She sighed and tried to find a way to begin. “I love you.” That was the best way. “I love you. I don’t want this to happen either.”
“But you made a promise. You said it wouldn’t. Not that you would be sorry if it did, but that you would do what was necessary so it didn’t.”
“This is something else.”
“Jane,” he said. “Everything is something else.”
“Let me try to explain,” she said quietly. “This is going to sound like some kind of legalistic excuse, but it isn’t. I said that if somebody came to me and asked for this kind of help, I would tell them I wasn’t able to do that anymore. I would have. This is a time when I need you to help me. I want to be honest and tell you everything, so you understand. You heard his voice. His name is … used to be Pete Hatcher. He worked for a big casino company in Las Vegas. They weren’t honest. He learned too many details. He also made them suspicious. They were busy preparing to kill him when I took him out.”
Carey shook his head. “What a shock—something so unprecedented. A gambling outfit that turns out to be dishonest. Boy, I’ll bet Pete Hatcher was surprised. Who would have guessed?”
She looked at him apologetically. “That’s part of being a guide. Some of the people I’ve taken out of their troubles weren’t innocent, or weren’t smart, or caused their own misery. Pete Hatcher is probably one of them. But he hasn’t done anything that I consider a capital offense.”
“You’d be amazed at how many people like that there are,” said Carey. “Billions. Some of them haven’t even committed a felony.”
Inside, she winced, but she forced herself to say, “If Pete Hatcher came to me out of nowhere tonight, I would tell him no. But he happened before I made that promise. He could be about to die because I didn’t do a good enough job. This isn’t something I can ignore. It’s as though you operated on somebody and left a sponge in his belly.”
“It’s not exactly an apt analogy,” said Carey. “If I had been operating on a patient, I would have been doing it in the legitimate pursuit of my lawful profession, doing what I was educated, trained, and certified to do. I would perform surgery if it were the generally accepted way of correcting a serious and possibly life-threatening condition. I’m part of a system. I’m not just some guy who decided on his own that real doctors aren’t doing enough surgery, or doing it well enough, so I try to do a few at home.”
She hugged him. “You’re right, Carey,” she said.
“I am?”
She stood up and went to her closet. “Yep. When you’re right, you’re right.”
“And?”
“And I was right to choose you. Not that there was any choice involved. We’re not talking about some profession here, that I had to give up. It’s just a trick I learned to do when I was too young and stupid to know any better.”
“So you’ll stay home—mail him another false ID and forget it?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Oh, I’m sorry, Carey. I didn’t mean that.” She went back to her packing.
“What did you mean?”
“I meant I’m much sorrier about this than you will ever know. You’re my life now. When I get this over with, I’ll spend the next few years trying to make it up to you—trying to give you back the confidence and peace of mind I just threw away, so you don’t think that any time the phone rings I might go off to do something stupid. Because I won’t. I just can’t start being smart tonight. I can’t pretend I didn’t abandon a person out there where I know he’ll be killed.”
Carey went to her and rocked her gently in his arms. “Is there anything I haven’t said that would talk you out of it?”
“No. You’ve done pretty well.”
“You know how I feel about it, right? No point in going into all the stuff about how a man feels letting his beautiful young wife go off to some place where she might get killed.”
“I know how you feel,” she said. “I can’t help this.”
He brightened, then looked dispirited. “Threats don’t work on you, do they?”
“Not very well,” she said. “You could make me very, very sad without trying very hard.”
“So whatever I do or say, all I can do is make a bad time worse for both of us.” He stared at his feet. “Need a ride to the airport?”
She threw her arms around him and held him as tightly as she could, clutching him and letting the tears run down her cheeks. “Thank you, Carey,” she said. She turned and went into the bathroom and closed the door.
Jane lifted the perfume bottle out of the medicine cabinet, opened it, and sniffed. It had a sweet, damp, earthy smell. Periodically, for years, she had collected the roots of water hemlock, mashed them for their juice, then purified and concentrated it. This batch was fresh enough, and maybe stronger than the last. In the old days, when an Iroquois wanted to commit suicide, he would eat a hemlock root and die within two hours. The perfume worked much faster. She put the bottle into her purse and felt the tears coming again.
She rested her foot on the rim of the bathtub and began to run adhesive tape around her thigh. She wiped her eyes and carefully retrieved the boot knife she had hidden on the underside of the drawer of her vanity. It was thin and weightless and razor-edged, made of zircon-oxide ceramic instead of steel so it wouldn’t set off metal detectors. She taped it to her thigh, then put her foot down and let her dress fall to cover it.
She walked into the bedroom and kissed her husband. “How do I look?”
14
The lights came up to reveal the Miraculous Miranda in a Victorian gown, standing behind tall glass windows in an octagonal set like a gazebo. The back wall of the little room was covered with library shelves. She stood on tiptoes to lift from a shelf a folio volume bound in worn leather, opened it, and turned the old parchment pages as she walked toward a small table. Finally she found a passage and read it with interest. She closed the book, set it on the floor, and snapped her fingers. A bottle of champagne appeared on the table. She snapped them again and a stemmed glass appeared beside it. She stared at the bottle with a scowl of concentration: nothing happened. She took a deep breath, stared harder, and the cork popped fifteen feet into the air. When it came down she caught it happily and held it while it turned into a little bird. She opened the window and let it fly away above the heads of the audience, then closed the window.
Miranda picked up the bottle and poured champagne into the glass, lifting the bottle higher so the stream of clear liquid caught in the spotlights appeared first green, then red, then blue, then the golden color of her hair. She sipped from the glass, then set it back on the small, graceful table, took a step away, and faced the audience to resume her act. But she changed her mind and returned to the table. She poured the liquid into the glass again. The bubbly liquid foamed to the rim, but she kept pouring. The foam frothed over the side of the glass and down the stem, off the table and onto the floor. She seemed to be intrigued by the way the foam kept bubbling and growing. Soon there was a sudsy puddle at her feet that threatened to cover the floor of the little pavilion.
Miranda seemed nonplussed. She righted the bottle and scrutinized the label with curiosity. But while she read it, she noticed that turning the bottle upright had not stopped the liquid from gushing out. It came faster and faster, first like a fountain, then like the eruption of a volcano. She set it on the table and backed uneasily away from it, toward the tall shelves of books.
The audience was enchanted, but Miranda seemed concerned about her long nineteenth-century dress. She held the skirts up with both hands as the sudsy champagne soaked her dancing pumps and rose to her ankles. She looked around toward the wings of the stage, but none of her helpers seemed to be able to see her around the walls of books at the sides of the set. She waved testily above the set at the lighting and music technicians in the glass booth behind the audience, but the fans who turned their heads to follow her gaze saw that the two men were shrugging and shaking their heads in dismay. The lighting man seemed to be the only one with any presence of mind, and he switched on a row of soft lights above Miranda so she could see what she was doing.
As the flood from the bottle rose higher, the audience could see that Miranda was on her own. She turned to
