Jane did not stop to form a clear, logical plan about what she was going to do. She simply knew that whatever arrangements the enemy had made must be to his benefit. She snatched up the forged suicide note, walked to the room where the body was lying, picked up the pistol, put it into her belt, and slid down the banister to the ground floor. Then she made her way back through the furnace to the crawl space, closed the closet door above her, replaced the metal panel, and crawled back out from under the house.
Within ten minutes she was back at the gas station taking the plastic tarp off her rented car. She dropped her room key in the mail slot at the motel office and drove south. She didn't know the enemy's name and she didn't know where he lived, but now she knew something about him. He wasn't some accountant who had hired a few head-bangers to block a courtroom so his embezzling wouldn't get noticed by the authorities. He was a pro.
15
Jane drove for the rest of the night. As soon as she was over the last big hill into Los Angeles County at Thousand Oaks, she ate breakfast at an enormous coffee shop surrounded by brown gumdrop-shaped hills. Just as she was taking her first sip of coffee the clock reached seven and men with heavy machinery began assaulting the mounds, shaving the tops to make level building lots.
She waited in a shopping mall until noon and then checked into a brick hotel in Burbank with a glass elevator that ran up the outside of the building to give future guests a view of whatever was going to be built in the empty, weed-tufted lot under it. She was glad that whatever was in the master plan for the lot had not yet been started, because she needed to sleep. She closed the curtains, undressed, and turned off the lamp. She knew that the dreams would probably come, but she was too tired now to fight them. She lay in the bed staring up at the single red light of the smoke detector on the ceiling, then relinquished her will and slept.
In her dream she found herself kneeling on a bare earth floor in a dark enclosure. Her ears told her that the space was about fifteen feet square. As her eyes slowly became more used to the dark she could see the texture of the inner side of the elm bark that had been shingled together to make the walls and roof of the ganosote. It was a large one built in the old style, about a hundred and twenty feet long with compartments like this one on either side. She counted ten cooking fires at intervals down the center aisle. She could see dark shapes of men, women, and children huddled at the fires or walking past them.
One of the children pushed aside the bearskin that was hanging at the east end of the longhouse to cover the door, and she had to look down to avoid the glare. She knew from the bright sunlight that it must be morning. When the child scampered out and the bearskin swung shut again she didn't raise her head because she was thinking about what the light had shown her. She was wearing a leather skirt and moccasins, and she could feel that the reason the bare ground didn't bother her knees was that they were protected by a pair of leggings. She reflected in a detached way that all of her clothes were soft deerskin, and this confirmed her impression that the day that was beginning was in the Old Time.
She could see that around her neck was a necklace woven from fragrant marsh grass, and she reached up to touch it. Every few inches there was a little disk of marsh grass covered with shell beads. She could smell the fresh, grassy scent, and she knew that the perfume made the smoke, cooking meat, and the twenty or thirty bodies in the ganosote easier on her nostrils.
She heard a noise and turned to see that behind her there was the big shape of a man on the lower platform along the wall of the compartment, and that he was stirring, about to wake up. She didn't know who he was, but stored on the platform five feet above him were her things - the extra moccasins she would use to replace the ones on her feet now, the elm bark gaowo tray she used to prepare corn bread, her collection of ahdoquasa with the bowl ends polished smooth for eating soup and the handles carved in the shapes of men and women embracing. She knew he must be her husband, but he stayed asleep in the shadows with his face to the wall because it was not time for her to see him yet.
She heard someone calling her name outside, and in the logic of dreams, she knew that the voice was the reason she was here. She stood up and walked past the fires to the bearskin flap. A strong hand gripped her arm, and she turned. A man whose face she did not quite see in the dim light said in Seneca, 'If you don't want to dream about the dead, you don't have to. If the women sing the Ohgiwe, they'll leave.' She knew this voice.
'I know, Jake,' said Jane. She lifted the corner of the bearskin and ducked out into the light.
'Jane!' said a voice. It was harsh and high, not quite human, like the screech of a parrot. 'Jane!'
She looked around her, and her eye caught a flash of deep blue above her on a maple tree, and then another flitted across the open air from an old sycamore. It flew in spurts, a dip and a wing-flap to bring the bird up, then a dip and a wing-flap and claws clutching the branch of the tree beside the first one. Jane could tell they were the two scrub jays she had captured in California.
The two birds dropped to the lowest branch of the maple just above her. The male tilted his head to the side and glared at her with one shiny black eye. 'Jane!'
'What?' she asked.
The female jay hopped to reverse her position on the branch, her head where her tail had been, and leaned down. 'We did what you asked,' she said. 'We took Dennis and Mona to Hawenneyugeh.'
'Thank you,' said Jane. 'But you have to go home now. You can't survive in this climate, and winter is coming.'
The male shifted back and forth on the branch nervously, and she could hear its claws scratching the bark. 'We came for you.'
The jays eyed her without moving. Jane felt a small, growing fear. 'Am I going to die too? So many people, all dying for nothing.'
The female dropped to the grass at her feet and jerked her head from side to side to bring first one eye and then the other to bear on Jane. 'It's not supposed to
'What we are?'
'Hawenneyu, the Right-Handed Twin, creates people, birds, trees. Hanegoategeh, the Left-Handed Twin, makes cancer, number-six birdshot, Dutch Elm disease. For every measure, a countermeasure: Hawenneyu creates the air, Hanegoategeh churns it into the cold wind; Hawenneyu makes fire and houses, Hanegoategeh makes the fire burn the houses.'
'Are you here to tell me it's my turn to be used up?' asked Jane.
'To warn you. If you want to be alive and breathe the air and drink the water, then look and listen. Nothing has changed since the beginning of the world. You're still walking through wild country. No sight or sound is irrelevant. Learn about your enemy.'
She studied the two birds. 'Who is my enemy?'
'Think about how he works,' said the female jay.
'He's been killing people,' Jane said. 'There's nothing special about it at all. It's just brutal: cutting up the Deckers - '
'Without leaving any sign in the house that a little boy had ever lived there,' the male reminded her.
'How about Mona and Dennis?' she asked. 'He hired some men to beat Dennis to death and throw Mona down a stairwell.'
'He waited until you had made your preparations for one building, and got the case moved to another. You had to go to a new place where a dozen men were waiting for you and court was already in session.'
'And what about Alan Turner?' asked the female jay.
'What about him?' Jane asked.
'We know how you got into Turner's house past the alarm system and out again. How did he do it?'
'I don't know,' said Jane. 'I suppose he rang the doorbell. Alan Turner let him in. They must have known each other.'
'You're not listening,' said the female jay. 'Anybody could get
'How?' she asked.
Jane awoke and listened to the sounds of the cars on the freeway a few blocks away. Rush hour must have begun, but then she remembered that the term had no meaning around Los Angeles. There were cars clogging the roads every hour of every day. She sat up and looked around her, then stood and walked into the shower.
She had only needed some sleep. She still didn't know the man's name, but while she slept she had figured out something else about him. He might have gotten into the house in Monterey without setting off the alarm
