a year, so the odds were good that nobody would catch one and start looking into the rest.
Mary Perkins looked increasingly alarmed. 'How long do we have to stay here?'
'It's up to you. If you want my advice, I'll give it to you. Spend your time around the university, where there are crowds of strangers of every description and all the thugs wear helmets and shoulder pads. Buy yourself a long, warm coat with a high collar and wear a hat and scarf.'
'You're telling me you're cutting me loose, aren't you?' said Mary Perkins with growing anxiety. 'I thought you were going to protect me and get me settled.'
Jane framed her words carefully, making an effort to keep the frustration out of her voice. 'You came to me in trouble, with two men on your back. I got you out of that trouble because you asked me to and I didn't think you could do it yourself. Now you're reasonably safe if you want to be. That's as far as I go with you.'
'It's because you think I can't pay, right? Well, I can. I've got money with me, and I can get more when it's safe to travel. Enough to make it worth your time, anyway.'
'Keep it,' said Jane. She picked up her purse and the keys to the car. 'The more you have, the longer it will be before you do something foolish.' She walked to the door, stopped, and added, 'Take care.'
'I have a right to know why.'
'No, you don't,' said Jane. She stepped outside, closed the door, and walked across the cold lot to the car. She started it and drove around the block and past the motel twice. When she was certain that nobody was watching the motel and nobody had followed the car, she continued straight to Route 94 and headed east toward the junction with 23 to Ohio.
7
When Jane reached Toledo she swung east across the vast flat lake country toward home, In the morning when she passed into the southwestern tip of New York, she felt as though she had left enemy territory. Three hours later, she drove the rented car to the Rochester airport and turned it in at the lot to make it look as though the driver had continued east on a plane. Then she took a commuter flight seventy miles west to the Buffalo airport, where she had left her own car.
She drove up the Youngmann Expressway to Delaware Avenue and turned north into the city of Deganawida in the late afternoon. The sun had already moved to a position in the west where its feeble glow did little to blunt the bite of the wind off the Niagara River. She drove onto Main Street near the old cemetery that had filled up before the Spanish-American War, took the shortcut along the railroad tracks and down Erie to Ogden Street, then turned again to her block. The house was one of a hundred or more narrow two-story wooden buildings placed beside the street that ran the length of the city from one creek to the next one, two miles away.
Jane pulled the car into the driveway and her eyes instantly took in the state of the neighborhood. She had been looking at these same sights since she had first stood upright and been able to see over the hedges to survey the world while she was playing. The houses in this block had been built before the turn of the century for the people who worked in the factories and shipyards that were no longer here, and the trees were tall and thick, their roots pushing the blocks of the sidewalks up into rakish tilts that had made roller skating dangerous. Her front yard looked lush and green and needed cutting, the blades thick and wet from the rain she had missed while she was away. The clapboards of the narrow two-story house always had looked soft and organic to her because the dozens of layers of paint spread on by generations of Whitefields had made the corners rounded. She saw the curtain on Jake Reinert's corner window twitch aside and she knew he had heard the car's engine in the driveway next door.
She walked to her front door, unlocked it, and slipped inside to punch the code on her alarm keypad before the alarm could go off. She left her front door open so Jake would know that she was willing to talk. She walked into the kitchen, poured coffee into the filter of the coffee-maker, opened the freezer and unwrapped a frozen square of corn bread and a package of blueberries, and started to defrost them in the microwave oven.
Jane heard Jake on the porch, his footsteps heavy and a little stiff. 'Come on in,' she called, then went back to the cupboard for honey. The microwave bell chimed, and she had the corn bread, berries, and honey on the kitchen table before Jake was comfortably seated. She heard him strain a little to ease himself down with his arms.
'I brought your mail,' said Jake. He set a pile of letters on the table.
'Thanks. Arthritis acting up?'
'It's just the winters,' said Jake.
'Cold nights getting to you?'
'Yeah, too damned many of them.'
He watched her bustling around getting cups, plates, and silverware. Nothing escaped his notice. She was wearing heavier makeup than usual, and her right eye was half closed and the high cheekbone on that side seemed tight - not puffy, exactly, but swollen. She still moved quickly and gracefully, but she didn't pick up things in groups: she lifted each one and set it down before she picked up the next. He judged it was probably a sprained wrist.
Jake had known Jane Whitefield for all of her thirty-two years, had known her mother for a few years before that, and her father all his life. He had come into this same kitchen as a child and watched her grandmother lay out corn bread, berries, and honey for him on this same table. Seneca women obeyed some ancient law that said that anybody who came in at any time of the day or night got fed.
He had not merely known Jane Whitefield, he had been around to see her coming, but it had been only two years ago that he had accidentally discovered what little Janie had grown up to do with herself. From the look of her, it had gotten harder lately. He said, 'Rough trip this time?' He had suspected he would feel like an idiot if he said it this way, and he did; a woman who made her living by taking fugitives away from their troubles and into hiding probably didn't have any kind of trips but rough ones. He had said it that way because it acknowledged that he knew the nature of her business and implied that he wasn't shocked by it anymore. He considered this a necessary piece of hypocrisy.
To Jake's surprise Jane didn't take the chance he had given her to shrug it off or make a joke out of it. 'Yeah,' she said. 'It was awful.' She set a plate of corn bread in front of him and started to eat her own, but then set the fork back down. 'I always thought the way it would end was that one day I would get sick of people and decide they weren't worth the trouble anymore. That probably won't be how it happens. I lost two of them, Jake.'
'Lost them?' he said. 'You mean you can't find them?'
'No.' She spoke clearly but with the quiet voice that made him know what she was going to say, because people spoke in low voices about the dead. 'I got them killed.'
'How?'
'I don't know, exactly. I mean, I know what happened, but not how. We - the three of us - were taking a little boy to California. There was an ambush. I didn't read it in time because it wasn't a dark alley or a lonely road. It was a courthouse. The other two had to stop and buy me time to get the boy inside where he would be safe.'
'I'm sorry,' Jake said. That was what people said when somebody died. A man his age ought to have thought of something better than that by now, but if he had, he never remembered it when he needed it.
'Somebody outsmarted me. He knew what bait to use, and somehow he must have figured out a way to be sure that this lawyer - the one who died - knew it was there. But the trap he set wasn't for a lawyer. It was for someone like me.'
'How do you know that?'
'He knew that I would find a way to get the boy into the courthouse before it opened in the morning, or at least study the building so I knew the entrances and exits and who was supposed to be where. So at the last minute he had them transfer the case to a different court.'
Jake ate some of the corn bread and honey, and thought about what she had said. 'Who is he, a cop?'
She said, 'He was tracking the boy all over the country for years. If you run into a crooked cop, you can almost always avoid him by driving past the city line. There's hardly ever a good enough reason to follow you beyond it. On one side of the line he's just about invulnerable. On the other, he has no legal power and the local police wonder what he's up to. No,' she said. 'I think he's something else.'
