Dance for the Dead

7

When Jane reached Toledo she swung east across the vast flat lake country toward home, In the morning when she passed into the southwestern tip of New York, she felt as though she had left enemy territory. Three hours later, she drove the rented car to the Rochester airport and turned it in at the lot to make it look as though the driver had continued east on a plane. Then she took a commuter flight seventy miles west to the Buffalo airport, where she had left her own car.

She drove up the Youngmann Expressway to Delaware Avenue and turned north into the city of Deganawida in the late afternoon. The sun had already moved to a position in the west where its feeble glow did little to blunt the bite of the wind off the Niagara River. She drove onto Main Street near the old cemetery that had filled up before the Spanish-American War, took the shortcut along the railroad tracks and down Erie to Ogden Street, then turned again to her block. The house was one of a hundred or more narrow two-story wooden buildings placed beside the street that ran the length of the city from one creek to the next one, two miles away.

Jane pulled the car into the driveway and her eyes instantly took in the state of the neighborhood. She had been looking at these same sights since she had first stood upright and been able to see over the hedges to survey the world while she was playing. The houses in this block had been built before the turn of the century for the people who worked in the factories and shipyards that were no longer here, and the trees were tall and thick, their roots pushing the blocks of the sidewalks up into rakish tilts that had made roller skating dangerous. Her front yard looked lush and green and needed cutting, the blades thick and wet from the rain she had missed while she was away. The clapboards of the narrow two-story house always had looked soft and organic to her because the dozens of layers of paint spread on by generations of Whitefields had made the corners rounded. She saw the curtain on Jake Reinert's corner window twitch aside and she knew he had heard the car's engine in the driveway next door.

She walked to her front door, unlocked it, and slipped inside to punch the code on her alarm keypad before the alarm could go off. She left her front door open so Jake would know that she was willing to talk. She walked into the kitchen, poured coffee into the filter of the coffee-maker, opened the freezer and unwrapped a frozen square of corn bread and a package of blueberries, and started to defrost them in the microwave oven.

Jane heard Jake on the porch, his footsteps heavy and a little stiff. "Come on in," she called, then went back to the cupboard for honey. The microwave bell chimed, and she had the corn bread, berries, and honey on the kitchen table before Jake was comfortably seated. She heard him strain a little to ease himself down with his arms.

"I brought your mail," said Jake. He set a pile of letters on the table.

"Thanks. Arthritis acting up?"

"It's just the winters," said Jake.

"Cold nights getting to you?"

"Yeah, too damned many of them."

He watched her bustling around getting cups, plates, and silverware. Nothing escaped his notice. She was wearing heavier makeup than usual, and her right eye was half closed and the high cheekbone on that side seemed tight - not puffy, exactly, but swollen. She still moved quickly and gracefully, but she didn't pick up things in groups: she lifted each one and set it down before she picked up the next. He judged it was probably a sprained wrist.

Jake had known Jane Whitefield for all of her thirty-two years, had known her mother for a few years before that, and her father all his life. He had come into this same kitchen as a child and watched her grandmother lay out corn bread, berries, and honey for him on this same table. Seneca women obeyed some ancient law that said that anybody who came in at any time of the day or night got fed.

He had not merely known Jane Whitefield, he had been around to see her coming, but it had been only two years ago that he had accidentally discovered what little Janie had grown up to do with herself. From the look of her, it had gotten harder lately. He said, "Rough trip this time?" He had suspected he would feel like an idiot if he said it this way, and he did; a woman who made her living by taking fugitives away from their troubles and into hiding probably didn't have any kind of trips but rough ones. He had said it that way because it acknowledged that he knew the nature of her business and implied that he wasn't shocked by it anymore. He considered this a necessary piece of hypocrisy.

To Jake's surprise Jane didn't take the chance he had given her to shrug it off or make a joke out of it. "Yeah," she said. "It was awful." She set a plate of corn bread in front of him and started to eat her own, but then set the fork back down. "I always thought the way it would end was that one day I would get sick of people and decide they weren't worth the trouble anymore. That probably won't be how it happens. I lost two of them, Jake."

"Lost them?" he said. "You mean you can't find them?"

"No." She spoke clearly but with the quiet voice that made him know what she was going to say, because people spoke in low voices about the dead. "I got them killed."

"How?"

"I don't know, exactly. I mean, I know what happened, but not how. We - the three of us - were taking a little boy to California. There was an ambush. I didn't read it in time because it wasn't a dark alley or a lonely road. It was a courthouse. The other two had to stop and buy me time to get the boy inside where he would be safe."

"I'm sorry," Jake said. That was what people said when somebody died. A man his age ought to have thought of something better than that by now, but if he had, he never remembered it when he needed it.

"Somebody outsmarted me. He knew what bait to use, and somehow he must have figured out a way to be sure that this lawyer - the one who died - knew it was there. But the trap he set wasn't for a lawyer. It was for someone like me."

"How do you know that?"

"He knew that I would find a way to get the boy into the courthouse before it opened in the morning, or at least study the building so I knew the entrances and exits and who was supposed to be where. So at the last minute he had them transfer the case to a different court."

Jake ate some of the corn bread and honey, and thought about what she had said. "Who is he, a cop?"

She said, "He was tracking the boy all over the country for years. If you run into a crooked cop, you can almost always avoid him by driving past the city line. There's hardly ever a good enough reason to follow you beyond it. On one side of the line he's just about invulnerable. On the other, he has no legal power and the local police wonder what he's up to. No," she said. "I think he's something else."

Jake stopped pretending not to stare at her face. "How did you get hurt?"

When she lifted her hands out of her lap and picked up her coffee cup he saw her knuckles and fingers. "At the courthouse," she said.

Jake ate his corn bread, drank his coffee, and considered. What she had wrong with her looked like one shot to the side of her face, but there was a lot of damage to her hands and wrists and probably elbows from somebody's teeth and facial bones. It was possible somebody was dead that she hadn't mentioned. "Should I be listening for sirens?"

"No. There was a judge who made sure I got out before it got to that stage." She noticed his puzzled look. "There are people like that. I don't know if I ever told you about that part of it. People who have no reason to take risks will do it. He knew he could get into trouble - probably get disbarred or something - but he did it anyway."

Jake answered, "People one at a time are a lot more appetizing than you would think if you look at them all at once." He shrugged. "So you came home."

She shook her head. "I was trying, but something else happened on the way home. There was a woman I ran into. She heard somebody talking about me in jail in California. She needed my help to get out of trouble. I started to do it. Then I realized I couldn't. I gave her some identification and some advice and left."

"Was she in danger when you left?"

"No."

"Then that's a good place to stop," he said.

She looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup. He couldn't see her mouth, just the deep strange blue of her eyes against her olive skin. To Jake it was like looking at both of Jane's parents at once. The skin and the long black hair that wreathed her face were all Seneca. But there was her mother too, the liquid blue eyes that had originated somewhere far from here in northern Europe. He tried to talk to the eyes because he had some superstitious feeling that he had something in common with them, some hope of talking to somebody behind them who shared at least one or two assumptions. But even before he began, he knew that it was nonsense. It was like thinking she was her mother because she was wearing her mother's dress. "I don't want to start giving you advice," he lied. "I never have, in spite of the fact that if everybody listened to me they'd all be a hell of a lot less erratic, since I seldom contradict myself. But I know something about how time works. No matter what you do with yourself, the day comes when it ends. You die or go into something else. If you spent your time catching fish, no matter how long you stuck at it, on the day you quit there would still be some fish out there somewhere. Not only can you not go back out and get them, but you shouldn't try."

Jane stood up and changed into the young woman next door again. She picked up the plates carefully, one at a time, and put them in the sink. She stood tall and straight, with her long black hair naturally parting to hang down her back, and began to clean her kitchen.

Jake stood up too and signified that he understood that their meeting was over. "Well, thanks for the snack, but I've got a lot to do in the yard before supper. It gets dark so damned early now, I barely have time to wake up before the streetlights go on."

Jane turned to him and gave him a small kiss on the cheek. "Thanks, Jake."

"I'll be home if you need anything," he said as he walked to the door. "I don't imagine much of what's in your refrigerator bears looking at by now." He stopped and glared suspiciously at the keypad on the wall by the door. "Can I open this without going deaf?"

"Yes," she said. "It's turned off."

He walked outside. "Don't forget to turn it on again."

Jane closed the door and stood beside it to listen to his footsteps going down the wooden steps and scraping on the sidewalk before she moved away. She walked back into the kitchen, washed the dishes, wiped the counters, and turned off the lights. She had cleaned the oven and emptied the shelves of the refrigerator before she had left to pick up Timmy and Mona in Chicago, so she could think of no justification for doing anything more in here. She walked out into the living room. She had given the whole house a nervous cleaning before she had left, and it had been closed tight with the furnace thermostat set to 50 degrees just to keep the pipes from freezing if the winds coming out of Canada turned fierce early, so there wasn't even any dust.

She climbed the old varnished staircase and walked into her bedroom. The telephone answering machine glowed with a steady, unblinking zero. She stripped off the clothes she had been wearing since she had left Michigan, stuffed them into the laundry bag she kept in her closet, then walked into the bathroom. She ran the water so that it cascaded into the tub hot, turned the air steamy, and condensed on the mirrors.

She stepped into the tub and let the water rise until it was close to the rim, then turned it off, leaned back, and closed her eyes. She had slept very little for the past few days, waiting until Mary Perkins was settled and breathing deep, regular breaths before she stood up, moved a chair to the best window, and sat watching the street outside the motel. Whenever she had begun to doze off, she had found herself sinking into a dream about Timothy Phillips.

She sat up, washed her hair, then lay back down and submerged her head to let the hot water soak away the shampoo and sting the bruises and abrasions on her cheek and jaw. She held her breath for a minute and a half, hearing the old, hollow sound of the pipes, feeling her hair floating up around her face and shoulders like a cloud of soft seaweed. Then she slowly lifted her head above the surface and arched her back to let the long, heavy hair hang down her back, draining along her spine. She lay back to feel the water cleaning every part of her body, slowly dissolving away the feeling of dirt, like a stain, that she always felt when she had been locked in a jail. The showers they had in jails could never wash it out. It had to come off in water she found outside.

Jane stayed in the water until it was cold, and then got out and dried herself gingerly with a big, thick towel, wrapped it around her, and brushed out her hair. Her skin was tender now, as though all of her pores had opened and the grime of the trip had been taken away, and then beneath that, a whole layer of skin cells had come off. She felt new.

She put on a clean gray sweatshirt, some soft faded blue jeans, and white socks, then lay on her bed facing the ceiling, her arms away from her body. She consciously relaxed each muscle, first her feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, then her fingers, hands, wrists, forearms, biceps, then her back muscles one pair at a time, from the waist to the shoulders, and fell asleep.

Jake Reinert raked the leaves in his back yard and put them into a new bushel basket. The problem with planting trees when you were young was that the damned things got bigger and more vigorous while you got older and stiffer, until you found one day that you were too old to pick up all the leaves. His problem was worse than most, because his grandfather had planted the one over his head right now. It was absurd to keep picking up sycamore leaves, but it was the first task that had presented itself while he was looking for a way to keep himself from thinking about Jane. The problem was that raking took so little thought that he kept coming back to her.

He remembered the day he had started worrying full-time, when Jane was ten or eleven. Jake had been working in the chemical plant up in the Falls. It was good money for those days, but it was heavy and hard, and the danger of it was constant. There were caustic chemicals that would have to be poured from the big vats a few times each day, and tiny droplets might hit your overalls without your noticing it. By the end of the shift there would be men in the shop whose clothes were already disintegrating, with pinholes through their pants and shirts that were getting big enough to meet each other. In those days nobody said much about it because this was a part of the country where most people worked in the heat of open-hearth steel mills, risked their limbs beside drop-forges or hydraulic presses, or worked in the lumberyards, where anything that made a noise had the capacity to cut you in two.

