Maybe five years of that was as good as a life. It was more of a life than many people had, and she felt lucky to have had it. By this time tomorrow she could be dead.
15
After Carey had left for work she completed the rest of her preparations for her flight. Seeing Ketter in Kennedy Airport had reminded Jane that for her, airports were dangerous places. All she could do was alter her appearance enough so that if she was not face-to-face with an enemy, he might not recognize her immediately. This time she wore tinted glasses to hide her eyes, a cashmere sweater that softened and rounded the thin, sinewy quality of her arms and shoulders, an understated pendant with a single diamond, and a skirt. As soon as she had gone through security in the Buffalo airport and shown her driver's license for the last time, she hid her black hair under a blond wig. She flew to the US Airways hub in Pittsburgh and then boarded her plane to Santa Barbara without ever taking her eyes off the people around her.
Her plane turned and lowered above the ocean off Santa Barbara while the sun still hung well above the blue horizon line. The plane hit the runway and rolled to the terminal, and the sky had a late-afternoon golden glow. Jane stepped off the plane quickly with her sunglasses on and her carry-on bag over her shoulder, scanning the faces of the people in the airport, then went to the car rental to claim the car she had reserved.
She had asked for a luxury car, and when she got to the rental area she found a Cadillac waiting for her. She had decided she wanted something big and overpowered for the drive up the coast. Lompoc was about an hour north of Santa Barbara, and if something went wrong she didn't want to be easy to outrun or bump off the road. She got into the car and drove out Sandspit Road to Ward Memorial Boulevard, a straight strip of concrete over the protected wetland at Goleta Beach, then turned onto Interstate 101 heading north away from Santa Barbara. After a few minutes, when the traffic thinned and cars were far apart, she pulled off the blond wig and shook out her hair.
She looked in the rearview mirror at the mountains that rose abruptly like a wall above Santa Barbara. She had always liked Santa Barbara in the old days because it was beautiful and warm, a city of white buildings with red tile roofs built between a mountain range and a white sand beach. Now it had become a city of ghosts.
Jane could remember the night when she had broken into the apartment on Ocean View Avenue where Harry Kemple had been living for years as Harry Shaw, the name she had given him. Before she got there, the police had already spent hours in Harry's place, and they had left greasy black fingerprint dust all over the windows, the doorknobs, the smooth surface of the table in the kitchen. Harry's body had been taken away, but there was a huge reddish brown stain in the dirty shag carpet where Harry had bled out after his throat was cut. His heart must have taken a long time to stop, to pump out that much blood.
Harry was the only runner Jane had ever had who had been caught, and he had died because of her. His killer had fooled her into believing he was a friend of Harry's who needed help, so she had brought him to Vancouver to the shop of Lewis Feng, the man who had made Harry's identification papers. Days later, when Jane had learned Lewis Feng was dead, she had rushed to reach Harry, but she arrived too late. Since then, Harry Kemple had sometimes visited Jane in her dreams.
Santa Barbara wasn't the best place for Jane to stay the night, anyway. It was too close to Los Angeles, and it had become crowded over the past few years. There were too many people from other places on the street, and any of them might be one of the people who hated her, and might see her face before she saw theirs. The best place to stop would be one of the smaller towns to the north—Buellton, or Solvang, or even Lompoc—but when Jane reached them she kept driving.
She chose Santa Maria. Since she had last been there Santa Maria had begun to evolve from a largely blue- collar ranch area to an overflow community for Santa Barbara. The open spaces looked like vanity ranches where rich people rode expensive horses. She selected a motel off the interstate and checked in for the night. The room was small and thin-walled, and there was a sliding pocket door to the bathroom that kept going off its track, but it was adequate and she was tired.
