moving.
The voice came again. “Slow down.”
Jane said nothing. Christie was more alert than she had expected. There was no hope of hiding the speed now, so Jane accelerated rapidly. The faster she was going, the fewer options Christie would have. It was already too late to shoot and jump.
“Stop the car or I’ll blow your head off.”
The car left the pavement and bumped onto the uneven surface of the lawn without losing speed. Jane watched the rearview mirror and saw the arm come up carrying the gun, then swing hard at her head.
Jane ducked to avoid the impact, but the gun caught the back of her head in a glancing blow that knocked her forward and made her see a red afterimage. Then she realized that the car had already reached the end of the grass. It shot outward, and it felt for a moment as though they were suspended in the air, and then the car began to fall. Jane’s seat belt seemed to tighten and drag her down out of the sky.
For a second she was aware that Christie was rising behind her in the back seat, both hands pressed against the ceiling to keep it away from her. Jane straightened her spine and sat up in her seat, looked out the windshield, and tried to see the surface of the river below. It was all darkness. She waited a second, then another, and then came the shock.
The car seemed to stab downward into the water at an angle. There was a bang as the airbag exploded out of the hub of the steering column and flattened Jane against her seat and, at the same time, a heavy thump as Christie was thrown forward behind her. Almost immediately, Jane heard a rushing noise in the dark, like a waterfall, and then the sensation of cold water on her feet.
It took Jane a second or two to determine that she could move. She fought the airbag to free her right arm, unbuckled her belt, and slipped sideways to the passenger side. She fell against the dashboard. The car was sinking front-first, the heavy engine weighing it down.
The water began to rush in faster. Her legs were in water up to the hip. Then she could hear more water, and she could feel that it was coming in through the weakened seal around the windshield. Jane listened, but she couldn’t hear Christie, so she tried to stare between the front seats toward the floor of the back seat.
At that moment, Christie moved. She pushed off against the back of the driver’s seat and brought the pistol around. There was a deafening report, and the airbag beside Jane deflated. Then Christie climbed higher onto the back seat, and Jane ducked lower.
Jane let the torrent of water coming through the open side window pour over her. She held herself against it with all the strength in her legs, and groped for the door handle. When she found it, she grasped it and stayed down. The water was up to her chest now, then her neck, and she held only her face above it. She knew that no human being could open a car door against the rush of water. She would have to hold on to the door handle and wait until the door was completely submerged.
The seconds went by, while Jane listened for another shot. Then she could hear nothing, because the water was up over her ears. She lifted her face above it to take a breath of air, pushed down on the door handle, put her shoulder against the door, and used her legs to press against it. The door opened. Jane slipped out and swam. She counted her strokes: one, two, three; her head broke out of the dark water, and she gasped in a breath.
Jane swam on the surface to the little margin of pebbles and mud on shore, pulled herself onto it, then looked back. The front of the car was completely underwater now. The only parts visible were the rear window, the trunk, and a bit of the roof, but it was sinking. Suddenly there was a shot, and a hole appeared in the rear window.
“No!” Jane shouted. “Get out the way I did! Swim down to the door!”
But there was no way Christie could hear her. There was a series of five muffled shots, and Jane saw bits of glass sparkling in the muzzle flashes as they exploded upward out of the rear window. Christie had created a ragged row of punctures, but she had not created an exit for herself. The car sank more rapidly, and the water reached the rear window. Christie’s shoe kicked against it once, making it balloon outward an inch or two; then the leg was pulled back to kick again when the rear window collapsed inward and Christie disappeared. The water poured in, and the car sank from sight.
Jane jumped to her feet and ran a few yards downstream, where the lazy current had carried the car, then sloshed back into the water until it was up to her thighs, and ducked into it. She dived downward, trying to reach the car. But the water was black, and she could not find it. She tried over and over, but her hands touched nothing except soft mud and stringy weeds. There was nothing that felt like metal. After what could have been ten minutes or a half hour, Jane crawled back onto the shore and lay there, panting.
Before she had fully regained her breath, she forced herself to stand. She took one last look at the slow, untroubled surface of the river. Then she turned away and began to walk.