There were a number of Indian fellows in the part of the plant where Jake worked. There were a few Tuscaroras from the reservation in Lewiston, two or three Mohawks who came over the Rainbow Bridge before dawn every morning from Brantsford, Ontario, and four Senecas - two from Cattaraugus and two from Tonawanda. They were always playing practical jokes on each other and shouting across the shop in their languages and then laughing. At lunchtime they all sat around one of the long workbenches that was covered with butcher paper and played as many hands of euchre as they could in half an hour, slapping cards down so fast that sometimes it was hard to see them. There were about ten in the shop but only eight played, so there were two games going at a time. They made tally marks on the butcher paper to keep score. Euchre usually went to ten, but they played to a hundred.

Jake had watched them for his first couple of shifts on the job when one day he heard an enormous roar of laughter. One of their interminable games had ended. The two losers sat in their places looking as solemn and wooden as any movie fan would have liked. The two winners stood over them and gleefully flipped the cards against their noses while everybody else pointed and laughed. If the loser was caught laughing or even let a muscle of his face change, the penalty was doubled. Jake didn't need to have it explained to him. They were playing for Nosey, just like kids had when he was growing up. Later, after he knew them better, they had corrected him. The name of the game was some Indian word - they all sounded like "yadadadadadada" to him. So he said, "What's it mean?" and one of them thought for a second, and then said, "Nosey."

They accepted Jake without appearing to notice that they had, and during the summer, when people took their vacation time, he would be the one they asked to sit in for the absent player. One late July he had sat down with his lunch and eyed the tally marks on the butcher paper, pretty certain that if he and his partner, Doyle Winthrop, didn't get lucky this was their day to go home with red noses. Or redder, in Doyle's case.

One of the Mohawks came in from the loading dock looking grim. He talked to two of the others in low tones and then one of the others talked to three more on the other end of the shop. Finally Doyle Winthrop looked back at the bench, stared at Jake for a moment, and then came to sit down.

Doyle leaned on his elbows across the table, stared directly into Jake's eyes, and said, "You were a friend of Henry Whitefield's, weren't you?"

After that the details didn't much matter, but Jake listened to them anyway. Henry was an ironworker. He had been part of a gang, all of them Iroquois, who had been out west someplace building a big bridge. Doyle said a cable that was holding the girder Henry was walking on had snapped, and down went Henry. Theirs was the generation that had fought in Europe and the Pacific, and the memory of it hadn't gotten hazy in the few years since. The Iroquois Confederacy had officially and independently declared war on Germany, and all of this little band that had somehow come to include Jake Reinert had seen friends blown apart by heavy weapons. They were all acquainted with the feeling, but none of them spoke again that day.

Jake had gone home early and found his wife, Margaret, already next door with Jane and her mother. Over the years after that he had tried to be helpful, but they weren't the sort of women who needed much help. Jane had been good at schoolwork, and had never had the sort of critical shortage of boys that would have required a fatherly man to come over and tell her the story of the ugly duckling. She managed to get herself a scholarship to Cornell and apparently did whatever they required of her, because they gave her a diploma at the end of it.

Jake had only begun to worry about Jane in earnest again a year or so after that, when her mother died. Here she was a young, strikingly attractive girl with a college degree and the whole world out there waiting for her. She came back, moved into the old house next door, and lived there all alone. She had always held jobs in the summers when she was home from school, but now, as nearly as he could tell, her movements weren't regular enough to accommodate any job he had ever heard of. She was not merely secretive about what she did, she was opaque.

If he managed to plant himself so that he was impossible to ignore while she was out front mowing her lawn and ask her a question like, "What are you doing these days?" she would say in her friendliest way, "Mowing my lawn." Then she would flick the conversation out of his hands, fold it into a joke, and toss it back to him. "When I get done with this one I'm heading over to your house to do yours. You're turning that place into an eyesore and lowering property values from here to Buffalo."

It was around this time that Jake had begun to notice the visitors. Maybe they had been coming for a long time, and he hadn't noticed because he was still going to work every day. But there they were. The strangers would come to her front door. Some were women, but most of them were men. The door would open and they would disappear inside. Sometimes late at night he would hear a car engine and then they would be gone. A lot of the time Jane would be gone too, and not return for a month or more.

After a couple of years of this he pretended he didn't know where the boundary was between small talk and prying. He asked her where she was getting the money to live. She said she had a "consulting business." That pushed Jake four or five steps past the boundary and made him determined to find out what was going on. Various theories suggested themselves. She obviously had plenty of money that she wasn't prepared to account for in a way that might set anyone's mind at ease.

He had worried himself five years closer to the grave before he heard her burglar alarm go off one night. He rushed to his corner window and flipped the switch to turn on the porch light that he used so seldom he wasn't even sure the 250-watt bulb was good anymore. There, caught in the sudden glare, were not one or two but four men. The one nearest him reached into his coat and produced a pistol. It wasn't the standard revolver the Deganawida police carried. It was big and square like the .45 Colts they used to issue in the army. Jake still considered it a great piece of fortune that the man's second reaction to the light had been to turn his face and then his tail rather than to open fire.

After that night he had sat Jane down and demanded answers to the questions he had been asking less and less politely for years. The ones he got weren't the sort that would induce a reasonable person to sleep much better. A man who had the sort of enemies other people only dream about had managed to get himself tracked to her door, and the four of them had tried to break in to see if there was anything in there to help them learn where he was.

Now Jake took his bushel basket and dumped the leaves into the big barrel by the garage. This part of the country was different from other places because the Indians had never left. There were so many differences between groups - the English from Massachusetts who had fought here in the Revolution and seen how much better this land was; the Irish recruited from their bogs to dig the Erie Canal, supposedly because somebody figured they could survive the swamps but maybe because nobody cared if they didn't; the German farmers who arrived as soon as there was enough water in the ditch to float their belongings here on canal boats - that the Indians weren't much stranger to them than they were to each other. After that the rest of the world arrived.

The names of most places stayed pretty much whatever the Seneca had called them, and the roads were just improvements of the paths between them. The cities were built on the sites of Seneca villages beside rivers and lakes, plenty of them with Senecas still living in them, at first just a trading post and then a few more cabins, and then a mill.

Even now things that people thought of as regional attitudes and expressions came straight from the Senecas. When anybody from around here wanted to say they were still present at the end of a big party, they would say they had "stayed until the last dog was hung." Most of them probably had no idea anymore that they were talking about the Seneca New Year's celebration in the winter, where on the fifth day they used to strangle a white dog and hang it on a pole. Nobody had done that for at least a hundred years It was easy to forget about Indians as Indians or Poles as Poles most of the time, so people did, but whenever Jake got to the point where he was pretty sure everybody was just about the same, one of them did something that was absolutely incomprehensible unless you compared it with what her great-grandpa used to do.

8

Jane awoke suddenly in the darkness. Her hands could feel the stitched outlines of the flowers on the quilted bedspread her mother had made. She was puzzled. It took her a moment to remember why she was in Deganawida, sleeping fully dressed. She could tell that her mind had been struggling with something in the darkness, but whatever it was, she had not been able to bring it back with her this time. There was a sound still in the air, maybe left over from the dream, and then she heard it again: the ring of the doorbell.

She stepped to the window and looked down at the front steps. She could see the faint glow of the porch light on Carey McKinnon's high forehead. He was carrying a big brown shopping bag. She hurried to the mirror, turned on the light, brushed her hair quickly, then rushed into the bathroom and reached for the handle of her makeup drawer, but the ring came again. She had no time.

She came down the stairs, crossed the living room, and swung the door open. She stayed back out of the reach of the bright light on the porch and said, "Oh, too bad. I was hoping it was Special Delivery."

"No, you weren't," said Carey. "They don't come at eleven o'clock at night. I happened to be passing by on the way home from work, and I saw your car was back."

"No, you weren't," she said. "Deganawida is north of the hospital. Amherst is due east."

"I had to stop near here to buy myself these flowers." He opened the bag and held up a dozen white roses. "Since you're up anyway, could you do me a favor and put them someplace?"

"Oh, all right." She reached out and took them. "I suppose you'd better come in while I do it. I don't want you scaring Mrs. Oshinski's Dobermans."

He stepped in and closed the door behind him. She knew she had imagined he had ducked to come through the doorway; he had just looked down to plant his feet on the mat. But he had always given the impression that he was a big boy and still growing, and it had never gone away, ten years after college, when his sandy hair was already thinning a little at the crown.

He followed her into the kitchen. "So how was your trip?"

"Who said I was on a trip?"

"Oh. Then how did your car like its month in the shop?"

"I was on a trip," she conceded. "California. It's pretty much as advertised."

He nodded. "Warm."

"Yeah. What's a doctor doing coming home this late? House calls?"

"Dream on. I'm working the emergency room. Night is the time when roads get slippery, fevers go up, people clean loaded guns."

Jane snipped the stems of the roses and skillfully arranged them in a cloisonne vase that had been her grandmother's, then placed the vase on the dining room table.

"Beautiful," said Carey. "Good place for them, too."

"They're right where you won't forget them when you leave."

"No, you might as well keep them. They're all wet." He pretended to fold up his shopping bag. "Oh, I forgot. They gave me this too." He held up a bottle of champagne. "Two-for-one sale or something. I couldn't understand the lady in the store. Thick Polish accent."

"Your mother was Polish."

"Was she? I couldn't understand her either." He walked to the sink, popped the cork on the champagne, and plucked two glasses out of the cupboard. "Explains a lot. Maybe that's what she was trying to tell me. Nice woman, though."

Jane had to step into the light to take her glass. Carey clinked it gently with his, then followed her into the living room.

"So why are you working the emergency room?" she asked as she curled her legs under her on the couch. "Finally piss somebody off?"

A change came into his voice as it always did when he talked about his work. "I decided I needed a refresher course, so I took over the evening shift a couple of weeks ago. If Jake asks, I've still got plenty of time to check my regular patients for suspicious moles."

"Why does a young quack like you need a refresher course? Doze off in medical school?"

"I guess I should have said 'a reminder course.' It's basic medicine. The door at the end of the hall slides open, and in walks Death. You get to look him in the eye, spin him around, and kick his ass for him. It's exhilarating.

Besides, the regular guy asked me to help him out. E.R. doctors last about as long as the average test pilot, and he's approaching the crash-and-burn stage. They don't always win." He seemed to notice her listening to him. "You look awful, by the way."

"Sweet of you to say so. That's how women look when you wake them up."

He turned his head to the left to call to an invisible person. "Nurse! More light!" Her eyes involuntarily followed his voice, and he turned on the lamp above him with his right. "Wow. Pretty good contusions and abrasions. Finally piss somebody off?"

She knew she wasn't going to get the car accident story past Dr. Carey McKinnon. "I was mugged outside my hotel."

"I'm sorry, Jane." he said, tilting his head to see her more clearly. "What happened?"

"It was nothing, really. He came out from behind one of those pillars in the garage under the hotel to grab my purse. I yelled and the parking attendant came. He got away."

"Is he all right?"

She frowned. "Why would anybody say that?"

"Your hands."

"Oh," she said. "Well, I did resist a little. I'm not dumb enough to die for a purse, but he scared me."

Carey was already on his feet and moving toward the door.

"Where are you going?"

"I left my bag in the car. I always have one with me in case there's a chance to bill somebody."

"You're a dear friend, but I like you because your big feet tromp my snow down in the winter so I can get my car out. Who said I wanted medical treatment from you?"

"I just need to bring it in. Old Jake probably recognized my car, and he's handy enough to break in for the drugs."

Carey stepped outside. She heard his trunk slam, and then his feet coming back up on the porch. In a moment he was inside, the black bag was open at her feet, and he was sitting beside her turning her head gently from side to side. He took a bottle out of his bag and poured something out of it onto a ball of cotton. He swabbed her face with the cold liquid and then stared into her eyes with a little flashlight. He took her hands in his and studied them, then bent her wrists a couple of times, staring as though he could see through to her bones.

"Doctor?" she said. "Just tell me, will I be able to play the piano?"

"Heard it. You couldn't before." He didn't smile. "The wrist is only a mild sprain," he said. "It'll be okay in a few days. The lacerations on the knuckles look good already - probably because you didn't put makeup on them. You're lucky. Human teeth are an incredible source of infection." He took a small aerosol can out of the bag and sprayed her hands. It felt colder than the disinfectant, but as it dried, the pain seemed to go away. He lifted her hand and kissed the fingertips. "I just like the taste of that stuff." He looked at her cheerfully. "You want to know the truth, it helps things heal. We don't tell people that, of course."

