need a way out of this as much as I do. The minute you helped your first felon to evade prosecution, you were meat on the hoof. Somebody - local cops, F.B.I. it doesn't matter who - was going to notice you and hunt you down.' His fingers closed numbly on the pistol.
'Without a powerful friend, you're going to be somebody's dinner.' He swung the pistol upward.
The shotgun blast blew through his chest. His body toppled backward to rattle the links of the fence, then lay still. 'But not yours,' said Jane. She turned and walked back through the snow to her car, put the shotgun in the trunk, and drove along the side of the building toward the gap in the fence.
31
Judge Kramer awoke from his dream. The house was dark, but the moon shone through the big magnolia tree outside his window, so small patches of gray-blue light fell on the bedspread. Something was wrong.
He heard the little voice and remembered that he had heard it in his dream and tried to ignore it. But it was all right. It was just the boy.
He swung his feet to the floor and walked out of the bedroom and down the hall to the guest room. He reminded himself that this was perfectly normal. A child who had seen what this one had was going to have night terrors. Kramer rubbed his eyes and struggled to wake up. He was going to have to be wise and strong and reliable. That was what this child needed right now. Adults came when you cried out in the night, and they told you everything was all right. If it wasn't all right, they damned well made it all right.
He stepped into the boy's room and said, 'It's all right. Here I am, Timmy.' He had barely uttered it when he realized he was wrong. The bed was empty. He looked around him. The boy was gone.
Kramer ran to the landing in time to see the triangular slice of moonlight appear on the floor of the foyer. The front door had opened. As he hurried down the first few stairs, he saw her step into the moonlight. 'It's just me, Judge,' said Jane Whitefield.
'What are you doing here?'
'I've come for Timmy.'
'No,' he said. He was shaking his head, but he knew she could not see it. 'There are procedures for this. The law provides for it. You can't just...'
He could feel, not see, Jane Whitefield's eyes on him. 'What does the law provide?' she asked.
'When it's safe, Children's Services will find him a suitable foster home.'
'It's never going to be safe,' said Jane. 'Even if all the money is gone, there will be people who think more might turn up or who know how to get more just by using his name. Barraclough had a lot of people working on these side cases for him. They're still out there.' She took a step with Timmy.
'You should know I have a gun.' The judge reached into the pocket of his robe.
'So have I,' Jane said. 'I didn't bring mine either.' She turned, took Timmy's hand, and then the slice of moonlight disappeared.
It was after midnight when Carey McKinnon turned his car onto the long gravel drive that ran up behind his old stone house in Amherst and parked his car in the carriage house that had, at some point in his grandfather's time, started being called 'the garage.' He swung the two doors closed and put the padlock on the hasp, not because anyone had ever tried to steal anything here but because the wind was cold tonight and by morning it would be strong enough to blow the old doors off their hinges if he didn't secure them. He had heard on the car radio that there was going to be another in the series of heavy snowstorms that had blown in, one after another, from the west, and he could already feel the cold front moving in.
Carey walked up the drive toward his house, looking down at his feet and trying to step in the spots where the snow had not drifted. He reached his front steps and stood under the eaves, stamping the snow off his shoes as he stuck his key into the lock, when he heard a car door slam. He looked over his shoulder at the street.
There was a person- - a woman - walking away from her car across his front yard: Jane.
He stepped across the lawn to meet her. 'Hey, I know you!' he said. 'What happened - did your flight get grounded?'
She smiled as they met, and he tried to get his arms around her, but the brown paper bag she was carrying was between them, so he snatched it away and put his arm around her waist. 'No.' She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. 'I'm home.'
They walked together to his front door and he opened it. 'Why didn't you call me? I'd have met you at the airport.'
'Great idea, Carey,' Jane said. 'Then tomorrow while you were at work I could walk back there in a blizzard and get my car.'
'Oh,' he said. 'Well, there must be some way that normal people do these things. I know some. I'll ask.'
He flicked on the light and they stepped into the little old-fashioned entry. He set the bag on the bench, hung his coat on a hook, slipped hers off her shoulders and hung it beside his, then took her into his arms. They kissed in a slow, gentle, leisurely way, and then Jane put her hands on the sides of his face, held him a few inches away, and looked into his eyes. 'You waiting for the wind to close the door?'
He shrugged, went to close the door, then came back and picked up the grocery bag. 'Bring your laundry?'
She took the bag and pulled out a bottle of champagne. 'There was a power failure in the store, so I thought this was Tabasco sauce. I figured you might be able to use it.'
'A common mistake, but I can't launch the ship in this weather. Maybe we can drink it or something.'
She reached into the bag again and pulled out a bouquet of white roses.
He looked at her for a moment, puzzled. Finally he said, 'Oh, you brought my roses back. Thanks. It was getting to be about time, but I didn't want to say anything.' He took the roses and sniffed them. 'Held up pretty well, didn't they?'
'Remarkably,' Jane said, but she barely got it out because he scooped her up and started to carry her toward the staircase.
He took her up the stairs, set her gently on the big bed, and began by taking off her shoes. He proceeded to undress her slowly. When he had finished, he sank down on the bed with her. He said quietly, 'I love you, Jane,' and before she could answer, his lips were on hers, and then by the time she could have spoken and remembered what she had wanted to say, words seemed unnecessary.
Hours later, Carey McKinnon awoke in his dark bedroom and moved his arm to touch her. She was gone. He stood up and walked down the hall. He found her downstairs, sitting on the couch in his big, thick bathrobe, looking away from him to stare at the fireplace. She looked tiny, like a child. He could tell she had heard him. 'Hi, Carey,' she said.
'What are you doing, figuring out how you're going to redecorate when your regime comes into power?'
'No. Come sit with me.'
He walked down the stairs and sat beside her. He saw that she was not smiling. 'What's wrong?'
She leaned over and kissed him, then said, 'I've been thinking about your offer.'
'You look like you've made up your mind.'
'I have,' she said. 'One year from tonight, the tenth of January, you can set the date. If you'll give me some notice, I'll be there with something borrowed and something blue. If not, I'll just be there.'
He grinned, but then his eyes began to look troubled. 'Why a year from now? I mean, I guess what I want to say is, 'I'm happy. Ecstatic. I love you.' But what is there about it that takes so long? It's not as though we don't know each other.'
Jane turned to face him. 'I'm going to tell you a story. At the end of it, you'll say that you understand.'
'I will?' he asked. 'Then the year is to see if I really do understand. So it's that kind of story.'
'I'm going to tell you about my trip.'
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EPILOGUE
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In the spring of the year, as they had forever, Seneca women met at Tonawanda one evening at dusk to sing the Ohgiwe, the Dance for the Dead. Spring was the time when the dead came back. There were no drums, no
