to death, and now to be home again with her tall, strong husband was enough to make her feel as though she must be dreaming.
The days, from the time when Carey left at six in the morning for the hospital until late afternoon, she spent trying to speed her recovery. Carey had begun rubbing Neosporin on her burns and scrapes as soon as she had come home. There had been no need by then for any antiseptic effect, but the stuff seemed to help prevent scars. She did her series of tai chi positions, and she could feel herself stretching farther and becoming more flexible. After that she left the house and went for long walks, lengthening her stride a bit each day and raising the rhythm of her steps to go faster. She lifted light weights to strengthen her upper body, but most of the time she concentrated on her right leg. When she was not exercising it she was resting. She took special care to eat well and get lots of protein and take vitamins, and to get plenty of sleep.
On the eleventh morning when Carey left, she took a bus to Rochester, New York, and bought a used car at a big car dealership. It was a gray four-year-old Honda with low mileage. She bought it under the name Emily Westerveldt, an identity she had built with many others, but had seldom used. When she got her car back to Amherst, she had it washed and waxed at the car wash on Niagara Falls Boulevard, and then drove it to her regular mechanic. She asked if he could check it over for a friend of hers. He glanced at it and said, 'I'll take a look at it.'
'Thanks,' she said. She knew he would take care of it, even if it meant he had to drive across the county for parts.
'Pick it up after four.'
When she picked it up, she filled it with gas and then stopped to buy the things she carried when she was on the road-a case of bottled water, bags of nuts, trail mix, dried fruit. Then she drove the car to her old house in Deganawida, put it in the garage, and went inside to make other preparations.
This was the house that her grandfather and his friends had built, the house where her father had been born, and where Jane had lived until she'd gone off to college, then returned to after graduation, and stayed in through the death of her mother. She had lived here until she had married Carey. She had kept it since then, partly because she couldn't sell it to some unsuspecting stranger who might wake up in the middle of the night to hear an unfortunate runner knocking on the door for help-or to hear someone worse coming in a window.
There were still things hidden in the house. For a few years she had stopped thinking of them as the tools of her profession, and had begun to think of them as precautions, like the fire extinguishers in the kitchen and the upstairs hallway in Amherst. She went down the cellar stairs gingerly, trying not to put too much weight on her wounded thigh. She walked to the far end, near her father's old workbench, took the stepladder, and carried it back to the area beside the old coal-burning furnace that had been left here when the oil furnace was installed when she was a child.
She climbed to one of the old, round heating ducts, disconnected two sections, and reached inside. There was a box that contained four pistols, all of them loaded, and boxes of extra ammunition. There was a metal cash box full of money. There was another in the back. When she opened it she found, carefully wrapped in plastic, pieces of identification. Some were for a woman who looked like Jane, and some for a man who looked like Carey, but who had names that weren't McKinnon. There were birth certificates, passports, driver's licenses, and credit cards.
Jane took some stacks of money, and then a Beretta nine-millimeter pistol like the one she had taken from Maloney, and a spare magazine. She set them on the ladder and then fitted the two sections of heating duct back together so they looked as though they hadn't been touched since the 1940s, moved the ladder back beside the workbench, and climbed back up the stairs.
When she came into the kitchen, she partially dismantled the gun, wiped the parts with a soft rag damp with gun oil, reassembled it, and then put it into her purse. She called a taxi to meet her three blocks away and took it home to Amherst; there, she hid the gun and the money in one of the spare rooms on the second floor with a small suitcase she had selected.
On the twelfth day she went to visit the Jo-Ge-Oh, the little people. They were very small, but they looked very much like the Senecas. They had been around for longer than the Senecas, but they had such a peculiar relationship with time that it was difficult to make assertions about it. They preferred to live in places where Seneca villages had been, either because those were simply the best sites in New York state-always near water and close to ground that was fertile and tillable-or because being close to full-size human beings scared off the animals that tended to trouble and annoy anyone their size. Raccoons, possums, skunks, and squirrels were particularly bothersome. For that reason the little people prized fingernail and toenail clippings, which they scattered around their settlements to give off a scent of big people. They were also extremely fond of the sort of tobacco that the Senecas favored, grown in western New York and Ontario, and mixed with a few shavings of sumac.
Jane had often visited them near the site of a large village that had once been along the Genesee River in Rochester. She usually approached the spot from Maplewood Avenue and climbed down the rocky sides of the chasm to the pebbly shore. But today, Jane didn't relish a climb, so she selected another place closer to home. She drove to the Niagara River, and then along River Road to the South Grand Island Bridge. She went over the east river and across the nine-mile-long island to a spot near the northern tip, then drove south along the river road. When she reached the right spot she parked and got out of the car, then walked along the eastern shore of the island to the site of an old, long-vanished hotel called Riverhaven. It was directly across the river from the old ferry landing in the city of Deganawida, and boats had landed here before the bridges were built at either end of the island. But the human occupation was much older than that.
This was a place that had been full of activity since long before the Senecas took the land by conquering the Wenros and Eries in the early seventeenth century. It was the site of one of the very few deposits of flint in the western part of the state, and it had been visited by Native people since the end of the last ice age. Jane walked the shore for a while, and then spoke. 'Jo-Ge-Oh!' she called softly. 'It's me, Jane Whitefield. I'm Nundawaono, and I've been away. I didn't want to leave again without visiting you.'
The Jo-Ge-Oh were known for taking in people who were in terrible trouble and hiding them from their enemies. They would conduct such people to their settlements and let them stay until they were safe. Often the person would think he had been with them for a week or a month, and then come back to the full-size world and discover that many years had passed. His enemies would be long dead and forgotten. Jane had admired the Jo- Ge-Oh and felt close to them since she was a little girl.
'Jo-Ge-Oh! Little people! I've brought you some presents.' She opened a foil package that the clerk in the store at the Tuscarora reservation had sold her. 'Here's some tobacco. I hope it's good and strong.' She made small piles of it on the rocks along the shore. 'Here are some clippings from my fingers and toes. I hope it keeps the pests away.' She took out a plastic sandwich bag and scattered the clippings around her.
She spoke to the little people in the Seneca language. 'I came to thank you for helping me get home alive and be with my husband.' Her speech was in keeping with Seneca practice, which was to thank supernatural beings for whatever they had given, but not to ask for anything. In English she said, 'Thanks, little guys.' After a few minutes of listening to the silence and watching the flow of the beautiful blue river, she turned and went back to her car. Tomorrow would be the thirteenth day.
That evening Jane had dinner ready early, and made sure she and Carey were in bed at shortly after ten. They began by making love slowly and gently, and then lay still for a time, holding hands. Then Carey moved again and loomed above her, kissing her hard, and she realized that she didn't have to tell him because he had already seen something-the overnight bag she'd packed, maybe-or just sensed the return of the melancholy she always had before she had to leave him. They began again, turning to each other wildly and passionately, as though it would be the last time in their lives and they were saying good-bye to everything that they loved and wanted.
Jane awoke at five a.m. as she had awoken many times, lying with her head on Carey's chest, feeling the rise and fall of his strong respiration, her long black hair spread over him like a blanket. She raised her head slightly and looked at him. His eyes were open, and he was looking at her.
'Good.' She put her hands on the sides of his face, and gave him a long, gentle kiss. 'One more chance to get that baby started. I'll be gone when you get home tonight.'
15.
An hour after Carey left for the hospital, Jane locked the door of the big old stone house in Amherst, walked to the driveway, and got into her cab. She took it to Deganawida, walked to her house, opened the garage, and
