to change the years to make me eighteen. The day I started work I brought in the copies. There was no secretary —that was the job I was taking—so I put the copies in the file I made for myself. If my boss ever noticed anything odd, he must have realized I had given him proof that he wasn't the one at fault.'
'Pretty effective. You'll do well to get some sleep while you can. We'll have to make a stop in a couple of hours, and I'll wake you up then.'
'Okay.' Christine's voice sounded small and distant now, and she fell asleep within a few minutes.
As Jane drove on along the rural road, she thought about what she had heard. What Christine had said about Sharon was true. The voice on the recorded telephone message had been Sharon's. And Christine seemed to be telling the truth about the way she'd changed dates on papers. She might have been exaggerating the story about her childhood, but probably not much if she had been on her own young enough to have to obliterate dates. There still seemed to be no lies, but there was much more she was leaving out.
4
Jane drove into the small town of Blackwater as the summer night took on its deepest silence. She slowed to twenty at the town limit, opened her window, and drove even more slowly, listening. Above the steady, gentle sound of the air going past, there was nothing. It was after two, and the town was asleep. She reached the center of town where the streets were lined with old houses that had been renovated by the latest generation of a long succession of owners. The house on her right looked about the way it must have in 1880, except that the white paint on the ornate cookie-cutter trim had been brushed on this spring. The house across from it still had the original brown sandstone foundation, but it looked to Jane as though it had just been professionally cleaned.
She decided that this set of owners must be rich, probably a wave of lawyers and brokers and executives who had retired early from jobs in New York City and come here to reproduce a vision of village life they imagined existed a hundred years ago. On Jane's previous visits, there had been an impression of gray peeled paint, overgrowth of vines, and patches of weeds. Now everything was neat and fresh and orderly. The lawns were rolled and cut, and recent plantings of bleeding hearts and currant bushes had appeared near the houses. Separate beds of heirloom roses had been cut into the side yards.
The biggest houses were all ranged around the small park in the center of town, each facing an ancient bandstand. As the road led off toward either edge of town, the houses got smaller, until they were simple, neat cottages that had been converted to stores, small restaurants, the offices of doctors, opticians, and realtors. Jane turned beyond the park, and kept going until she reached the barn-sized building that used to be the town's feed and hardware store. She pulled off the road to the gravel parking lot, and backed her car up to the rear of the building. As she got out of the car, Jane saw Christine open her eyes, blink, and focus on her. Jane whispered, 'It's okay. Go back to sleep.'
Jane walked across the dark, quiet street, and listened. She headed back to the center of town to the park and into the shadows of the two-hundred-year-old maples and oaks. In small upstate New York towns like Blackwater, people often left their dogs out in their yards on summer nights, and Jane knew if she came too close to the houses, she would set off a proprietary bark or two, so she stayed on the path to the bandstand. When she came under the tallest of the trees she saw the broad wings of a gliding owl carry it to a high limb and flap soundlessly once to pause in midair while the talons took hold, but then she lost sight of the owl in the foliage.
She passed the bandstand and crossed the street on the other side. She walked straight to the front of the big Civil War-era redbrick house, climbed the steps, and watched the door open in front of her. The person standing inside the dim doorway was shorter than Jane and slender, but Jane could see that there was a handgun in the right hand.
'Put it away,' said a voice from somewhere deeper inside the house. 'I know her. Evening, Jane.'
'Hello, Stewart,' said Jane. Now she could just make out the distinctive shape of Stewart Shattuck, short and wide-shouldered, standing by the staircase.
'Come on to the office.'
In the dim light that leaked from beneath a closed door at the end of the hallway she followed him to the door to the left of the staircase. The office was a room that must have been, at some early date, some kind of interior storage space. It was in the center of the first floor of the house, opposite the stairwell, and it had no windows. Shattuck was nocturnal, and during his business hours no ray of light escaped his workroom to raise suspicion outside.
When he had closed the door behind them, he moved the switch on a rheostat to bring up the lights. He said, 'Will you sit down, please?' He settled himself on a straight-backed chair beside the eight-foot table he used as a desk, and made a few tiny marks on a piece of paper in front of him, bending so his face was within six inches of it.
Jane chose the straight-backed chair across from the table. It felt warm to her, and when she looked straight ahead she had a clear view of an array of video monitors from closed-circuit cameras mounted on the front, back, and sides of the house. She had taken the chair that belonged to Shattuck's guard. The images on the screens were now motionless, no living creature moving out there.
After a full minute in which he seemed to have forgotten Jane was there, Shattuck said, 'It's been several years. I had assumed that you had been killed.'
'Not yet.'
He raised his eyes to look at her. 'You're wise to think of it that way. I always thought that wisdom was the direction where you were heading, even when you were very young. Now that you've reached middle age, you've arrived.'
'If I agree I'm wise, do I have to accept that I'm middle-aged? Or is accepting it more wisdom?'
Shattuck smiled so his glasses sent a flash of reflected light, then lowered his head to his paper again. 'Of course you would see the way out of the trap. I've missed your visits.'
'I only come when I've got trouble, so I don't share the feeling.'
'There is that, isn't there? But most of the customers for a forger aren't pretty or wise.' He sat up straight, took a look at the document he had been working on, and put it aside reluctantly, keeping his eyes on it all the way to the pile at the corner of his table. 'All right. Let's hear what you need this time.' He lifted a pad and changed pens.
'It's a young girl, nineteen or twenty. First she needs ID to travel. It has to be good enough to pass, but only the essentials—driver's license, Social Security card, maybe a few simple things to fill a wallet, a library card, and so on.'
'What next?'
'The hard stuff—a second good, solid set of papers that will last her forever, if necessary.'
He squinted and stared past Jane's shoulder, then wrote as he spoke. 'Driver's license, Social Security, birth certificate. MasterCard, Visa, American Express. Passport, too?'
'If you can get all that safely.'
'Of course. But passports are taking at least six weeks these days.'
'I'll give you a mail-drop address to forward it to.'
Shattuck said, 'Is it all right if we give her an address in Syracuse to start? That way I don't have to go far to pick it up.'
'Sure. She can fill out change-of-address forms when she's settled somewhere. Until then, just forward everything to the mail drop.' She pointed at his pad. 'May I?'
He handed her the pad and pen, and she wrote out an address and handed them back.
'Telephone?'
'Make one up.'
He held out his hand. 'Let's see her photograph.'
'I have her with me.'
'Even better. We'll take different shots for each form of ID. Anything else for you tonight?'
'Yes,' she said. 'When you have the first set of documents, I'd like you to put together a set of papers for a baby with the same surname. A birth certificate and a Social Security card. That ought to do it if she has to run.'
'How old is the baby?'
