came in. They were all ready, you know.”
“I thought they might be,” said Jane. Violet saw a flash of white teeth smiling in the red paint. “It’s a good thing it was only you.”
“It’s not a good joke, Jane.”
Jane shrugged. “It’s the only joke we have. Tell me about Carey.”
“He’s exactly as you left him,” said Violet. “He’s so worried about you he looks like something hurts.”
Jane said, “I came to tell you to go home, Vi. Tell Carey where we were when you saw me.” Jane’s body seemed to pick up the beat of the drums. She began to dance a little, moving slowly away into the crowd.
“Wait,” said Violet. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and slipped a small piece of white paper into Jane’s palm. “One of the agents gave me that. It’s his name and the number you call to get connected directly to him. He said it was in case I change my mind. Keep it in case you change yours.”
Jane closed her fingers around it without glancing at it. She said, “Please, Vi. Don’t worry about me.” Jane looked over her shoulder at the crowds of people of both sexes and all ages, wearing every kind of gear and ornament that had ever been seen on the continent, almost all of them with hair that gleamed black in the floodlights above the field. “They can’t even see me.”
Jane walked out past the man in the glasses, nearly brushing his shoulder as she went, then slipped between the man and the woman in cowboy hats. They looked at her, but they saw only a flash of bright paint and the clothes of a woman who might have lived long ago.
31
When Jane returned to Cleveland she seemed different to Christine. She spent the first day in the little apartment staring at the wall. On the second, she went out for the whole day. She came back with shopping bags full of new clothes, some hair dye, and a shoulder bag full of hundred-dollar bills. She sat Christine in the living room beside the telephone.
“What’s going on?” Christine asked.
Jane said, “I had hoped to avoid doing anything as risky as this, but nothing that wasn’t risky has worked. When that man pretending to be a policeman came to you, he gave you a phone number that you were supposed to call and ask for Jane. Dial it.”
Christine frowned and looked at her, but she could see that she wasn’t supposed to say anything. She dialed the number and handed the telephone to Jane.
Jane listened for a moment, then broke the connection. “Try again.”
Christine dialed the number again; Jane listened, then hung up. “They must have found the body.”
Christine picked up the receiver, dialed the same number, and listened to the voice. “The number you have reached is out of service. If you feel you have reached this number in error, please hang up and dial again.” Christine set the receiver down.
Jane took a deep breath and blew it out again. “I was hoping they needed to keep that number open, because they had other runners out who might need to get in touch. But they’re too smart. They must have used it for initial contact only. Maybe they used it just for you.”
“What were you going to do?”
Jane sighed. “Tell them I had embezzled some money and needed to disappear.”
Christine realized that her mouth was open. “You wanted to be their client? But they saw you.”
“Two of them did. One is dead.”
“Still …” said Christine.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jane said. “It isn’t going to happen.” She walked into the bedroom, tossed the bag of money on the bed, and looked at the shopping bags doubtfully. “Those might fit you.”
“I can’t believe you were going to do that.” She realized that she sounded foolish. “What are you going to do now?”
Jane shrugged. “Go back to Minneapolis. If I can find more of their runners, it’s possible I’ll learn who they are, where they are …”
Christine looked at her for a moment. She couldn’t keep it a secret, but she wasn’t sure how to admit she hadn’t told Jane everything. “Other runners? Like me?”
“Yes,” said Jane.
“Then I guess I have something to tell you. It didn’t seem like it was important, and I kind of forgot—”
“Tell me.”
“I was in Baltimore when the policeman told me to call the number. The woman on the phone said to wait on a particular corner. A car drove up and a man took me to an apartment, and explained what I had to do: get plastic surgery, collect money, and get ready to go. Then they flew me to Chicago, put me in another apartment, and had me wait some more. I lived there for a long time—a couple of months—and they would come about once a week with groceries and things. They said they were getting ready to move me someplace where I could live permanently. I kept asking, ‘Where am I going to live?’ and they’d say, ‘We’re looking for the perfect place,’ or, ‘We’re getting it ready.’ Each time they had some agenda. Once they took my picture for IDs. Sometimes they told me things about how to stay hidden, brought me new clothes … things like that. There was a closet in the apartment that was locked. One day they opened it up, and it was filled with boxes.”
“What kind of boxes?”
“About the size that copy paper comes in. About a foot wide and two feet long. They were all wrapped in brown paper and sealed with packing tape. One of the men put stickers on them and they carried them away.”
“Stickers?”
“Mailing labels.” She looked a little uncertain. “I wasn’t supposed to go near the closet. One man would carry a couple of boxes down to the car, and when he came back, the other would carry a couple. After a while, they got careless, and they were both outside at once, so I looked: 80183 Padre Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101.”
“Why do you remember the address after all this time?”
Christine made a face. “I had this stupid idea that it was like the underground railroad or something. Somebody had been in this apartment first, then got moved to the next place. That meant that the address in California was where I would go next. So I thought about it a lot. One day one of the men asked if there was any reason I couldn’t live in California, so that made me sure. I didn’t find out that I was wrong until I saw the address on the driver’s license Sid Freeman gave me that night. Ten minutes later you were there.”
“And you forgot?”
“Not exactly,” said Christine. “I figured it was the place where you would take me.” She frowned. “I’m wrong a lot.”
Jane was pacing, looking at the wall, then turning and walking toward the opposite wall. The intensity of her eyes frightened Christine. “Is there anything else that you saw or heard that I don’t know?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“What about the name? Was there a name on the labels?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “It was C. Langer. I wasn’t going to snoop, but I glanced at the pile of boxes and that was what I saw first. It looked like the name was ‘Clanger.’ It seemed like a joke, at first.”
Jane spoke quietly, as though to herself. “It is a joke.”
Jane was quiet again for a full day. When Christine awoke the next morning, Jane was in the living room as usual, but she was not finishing her exercises. She had used the time to make a transformation.
She had braided her hair and rolled it into a bun behind her head. She was wearing a pair of photosensitive glasses with big lenses that made it difficult in the bright morning light to tell what color her eyes were. She had replaced her usual jeans and sneakers with a light gray skirt and jacket. It wasn’t as though she was a different person, Christine decided. It was as though she was a different type of person.
Christine had gotten used to thinking of her as a sort of athlete—someone who wasn’t exactly deprived, but who denied herself, subjected herself to some kind of harsh, unforgiving discipline. The physical changes were minor, when Christine analyzed them, but the attitude of the woman before her was different. The word that came