Jane couldn't think of a retort. In all of the twelve or thirteen years she had known Carey McKinnon, they had been buddies. They had kissed hello and goodbye, but he had been the friend she could call so she didn't have to go to a movie alone or eat at a table for one. The champagne was a pleasant surprise, but the roses brought with them a new ambiguity, and it was growing and getting more confusing.

"Stand up," he said. She stood up. He moved her arms and felt the elbows, pressed the radius and ulna between his fingers. He put his big hand under her rib cage and poked her a couple of times with the other. "Does that hurt?"

"Uh! Of course it hurts. Cut it out," she said. At another time she would have poked him back, but now he was being a doctor - at least she thought he was.

"Your liver didn't pop loose, anyway," he said. "You can have champagne without fear of death."

"Oh?" she said. "How long have I got?"

"What do I care?" He sipped his champagne. "I'll have been dead for twenty years. You pamper yourself like a racehorse, and women handle the wear and tear better than men." His eyes swept up and down her body with a frankness that she wasn't positive was detachment. "It's just a better machine."

"Then you must really be walking around in a piece of junk," she said. She stretched her sore arms and rubbed her shoulders.

"That's only muscle pain," he said.

"Well, don't sound disappointed. It's the best pain I can manage right now."

"A big shot of adrenaline comes in and your muscles go from rest to overperformance in a second or two, and they feel the strain. In two days you'll be back out there teaching truck drivers to arm wrestle, or whatever it is you do."

"Consulting."

"Insulting them - whatever," he said. He started to close his bag, but then spotted something. He picked up a clear bottle with a liquid in it that looked like vinegar. "Try this stuff."

"What is it?"

He handed it to her. "Don't look free samples in the mouth. Doctors get an incredible number of them, and once in a while you get something you can give your friends legally. This stuff is terrific."

"What's it for?"

"It's not medicine. It's just glorified massage oil. It's got a very mild analgesic in it, so it puts a deep warmth on sore muscles."

Jane opened the bottle and sniffed it. "You're not lying, anyway. It smells too good to be medicine."

He took it back. "Come on," he said. "Lie down and I'll put some on you."

"Lie down, Carey?" she asked. "Could you be a little more specific, please? Or maybe less specific?"

"I assure you, madam, I am a qualified physician. Board-certified. Climb up there on the board." He pointed to the dining room table.

She walked uncertainly in that direction and stared at the table skeptically. "The table? Are you sure?"

"Well, if I asked you to lie down on your bed, would you do it?"

"Maybe," she said. Then she wondered how much she had actually meant by that. If it wasn't what she was afraid it was, why had she hesitated?

He said, "Okay, if it's not occupied, let's use it." He walked to the stairs.

Jane took a big gulp of her champagne. They had been friends for so long that the possibility of a sudden change was unsettling. She didn't want to lose him. She picked up the bottle and followed. "I was thinking about you a few days ago," she said. "I was talking to a little boy."

"Tall or short?"

"Uh... tall, I guess, for his age. He's eight."

"Tell him surgery, then. Dermatologists are short, as a rule. Surgeons are tall."

He stopped at the door of her bedroom, and she edged past him and sat on the bed. She looked up at him. "Are you sure you're not just trying to get funny with me?"

Carey sipped his glass of champagne thoughtfully. "It's crossed my mind. Always does. We never have before, and this may not be the best time to start. I sure don't want to lose you just because we disagreed on how to go about it. It's kind of tricky, and you're a very critical person."

"I am not," she said. "But what if it turned out to be an awful mistake? Would you still be able to call me up when you wanted to go someplace where no respectable person would go with you?"

"It's hard to know. How about you? If you needed somebody to make fun of, would it still be me?"

She stared at him for a moment. "I don't know. I guess we should talk about it sometime when we're not exhausted and the bottle's still corked." She flopped onto the bed on her stomach with her arms bent and her hands under her chin. "Right now I need an old friend who's willing to rub my sore back."

He sat on the bed beside her, lifted the sweatshirt a few inches, poured a little of the oil in his hand, and then slowly and gently rubbed it into the small of her back in a circular motion.

"Ooh," she sighed. "That's good."

He worked patiently, his strong hands softly kneading the sore muscles in exactly the right spots, working up higher on her back now, to the shoulder blades. She could feel the tight, hard knots of muscle relaxing under his touch. The hands kept moving inward toward the tender muscles along the spine. When he stopped to pour more oil into his palm, Jane pulled the sweatshirt up almost to her shoulders, hesitated, then slipped it up over her head and set it beside her. She was naked to the waist now, but it had seemed that making him work under a shirt was idiotic. If Carey saw her breasts, he saw her breasts.

His hands were on her shoulders, and then the connecting muscles to her neck and then along the back of her neck to her scalp. She felt goose bumps and shivered, then relaxed again. She was so loose and at ease now that all the muscles on the top half of her body were on the edge of some kind of sleep, a paralysis of laziness, so happy not moving that they didn't quite belong to her anymore. They were just there waiting for him to touch them again.

Carey said, "How's it going so far?"

"I'm ready to die now," she announced. "Just give me more champagne and keep rubbing, and you can tell them to pull the trigger whenever."

He worked back down her spine, and she began to imagine that she could see him clearly from the position of his hands on her skin. She remembered telling Timmy about him. She had said he was special, and he was. Without warning, the word angel appeared in her mind, and she laughed.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing," she answered with the smile still in her voice. "You're being an angel."

"How about your legs?"

"What about them?"

"Do they hurt?"

She considered the implications. He couldn't rub oil on her through a pair of blue jeans. He knew that. "Not at the moment." When she had said it she felt a sense of loss that she didn't have the time to analyze if she was going to fix it. "You can't be too careful, though." She reached under her stomach to unbutton the jeans and give a tug on the zipper.

He slipped the jeans down her legs and off her ankles, and she felt tension in her throat. Then his hands were on the soles of her feet, squeezing them with tiny circular movements, until she began to imagine she was feeling him sending messages up the nerves to her shoulders and neck. The tension didn't go away, but it wasn't unpleasant anymore. He worked up the Achilles tendon, the calves, and very softly the backs of her knees, and then slowly and carefully up the hamstrings. She was calm and happy, and she wasn't thinking at all anymore, just following his touch. But then the circular movement of his hand passed for a moment between her thighs and she caught herself arching her back to spread them apart the tiniest bit.

He kept working on her legs and back, but she could feel that the hands weren't alternating anymore, so he was undressing with the other. Then she felt the panties being peeled off, and he turned her over to gently kiss her bruised face, and they slowly joined in the embrace that she had always known would come.

Everything began with a slow inevitability, a luxurious ease and simplicity that made her feel warm, then eager, and then glad. But the feeling didn't fade. It built and intensified. After that, every second, every heartbeat expanded into a moment of its own. Suddenly she became aware that she was hearing a woman's voice, and she wondered how long she had been doing that, moaning and making little cries that she couldn't have silenced if she tried. Then she went beyond thinking into a place where every sensation seemed to go up one notch on the scale to the highest frequency - colors, sounds, movements. She was almost afraid when the intensity kept building, and the word angel came back to her, but this time she didn't laugh, because everything was bright and fever-clear and immediate, with no distance left at all, no will inside her but his.

The whole night passed without her knowing the time, because she had the sense that she would have to give up something in order to think. They would pause and let their heartbeats slow, lying together still clasped in the same embrace but not the same now, somehow friends simply passing together into sleep. But then one of them would stir, and the other would silently say yes, each time the question and the answer completely different, because every time the last time had not faded or gone away, so it was like going up another step on a stairway.

At dawn they were lying on the bed, eyes closed, when he said, "What do you think about getting married?"

Jane's breath caught in her throat. Have beautiful tall children. Live here - not in this house, but at least close by, in the big old stone one in Amherst with him. Maybe that was where all of this had been taking her, leading her away from death the way she had taken other people. She would never have to tell him what a guide was because it would all be over - already was over when you started losing.

"No answer?" he asked.

"Every girl's fondest wish," she said. "Think the guy who owns the Buffalo Bills might be interested in marrying me? Maybe the one who fathered those quintuplets. There's a guy who knows his way around a diaper."

"I mean it," said Carey. "We should get married."

Jane sat up, then leaned over and kissed him, letting her hair hang down on both sides of their faces like a curtain. She lay back down. "Thank you," she said. "I guess we ought to have a serious talk about it sometime."

"Does that mean yes? That's what you said last night."

"Don't be an idiot."

"Meaning?"

"I've always loved everything I knew about you."

"So why are you saying no?"

"I didn't say no." She sat up again and ran her fingers through her hair to find imaginary tangles. "I said we should have a serious talk sometime. I'll start any time you want to, but I'm not going to say yes right now."

He sat up too. "I can do that."

She sighed. "When was the last time you had sex, Carey?"

He pursed his lips and said reluctantly, "The other night."

"You mean the night before last night. The last time you came off a shift."

"It was a colleague. It wasn't a routine procedure. She's a terrific diagnostician, a person of the highest - "

"I don't want to know."

"What is this? You pry and then pretend you're not interested?"

"You'd make a lousy husband."

"Jane, this thing with my colleague. It's not anything to get jealous about. It was a single, isolated event. Two patients died at the end of the shift after we did everything we could. I think we were just comforting each other. There's something buried deep in the cerebral cortex that gets triggered when you lose a life, some primitive forgotten instinct that says 'Fuck while you can, because one of these times that is going to be you.' It's the practical animal reaction that evolved to keep the species alive after prehistoric kill-offs. She's probably mystified that we did it. Next time we do a shift together we'll be perfectly professional."

"I'm sure you will. You're a good doctor, and you'd know if she weren't. But I assure you, if you had her in the sack, she's not going to let herself get too mystified. She's probably waiting on your doorstep. If she isn't, it doesn't matter, because there will be another along shortly. There is, in fact, isn't there? Me. The world is full of women - an endless supply - and every last one of them has something about her: a little smile that makes you want to smile too, or breasts like two perfect grapefruits. Remember her? That's probably why she hung around your supermarket - so you could make the comparison."

"That's not fair," he said. "You want me to start quoting you?"

"No," Jane answered. "It isn't fair. That's part of what I'm talking about. What we know about each other looks a little different if marriage rears its ugly head. And I'm not criticizing you."

"You aren't?"

"No. I never thought for a second that there was anything wrong with anything you do. I still don't. But the only way it would make any sense to marry you is if I had some reason to believe you had become monogamous."

"You actually think I can't do that?" Carey asked.

She smiled and lay down with her head on his shoulder. It was surprising how good it felt. In a moment she said, "Want some breakfast?" and was up and heading for the kitchen. She slipped her bathrobe on as she walked down the hall. Then she heard the beep-beep-beep-beep, stopped, and walked back to the bedroom doorway. He was sitting on the bed staring sadly at the pager attached to the belt on the floor. "Your alarm's going off," she said. "Somebody seems to be breaking into your pants."

Carey picked up the beeper, slipped on his pants, walked to the telephone by the bed, and cradled the receiver under his chin as he dialed. "It's the hospital," he said, and buckled his belt. As she walked back down the hallway she heard him say. "Dr. McKinnon."

Jane went into the kitchen and packed him a little lunch while he talked on the telephone. She could hear him thumping around up there, probably not doing a very good job of making himself presentable. When she heard his feet on the stairs she came out and handed him the little brown bag.

"Sorry," he said. "I'll call you as soon as I'm off and get some sleep."

"Thanks," she answered, then added, "If I'm not around, don't worry. I may have to go out of town."

"See?" He grinned. "Nothing's changed. You always say that." He gave her a long, gentle kiss, picked up his black bag, and hurried out to his car.

Jane thought about what she had said. She had no plans to go anywhere. It was simply the old habit: never give anyone a reason to ask the police to look for you.

