'Then don't dye it,' said Jane. 'You've got easy ways to stay lost, and hard ways. Changing the color of your hair is one of the easy ways.'
Mary glared at the model on the box. Whatever color her hair had been when the picture was taken, an artist had painted it over a hedgehog brown. 'That color?'
Jane set the box on the sink just under the mirror. 'What's wrong with it?'
'I've just always been blond.'
Jane's eyes lifted to glance at her in the mirror, and then Mary saw them move to the picture on the box. She said nothing, but Mary saw what she was comparing the color on the box to. She angrily snatched another towel off the rack, wrapped it around her and tucked it under her arm like a sarong. 'I meant I've always
Jane didn't turn to face her. 'We've got less than two hours before checkout time. If you want to look different, the time to do it is before you rent an apartment, not later, after everybody has seen you already. I'll be out there. Think it over.'
Mary sat on the edge of the tub and stared at the mirror. It was just high enough so that all she could see of herself was the glowing blond hair at the crown of her head. It was bright, shiny, almost metallic when it was wet like this. She walked to the door and called, 'Okay, let's get it over with.'
Jane came back in, slipped on rubber gloves, pulled a chair up next to the sink, and went to work on Mary's hair. The acrid smells and the mess on the counter were all familiar to Mary, but it had been years since she had endured them outside of a hairdresser's shop.
Jane worked in silence and with extreme care, glancing at her watch every few minutes. Then it was over, and she was brushing Mary's hair out.
Mary said, 'You've done this quite a bit, haven't you?'
'Sure,' Jane said. 'If you do all of the easy things, the hard ones work better. Dyeing your hair, buying new clothes, using glasses to change the way your eyes look - those are easy. You can do all of them in a day, and none of them has any risk. If you think about what you're trying to accomplish, you can do it as well as I can.'
'What am I trying to accomplish?'
Jane looked at her in the mirror impatiently. 'You put in a lot of time trying to be Mary Perkins. You had it all worked out. Just do it in reverse. For the time being, you have nothing in common with Mary Perkins. She liked Las Vegas. You hate it; the lights give you a headache and everybody on the street looks like a zombie to you. Mary Perkins made businessmen think about her and remember her. Lose everything you did to accomplish that. Be the one who doesn't catch their eye. That's easy to do, and if you don't do at least that much, you're finished. Anybody who wants to find you can knock on doors and show your picture.'
Mary Perkins studied her reflection. The effect wasn't as bad as she had expected. The woman who stared back at her wasn't dowdy or mousy. She was mildly, quietly attractive, and with a little makeup she could be made better than that. What she looked most like was a woman who had never existed; she looked like a grown-up version of Lily Smith. 'All right,' she said. 'What do we change next?'
'That will have to do for now. Come on.'
Checking out consisted of sitting in the car while Jane went into the motel office and set the key on the counter. When she returned, she started the car and said, 'All right. Now we start getting into the hard parts. Do you have identification in any name besides Mary Perkins?'
'Lila Samuels,' said Mary.
'Throw her away with Mary Perkins. You've been in county jail. Although you haven't exactly said so, you've been investigated, and probably arrested more than once. The authorities know your aliases, and so can anybody else who wants to.'
Mary Perkins said, 'I've got to be somebody.'
'I've got some papers with me that you can use. Your name is Donna Kester. You're thirty-five.'
Mary Perkins stared at her. 'You have fake I.D. with you? But you were arrested too. They went through your purse.'
Jane pulled the car out of the parking lot and drove up the street. 'It wasn't in my purse.' Jane had brought the papers for Mona and kept them taped under the dashboard of each car they had used while traveling across the country. After Dennis had wrecked the last car, she had gone to the lot where it had been towed and found the papers untouched. 'You can be Donna Kester without worrying about anything for a while.'
They looked at three different apartments before they found the right one. It was in a building in the middle of a large modern apartment complex on Huron Street that seemed to contain a high proportion of single people, but it was far enough from the University of Michigan campus to be vacant. The fact that Donna Kester had a credit card was enough to get her a lease that began in two days. The fact that she had no local employer only confirmed her story that she had just gotten to town.
That afternoon Jane checked them into another motel at the edge of Ann Arbor, past the place where Huron Street crossed Route 94 and became Liberty Road. Jane sat in the motel room on the twin bed across from Mary. It was dusk, and the cold wind was beginning to blow outside to announce that the short fall days were fading into winter nights here. The tree branches that scraped and rattled the gutters of the building were bare, and the wet pavement of the parking lot outside the window would be frosted by morning.
Jane said, 'This is a good place to be. There are about thirty-five thousand students here, just about all of them strangers. Figure five thousand faculty, all from other places. Most of them are married, so they're really ten thousand, and another five thousand staff. Most of those people just returned here for fall semester. You're one of fifty thousand people who just got to town in a community with a year-round population that can't be much over a hundred thousand.'
'Are you trying to sell me a condo?' asked Mary.
'No,' said Jane. 'I'm trying to teach you something. If you're going to be a fugitive you'd better get good at it. I've heard a couple of versions of who isn't chasing you, but not who is. It doesn't matter. This isn't the sort of place where they'll look first. That's the best you can do in choosing a place to be invisible. There are always about five likely places to look for anybody. If you're stupid, you'll be in one. Once you move beyond those, every place is about as likely as any other, so the odds of finding you drop dramatically.'
'Where would you look? You said five places.'
'J haven't studied Mary Perkins as thoroughly as they have. You've been to Las Vegas and liked it. You'd be too smart to go back, and Reno's too close, so I might try looking in Atlantic City. You said you had worked in Texas and California, so people know you. But that leaves lots of cities in between that would appeal to Mary Perkins: I'd try Scottsdale, Sedona, Santa Fe. You like to be around money and sunshine.' As she watched Mary, she could see that the list was making her frightened. 'The fifth place is somewhere in the South.'
Mary Perkins looked like a woman who had paid to have her palm read and heard that she had no life line. 'Where?'
'You have just a trace of a southern accent. Since I know you've been arrested, I'd check the arrest record to find the city where you were born. That's always the fifth place.'
Mary looked at Jane with an expression that was meant to be intrigued puzzlement, but the surface never set properly; her face only formed itself into pie-faced hurt. 'Why is that?'
Jane's eyes were tired and sad. 'I don't know. Some people will tell you it's because they know the territory better than a stranger could, but they say that even if every inch of the place was bulldozed and rebuilt the day they left. Some of them say it's because they can get help from friends and relatives, but half the time they don't ask for it when they're there. They go there even if everybody they ever knew is dead and buried.'
'You're telling me what you don't believe. What do you believe makes them go back?'
'I'm telling you I don't think the people who do it know why. Maybe it's just some feeling that people have because we're animals too. You go to ground where you once felt most safe, and that's wherever your mother was.' She watched Mary Perkins for a moment. 'It's a lousy instinct, and it will get you killed.'
'So what now?'
'This is a place where nobody is searching for you. You look a little different, and if you work at it you can change more. You have identification as Donna Kester that should hold up. The credit cards are real. You'll get the bills. The driver's license is from New York, but it's good too. Somebody actually took the road test. You can get a new one here with the old one and the birth certificate. That's real too.' A man Jane knew had found a job in a small-town courthouse and added forty or fifty birth records that hadn't been there before. He sold about one name
