Blood Money

34

As Jane drove back toward Terre Haute, she tried to sort out what had happened. She had spent her life concentrating on the simple goal of not losing. If the other side won, her runner would die. If Jane won, all that happened was that her runner got to keep breathing for one more day, one more week. But this time, she had actually participated in something that felt like victory.

Today, while she had been inside the prison with Vincent Ogliaro, mail carriers all over the country had probably delivered the last of the letters to the offices of charities. Henry Ziegler was home in Boston. Rita and Bernie were sitting comfortably in a nice hotel in Terre Haute, and Jane was driving along a fast, open highway in a clean, untraceable rental car. She had checked her rearview mirror a dozen times in the past five miles, and the road behind her was clear.

Everything had happened as she had hoped it would, and now she had to decide how to accomplish what she needed to make happen next. She was back to doing what she had done so many times for so many people: making them vanish and reappear somewhere else where they would be safe.

Jane was beginning to feel hungry, and as soon as she recognized it, she remembered that she had not eaten today. She looked at her watch. She had hoped to make it back to the hotel in Terre Haute in time to eat with the others, but it was already dinner time. She decided to pull off the highway at Effingham. She would eat dinner and change into comfortable clothes.

Mary Ellen Tolliver sat uncomfortably in her chair at the Davis House dining room in Terre Haute, and studied her menu for the tenth time. She sat here with the stiffly starched white napkin on her lap, carefully lifted the silver cream pitcher and sugar bowl to see the silversmith’s mark on the bottoms, stared out the window at a bird on the crab-apple tree in the garden, and waited for John.

She liked the restaurant. It reminded her of the nice places her parents used to take her when she was a child, with the butter in pats on a little bowl of ice, and silverware that was too big for her hands, and everything heavy—the glasses lead crystal, the tablecloths real linen. She kept wanting to say something about it to John, but he was still out on the telephone.

He came back looking red-faced and excited, and it made Mary Ellen shift her eyes toward the girl. No, she didn’t seem to have noticed. She was just sitting there picking at her dinner, the way girls her age always did.

John glanced at her too. “See the other one yet?” he asked.

Mary Ellen shook her head, and her expression was sharp. John had never picked up the knack of whispering. Maybe it was because when he was still working at the car assembly plant, something had happened to his hearing. But he wasn’t very good at anything that required subtlety.

He seemed to notice the restaurant only as he put the big napkin on his lap. He said, “I like this place. It reminds me of the way restaurants used to be.”

Mary Ellen issued a blanket pardon that forgave him for everything, and settled into the adventure again. Since they had retired, there had been a lot of these trips. That was the way she always said it—since we retired—even though it sometimes made people ask the irritating question of what she had retired from. Both of their lives had been one way, and now both of their lives were another way, and that was that. She and John had started doing things differently.

The enemy in retirement was that nothing you did seemed to cause you to look forward to anything. Weekends were the same as weekdays, and payday was just a notice from your bank that the check had arrived as usual. It was Mary Ellen who had slowly begun to introduce the element of chance. Three years ago for Father’s Day, she had bought John a metal detector. They had begun by taking it on a vacation to Florida, and while Mary Ellen had sat on the beach getting sunburned, John had found fourteen dollars in change and a pretty good wristwatch. They had taken it to parks, and even walked along the Mississippi with it now and then. They had never found anything quite as good after that, but Paducah wasn’t Miami, either.

Over the past couple of years, a lot of their little adventures had to do with found money. They were adequately provided for, with John’s pension from the plant and Social Security. The money itself wasn’t the attraction. One time, when the Illinois Lottery had been up to forty million, they had driven over into Illinois and bought tickets. They hadn’t won, but they had started driving over for tickets about once a month after that.

That was how they happened to see the flyers saying “Find This Girl” and “Woman Missing.” They had driven up from Paducah one day, and when they had stopped for lottery tickets, John had picked up the flyers off the counter. They had decided to keep driving deeper into Illinois, looking hard at the faces of all the women they had seen. They had driven up to Marion, where the prison was. Then they had decided that if the women were somewhere around the prison, the only major routes they had not covered on the way up from Paducah lay to the north. They had ended up here in Terre Haute, Indiana. It had been like a dream. They had come into this hotel to eat dinner, and there was “Find This Girl” sitting at a table overlooking the garden all by herself.

“Did you get through to them?” she asked quietly.

He nodded happily. “I did. They said they’d check it out right away.”

“And they took your name and address and everything?”

“You bet,” he whispered. “All they’ve got to do is come and see for themselves that it’s the same one, and we’re going to get the money.”

“If it’s the right one,” she reminded him.

“Of course it is,” he said. “Look for yourself.”

Mary Ellen tried to keep the excitement at a low level, the sort of feeling she could manage without getting a fluttery heart or something. She ventured another glance, and she felt her heart quicken a little. There was absolutely no question it was “Find This Girl.” Now she let herself hope that “Woman Missing” showed up before the investigators did. That would be twice the money.

As Mary Ellen ate her dinner, she felt a little bit guilty about her good fortune. The flyers had implied that “Find This Girl” was some sort of runaway child. Sometimes what that meant was that there was some terrible story involving abuse. Either that was the reason why they left home, or what everybody feared had happened to them since. It would be a shame to get rich and then find out that her windfall and John’s had been based on something like that. She tried to reassure herself with thoughts about “Woman Missing.” She looked quite a bit older, and what was said about her implied that she was a criminal, not a victim. Maybe Mary Ellen would be the one who saved the girl and put the criminal in jail.

Mary Ellen was all the way through her dessert—an apple cobbler with vanilla ice cream—and she still could see no sign of policemen or detectives. Maybe John had given them directions that were too vague, or completely wrong. Maybe they had heard his voice and thought he was a nut.

The waiter brought the girl her check in a leather folder. She signed it, got up, and left. Mary Ellen looked at her husband in horror. “She’s leaving.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“But if they don’t get here, she’ll be gone, and we won’t get the reward.”

“Sure we will,” he said. “Didn’t you see the way she signed the bill?”

Mary Ellen was sure her husband had lost his mind. “What was I supposed to see?”

“She didn’t give him a credit card. She just signed it, and wrote a room number. She’s not leaving. She’s staying at the hotel.”