She considered going back to bed, but if she did she would be out of step with the sun and moon, and she hated that feeling more than being tired. She spent the day cleaning her clean house, cutting her lawn, and weeding her flower beds. She tried not to think about what Carey McKinnon was doing, or about being Mrs. Carey McKinnon, or about finding the right way of loving a particular person. What she needed to know wasn't something that could be figured out in advance. She had to wait until she was sure she wasn't taking an old friend and converting him into the consolation prize for failure. It was only after night had come that she went back up to bed and allowed herself to sleep.

9

Jane sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. The sun was beginning to come up, the light now diffused and gray beyond the window. She wasn't sure how long she had been hearing the birds, but they were flitting from limb to limb now, making chirrups. She used the hot coffee and the silence to work her way back through her dream, and she knew where every bit of it had come from.

She had been running at night through the woods, trying to make it to the river. She must have been a child, because her parents were with her. There was something big and dark and ferocious chasing them, but she wasn't able to catch a glimpse of it through the trees. Every time she tried to look over her shoulder it seemed to be closer, but she could only discern a shadow that blotted out some of the stars, or see branches shaking as it trampled through a thicket.

She walked to the middle of the living room and cleared her mind while she began the one hundred and twenty-eight movements of Tai Chi, one flowing into the next without interruption. She decided her muscles weren't as sore as they had been yesterday. Maybe Carey's liniment had worked after all - or something else had. Her body borrowed part of her consciousness as it had learned to do through long years to move through positions with names like "Grasp Sparrow's Tail" and "Cross Hands and Carry Tiger to Mountain," and ended as it had begun, almost floating. Then she slipped on a sweat suit, hung her house key on a chain around her neck, went down the front steps, and began to run.

She started slowly and easily in the cold dawn air and gradually lengthened her strides as her body warmed and her muscles relaxed. She ran down to the river and along the open grassy strip toward the south. Deganawida was alive this morning with people just up and driving along Niagara Street toward their jobs, the men's hair wet from their showers and plastered to their heads, the children dressed in their second-heaviest coats already, their mothers hustling them down the sidewalk and making sure they were at least pointed in the direction of the school when they started off. She ran up as far as the Grand Island bridge and then turned back. The run home would give her just the right stretch of time to shower, change, and eat before the library opened.

Inside the library she walked to the desk and collected all of the past month's issues of the Los Angeles Times, then hid in the small room in the corner surrounded by the reference books that nobody ever used unless they wanted to settle a bet, and sat down to read. The first one that caught her eye was two days old.

INVESTIGATION OF COURTHOUSE DEATHS IS INCONCLUSIVE

van nuys - In the latest development in the strange saga of Timothy Phillips, kidnap victim and heir to a San Francisco fortune, an L.A. Police spokesman conceded today that the investigation has so far produced no charges against anyone. The bizarre events at the Van Nuys courthouse which caused the deaths of two persons and the arrests of five others last month are still under investigation, said Captain Daniel Brice. Details are still sketchy, but the police have put together this much of the puzzle: Just as the courts began session on the morning of the 15th, attorney Dennis Morgan, 38, of Washington, D.C. stopped his car in front of the courthouse to let off his eight-year-old client, Timothy Phillips, and Mona Turley, 29, the woman posing as Phillips's mother. The rented car then apparently slipped into reverse and slammed into an oncoming vehicle. Driver Harold Kern, 23, and passenger James Curtain, 26, both of Los Angeles, suffered minor injuries, but Morgan was (See Inconclusive, A 29)

Jane impatiently searched page 29 and found the rest of the article in the lower left corner.

pronounced dead at the scene.

Kern and Curtain ran into the courthouse, apparently seeking assistance for Morgan. Mona Turley, police theorize, may have believed the two men were pursuing her with hostile intent. A struggle ensued, in which numerous bystanders took sides. The confrontation erupted into a fight in a fifth-floor hallway, where bailiffs in a nearby courtroom responded to the disturbance.

Arrested with Curtain and Kern were Roscoe Hull, 22, Max Corto, 28, both of Burbank, and Colleen Ma-honey, 29, of Orlando, Florida.

After police restored order, the body of Mona Turley was discovered at the bottom of a stairwell, an apparent victim of a fall from an upper floor. Police sources confirm that a maze of conflicting allegations have been made, but eyewitnesses have established that none of the five persons arrested could have left the hallway once the fighting began.

Captain Brice explained that in the absence of evidence that any of the combatants had ever met the deceased, had any motive to harm her, or were in the stairwell at the time of her death, they could not be considered suspects. He said that foul play has not been ruled out, but that Turley might have been overcome with anxiety or remorse because of possible kidnapping charges and taken her own life.

Jane sat and stared at the orderly rows of thick volumes on the shelves in front of her. They had killed Mona, but the best she could do was to go into court as Colleen Mahoney, lie and say she saw them, then watch twenty witnesses parade to the stand and say she was wrong. The ones who had been in the car had certainly broken Dennis's neck with a choke-hold after the crash, but she hadn't seen that either.

If the police hadn't found a connection between any of them and the Timothy Phillips case, then they were hired hands. No doubt the police and the F.B.I, were quietly looking for Colleen Mahoney, but there was no reason to let them find her. She was finished.

She looked through the newspapers for more articles about Timothy Phillips. Finally she found one that was only a day old.

HOFFEN-BAYNE NOT SUSPECTED OF WRONGDOING, D.A. SAYS

A spokesman for the District Attorney's office issued a statement today denying rumors that Hoffen-Bayne Financial, Inc. is under suspicion of attempting to defraud kidnapped heir Timothy Phillips of the multimillion-dollar estate of his late grandmother.

"The rumor has no merit," said Deputy D.A. Kyle Ambrose. "All you have to do is read the conditions of the trust. If Mr. Phillips were deceased, Hoffen-Bayne did not stand to benefit. All the money was to be donated to charities. I'm convinced that they filed to have the child declared dead because it was the proper procedure under the trust instructions, and consistent with the behavior of a good corporate citizen. There's very little benefit to society from having vast fortunes tied up in trusts with no beneficiaries. The intent of the grandmother was to provide for her grandson, not to build a perpetually-growing pyramid of unused money." Ambrose noted that Hoffen-Bayne had reason to be delighted with the news that Timothy Phillips had been found. "If the estate went to charities, the company would have lost large annual fees as trustee and executor, which now legally must continue until the boy reaches eighteen, and could continue as long as he wishes."

Jane read the article twice. Dennis had been certain that the men who were after Timmy had been hired by Hoffen-Bayne. Dennis was a lawyer, and there had been something in the documents that had convinced him that Hoffen-Bayne had a rational reason for doing it. But the Los Angeles D.A.'s office was full of lawyers, criminal lawyers at that. Were they just convinced that companies like Hoffen-Bayne weren't in the business of killing their clients?

She tried to look at it in a logical way. Hoffen-Bayne had chosen this time to have Timmy declared dead. If they were capable of murder, they could have waited until they had actually killed him, left his body where it would be found, and let the coroner do the paperwork. Or they could have waited and filed the papers at the best possible time for them. No, she had to assume that they had already waited, and that this was the perfect time. There was nothing external to make them do it now. There were ten more years until Timmy could take control of the money and fire them, ten more years of the "large annual fee" the D.A. had mentioned.

Jane stood up, walked out to the librarian's counter, and caught Amy Folliger's eye. "Can I make a couple of copies on the machine?"

"Sure," said Amy. "A dime a copy. But I'm afraid you'll have to sign this sheet," she added apologetically. "It relieves the library of liability if you violate a copyright."

Jane glanced at the papers on the clipboard. The first page was a summary of the copyright law of 1978. She signed the second page and handed it back.

"Sorry," said Amy. "Did you ever wonder how we ever got to this point?"

"What point?"

Amy's big eyes widened behind the silver-framed glasses that Jane had never seen her wear except on duty at the library. "Where everything is lawyers. Of course they get to write the laws. Did you ever hear of a lawyer missing the chance to give himself perpetual fees?"

"Once or twice," said Jane. "Maybe if we all behave ourselves for a hundred years, they'll go away." She copied the articles, then walked to the newspaper rack and carefully replaced the stack of L.A. Times.

Jane put the copies into her purse and walked out of the library. As she approached her car, she composed the note that she would write to Karen the lawyer to explain what was bothering her, but it didn't feel right. What was bothering her was that she wanted to know now.

Jane passed the telephone booth beside the building and then walked back to it. She dialed the number and said to the secretary who answered, "This is Jane White-field. She knows me. Tell her I'm going to fax something to her."

"Would you like an appointment for a consultation or - "

"No, thanks," she said. "She can call me." Jane hung up and walked up Main Street to the little stationery store that Dick Herman had run for the last few years since his father retired. The growing collection of signs in the window announced there were post office boxes, copiers, and a fax service now.

When she had sent the clippings Jane drove home, walked inside, and heard the telephone ringing. She closed the door and hurried to the phone. Maybe Carey wasn't with the great diagnostician. She snatched up the receiver just as her answering machine started. "You have reached - " said the recording, and clicked off. "Hello?"

"Hi, Jane." It was Karen's voice. The last time Jane had heard it Karen had wondered aloud - in a purely speculative way - whether there was any way to protect a witness who had just saved a client of hers. "I got your message. But what is it?"

"Did you read the articles?" said Jane.

"The second woman - I take it that was you?"

"You don't want to know."

"It's okay. Attorney-client privilege."

"I'm not a client."

"If you're in trouble you are."

"I'm not," said Jane. "I just need advice. How are they stealing the money?"

"I don't have the slightest idea," said Karen. "If it were obvious, I certainly wouldn't be the only one who could figure it out. Without reading the documents that established the trust I'd only be guessing anyway."

"All right," said Jane. "Let me fish, then. What's the statute of limitations on stealing money from a trust fund?"

"That's breach of trust as a fiduciary. Here it's four years. I'd have to look up California."

"Suppose they robbed Timmy the day the old lady died. They have Timmy declared dead and it's over? Nobody can do anything?"

"No," said Karen. "He's a minor, right? The statute time doesn't start running until he's eighteen, when the money goes to him. If he doesn't spot it after four years, they're in the clear, as long as they didn't do anything worse."

"What if he were dead?"

"Then the next heir gets the money - presumably some adult - and the clock starts again. Who is it?"

Jane was silent for a minute. "The charities," she said. "That's it, isn't it?"

"That's what?"

"That's the answer. That's why they wanted Timmy dead - legally or really. So that the heir isn't a person."

"I'm not sure I follow that."

"Timmy's grandmother set up this trust fund. It was supposed to go to her son. The son died. The next beneficiary was her infant grandson. That's Timmy. There weren't any other relatives, or if there were, Grandma wasn't interested. The D.A. mentioned it in that article. The money goes to charities."

"It can't be that. Charities aren't generally run by stupid people. They receive bequests all the time, and their counsel are very sophisticated about making sure they get what the benefactor wanted them to. The charity is a corporation, and that's like a person in law. The charity would have four years before the statute time ran. The lawyers would go over the will and the trust papers the day they heard about it."

"No," said Jane. "The trust doesn't go to the charities. Only the money does."

Karen was silent for the space of an indrawn breath. "Oh, no," she said. "You're telling me the old lady didn't specify the charities?"

"Nobody has ever mentioned any," said Jane. "And Dennis - another lawyer who did read the papers - said it was just 'charities.' He was sure they were going to steal the money, but he didn't say how."

Karen's voice sounded tired, but she spoke quickly, as though she were reading something that was printed inside her eyelids. "Then I can think of a lot of ways to do it. Here's the simplest. Timmy becomes deceased - either in fact or in law - and they get a death certificate. They then disperse the money to a charity of their choice, or even of their own making, which kicks most of the money back in some way: ghost salaries and services, paid directorships, whatever."

"Is that the way you would do it?"

Karen's voice was a monotone. "Thank you very much."

"You know what I mean. Is it the smartest way? They picked this time to have Timmy declared dead. They could have waited forever. There must be a reason why they did it now."

"What I just told you is the dumb way. The smartest way is always to stay as close to legality as possible. If they were sole trustee and executor, they could have been draining the fund since it was started. They could set enormous fees, charge all sorts of costs to the trust, and cook the books a little here and there to show losing investments. They wouldn't steal it all. They would leave a substantial sum in there. How much is there?"

