She matched her speed to the traffic and changed lanes only when she needed to. After a half hour, she could hear Bernie snoring.
Rita asked, “Were you listening to what Bernie said?”
Jane nodded.
“You agree with what he said?”
“I agree with what I heard.” She gave Rita a sympathetic look. “He’s been around for a long time, and he seems to have had his eyes open through most of it.”
“I mean about men.”
“The ones he knew probably weren’t an appetizing set of specimens, but I think he has the picture.” Jane looked at Rita again.
She was slouching now, looking down. “Not that I’ll ever know.”
Jane sighed. “Right now, we’re trying to keep you isolated and invisible, and you’re an eighteen-year-old girl who would like to go out and be seen and meet a nice boy and have fun. I’m sorry, but it won’t last forever.”
“I’m not complaining about that,” said Rita. “This is something I wanted to do. But when the money’s gone … ”
“The job isn’t just giving away the money,” said Jane. “It’s surviving afterward. That’s the hard part.”
“If I had your life, I guess I’d feel better about it.” Rita was silent for a moment. “What’s your husband’s name?”
Jane hesitated. “This is another time I’m going to have to say I’m sorry. You’ve already found out more about me on your own than I’ve ever let any runner know.” She looked at Rita, her brows knitted. “If those men—say, Frank Delfina—caught you five years from now, then you would have enough in your head to kill me. They already have a picture of me. I can’t do anything about that, but I don’t think I should make it worse.”
Rita shook her head. “I wouldn’t tell. I never would.”
“I know,” said Jane. “I had … have a nice, quiet life.” She smiled. “That’s my secret.”
“Huh?”
“Staying invisible is hard. The secret is to find a place in the world where you’re surrounded by other people who don’t appear to be very different from you, and spend some time working at making yourself happy.”
“Why? What does that do?”
“It means you won’t take risks because you’re restless or bored. You won’t move around much. Very soon, people around you get used to you. They don’t remember when they first noticed you or how long you’ve been there. Without knowing it at first, you begin to forget too. Time begins to work for you.”
“You told me that in San Diego.”
“It was true,” said Jane. “You have a lot of advantages, but time is the biggest. The men we have to worry about are career criminals. That means our immediate problems are as bad as they can be—they know what they’re doing, and they won’t hesitate to kill you. But time will help a lot. Career criminals spend a lot of their lives moving in and out of jails. Some get killed. The reason they became criminals in the first place is that they wanted quick profits without working very hard, so they don’t have the patience to keep at something that’s not paying off for years.”
“You keep talking about years. You mean I have to hide indoors all that time? How long?”
“It’s not what I mean at all. What you have to do is make yourself a real life, so that while those men are standing in the rain outside some airport day after day watching for you, you’re in some pleasant town having dinner with friends and sleeping in a comfortable bed.”
“I don’t know how to do those things,” said Rita. “I’ve never done that.”
“The good thing about having to give up being the person you’ve always been is that you get to choose who you’ll be next,” Jane said. “It’s not an impersonation. The new person has your qualities—not your looks, but the things nobody can see. You’re a pretty unusual young woman. You took over your own life and began acting like an adult a couple of years ago, at least. You’ve worked hard and supported yourself and taken care of your own needs. I’ve been watching you through this whole mess, and you have more courage than is actually good for you. My guess is that all you’re going to need is a new town and a good cover story.”
“You already did that for me. But I was just hiding. I don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want my big accomplishment in life to be staying alive.”
“What can I do?”
“I want to be with Bernie. And he wants to be with me. Then at least we’ll both have somebody to talk to, to do things for.”
“We’ll work on it. Maybe you’ll go to college, if you’re interested. I’ve cooked up some pretty convincing academic records in my time, and I could do it again.”
Rita was silent, as though she was considering it.
“That way you wouldn’t just be hiding. Of course, there are some simple precautions that you’ll always have to take. The Mafia makes most of its money on vices—drugs, gambling, prostitution, and so on. You’ll have to stay far away from the places where those things happen. And you can never tell anyone the name you were born with, or anything that’s happened to you up to now.”
“If I get married, I can’t tell my husband?”
Jane shook her head. “The last thing you want to do is to hurt the person you love. There’s nothing about this story that will make him any happier, any stronger, any safer. He’ll never know it, but part of what you’ll bring to the relationship is that you didn’t make him afraid.”
Jane was silent for a long time, until she felt Rita staring at her with curiosity. Rita asked, “Does your husband know?”
“That’s not something I’m going to talk about,” said Jane.
Rita lapsed into silence, and before long, Jane saw her take the gum out of her mouth and settle back into the seat to sleep.
It was only one more day before the road swung up into Missouri and merged into Interstate 70, which took them into Illinois, then Indiana. They slept in shifts, stopping only to eat and buy gas for the Explorer. Jane insisted that they pull off the big interstate and drive into a small town each time. On the second day at two-thirty in the afternoon, they were driving past the hotel where Jane had stayed in Toledo, Ohio.
Jane stopped the van and let Rita out to mail letters at a box a few blocks away, then turned onto Navarre Avenue, stayed on it after it became Route 2, and drove along the south shore of Lake Erie. At four-thirty, they reached Sandusky, where Bernie put some letters into the mailbox beside a newsstand, then drove eastward toward Cleveland while Rita slept and Jane skimmed the newspapers he had bought.
“What are you looking for?” Bernie asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “It could be anything—some sign that Henry was spotted, some sign that people are beginning to notice the big donations, bad weather that could hold us up.”
“I heard you tell Rita they had a picture of you.”
“It’s a drawing. Would you like to see it?”
Bernie held out his hand as he stared ahead at the road. Jane pulled out the flyer she had gotten from the mailbox rental in Chicago. He took it, looked down at it for a second, then handed it back without speaking.
“Well?” said Jane. “What do you think?”
“It explains your hair. Rita said it was a disguise. I was thinking it was just … bad hair. I don’t know why you have to look in the papers for bad news. The picture ought to be enough bad news for you.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” said Jane.
“I’m sorry, honey,” said Bernie. “I wish we hadn’t talked you into going on with this.”
“You didn’t,” said Jane. “I would have done things differently—tried to get you and Rita settled before I mailed the rest of the letters, probably—but I wouldn’t have given up.” She shrugged. “It wouldn’t have gotten less dangerous. It would have given the other side more time to figure out what’s going on while I was still out. I just wish I knew where the picture came from.”
“Niagara Falls,” said Bernie. “The day I met you.”
“How do you know that?”
“The picture. It’s not just your face. It shows the collar of the blouse you were wearing. It was white. But whoever described you to the artist must have noticed there was a faint pattern woven into the cloth, see? The artist put the flowers in, but you could only see them close-up. That’s the only time you wore that one.”
