started the used Honda she had bought.
She stopped at a large sporting goods outlet in Niagara Falls and bought a Remington 1200 shotgun and twenty-five double-ought shells. When the man asked her what she wanted that kind for, she said, 'Home defense.' She bought a gun cleaning kit and a box of rubber gloves; a large, razor-sharp folding knife; a short-handled spade; and a hatchet. She stopped at an electronics store and bought four pay-as-you-go untraceable cell phones with cash.
In another few hours of driving east she was past Syracuse and making the turn onto Interstate 81, heading north to Watertown. From there Route 3 took her east on a winding road into the Adirondacks, and she drove the rest of the day to reach Lake Placid, where she checked into a hotel and slept.
It was mid-afternoon the next day, after she had read the rental listings in the papers and had spent hours combing the area around Lake Placid, when she found the house she wanted. Jane walked the property, climbed on the woodpile outside and looked in the windows, and then walked in the woods nearby. She found the trails: one a game trail that went only as far as a tiny clearing with weeds that had been flattened by deer as a resting place; and the other a man trail, bare of vegetation, that led two hundred feet or so to a small, dark Adirondack lake.
She liked the fact that the building had two stories. The upper story would give her a chance to see what was coming toward her from a greater distance. Because she had driven into the Adirondacks to a place that got cold in the winter, it hadn't been hard to find houses of brick and stone built to hold up to the weather. They would also stop a bullet. This one she judged to date from the 1930s. It had a sloped cellar door that led down steps to a second, vertical door to a basement. The windows were all old-fashioned thick glass, all two-light, opening inward like little doors, secure on the inside and equipped with shutters. She could see through rooms to the inner sides of some of them, and they all had iron fittings so in the winter they could be barred with two-by-fours. The snow in the Adirondacks had been known to pile up to twenty feet, and the windows had been built to hold up against the weight and the winds. The roof had a steep peak to prevent snow and ice from building up and getting heavy.
She took another look around, and then drove up the dirt road to the county highway, and then into Lake Placid to find the landlord. The owner turned out to be a young blond woman whose main business was a store that sold things summer visitors wore-high-end sunglasses; hiking boots; hats for keeping the sun out of the eyes; helmets and bright synthetic shirts and spandex shorts for those who rode the bikes hanging from the rack overhead.
Jane walked in, saw that the blond woman was the only person in the store, and said, 'You're Cora Willis, right I want to rent your house.'
'The cottage Don't you want to see it first'
'I've seen it,' Jane said. 'I was just out there. I like it. My name is Janet Keller.' She held out her hand and the other woman shook it. 'In fact, I was surprised you weren't asking more for it.'
Cora Willis shrugged. 'I get a lot more earlier in the summer. Usually I close it for the summer at the end of August, and then do whatever upkeep I need to do. There are plenty of years when the nights start to get cold by now. I should warn you about that-you could wake up one morning and find it's fall.'
'It's okay,' Jane said. 'I'm prepared. I saw it was empty, and I'd like to move in later today or tomorrow, if I can.'
'No reason not to. I don't need to wait for your check to clear. You seem honest.'
'I am. But I assumed you would be careful, so I brought cash.' She counted it out onto the counter silently. 'Is there a security deposit'
'Uh . . . no,' said Cora Willis. She went to a cabinet behind the counter and produced a rental agreement, a pen, and a key. She walked around her store hanging up clothes that had been left in the dressing room while Jane filled in her false name and address. When Jane was finished, Cora Willis glanced at the agreement as she put it into her computer printer and made a copy for Jane, signed it, and handed it to her. 'You should have a nice, quiet time. I always do when I'm out there. My great-grandfather built it.'
'It's just right,' Jane said. She walked toward the door. 'Thanks a lot. I'll be back in two weeks to turn in the key.'
'Okay. If you forget, mail it to me. You're the last renter of the season, so there's no rush.'