"I don't know. I get the impression it's tens of millions, maybe hundreds."

"Okay. Say it's a hundred million. They could get away with four or five percent a year as trustee and executor. They could also do virtually anything with the principal. There are written guidelines in every state I know of, but they're broad, and they're open to interpretation. They could invest in their friend's chinchilla ranch and have their friend go bankrupt, if nobody knew the connection. If they were smart enough to steal it slowly and vary the investments to make it look inconclusive, they could do a lot."

"Inconclusive?"

"You know. The trust has lots of stock in fifteen hundred companies, twenty million in federal bonds and a five-million-dollar write-off on the chinchilla ranch, and it's tough to prove they were anything but mistaken on the issue of chinchilla futures. Not dishonest."

"So then what?"

"They do it a few more times over the years, always making sure that the proportions are right - nine winners, one loser. They're stealing a lot, but some of it is hidden by the fact that most investments are making money. You have to remember that even the good investments go up and down too, so the bad ones are hard to spot. When they've got all they can, they call it quits."

"How do they call it quits?"

"They fulfill the terms of the trust - that is, they disperse the money to charities. Only now it's not a hundred million. It's twenty million."

"And nobody notices that eighty million is gone?"

"If the trust doesn't change hands, nobody looks. If you have twenty million, you can create quite a splash in the world of charity. You don't write a twenty-million-dollar check to the United Way and close the books."

"What do you do?"

"You divide it into ten-thousand-dollar tidbits and dole it out. Now you have two thousand checks from the Agnes Phillips Trust, which nobody ever heard of. Each year, you send four hundred different charities all over the country ten thousand dollars each. That's more than one a day. You do it for five years. The first year, when the Children's Fund of Kankakee gets a check from the Agnes Phillips Trust, what does it do?"

"You've got me."

"It sends a thank-you note. They're not going to demand an audit of the trust that sent them ten grand. It would never occur to them, and if it did, they couldn't make it stick. They're not heirs named in a will. They're a charity that got a big check at the discretion of the people who sent it. They're grateful. They have no idea of the size of the trust, and they hope they'll get another check next year so they can help more children."

"So at the end of five years, the money is all gone, and the statute of limitations has run on the eighty million they stole?"

"If they get only five percent return on the money while they dole it out, they get a couple of extra years. What's working most in their favor is that during all that time - figure eight years - nobody is asking any questions. That's the main thing. If at the end of that time there's a full-scale audit, the auditors won't be able to find a single instance of mistaken judgment that isn't at least eight years old, and no theft at all. As long as it's more than four since the payout began, nothing much matters."

"So what do I do now?"

"I'll tell you one thing I'd do. I'd make sure Timothy Phillips isn't alone much. None of this works if the heir is alive."

10

Jane went to the pay telephone at a market a few miles from her house, dialed Los Angeles Information to get the number of the Superior Court in Van Nuys, then asked to be transferred to Judge Kramer's office. It was still early in the morning in California and Judge Kramer's secretary sounded irritable and sleepy. "Judge Kramer's chambers."

Jane said, "Could you please tell him it's Colleen?" The last name he had given her had slipped her mind.

"One moment. I'll see if he can be disturbed."

The name came back to her. "Mahoney."

"Pardon me?"

"Colleen Mahoney."

Jane's mind could see the secretary pushing the hold button, walking to the big oak door, giving a perfunctory knock, and walking into the dim room with the horizontal blinds. She allowed a few seconds for the secretary to tell him, but before she expected him to remember and pick up, he was on the line. "Judge Kramer."

"Hello, Judge," she said. "Remember me?"

"Yes. This is an unexpected pleasure," he said. "At least I hope it is."

"I found out something that you need to know."

"What is it?"

"Well, I read that the D.A. has taken a look at Timmy's trust and said Hoffen-Bayne couldn't be anything but honest. He missed something."

"What did he miss?"

Jane spoke with a quiet urgency. "If Timmy was dead, the trust was to go to charities, so the D.A. assumed everything had to be okay. But in the trust Grandma didn't say, 'If Timmy dies, dissolve the trust right away and divide its assets among the following charities,' or 'Let the trust continue forever and the income go to the following charities.' She simply said, 'Give it away.' So there was no specific organization named in the trust who could demand the right to see the books."

"You're saying that someone at Hoffen-Bayne planned to plunder the trust fund, give the residue to charities, and nobody would be the wiser?" he asked. "I don't see how they could imagine they would get away with it."

"A lawyer friend of mine thinks it would have worked fine if Timmy hadn't turned up. If there are no heirs, there's nobody with the right to demand an audit."

"Except the state of California."

"Let me ask you this. When the grandmother died, wouldn't the trust have either gone through probate or been declared exempt?"

"Well, yes."

"And doesn't it have to file tax returns each year?"

"Certainly."

"My friend seems to think that there's no other occasion when the state automatically takes a look, unless the trust changes hands. Somebody with a legitimate reason has to ask. And the statute of limitations for embezzling the money is something like four years."

The judge blew some air out through his teeth. "Your friend seems to have worked this through more carefully than I have. If they filed the standard annual forms, declared Timmy legally dead, and took their time about the disbursement to charities, then yes, they could probably avoid scrutiny until it was too late to prosecute the theft. Your friend must practice in another state. The statute of limitations here isn't four years. It's two."

"Great," she muttered.

"But they can't do what they planned. They never got the death certificate."

Jane spoke slowly and quietly. "If they've already robbed him, then they still need to get one. I think they're committed."

"It's all right. Timmy is under police protection."

"I know," said Jane. "I went into his bedroom, talked to him, took him for a ride, and brought him back."

"I'll order him moved," said the judge.

"Moving him increases the danger. Just tell them you're not keeping him incommunicado, you want him protected, and they'll do their best. I'm sure you know they can't keep somebody from killing him if the person tries hard enough."

"Then what the hell do you want me to do?"

"Remove the motive."

"How?"

"The reason to kill him is to hide a theft, so uncover it. He's a ward of the court. Order an audit of his assets. Open everything up."

"All right."

"And, Judge," Jane said, "can you make it a surprise? You know - like a raid?"

"Yes. I'll have to do some preliminary probing first, and I'll have to find probable cause for a search, but I'll do it. Now what else are you waiting for me to stumble onto?"

"Nothing." Then she added, "But, Judge..."

"What?"

"I don't know if it's occurred to you yet, but if they realize you're going to do this, then Timmy isn't the big threat to them anymore. You are."

"I'm aware of that," he snapped. "Now I've got sixty-three litigants and petitioners and all their damned attorneys penned up in a courtroom waiting for me, so if you'll excuse me..."

"Keep safe. You're a good man."

"Of course I am," he said. "Goodbye."

Jane hung up the telephone and drove home. She climbed the stairs, opened her closet, and then remembered that she had given the suitcase she was looking for to the Salvation Army in Los Angeles. She went downstairs into the little office she had made out of her mother's sewing room, looked in the closet, and found the old brown one. It was a little smaller, but she wasn't going to bring much with her. She stared at the telephone for a moment, then dialed his number. His answering machine clicked on. "Carey, this is Jane. I'm afraid I was right about the trip. I'll call when I'm home. Meanwhile you'll have to make your own fun. Bye." She walked upstairs to her bedroom and began to pack.

As Jane set down her suitcase and walked through the kitchen to be sure that all the windows were locked and the food stored in the freezer, she saw the pile of letters that Jake had brought her. She had not even bothered to look at them. She leaned against the counter and glanced at each envelope, looking for bills. There were several envelopes from companies, but they were all pitches to get her to buy something new.

Finally she opened the one at the bottom. It was thin and square and stiff, from Maxwell-Lammett Investment Services in New York. Inside was a greeting card. It was old, the picture from a photograph that had been hand-tinted. There was a stream with a deer just emerging from a thicket, so that it was easy to miss at first. All the leaves of the trees were bright red and orange and yellow. The caption said "Indian Summer." When she looked inside, a check fluttered to the floor. The female handwriting in the card said, "You told me that one morning after a year or two I would wake up and look around me and feel good because it was over, and then I would send you a present. I found the card months ago and saved it, but you're a hard person to shop for. Thanks. MaRried and PrEgnant." R was Rhonda and E was Eckerly, or used to be.

Jane picked up the check and looked at it. The cashier's machine printing on it said "Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand and 00/100 Dollars." The purchaser was the investment company, and the notation said "Sale of Securities." She put the check into her purse and took one last look at the card. Rhonda had probably felt clever putting her name in code. If the people her ex-husband had paid to hunt her had known about Jane they could have identified Rhonda's prints from the paper and probably traced her through the check.

She switched on the ventilator on the hood over the stove, set out a foil pan, lit the card at a gas burner, and set it in the pan to burn. There would come a time when an uninvited guest would go through this house. Maybe it would be some bounty hunter, or maybe it would be the policemen investigating her death. Whoever it was would not find traces of a hundred fugitives and then turn them into a bonanza for his retirement. When the card was burned, she turned off the fan, then rinsed the ashes into her garbage disposal and let it grind them into the sewer. She dropped the rest of the mail into the trash can, picked up her suitcase, set the alarm, and stepped out onto the porch.

As she locked her door and took a last look at her house, she thought about the old days, when Senecas went out regularly to raid the tribes to the south and west in parties as small as three or four warriors. After a fight they would run back along the trail through the great forest, sometimes not stopping for two days and nights.

When they made it back into Nundawaonoga, they would approach their village and give a special shout to tell the people what it was they would be celebrating. But sometimes a lone warrior would come up the trail, the only one of his party who had survived. He would rest and eat and mourn his friends for a time. Then he would quietly collect his weapons and extra moccasins and provisions and walk back down the trail alone. He would travel all the way back to the country of the enemy, even if it were a thousand miles west to the Mississippi or a thousand miles south beyond the Cumberland. He would stay alone in the forest and observe the enemy until he was certain he knew their habits and defenses and vulnerabilities. He would watch and wait until he had perceived that they no longer thought about an Iroquois attack, even if it took a year or two.

It occurred to Jane as she got into her car that Rhonda's present had come at a good time. If she stopped to deposit it on her way to the airport, it would buy a lot of spare moccasins.

11

Jane took a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth under the name Wendy Simmons, and another to San Diego as Diane Newberry. Then she took a five-minute shuttle bus ride from the airport to the row of tall hotels on Harbor Island. She stepped off at the TraveLodge, but walked down Harbor Island Drive to the Sheraton East because it seemed to be the biggest.

She checked in with a credit card in the name of Katherine Webster. She had gotten the card in the same way she had obtained the five others she had brought with her: she had grown them. Now and then she would take a trip to a different part of the country just to grow new credit cards. She would start with a forged birth certificate, use it to admit her to the test for a genuine driver's license, and then would go to a bank and start a checking account in a new name. If the amount she deposited was large enough, sometimes the bank would offer her a credit card that day. If it did not, she would use the checks to pay for mail orders. Within a few months, the new woman would begin receiving unsolicited mail. Among the catalogs and requests for contributions would inevitably be offers for credit cards. She used the credit cards carefully, a new one in each town, so that when Katherine Webster disappeared, she didn't reappear in the next city. Instead, a woman named Denise Hollinger took her place.

The banks that issued their own credit cards were happy to pay themselves automatically each month from her checking account, so all she had to do was to keep the balance high. For the others, she simply filled in the change-of-address section on the third bill and had future ones sent to a fictitious business manager named Stewart Hoffstedder, C.P.A. One of Mr. Hoffstedder's services was paying clients' bills. He had a post office box in New York City to receive the bills, and he issued neatly typed checks from a large New York bank to pay them. The imaginary Mr. Hoffstedder was so reliable that each year most of his clients would have their credit limits increased.

Sometimes Jane would grow a different kind of credit card. It would begin with her opening a joint checking account for herself and her husband, who was so busy that she had to bring the signature card home and have him sign it and return it by mail. Months passed while the husband paid for his mail-order goods with the checks and got his credit card. Then Jane would close the joint checking account and make sure the imaginary Mr. Hoffstedder got her imaginary husband's bills. She could use the man's card to pay expenses if she made reservations over the telephone, and when traveling let people guess whether she was wife, lover, or colleague without having to give herself any name at all.