Jane prepared her clothes and belongings for the next day, checking them off against the sheet of prison regulations she had printed out from her computer at home. Visiting hours were eight-thirty to three on Friday, Saturday, and federal holidays. Processing of visitors stopped at two P.M . A visitor could carry only a clear plastic change purse, eight inches or smaller, forty dollars, and a comb. Jane would be permitted to wear 'a reasonable amount' of jewelry. If she brought a baby she could have a clear plastic diaper bag with 'a reasonable amount' of baby food, clothes, bottles, powder, and lotion. Shorts, halter tops, sheer clothing, skirts more than three inches above the knee, or khaki clothing were prohibited. Khaki clothes were what inmates wore.
She examined the picture ID she had asked Stewart Shattuck to make her the night she had brought Christine to see him. It was a duplicate of a California driver's license with Jane's picture in place of the original. Jane had known from the moment when Christine had told her the story of her family that she might need it one day. Jane put the license on the dresser and then went to bed and let the fatigue of the long day overtake her. In a few minutes she was asleep.
In her dream she was driving into Santa Barbara. She took the Salinas Street exit from the freeway, and then went by the corner of Ocean View Avenue, but didn't dare to take the turn. She couldn't avoid recognizing the tall hedge at the corner—at least twelve feet high and so thick it was opaque. The hedge was one of the first things she had seen when she had gone to Harry's apartment. She kept going and drove through the city, trying to get away from the memory of Harry's death. And then she made a turn and saw the old main building of Mission Santa Barbara ahead.
The sight of the Mission made Jane feel sick. It was an old adobe church with a tower and a long, low wing continuing to the left of it, the whole complex situated at the top of a vast sloping green lawn set off by big rose gardens. There was a small parking lot and a fountain, and to the right of the church was a high wall. It was what was behind the wall that was important. That was where the truth was hidden.
When the Jesuit missionaries came to the Senecas, they were promptly sent to their heaven. But the people who once inhabited this part of California coast weren't like the people of the eastern forests. They hadn't been fighting for a thousand years like the Iroquois. It took only a few Spanish soldiers on horseback to round them up and make them live in captivity. They died in such numbers that the cemetery filled up and the bodies had to be dug up and re-buried elsewhere over and over to make room for the new deaths. Jane couldn't help walking out through the side door of the church into the cemetery. There were old stone markers here, with names and dates worn away. And there were green plants and flowers growing with the vigor of Santa Barbara's perpetual May. There was a melancholy silence here, interrupted about once every two minutes by the whispery sound of a car passing beyond the wall.
'So you're back.'
Jane shut her eyes tightly, but she knew she had to turn around, so she did. She opened her eyes, knowing. There he was, the way he always was in her dreams. 'Hello, Harry,' she said. He was wearing the moss green sport coat that had always seemed slightly too big for him. It made her wonder if he'd bought it that way to hide cards in poker games, or if he had begun to age and get smaller before she had even met him. Harry was leaning on the high stone cemetery wall, his sad brown eyes fixed on her. She added, 'I was thinking of you when I flew into the Santa Barbara airport today. I can't come here without thinking of you.'
'I'm hard to forget even after all this time.'
'You are. I'm so sorry, Harry.' She could feel the tears beginning to well in her eyes.
'I know, I know. It doesn't matter to me anymore. Dying was one nasty surprise on one night of my life, the big hand in my hair jerking my head back, and then the knife going right across my throat, as quick as that. The experience was really all over before I even figured out what had happened. The result was determined, I mean. He let go of me, and I was already dead, while I was stand ing up.' Harry tilted his head back, and she could see the mortician's crude stitching across his throat. 'Looks like a baseball, doesn't it?'
'A little.'
'It doesn't matter. By now I could be dead from a bad piece of meat. Don't waste time blaming yourself. This was just the twins, the grandsons of Sky Woman. Hawenneyu the right-handed twin creates, and Hanegoategeh the left-handed twin destroys. We're all just part of the battle they've always fought with each other, and we don't even know what part we're playing. Hawenneyu creates a bright little boy who grows up to be an anesthesiologist, but Hanegoategeh has already given him a blind spot in his peripheral vision so he won't notice that the dial on the
