Christie was thrown forward behind her. Almost immediately, Jane heard a rushing noise in the dark, like a waterfall, and then the sensation of cold water on her feet.
It took Jane a second or two to determine that she could move. She fought the airbag to free her right arm, unbuckled her belt, and slipped sideways to the passenger side. She fell against the dashboard. The car was sinking front-first, the heavy engine weighing it down.
The water began to rush in faster. Her legs were in water up to the hip. Then she could hear more water, and she could feel that it was coming in through the weakened seal around the windshield. Jane listened, but she couldn’t hear Christie, so she tried to stare between the front seats toward the floor of the back seat.
At that moment, Christie moved. She pushed off against the back of the driver’s seat and brought the pistol around. There was a deafening report, and the airbag beside Jane deflated. Then Christie climbed higher onto the back seat, and Jane ducked lower.
Jane let the torrent of water coming through the open side window pour over her. She held herself against it with all the strength in her legs, and groped for the door handle. When she found it, she grasped it and stayed down. The water was up to her chest now, then her neck, and she held only her face above it. She knew that no human being could open a car door against the rush of water. She would have to hold on to the door handle and wait until the door was completely submerged.
The seconds went by, while Jane listened for another shot. Then she could hear nothing, because the water was up over her ears. She lifted her face above it to take a breath of air, pushed down on the door handle, put her shoulder against the door, and used her legs to press against it. The door opened. Jane slipped out and swam. She counted her strokes: one, two, three; her head broke out of the dark water, and she gasped in a breath.
Jane swam on the surface to the little margin of pebbles and mud on shore, pulled herself onto it, then looked back. The front of the car was completely underwater now. The only parts visible were the rear window, the trunk, and a bit of the roof, but it was sinking. Suddenly there was a shot, and a hole appeared in the rear window.
“No!” Jane shouted. “Get out the way I did! Swim down to the door!”
But there was no way Christie could hear her. There was a series of five muffled shots, and Jane saw bits of glass sparkling in the muzzle flashes as they exploded upward out of the rear window. Christie had created a ragged row of punctures, but she had not created an exit for herself. The car sank more rapidly, and the water reached the rear window. Christie’s shoe kicked against it once, making it balloon outward an inch or two; then the leg was pulled back to kick again when the rear window collapsed inward and Christie disappeared. The water poured in, and the car sank from sight.
Jane jumped to her feet and ran a few yards downstream, where the lazy current had carried the car, then sloshed back into the water until it was up to her thighs, and ducked into it. She dived downward, trying to reach the car. But the water was black, and she could not find it. She tried over and over, but her hands touched nothing except soft mud and stringy weeds. There was nothing that felt like metal. After what could have been ten minutes or a half hour, Jane crawled back onto the shore and lay there, panting.
Before she had fully regained her breath, she forced herself to stand. She took one last look at the slow, untroubled surface of the river. Then she turned away and began to walk.
45
Early one morning in late August, a young woman with long black hair parked her rented car in a small lot around the bend from the Glen Iris Inn at Letchworth State Park in Livingston County, New York, and walked along the park road to one of the narrow paths leading down into the gorge of the Genesee River. She descended the steep steps cut into the cliff in a zigzag that sometimes took her within a foot or two of the top leaves of a tall tree, then came back again beside the trunk and then passed once more near the place where the roots had dug in among the rocks. The land had been made a park in the 1860s, so the woods were thick and old. She emerged from the shadows of the trees, walked the last hundred feet on flat weedy ground, then stepped out on a smooth stone ledge above the water.
She looked around her and listened. The river was shallow here, and it made a whispery sound as it rushed over the rounded pebbles and flat shelves. She could hear the birds above the wooded path she had just left, but there was no sound of a human being yet. In an hour or two, hikers and picnickers would be crowding the trails, making the last, sweet week before Labor Day loud with their usual desperate enthusiasm. But now it was just a Seneca woman standing alone by the Genesee River, and this could have been any morning since the last Ice Age.
The Genesee River was the place where the Stone-Throwers, one of the tribes of Jo-ge-oh, lived. They were said to be no taller than the length of a person’s foot, so they were called Little People, but they were very strong. On the few occasions when they had allowed themselves to be seen, they had done it to intervene and save a person in extreme danger. They would take him out of the world for a time, to hide him from his enemies until the danger was over.
The Seneca woman took the purse off her shoulder, set it on the rock ledge at her feet, and pulled out a pouch of pipe tobacco she had bought at the Rochester airport. She took a pinch and tossed it into the air, then watched the wind carry it down onto the rocks below her.
“It’s me, little guys,” she said. “Jane Whitefield.” She waited for a few seconds, listening to the water whispering over the stones, then poured more tobacco to the rocks below her.
“I brought you the usual presents.” The Little People liked tobacco, and their only source of supply was the Senecas, who had not lived along this part of the Genesee since the Buffalo Creek treaty of 1826. She emptied the rest of the brown shreds of tobacco from the pouch and reached into her purse again.
This time she had a plastic bag containing the clippings of her fingernails. The Little People particularly valued the fingernail clippings of human beings, which they used to fool foxes and raccoons into believing that big people were nearby. She sprinkled the little moon-shaped clippings onto the rocks to make a wide zone of safety for the Little People.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for keeping my husband safe.” She stood looking at the river for a few minutes, then said aloud, “I’m going home to be with him now.”
Jane drove the length of the park road, then turned onto the Genesee Expressway at Mount Morris and headed north to change to the New York State Thruway west of Rochester. As she drove, she could see signs that the summer had reached its fullest perfection and was about to end. The leaves on the maple trees had all matured, opened flat, and grown as big as a man’s hand.
In the Old Time, the people’s lives had followed a cycle announced by signs in the world. Each spring, when the white oak leaves were the size of a red squirrel’s foot, the women would go out to the fields to plant the corn, beans, and squash. When the leaves on the deciduous trees had opened a little farther, and the foliage was thick enough to hide a human shape in the forest, warriors would slip away, sometimes in parties of three or four and sometimes alone. They would travel in silence just off the trails, until they had reached the countries of enemies. They would stay for most of the summer watching, listening, and studying until they had found the enemy’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
When the nights were just beginning to turn cool and the days shorter, and the corn in the enemies’ fields was beginning to ripen, the scouts would begin the journey back to the land between the Niagara River and Sodus Bay. They would travel quickly through the forests, often from as far west as the Mississippi River and, more rarely, from beyond it to the eastern slopes of the high mountain range they called the Rim of the World, where the Left- Handed Twin was reputed to wait for the souls of the dead.
They returned to take part in the Green Corn ceremony that was held when the ears on the stalks standing in the women’s fields had ripened enough to be edible. Green Corn marked the end of the female half of the year, when the country of the Senecas was warm and fruitful, and the corn, beans, and squash they called the Three Sisters grew to feed the people. The festival began on the day when the people knew that for this year, at least, they would not starve. Their lives had been preserved.
A few weeks later the crops would be harvested and the male half of the year would begin. In the dark, cold half of the year, the celebrations were given by the men. There were hints that the men’s ceremonies came from a