After Katherine Webster checked into the hotel, she bought the San Diego newspapers, went directly to her room, ordered dinner from room service, and made the preparations she had planned during her long trip across the country. First she ordered a rental car by telephone, the keys to be delivered to her room for Mr. William Dunlavey, and the car left in the hotel parking lot. She spent a few minutes reading the society page of the San Diego Union, then set her alarm for six a.m. and went to bed.

When the alarm woke her, she checked the name she had found on the society page again: Marcy Hungerford of Del Mar, co-chair of the Women of St. James Fund-raising Committee and honorary chair of this year's ball, was headed for the family's eastern digs in Palm Beach. That was the best name in the columns. Honorary chairs were either famous or had money, and Marcy Hunger-ford wasn't famous. She was doing fund-raising and was active in that world, so she might have one telephone number that people could find. Jane checked the telephone book and found it listed, with the address beside it.

Jane took the stairs to the swimming pool, went out the garden gate, and skirted the building to the parking lot. She had no difficulty finding the rented car. She had told the woman on the telephone that Mr. Dunlavey liked big black cars, and this one had a small sticker on the left rear bumper that had the right rental company's name on it. She walked farther along the line of cars until she found one with an Auto Club sticker, peeled it off with a nail file, and stuck it over the one on her car's bumper.

She drove out to the Golden State Freeway, headed north to the first Del Mar exit, went over a high mesa and came down onto the road along the ocean. The houses on the west side of the street were big and far apart, and she could see vast stretches of flat beach on the other side of them. When she found Marcy Hungerford's house she was satisfied. It was two stories with a long, sloped roof and stilts on the beach side, a four-car garage under it on the street side, and about eight thousand square feet in the middle. She drove past it at thirty miles an hour and studied the exterior. The establishment was too complicated for Marcy Hungerford to have given all of the servants the week off or taken them with her, but they would cause no trouble. By the time they realized something was wrong, it wouldn't be wrong anymore.

At nine a.m. Jane found a little shop in San Diego that rented post office boxes, and she took a key and paid for a month in the name of Marcy Hungerford. Then she drove back to Del Mar and found the post office. She filled out a change-of-address form and had all of Marcy Hungerford's mail sent to her new post office box beginning the next day.

At ten a.m. Jane went to a pay telephone in a quiet corner of Balboa Park and dialed a Los Angeles number. As she put the coins into the slot, she checked her watch again.

"Hoffen-Bayne," said the receptionist.

"I'd like to speak to a representative for new customers, please," said Jane.

"Your name?"

"Marcy Hungerford."

"Please hold and I'll transfer you to Mr. Hanlon." There were a few clicks and a man said "Ronald Hanlon" in a quiet, calm voice. "What can I do for you, Ms. Hungerford?"

Jane said, "It's Mrs. I'm considering new financial management and I'm shopping around. I'd like to know more about Hoffen-Bayne."

Mr. Hanlon said, "Well, we've been in business in Los Angeles since 1948 and handle a full range of financial affairs for a great many people. We offer investment specialists, tax specialists, accountants, property-management teams, and so on. If you could give me a rough idea of your needs, I think I could give you a more focused picture."

That was the money question. "Well," said Jane, "my husband's affairs are managed by Chase Manhattan." This established that she wasn't somebody who had just dialed the wrong number; banks seldom managed anything less than a few million. "But I have some assets I like to hold separately." She kept her voice cheerful and opaque. Maybe there were problems with the marriage, and maybe not. If there were, California was a community-property state, and this meant she might be talking about some money the husband didn't know about and half of what he had at Chase Manhattan. She was giving Mr. Hanlon a small taste. "I'm interested in having somebody I trust manage my money conservatively so that it pays a reliable income each year."

"Conservative" meant she didn't need to gamble to make more, and the income was another hint of divorce.

Hanlon rose to the bait slowly and smoothly. "Yes, that sounds wise," he said. "That would mean setting you up with our accountants and tax people, and a financial planner."

"And property management," she added. "Do you have arrangements to handle foreign real estate? France and Italy?"

That did it. He wasn't talking to a lady with a couple hundred thousand in passbooks. "I think the best thing to do would be to make an appointment and we can talk it all over in detail with advisers from some of our departments. When are you free?"

"That's a problem," said Jane. "I live in San Diego and I'm leaving for Palm Beach today." She checked her watch again to see how long she had been talking.

"When will you be back?"

"I'm not sure. It could be a month. I'm asking for information from several companies. I'm going to look it over while I'm away, and when I'm back I'll have the choices narrowed down." The element of competition would help. "I'd like to have you send me whatever material you've got that will help me know whether your company is the right one for me." She decided Marcy Hungerford had no reason to be vague, and making her naive wouldn't help. "I'd like to know the backgrounds and qualifications of your investment people, financial planners, and so on."

Mr. Hanlon seemed a little surprised. Maybe she had gone too far. "I think we have some things we can send you. What's your address?"

"It's 99.233 The Shores, Del Mar, California 91.182." She glanced at her watch again. She had only twenty seconds left before the operator came on and asked for more quarters.

"Phone?"

Jane gave him Marcy Hungerford's telephone number. The answering machine or the maids would tell him she was out of town.

"Got it," he said. "I'll get that right out to you."

Ten seconds left. "Fine. I'll watch for it. And thanks." She hung up and walked across the lush green grass of the park in the direction of the zoo. She felt satisfied. Hanlon would make a serious attempt to impress her with Hoffen-Bayne's operation. The main issue would be whether he had caught the hint about backgrounds. Whoever had gone after Timmy Phillips had been in the company seven years ago and was still there.

The next morning when Jane went for her run on the beach, she considered the ways of taking the company apart so that she could see what was inside. If Hoffen-Bayne had been around since 1948, then they had almost certainly been sued. She could drive up to U.C.L.A. and hire a student to research the county records for the cases. The least that would give her were the names of the people at Hoffen-Bayne who had been served with subpoenas, and almost any lawsuit would provide a lot more.

But that would mean dreaming up another story to tell the law student that would make him feel comfortable about doing it but not comfortable enough to talk about it freely. It would also place the student in a public building where someone might notice that he had an unusual curiosity about one particular company. He might be helping somebody build a case. That sort of information might easily get back to Hoffen-Bayne. Certainly when Dennis Morgan had been doing his research, somebody at Hoffen-Bayne had learned about it. She decided not to bring anybody else into this mess.

At four o'clock Jane drove back along the Golden State Freeway to Del Mar and stopped at the little store where her post office box was. She saw through the little window that Marcy Hungerford had lots of mail. She sorted through the letters and bills and catalogs until she found the packet from Hoffen-Bayne, then drove to the post office and filled out another change-of-address form so that Marcy Hungerford's mail would start being delivered to her house again.

She considered scrawling "misdelivered" on today's mail and slipping it into the nearest mailbox, but she decided that the safest way was to ensure that there was no interruption in service. She waited until eight p.m. when it was dark along the beach, walked past Marcy Hunger-ford's house, left the mail in her box, returned to her car, and drove on.

At the hotel Jane opened the packet from Hoffen-Bayne and began to study it. She could see immediately that Mr. Hanlon had not missed any of her hints and that he had been convinced that her account was worth having. There was a printed brochure that included little descriptions of the various arms of the company and a cover with a touched-up photograph of their building on Wilshire Boulevard. Inside were graphs and tables purporting to be proof of high returns for their clients, mixed with a text that promised personal service. Mr. Hanlon had also dictated a cover letter to Mrs. Hunger-ford, and stapled to it was a little stack of computer-printed resumes.

The next morning Jane checked out of the hotel and drove up the freeway toward Los Angeles. The coast of California had always made her uneasy. The air was lukewarm, calm and quiet, as though it were not outdoors. On the left side of the road the blue-gray ocean rose and fell in long, lazy swells, looking almost gelatinous where the beds of brown kelp spread like a net on the surface. The low, dry, gentle yellow hills to the east always made her sleepy because they were difficult for the eye to define, not clear enough to tell whether they were small and near or large and far. Behind them she could see the abrupt rising of the dark, jagged mountains like a painted wall.

The land along this road always looked deserted. She had to remind herself that it had been the most densely populated part of the continent when the Spanish missionaries and their soldiers arrived. The Indians here had not been at war for centuries the way the Iroquois had, so they weren't fighters. The first Europeans they saw herded them into concentration camps where they forced them to build stone missions and work the fields, and then locked them up at night in barracks, the men in one and the women in another. They were chained, whipped, starved, tortured, and executed for infractions against the priests' authority, and they died from diseases that flourished in their cramped quarters until they were virtually exterminated.

California was a sad place, a piece of property that had begun as a slaughterhouse and could never be made completely clean. It was perpetually being remodeled by new tenants who could not explain why they were doing it. They bulldozed the gentle hills into flat tables where they built hideous, crowded developments that encrusted the high places like beehives. They gouged and scraped away at the surface and covered it with cement so that every town looked like every other town, and the rebuilding was so constant that every block of buildings in the state seemed to be between ten and twenty years old and just beginning to show signs that it needed to be bulldozed and rebuilt again.

Jane drove along the Golden State Freeway for three hours until she came to the Hollywood Freeway, took the exit at Vermont, then swung south again for the few blocks to Wilshire Boulevard, where the tall buildings that sheltered corporations instead of people rose abruptly out of the pavement.

The things that had been happening had a very impersonal quality to them: a respected corporation had managed an account, and it had decided it was time to file a petition to declare a client deceased. But somewhere behind the opaque and anonymous veneer there was a person. Money was stolen by human beings. Sometimes thieves worked together and sometimes separately, but most successful embezzlers worked alone. It was time to find the man.

12

In the late afternoon, Jane began to watch the Hoffen-Bayne building from the window of a restaurant across Wilshire Boulevard. It was small for this part of Los Angeles, only five floors. The bottom floor was rented out to a travel agency and a coffee shop, and the second floor was a reception area for Hoffen-Bayne. After an hour she moved to the upper tier of the parking ramp for the tall insurance building beside Hoffen-Bayne and studied the upper windows to determine which ones were small, functional offices for accountants, brokers, and consultants, and which ones were big pools for bookkeepers and secretaries. She paid special attention to the desirable corner offices.

At six p.m. when she saw people inside taking purses out of desk drawers and turning off computers for the day, she strolled along the quiet side street near the driveway and studied the men and women who came out and got into cars in the reserved-for-employees spaces in the parking lot. She wrote down the license numbers and makes and models, and matched the cars to the people she had seen in the windows.

Tall-Thin-and-Bald wanted to be noticed. He drove a gray Mercedes 320 two-door convertible that retailed for about eighty-five thousand and was too sporty for him. Woman-with-Eye-Trouble, who had the habit of putting on her sunglasses while she was still inside the office, drove a racing-green Jaguar XJ6, which was only about fifty thousand, but she was still a possibility, as was Old Weight-Lifter, who drove a Lexus LS 400, which sold for even less. Eye-Trouble might have chosen her car because it was pretty, and Weight-Lifter might be the sort of person who bought whatever the car magazines told him to.

Jane made four grids on a sheet of paper to represent the windows of the upper floors, labeled them "N,"

"S,"

"E," and "W," and made notes on each window about who had appeared in it and what went on when he did. A supervisor might pop in on a subordinate, might even deliver sheets of paper to the subordinate's desk, but when several people met in an office, it was usually the office of the ranking person.

An hour later, after the upper windows were dim but there were still people in the coffee shop and travel agency, she went into the lobby, took the elevator to the second floor, and stood outside the locked glass doors to the Hoffen-Bayne reception area. She was looking for a directory of offices posted on the wall, but there was none. The reception area was all smooth veneer and expensive furniture that made it look like a doctor's waiting room. There was no easy way into the complex, and there was a small sticker on the glass door that said "Protected By Intercontinental Security," and under that, "Armed Response." She didn't particularly want to bet that she could fool the sort of security system a company that handled money for a lot of rich people might consider a good investment, so she turned and went back to the elevator and took it to the basement of the building, on the level with the parking lot, and found a door with a no admittance sign. The door had a knob with a keyhole to lock it and it wasn't wired, so she had little trouble slipping her William Dunlavey MasterCard between the knob and the jamb and pushing the catch in. Inside the room were circuit breaker boxes and a telephone junction box. She opened it and studied the chart pasted inside the door. It gave the extensions of the various offices in the building, so she copied them and returned to her car.

