fragile and complicated than she had ever imagined. Trouble came in quiet, unexpected ways. Things had to be said over and over again, all existing agreements renewed and clarified.
When Jane returned to the car, the girl was half-turned in the front seat and the old man was leaning forward in the back, while they talked. As soon as the girl saw Jane coming, they stopped and both stared straight ahead. Jane wasn’t sure that she liked that, either. She got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and drove off onto the highway.
It took only a few minutes for the old man to speak. “You know, I think I’m going to need a car. Mansfield is big enough to have a couple of used-car lots. Suppose Rita comes in with me to buy one. I’m old, so nobody is shocked if I’m old-fashioned enough not to trust banks. I pay cash. Rita makes a big deal about what a crazy old coot I am—you know, like she’s embarrassed—and the salesman sells it to me. That way I don’t need a bank account with a name on it and all that.”
Jane muttered, “If you have a valid driver’s license, I assume it must be in your own name. Otherwise it might work.”
“What might work better?” asked Bernie. “How about if we rent an apartment, you buy a car under a false name, wait for the ownership and registration to come in the mail, and sign the pink slip over? Would that be better?”
“You know it would,” said Jane. “But I’m not staying in an apartment with you for a month while the state of Ohio gets around to mailing a lot of papers. I own this car—not in my real name, of course. We’ll go to Mansfield. I’ll sign the car over and Rita and I will be on our way.”
“Oof,” moaned Bernie.
Rita turned in her seat. “What’s wrong?”
“Uh … nothing,” said Bernie. “I guess I’m just tired.” To Jane he said, “Keep going.”
“I don’t have much choice,” she said. “There’s not much point in stopping unless we come to a hospital.”
“No,” said Bernie. “I don’t need a doctor, and if I did, the price of stopping would be a little steep. I’m just not used to the excitement, and I’ve been out a lot today. When we got to the hotel and Rita wasn’t there, I went to see the Falls. Pretty spectacular.” Jane expected him to be quiet, but he added, “The day I died we were in San Antonio, Texas. Before the credit report came telling us where to find Rita, I got to see the Alamo.”
It was clear to Jane that he wanted to continue talking, but she was not sure whether he was trying to ignore some pain or keep her occupied. “What did you think of it?”
“All my life I’ve been hearing about it,” he said. “But it’s not much to look at. A crappy place to die. Don’t you think so?”
“I’m not a believer in last stands,” she said. “I’m a believer in running.”
Bernie chuckled. “That comes with the high I.Q., I guess.” He was quiet for only a few seconds. “I wanted to go to all of those places.”
“You mean since you died?”
“No. I’ve wanted to see Disneyland, for instance. I’ve wanted to know what the fuss was about since they started building it in the fifties.”
“Danny was going to take you to all those places?”
“Others, too. He was a good kid. He was scared shitless for this trip, but I kept him at it. We just got to Niagara Falls this morning.”
When they reached the Mansfield city line, Bernie said, “Honey, I hate to be trouble, but I’d like it if you could stop at a motel around here. I got to rest.”
Jane was careful not to pick the first one. She wasn’t ready to trust Bernie the Elephant.
When the car came to a stop beside the third motel, Jane saw that Rita was sitting stiffly, pretending to stare straight ahead, but her eyes had sneaked to the corners of their sockets to see what Jane was going to do.
“Thanks, honey,” said Bernie. “Get three rooms. If they see you two go into one with an old man, they’re not going to respect you.”
Jane reached across Rita to open the glove compartment and take an envelope out.
Bernie said, “What are you doing?”
“I’m signing the pink slip to the car.” She put it back into the glove compartment and closed it. “This way, if my sanity returns in the middle of the night, Rita and I can get a cab without waking anybody up to say good-bye.” She got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked toward the motel office.
4
Jane awoke, already aware of the sound. It was a man walking along the corridor. She heard him stop at her door, and she identified the disturbance that had brought her out of her sleep. The man had been trying to walk quietly. She rolled off the bed, picked up the heavy ashtray from the nightstand, stepped close to the door, and waited in the darkness.
She heard something go into the lock, then saw the door open until the chain caught it. A bent coat hanger snaked inside, hooked onto the last link of the chain, slid it to the end of its track, and removed it. The door opened a few more inches, and Jane saw him through the crack at the hinges.
“Hello, Bernie,” she said quietly.
“Oh, there you are,” said Bernie. “Can I come in?”
“It’s a little late to ask for an invitation.”
The old man stepped inside and closed the door, then flipped the light on, and quickly averted his eyes. “Sorry,” he said.
Jane remembered, picked up the jeans and white blouse she had left at the foot of the bed, and slipped them on. “How did you learn to open a hotel door?”
He shrugged. “Oh, it’s just an old trick from when I was young. I was so broke I couldn’t afford hotels in those days, so once in a while I needed to use one without paying.”
She shook her head. “Bernie, when they’re unoccupied, the chain isn’t fastened.”
“That’s a different trick. I thought you meant the lock. Motels like this don’t give a shit about what happens to their customers. The doors are hollow and easy to kick down, so they put cheap locks on them to save the expense of replacing them.”
Jane decided that she didn’t really care why the old man had once broken into occupied hotel rooms: armed robbery, probably, but that had been long ago. “What do you want, Bernie?”
“Just friendly concern. I went out for a walk, and I happened to notice the light in the window. I thought I’d see why you were up.”
“If there was a light, it wasn’t in my window,” she said. “Let’s get beyond the preliminary lies and get to the big ones. You want me to take you to some safe haven.”
“That would be nice,” he agreed. “But I guess I’ll have to figure out how to close out my own life.”
“That’s how you’re seeing this?”
“How can it be anything else?” he asked. Then he said thoughtfully, “Did you hear how I got killed?”
Jane nodded. “I watched the television news before I went to bed. They said that a seventy-year-old woman died when you did. How did that happen?”
“She was the one who shot me.” He looked sad. “I guess the excitement was too much for her heart. She died on the way to the hospital.”
“You were supposed to be killed by an old woman?”
Bernie sighed. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me.” He looked at her, and the pain in his eyes seemed genuine. “I loved her. Francesca Giannini.” The eyes looked colder now, as though they were judging Jane. “People saw her near the end, and they probably saw this old lady with hard, sharp black eyes like a hawk, and wrinkled skin. They wouldn’t have been able to imagine what she was like in the old days.”
Jane could tell that Bernie was testing her: whether she was smart enough to know that she would be old too. She sat at the foot of the bed beside him.
Bernie said, “I met her at the Fontainebleau in Miami. She was twenty, I was twenty-two. In those days, mob sit-downs were different. They used to meet in places like that. It’s hard to believe now, but they’d bring their