Jane had not intended to move into the cottage right away, but she didn't want anyone around when she got there, and she needed to have the deal be a certainty, so she had started the rental period right away. She drove to Watertown and began to shop for the items she would need. She went to a military surplus store and bought a marine K-Bar fighting knife with a black blade; a blood gutter and a hilt to keep her hand from slipping onto the blade; a whetstone; some basic cooking utensils; a high-intensity flashlight; a camouflage tarp; and a hundred feet of rope.
At a Target store she bought men's jeans, shoes, a shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, a box of rubber gloves, dishwashing detergent, and some sheets and blankets.
She stopped at a copying and mailing store, where she rented a computer and sent Stewart Shattuck an e- mail. Stewart Shattuck was a highly skilled forger and a dealer in false identification with whom she had dealt a number of times over the years. 'Stewart, I need a favor. Please make sure that a few of the wrong people find out that I asked you to mail me some new cards-maybe an e-mail acknowledgment that looks as though you accidentally hit `reply all' would do it, but you know best. Here is the address.' She put in the address of the cottage near the lake.
Jane waited nearly an hour before she received the reply: 'It's done. If you have any doubts about this, don't ever go there.'
Near the mailing store was a party goods store. As she had hoped, the paucity of holidays in the latter part of the summer had forced the staff to lay out the Halloween costumes and decorations early. She went through the displays of masks until she found the one she wanted. It fit over the whole head and had close-cropped brown hair and a smooth complexion. The name on the label said 'George Clooney mask.' She bought it and a set of rubber hands and rubber feet.
It was nightfall by the time Jane was finished with her shopping. She decided she was not ready to drive several hours to arrive in the dark at a dirt road to an unoccupied house. She drove to the entrance to Route 81, where she remembered there was a large, pleasant-looking hotel, and rented a room for the night. She went back outside to move her car to a spot in the parking lot where it was lighted and she could see it from her room, then went to sleep. She had gone to sleep so early that she awoke at four, then drove the four hours to reach the cottage by eight.
Before she left the highway she refilled her gas tank. She had learned over the years that eluding pursuers was often a matter of tiny precautions, many of them no more esoteric than maintaining a full tank. Afterward she drove the rest of the way to the dirt road and up to the house, where she unloaded her supplies into the kitchen. Then she drove the car back along the dirt road to the highway, and then up the man-made trail she had found in her initial visit. She kept going past the distance where her car would become invisible from the highway, until she found the slab of rock. She parked the car on it, covered the car with leaves and branches, and then followed the trail the rest of the way to the small, calm lake and along the shore to the path that led up to the house.
She locked the doors and began to deal with the supplies and equipment she had brought. She went upstairs and made the bed in the master bedroom, which was at the head of the stairs. Then she went down the hall and selected a second bedroom where she would sleep. There was a lot of work to do, and she had only the hours of daylight to accomplish it. She went downstairs, emptied a half dozen glass iced tea bottles into a pitcher, tied the bottles together with nylon fishing line, and set pairs of them along the upstairs hallway from the stairway to the second bedroom. If anyone came up here in the dark, he would set off a racket with the falling bottles, and very likely tangle himself in the fishing line.
The men's clothing she had bought she filled with leaves, pine needles, and a few sticks, making the most realistic dummy she could. His head was the rubber pullover George Clooney mask filled with crumpled paper bags. His hands were the rubber hands from the party shop. She tried using the rubber feet, but ultimately settled on the shoes with the rubber feet stuffed into them, so the human-looking ankles could be seen. After several experiments with the dummy, she found that the best place for him was seated on the bed in the master bedroom with his back propped up on pillows, the small reading light on the headboard turned on behind his head so his face was in shadow, and a book from the bookshelf propped in his lap. She plumped up some pillows and put them under the covers so it looked as though a woman were asleep on the far side of him.
From time to time Jane stopped her preparations and looked out each of the upper windows, standing still
