airports than... a couple more than my suitcase has, anyway. I always seem to be strapped into an airplane seat when you're home, and then we have to sit down and run figures for the next meeting the minute we're in a hotel, and get to the meeting by breakfast time. Enough whining. I'm not mad at you. I'll call you when I'm home.' She caught herself before she said 'I love you' because he had never said it to her, but then she felt foolish for being petty. She changed it into 'I miss you,' then hung up. She tested the sound of it in her mind and decided it was true, as far as it went. She did miss him.
There had been two or three friends in college who had known that she had a knack for hiding people, but Carey McKinnon had not been one of them. Each year thereafter it would have been harder to tell him, but that was not why she had avoided it. She had been saving him for herself. She needed to keep home a safe place where she could talk to people who cared about her and forget that the next day she might have to take a fugitive out of the world. But she had planted a lie that had grown thick enough to choke her. Now that he had asked her to marry him, she could barely stand to talk to his answering machine.
As she stepped off the curb, she realized that the only solution she had thought of was to perpetuate the lie - tell him the profession she was quitting was the consulting business - and not admit to him that she was not the person he thought he knew. She would only be doing what she had taught dozens of other people to do - pick the life you want and lie fifty times a day to get it - so she felt ashamed that the prospect seemed so empty and hopeless to her.
Then she recognized that she was thinking about it as though she had decided to marry Carey. She had not decided. The time to decide about marriage was when you had reason to assume you would be alive on your wedding day.
Jane took a bus back to Ann Arbor and got off at the university. She did not begin the walk down Huron Street back to the apartment until after midnight. She had taken a longer time than necessary to give Mary Perkins a day alone. The more time Mary had to think, the better she would be.
As Jane walked up Huron in the cold, still air, listening to her feet crunching the snow, she began to hear another sound, far off behind her. It started low and quickly moved up an octave a second until she recognized it as a siren. She walked along, listening to it grow louder and closer, until she heard it pass her on a parallel street. A minute later, she heard another set of sirens coming toward her from somewhere ahead and to her right.
She watched the intersections ahead and saw the blinking lights of a fire engine swing around a corner and head out Huron Street. After another block she began to smell the smoke in the air. It was a thin, hanging haze like the smoke from somebody's fireplace in the windless night. She began to walk faster, and at the next corner she turned down a side street. It was a two-alarm fire so far, and there was no point in walking into the middle of a lot of firemen and policemen after midnight carrying shopping bags. At the first corner she turned right along the street behind Huron and hurried on.
When she was still two blocks from the big old house where Mary lived, she could see the sky suddenly begin to glow. She dropped her bags and broke into a run. It must be the house. As she ran up the quiet residential street, she began to see other people coming out of apartments and houses and walking toward the fire.
When Jane turned back onto Huron, she could see the trucks lined up in front of Mary's house. The coats of the firemen were glowing, their wet helmets reflecting the flames that were now coming out of the lower windows and licking up the wooden clapboards toward the upper floor.
Jane forced herself to slow her pace to a fast walk, looking carefully at every human shape illuminated by the fire. She tried to recognize one that might be Mary, already almost certain that she would not see her. The fire didn't make sense unless they had made a mistake and killed her. They had set a fire not because it would fool a coroner - Farrell, the training officer, would have taught them that much - but because fire got rid of fingerprints and fibers, and because water and firemen's boots obliterated footprints.
She moved into the curious crowd and began to study the faces of the people who had gathered in a big circle around the fire. She wasn't looking for Mary anymore; she was looking for any face that she had seen before.
She heard the loud
She edged closer to the ambulance and watched the two paramedics haul their collapsible stretcher out the back and rush, not to Mary's house but up the other side of the hedge to the lawn of the house next door. Jane felt a tiny resurgence of hope that she could not suppress. Maybe that was where the firemen had taken the victims - out of their way and out of danger - and if the paramedics were in a hurry, they must believe they had a patient waiting for them, not a corpse.
Jane followed the paramedics. They hurried up the lawn until they reached a pair of firemen in gas masks who were kneeling over somebody lying prone on the snow beyond the hedge. One of the firemen had an oxygen tank on his back like a scuba diver, and he was holding the mask over the face of the person on the ground. Jane held her breath as the four men slid the victim onto the stretcher. When they lifted it to unfold the legs, she let her breath out in disappointment. The person on the stretcher was wearing a black rubber turnout coat and high boots. One of the firemen must have collapsed from the smoke.
She turned away and looked at the house. The top floor had caught now, and she could see the flames eating their way through the inner walls. In a few minutes the roof would collapse into Mary Perkins's apartment and the killers would have accomplished what Barraclough's training officer had taught them to do when things went wrong.
She watched the firemen straining to hold the hoses steady while they sprayed enormous streams of water into the upper windows. She glanced at a couple of firemen coming around the house carrying long pike poles. Their faces had dark, grimy smoke stains around the eyes and on the foreheads where their masks had not covered, their coats and pants glistened with water and dripped on the snow as they trotted toward their truck. She whirled around in time to see the four men pushing the stretcher toward the back of the ambulance. The injured fireman's turnout coat wasn't wet. He had been in there long enough to succumb to the smoke, but he didn't have a drop on him. The two firemen who had been kneeling over him were dry too.
Jane moved quickly in a diagonal path toward the ambulance, keeping her eyes on the stretcher. They had the tie-down restraints strapped over a blanket they'd draped over the turnout coat, and the mask still over the face. She couldn't see the hair because they had a pillow under the head and their bodies shielded it from view. As they reached the lighted street she stared hard at the side of the blanket, where a couple of the victim's fingers protruded an inch. The red, whirling light from the fire truck just ahead passed across them and glinted off a set of tapered, polished fingernails. It was Mary Perkins.
Jane stepped around the front of the ambulance, slipped into the driver's door, and crouched on the floor. She heard the back doors open, the sliding of the metal wheels of the stretcher, and then the back doors slammed. She climbed into the seat, threw the transmission into gear, stepped on the gas pedal, and veered away from the curb to avoid the fire engine parked thirty feet ahead.
Then she straightened her wheels and roared down the block. She glanced in the rearview mirror. The four men took a couple of steps after her, then seemed to see the futility of it and stopped in the street. Before she turned the corner at the first traffic signal she looked again, but she couldn't see them anymore.
She drove fast for five blocks, letting the siren clear the way for her, and then turned into a smaller street, flipped off the flashing lights and siren, and went faster.
'Mary!' she called. There was no answer. It occurred to her that the gas in the fireman's tank had probably not been oxygen. It could as easily have been medical anesthetic. If it was, Mary was about as likely to die as recover. Jane drove on for another minute, then pulled the van to a stop in the lot behind a school. She ran to the back of the ambulance, opened the door, climbed inside, and looked down at Mary. She could see that her eyes were wide open, and then they blinked.
'You're alive after all,'' said Jane. She pulled at the oxygen mask and saw that it was held by a piece of elastic behind the head, so she slipped it up and off. There was a wide strip of adhesive tape across Mary's mouth. She undid the top straps on the stretcher.
Mary quickly sat up and fumbled to free her own feet. She was sobbing and shaking, and kicking at the strap so hard that her own hands couldn't hold on to it. Jane undid that strap too. 'You'd better take the tape off your own mouth,' she said.