45
Early one morning in late August, a young woman with long black hair parked her rented car in a small lot around the bend from the Glen Iris Inn at Letchworth State Pa
rk in Livingston County, New York, and walked along the park road to one of the narrow paths leading down into the gorge of the Genesee River. She descended the steep steps cut into the cliff in a zigzag that sometimes took her within a foot or two of the top leaves of a tall tree, then came back again beside the trunk and then passed once more near the place where the roots had dug in among the rocks. The land had been made a park in the 1860s, so the woods were thick and old. She emerged from the shadows of the trees, walked the last hundred feet on flat weedy ground, then stepped out on a smooth stone ledge above the water.
She looked around her and listened. The river was shallow here, and it made a whispery sound as it rushed over the rounded pebbles and flat shelves. She could hear the birds above the wooded path she had just left, but there was no sound of a human being yet. In an hour or two, hikers and picnickers would be crowding the trails, making the last, sweet week before Labor Day loud with their usual desperate enthusiasm. But now it was just a Seneca woman standing alone by the Genesee River, and this could have been any morning since the last Ice Age.
The Genesee River was the place where the Stone-Throwers, one of the tribes of Jo-ge-oh, lived. They were said to be no taller than the length of a person’s foot, so they were called Little People, but they were very strong. On the few occasions when they had allowed themselves to be seen, they had done it to intervene and save a person in extreme danger. They would take him out of the world for a time, to hide him from his enemies until the danger was over.
The Seneca woman took the purse off her shoulder, set it on the rock ledge at her feet, and pulled out a pouch of pipe tobacco she had bought at the Rochester airport. She took a pinch and tossed it into the air, then watched the wind carry it down onto the rocks below her.
“It’s me, little guys,” she said. “Jane Whitefield.” She waited for a few seconds, listening to the water whispering over the stones, then poured more tobacco to the rocks below her.
“I brought you the usual presents.” The Little People liked tobacco, and their only source of supply was the Senecas, who had not lived along this part of the Genesee since the Buffalo Creek treaty of 1826. She emptied the rest of the brown shreds of tobacco from the pouch and reached into her purse again.
This time she had a plastic bag containing the clippings of her fingernails. The Little People particularly valued the fingernail clippings of human beings, which they used to fool foxes and raccoons into believing that big people were nearby. She sprinkled the little moon-shaped clippings onto the rocks to make a wide zone of safety for the Little People.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for keeping my husband safe.” She stood looking at the river for a few minutes, then said aloud, “I’m going home to be with him now.”
Jane drove the length of the park road, then turned onto the Genesee Expressway at Mount Morris and headed north to change to the New York State Thruway west of Rochester. As she drove, she could see signs that the summer had reached its fullest perfection and was about to end. The leaves on the maple trees had all matured, opened flat, and grown as big as a man’s hand.
In the Old Time, the people’s lives had followed a cycle announced by signs in the world. Each spring, when the white oak leaves were the size of a red squirrel’s foot, the women would go out to the fields to plant the corn, beans, and squash. When the leaves on the deciduous trees had opened a little farther, and the foliage was thick enough to hide a human shape in the forest, warriors would slip away, sometimes in parties of three or four and sometimes alone. They would travel in silence just off the trails, until they had reached the countries of enemies. They would stay for most of the summer watching, listening, and studying until they had found the enemy’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
When the nights were just beginning to turn cool and the days shorter, and the corn in the enemies’ fields was beginning to ripen, the scouts would begin the journey back to the land between the Niagara River and Sodus Bay. They would travel quickly through the forests, often from as far west as the Mississippi River and, more rarely, from beyond it to the eastern slopes of the high mountain range they called the Rim of the World, where the Left-Handed Twin was reputed to wait for the souls of the dead.
They returned to take part in the Green Corn ceremony that was held when the ears on the stalks standing in the women’s fields had ripened enough to be edible. Green Corn marked the end of the female half of the year, when the country of the Senecas was warm and fruitful, and the corn, beans, and squash they called the Three Sisters grew to feed the people. The festival began on the day when the people knew that for this year, at least, they would not starve. Their lives had been preserved.
A few weeks later the crops would be harvested and the male half of the year would begin. In the dark, cold half of the year, the celebrations were given by the men. There were hints that the men’s ceremonies came from a time when the land between the Niagara and the Hudson had been much colder and barer, and the people had lived by following the migrations of herds of large animals. Every year, as soon as the harvest was completed, the men went off to hunt deer and bear or to attack the enemies that the scouts had observed during the summer. But Green Corn was a time when all of the people came together.
When Jane reached the edge of Amherst, she stopped along the road, tilted the rearview mirror so she could see her face, brushed her hair, and put on her makeup. Then she readjusted the mirror and drove on.
She turned into the driveway of the big old stone house, glanced in the rearview mirror, and watched the woman in shorts and a T-shirt strolling along the other side of the street stop, open her purse, and fiddle with something inside it, her lips moving. She was apparently muttering to herself about something she was looking for, but Jane smiled in the mirror at her and said, “It’s me, all right. Tell them I said ‘Hi.’ ”
Jane got out of the car and walked toward the front of the house. The door swung open, and Carey stepped onto the porch.
Jane said, “How was the rest of the movie?”
He shrugged. “A cynical attempt to pander to the romantic, sensitive female audience. You would have been putty in my hands.”
“Didn’t understand it, huh?”
“I put some estrogen in the popcorn after you left, but it didn’t help.” He rubbed his chin. “Didn’t have to shave for twenty-eight days, though.”
She put her arms around him and held her cheek against his in a long, hard embrace. “It seems to have worn off.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I got tired of the popcorn.” He suddenly bent to scoop her off her feet, carried her inside the house, and pushed the door shut with his foot.
Jane said, “Nice of you to give me a lift, but I can only stay a minute.”
He withdrew his right hand so her feet swung to the floor. “These nightmares are beginning to get a perverse, teasing quality to them.”
“I came to get your opinion of a place I rented. Would you be willing to take a look at it?”
“I was going to do a crossword puzzle, but I could work on it in the car …”
“Well, then, come along. It’s kind of nice.” She took his hand and tugged him toward the door. “I promise you’ll like it. It’s got four hundred rooms, and a bed in every one.”
He brightened. “A hospital! You finally got me a hospital.”
She wrapped her arms around him again and kissed him. She broke it off and looked at him happily. “No,” she said. “I didn’t.” Then she swung the door open and pushed him out toward the car.
Dr. and Mrs. McKinnon did not return to the house in Amherst that night. At eight the next morning they were seen driving from a hotel in Buffalo eastward to the Tonawanda Indian Reservation. At nine-thirty the mobile surveillance team was ordered to break off contact, and the team at the house in Amherst was told to dismantle their observation post and stand down.
John Marshall arrived in Tonawanda in the afternoon. He parked in a small blacktop square near a long,
single-story building with a door and a chimney at each end and a row of windows along the side. There were two smaller buildings nearby, where he could smell food cooking and now and then hear women’s voices and the clatter of utensils.
He entered the long, low building he had been told to call the longhouse in time to hear several speeches in a language so alien to him that he was occasionally incapable of discerning even the mood. He guessed correctly that the first one was a prayer.
The prayer was spoken by a man who’d held an office in unbroken succession since Deganawida and Hiawatha convinced five warring nations to form the Iroquois confederacy at least five hundred years ago. The prayer was much older than that, and it contained a skeleton of the Seneca cosmology. In it the people thanked the Right-Handed Twin, Hawenneyu the Creator, for making all parts of the universe and, at the same time, thanked each of the parts themselves. The prayer began with the lowest earthbound beings, the warriors and women, then moved upward to the water, the herbs and grasses, the bushes and saplings, then the trees, the corn, beans, and squash, the game animals, the birds. Then the people thanked the Thunderers, the winds, the sun, moon, and stars, and finally Hawenneyu. There was nothing in the prayer but thanks, because the Senecas did not believe in asking for anything. They only expressed gratitude for what had been created and preserved.
After that there was a recitation of an abridged version of the Gaiiwio, the “good word” that the prophet Handsome Lake had received in his visions two hundred years ago, during the worst moments of Seneca history, when the world had seemed to them to have changed terribly but really had not changed at all. One of Handsome Lake’s visions had told him to preserve the ancient cycle of feasts.
Marshall listened as an elderly man with a stentorian voice addressed the people on what appeared to be another matter of profound seriousness, upon which the audience burst into laughter, stood up, and went about preparing to serve food. Marshall drifted through the crowds and began his search.