She checked into a hotel two miles down Wilshire Boulevard and compared her office chart with the telephone extensions. Some of the offices must be the big ones she had seen through the third-floor windows, where people sat at computers and worked telephones in a pool. Nobody important had a single number with fifteen extensions. The offices she wanted were on the fourth and fifth floors, so she concentrated on them. She dialed each number and listened to a computerized voice-mail system telling her what part of the company it belonged to - investment, property management, billing, accounting - but not the name of the person. She used the information to eliminate more of the offices. The person who had been robbing the trust fund would have to be in a position to exert power over where the money was placed and how the company kept track of it. He didn't share an office, or send out bills for services, or manage real estate, or answer other people's phones. She consulted the resumes that Mr. Hanlon had sent her, and filled out more of the chart before she went to sleep.

The next morning Jane went to the Hollywood lot of the car-rental agency, told them Mr. Dunlavey didn't like the car he had rented in San Diego and that he had instructed her to exchange it for a different model. She drove out with a white Toyota Camry and sat on the side street watching the west side of the building while the Hoffen-Bayne executives arrived for work.

She watched and worked on her chart of the company for three more days. Each morning she turned in the car she had rented the day before and went to a different agency to rent a new one under a new name. Each evening she would choose one of the likely executives and follow him home when he left the office. Each night she slept in a different hotel in a different part of the city.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Jane was reasonably sure that the man she was after was Blond Napoleon. His name was Alan Turner, and he had the office on the southeast corner of the fifth floor. This afforded him the best view of the city and made people walk a long way to get to him, past secretaries and intermediaries. The car he drove, a dark blue BMW 7401, cost about sixty thousand dollars. It was not the most expensive, but like only four others in the lot, it had a license plate holder from Green Import Auto, a leasing company in Beverly Hills. To Jane this meant that he was one of only five people who were entitled to company cars.

Whoever had been robbing Timmy would have needed to be high enough in the hierarchy seven years ago to make decisions about the Phillips trust's portfolio without much fear of second-guessing. He would also need to remain in that position long enough to see the cover-up through to the end. Of the five people who drove company cars and occupied the right sort of offices in the building, two had joined the firm within the past four years. Of the others, one was a tax attorney and another the head of the Property Management Division. There was nothing in either man's resume to suggest that he had ever served in another capacity or had the background to handle a trust fund. The only one who had been with the company long enough and who had a specialty that sounded promising was Alan Turner, head of the Investment and Financial Planning Division.

Jane decided to test-drive a car from Green Import Auto. She selected a gray Mercedes with a telephone in it and drove directly to the side street below the southeast corner of the Hoffen-Bayne building. She waited until three o'clock, when even the important people were back from lunch meetings and the sun was on the west side of the building so that Turner's blinds would be open. She turned the corner off Wilshire and cruised toward the building, dialed the number of Mr. Hanlon, the salesman, and set the receiver in the cradle so she could use the speaker and keep her hands free.

"Hanlon." he said. She knew he was at his desk on the other side of the building.

"This is Marcy Hungerford. We spoke a few days ago, and you sent me some material." She pulled over and parked on the quiet, tree-lined street.

"Yes. Did you have a chance to look it over?"

"I did, and I think yours is one of the firms I should talk to." She wanted to make it clear there was no commitment. She was not in the bag yet.

"Good," he said. "I've been thinking about what you've told me, and I think I'd like to get you together with one of our partners for a talk." Salesmen didn't make decisions like that; partners did. He had told his boss about her call. "Are you back in Del Mar?"

"No," she said. "I won't be back for another week. I just thought I should tell you I got your information and am still considering it."

Hanlon went on cheerfully as though he hadn't heard her. "The man I'd like you to meet is very experienced. He's been with the company for twelve years, and he's knowledgeable about all aspects of personal management."

Jane listened carefully. While she had been investigating them, they had been investigating Marcy Hungerford. The name had rung some bell or other. She had chosen well, but from here on she had to be cautious. They knew more about Marcy Hungerford than she did. She decided to stop flirting. It would do her no good to convince people Marcy Hungerford was an idiot. "Fine," she said. "I'll be happy to drive up there and meet him as soon as I'm back in California. Can you connect me with whoever keeps his calendar?"

"Let me see if he's free to talk to you himself right now. I know he'd like to if he can."

"Even better."

She heard a cascade of annoying music pour out of the speaker, and watched the man in the corner window. She saw him pick up the receiver. He talked to Hanlon for a few seconds, reached across his desk, picked up a file, opened it, and then pushed a button on his telephone.

"Hello, Mrs. Hungerford," he said. "My name is Alan Turner."

"Hello," she said. She started the car and pulled away from the curb.

"I understand you're considering us to manage your assets."

"Yes, I am," she said. She drove up the street away from the building, turned right at the corner, and kept going west. "I'm considering several companies. I'd like to find someone who will take responsibility for handling things."

"Well, that's what we're in business to offer," said Turner. "We have experts on the staff in every aspect of financial management, and - "

"I know," she interrupted. "Mr. Hanlon said the same thing. But let me explain. I want to know who would be the one person coordinating everything. I don't want to have to call thirty people every time I have a question."

"I understand perfectly. With your approval, I would manage your account myself. I don't do much of that anymore, but I still have a few."

"That's very kind."

"Here's what I propose. I'll sit down with you when you return from Palm Beach. We'll take an inventory of your current assets. I'll examine what you have and come back with a hypothetical portfolio that's sufficiently diversified to ensure you a good income. We can arrange to have it continue in perpetuity for your heirs, if you wish."

Jane had to be sure. "That sounds like a trust fund."

"That's what it is," Turner said. "In my experience, people who are busy - as I know you are, with your charity work and so on - don't want to waste their lives micromanaging their wealth. Over the years I've helped quite a few of our clients establish trusts, and so far we've done very well for them."

Now she was sure that they'd had Marcy Hungerford investigated. She had never mentioned charities. "What do you charge for all this?"

"Our commission is five percent of income," he said. "Of course there would be incidental fees from time to time for brokers, front-end loads on certain purchases, and so on, but you're familiar with those and they don't go to Hoffen-Bayne. They might be quite high in the first year while we're developing a group of haphazard assets into a coordinated portfolio, and there will be legal fees if you choose to establish a trust, but the costs taper off as the years go by."

"That all sounds good," said Jane. "What you've said in the last few minutes has done a lot to convince me that you're the one I'm looking for. I'll call you as soon as I'm back home."

"Wonderful," he said. "I look forward to meeting you."

"Goodbye," she said, and tapped the button to disconnect, then drove the Mercedes back to the dealer's lot. She looked at a few more models, then let the salesman know that she hadn't found anything she was really comfortable in. She got back into her rented Honda Acura and drove over the pass to the Hilton on the hill above Universal City and took another room. It was a comfortable hotel, and she didn't mind staying there a few days while she did the paperwork. After she was settled and had dinner she left instructions with the concierge to have both the morning and evening editions of the LA. Times delivered to her room each day, and went for a walk.

She strolled around the complex of buildings at the top of the hill and across the parking lots to a row of pay telephones outside the gate of the Universal Studios tour. She reviewed what she was about to do. There was no way anyone could trace to Jane Whitefield a call made from a public telephone at a place that had millions of visitors a year. It was safe. With the three-hour time difference, she would catch him just after he had come home. She felt a little uncomfortable. She had told herself that she was doing it now because she was afraid of waking him up early in the morning, and there was no point in calling while he was out. But she also knew that if he had decided to do something other than come home from work, this would be the time a person might call and find out. She had no choice but to behave the way she would if she were trying to check up on him, and she hated that. She pushed a quarter into the slot and dialed Carey McKinnon's number. The operator came on to tell her how many more quarters were needed, and she dropped them in.

"Hello?" he said. His voice seemed a little thin, as though he were winded.

"Hi, Carey." she said. "It's me."

"Well, hello," he said. He sounded delighted, and she felt glad. "Are you back from your trip?" When she noticed he had not yet said "Jane," it occurred to her that there might be a reason.

"No, I won't be able to get through this job right away. I just felt like hearing your voice."

She wanted him to say "And I felt like hearing yours," maybe because if he said it she would know there wasn't another woman in the room with him. The thought made her feel contempt for herself. He said, "My sentiments exactly. I must have just missed you the other day. When I came in there was your message on my machine. When will you be back in town?"

"I'm not sure."

She heard the beep-beep-beep of his pager in the background. "Oh, shit," he said. "That's my pager."

"I heard it."

"Look, give me the number where you're staying, and I'll call you when I'm back from the hospital."

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I'm out and I don't have it with me. I'm never there anyway. I'll have to try you again in a day or so, when things cool down."

"Do that."

"Goodbye."

"For now," he said.

As Jane stepped away from the bank of telephones she had to dodge a group of Asian teenagers who swept past laughing and talking. She wished that she didn't have the kind of mind that always suspected deception. She reminded herself that it was ridiculous even to think of Carey that way - as though she had a right to expect that he would never see another woman. He had offered, and she had not agreed, had only said "We'll talk about it." There was no proof that a woman was in the room with him, anyway. She was just inventing a way to make herself miserable. As she walked back to her hotel, she wished that she hadn't known that when a pager was clicked off and then on again, it beeped to signal that it was working.

She spent the late evening trying to think about Alan Turner, but found her attention slipping back to Carey McKinnon. She was angry at herself for being suspicious, and angry at him for being the sort of person who made her suspicious. He was probably innocent, and if she cared about him enough to be this uncomfortable, what was she doing thousands of miles away from him, forming agonizingly clear pictures of what he might be doing with some other woman? She should be there. She was surprised by the strength of her urge to be with him. She wondered why it was stronger now than it had been yesterday. Was it because his voice had triggered some unconscious longing for him - maybe love, but maybe just some crude sexual reflex, the equivalent of Pavlov's dogs' hearing a bell and salivating - or because it had set off an even cruder instinct to gallop back and defend her mate from the competition? Twice she was tempted to call the hospital to see if he was on duty but fought down the impulse.

When the hour was late enough so that she could not imagine a good excuse to call any of Carey's numbers, Jane managed to remind herself of what she was doing in Los Angeles. She had decided it was necessary to find out who had been trying to kill Timmy Phillips. If that was true a week ago, then it was still true. Turner was the prime suspect, and anything she could figure out about him might save a little boy's life. Thinking about anything else was a waste of time. When she had reached this conclusion, she promptly fell asleep.

As the morning sun came up over the next ridge in a blinding glare, Jane laid all of her information about Alan Turner on the table of her room and studied it. She had Turner's name, the license number of the car he drove, the address of his office, and the address of his house on Hill-crest in Beverly Hills where she had followed him two nights ago. The resume that Hanlon had sent to Marcy Hungerford said that Turner was a 1969 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and that he had an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California.

She forged a letter from Turner to the U.S.C. registrar's office requesting that a transcript of his graduate work be sent to the personnel manager of Furnace Financial, Ltd. in Chicago. The Furnace corporation was a business she had founded some years before. It had a genuine legal existence, but the ownership was cloudy and the physical plant consisted of a post office box that she had rented in a small Chicago mini-mall, with the arrangement that everything that arrived was to be sent unopened to another post office box in Buffalo. Then she called the owner of the little shop where the box was and asked him to call the Hilton when anything with a U.S.C. return address arrived.

As soon as she hung up she dialed Carey's number. When his machine clicked on, she tried to think of the right kind of message. She knew he wasn't working now, or she thought he wasn't. It occurred to her that if there had been a woman with him last night, she would still be there. She simply said, "It's Jane Whitefield." She paused to let him change his mind or go to an extension where the woman wouldn't hear. "I guess I missed you again." As she hung up, she closed her eyes and felt a headache building. All right, she thought. I said I would call him, and I've called him. Enough. I have work to do.

She drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Glendale and filled out a form. On a line near the top, she provided the license number of the BMW Turner drove, and in the big space at the bottom she said he had scraped her car in a parking lot. The DMV answered with the name and address of the owner, which was only the leasing company Green Import Auto, but it also listed the lessee, Alan Turner, and included his driver's license number.

After only two days, the U.S.C. transcript arrived in Chicago. Jane asked the owner of the shop to open it and read it to her. From this she got Turner's Social Security number. With the driver's license number and Social Security number, she was able to have Furnace Financial request a credit report on Alan Turner.

The credit report told her he was paying a mortgage of one million, eight hundred thousand dollars to Southland Mortgage. This must be the house on Hillcrest. He had several credit cards and paid the balances each month to avoid interest charges. He had checked the box on his mortgage papers that said "Divorced," which made things simpler: he didn't have a wife with a second income. But there was also a surprise. Turner was repaying another loan of six hundred thousand dollars to the Bank of Northern California. It was a mortgage on a second home.

She looked in the telephone book for the Bank of Northern California and found listings for several branches, as well as a Bank of Northern California Mortgage Services in San Bernardino. She called the mortgage office and asked for the credit department. Anybody who loaned money must have a credit department. In a second a woman answered.

"This is Monica Butler at the San Francisco office," Jane said. "I've got a loan application here from a customer who lists a mortgage from us already for six hundred thousand. I'd like to know what the property is."

The young woman said, "The name?"

"Alan R. Turner. Need his Social Security number?"

"No," the woman said. She was typing the name into a computer. If the person on the other end of the line thought you were from the same company, none of the privacy rules applied. She was merely transferring information from one internal file drawer to another.

"The property is at 1522 Morales Prospect, in Monterey."

"Do you have a zip?"

"Sure. It's 93.940."

"Thanks." Jane hung up and wrote down the address. The picture she was forming of Turner was coherent and consistent: he made a lot of money and he was cautious and premeditated. He saved some by driving a leased company car. He used his high income and stability to take out big deductible mortgages on two of the most desirable addresses in the Western Hemisphere, so he probably didn't pay much in taxes. But those were relatively modest prices for their neighborhoods, so he wasn't taking big risks. He wasn't in love with debt, because his credit cards had never carried a balance to the next month. He didn't look like an embezzler. If he had been quietly robbing the Phillips trust fund for years, he must have had the foresight to know that some day a stranger might take a look at his assets. Either he was extremely sophisticated or she had chosen the wrong man at Hoffen-Bayne.

The following morning Jane rose before dawn, walked to the door of her room, picked up her copy of the Los Angeles Times, and unfolded it to reveal the second page, where the summary of major articles was printed. On the lower left side was a box that said, "Judge Seizes Hoffen-Bayne Records (See E-l, Business)." She had run out of time.

13

Jane had checked out of the Hilton and had her car on Laurel Canyon Boulevard by five a.m. She hadn't dared stop to read the whole article, but she had scanned it on the walk down the hallway to the desk, and took a longer look while she was waiting for the valet to bring her car to the entrance. The judge had been devious. He had issued requests for specific documents, which Hoffen-Bayne had dutifully provided a week ago. Probably he had done this to give them the impression that he was just going to take a cursory glance at a couple of carefully cooked annual reports. If he hadn't asked for something, they would have suspected trouble. Then, last night after business hours, he had issued a warrant and sent cops with a truck down to Wilshire Boulevard. She moved her eyes down the column of print, but could see no names.

She decided to avoid Wilshire Boulevard. The office would already have reporters and cops and, as soon as the clients got up and read their papers, enough panicky investors to keep them all busy. She needed to go to Beverly Hills.

She reached Sunset and turned right. Even at five in the morning the street was busy, but the cars were moving quickly. She made her way in the intervals between cars, the skyline in front of her dominated by enormous lighted billboards with pictures of pairs of giant actors looking stern and fearless, and actresses with moist lips the size of watermelon slices.

The judge had done his work. Timmy was, at least for the moment, as safe as anyone could make him. He had already told the authorities everything he knew. The judge had taken away the incentive for anybody at Hoffen-Bayne to kill him. It would be like killing a witness who already had testified. There was only Turner to occupy her mind now. She had calculated that she would have a few more days to study him, and her feeling of frustration surprised her. It wasn't that she had any real hope that she could do any more than the authorities could to get Timmy's money back. She wasn't even sure how she felt about the money. She had to fight the conviction she had been raised with that accumulating wealth was a contemptible activity.

This wasn't something that her parents had invented. It was an old attitude that had never gone away. In the old days no family ever built up disproportionate surpluses of food. Whatever they had was shared with scrupulous equality. Each longhouse was owned by the women of the clan, and each woman had a right to live there and raise her children and sleep with her husband when he was around. A man was a warrior and hunter, out in the forest for most of the year, and he seldom owned anything he couldn't carry. If he wanted respect, he would bring back lots of meat and plunder for the village. A person's status was a measure of how good he was at obtaining things to share, not how much he was able to take and hoard. After the white people arrived they advised each other that the way to find the leaders of the Iroquois was to look for the men in rags.

Whatever would happen to Timmy's money would happen whether she was here or in Deganawida. It was Turner she was interested in. She had to know if his careful accounting and his conservative, respectable manner of living had all been part of a scheme to disguise a greed strong enough to make him kill people.

She turned down Hillcrest and cruised slowly past Turner's house. She had to be alert and careful this morning. The richest parts of Los Angeles were guarded with a strange, subtle vigilance. There were small, tasteful signs with the trademarks of security patrols on every lawn, small, unobtrusive surveillance cameras on the eaves of the big houses, and lots of invisible servants watching. The sound of a helicopter overhead probably meant a cop was looking down with night-vision binoculars. An unfamiliar car parked in the wrong place, a stranger walking down the street, and particularly anybody doing anything before sunrise, were ominous signs to be remembered and reported.

She drove across Sunset onto the slope on the north side, parked her car on a side street next to a medical building in a space that was shielded from the intersection by a big tree and a Land Rover, and ducked down in the seat while she changed into her sweat suit and sneakers. She pulled her hair behind her head, slipped a rubber band around it to make a ponytail, and began to jog slowly down onto the flats.

The sidewalks here were wide and even, and the street was lined by two long rows of coconut palms. The air was warm for early morning, and she could hear traffic above and below her but saw no cars driving down Hillcrest yet. She ran slowly and easily, less to keep from pulling a muscle than to keep anyone who saw her from looking twice. A woman trotting painfully along a residential street at dawn was just another local girl in the dull business of keeping her waist and thighs attractive; a woman loping along like a track star was something else.

Jane took her time and looked closely at the houses. Few of them showed any interior lights at this hour. The garages were all hidden far back behind the houses at the ends of long driveways, and nobody left his car parked on the street. When she approached Turner's block she slowed to a walk, as though she were catching her breath.

The house had lights on behind the drawn blinds. She watched the windows for a few seconds and glanced at her watch. It was five-thirty now. When she looked up, one of the lights had gone off. She began to jog again. If he was turning lights off, he must be coming out. She passed the house, keeping her head forward but moving her eyes to the left to scan the house and the yard. As she came abreast of the house, another light went off.

She saw the newspaper lying on the front porch. As she trotted on down the street she wondered about it. By now there was no chance he didn't know that his office had been raided. If he hadn't been behind his desk at Hoffen-Bayne when the cops came in and started padlocking filing cabinets, then somebody certainly would have told him. Reporters would call him. Was it possible that he wouldn't bother to read what the newspapers said about it the next morning?

She stopped running again at the end of the block and looked back at the house as she crossed the street. Two lights were still on. She started moving again, this time down the street toward Wilshire, glancing back now and then to see if anything had changed. Maybe he had gone out in the night to buy the paper as soon as it had come off the presses. No, that didn't make sense; the newsstands carried only the early edition that had been printed the previous afternoon, before the raid.

She turned and ran toward her car. The sun would be up before long, and there would be people out even in this quiet neighborhood. Inside her car she quickly changed into a pair of jeans and a blouse.

She drove back down onto Hillcrest. As she passed the house, the other two lights went off. She checked her watch. It was exactly six o'clock. She was positive now that the lights were on timers. The ones they sold in hardware stores had crude dials on them, so it was difficult to set them for any time but an hour or half hour. She had always used them in her house when she went on a trip, and had solved the problem by setting the present time on them not to correspond with what her watch said. Turner wasn't as good at this as she was. He might be a thief, but he had not learned to think like one. He had not even timed them to be sure they didn't click off before the sun was up.

Still, it was conceivable that he had set them but hadn't left yet. She stopped at a small convenience store with an iron grate across the door, walked to the pay telephone, and dialed his number. There was no answer and no machine to record a message. She hung up after ten rings and got back into the car. As she started it, she checked the rearview mirror and saw a car coming that had lights on the roof like a police cruiser. It had blue and yellow stripes, and the shield on the door said "Intercontinental Security." She pulled out and followed it at a distance. The car swung up and down a couple of side streets above Sunset, and then came down to Hillcrest, gliding along, the driver glancing casually at all of the houses with blue-and-yellow security signs. He pulled up at the curb in front of Turner's house and got out. He was young and broad-shouldered and wore a tight uniform like a cop's with a gun belt that made him hold his arms out a little from his sides as though he were carrying two buckets. He opened the gate, ran a flashlight over a couple of side windows, and picked up the newspaper. Turner was gone.

Jane drove on, turned left on Sunset Boulevard and continued west to the entrance for the 405 freeway near U.C.L.A. This was the way Turner would have come after he had heard the news. He could have turned south toward the airport, but she was sure he had not done so. He was a conservative, judicious man. He had taken the second ramp, the one that got him safely out of town but didn't incur the risk of appearing to flee the country. He had gone north to his house in Monterey.

14

Jane came up over the hill that separated the city from the San Fernando Valley and edged to the right onto the Ventura Freeway, then stayed on it as far as Santa Barbara before she stopped for breakfast in the restaurant of a sprawling hotel complex along the beach. By the time the food was cooked she was too impatient to eat, so she had the waitress put it in a Styrofoam container and took it with her in the car. North of the city at the Santa Barbara airport, she turned in the rented car and took a commuter flight to San Francisco, then rented another car there to drive down the coast to Monterey. It was early evening when she checked into a small motel a mile inland from the ocean, showered, and wrapped herself in a towel.

She sat on the bed and dialed Carey McKinnon's number, then hung up before it rang. She had been waiting, listening to the static while the telephone company's computers threw switches to move the call across the country to Carey's house, and she sensed in herself a feeling that was not right. She had not been calling because she wanted to give him a message of love before he dropped off to sleep, or even to soothe herself with the sound of his voice. These were the only legitimate reasons for calling Carey tonight. If the eagerness she had been feeling was morbid curiosity or the grim satisfaction of confirming a suspicion, then the only decent thing to do was leave him alone.

She opened her suitcase and looked at her clothes. She decided that evening in Monterey was an occasion for basic black. She put on a black turtleneck sweater, a matching jacket, and black pants, then tied her hair back. The accessories were what would make such an outfit. She laid out the few items of female paraphernalia she had brought and made her selections. She fastened her hair with a black ring and a thin five-inch-long peg that had a T-shaped handle at one end and was sharpened at the other. Before she put the perfume bottle into her purse she opened it and sniffed cautiously. It had a soft wildflower smell with a little touch of damp earth that tickled the nose a little. It was a mixture of mayapple and water hemlock roots that she had mashed and strained into a clear concentrate. Eating the roots was the customary Iroquois method of suicide.

For her feet she chose a pair of twenty-dollar black leather Keds. They had gum soles like sneakers, but the soles had no distinctive lines or patterns. They were merely plain, flat, and rough, a texture that could make it hard to distinguish the prints they left as a human track, let alone identify them as the prints of a particular woman's shoe.

She left the lights on in her motel room in case she returned, but put her suitcase in the trunk of the car in case she didn't. She made her preparations carefully because she could not have said what she was preparing for. As she started the car and pulled out of the lot, she began to feel uneasy. If she had seen another woman adorning her hair with a spike designed to be driven into a person's chest, or popping a vial of hemlock extract into her purse, she would have said that the woman was on her way to kill someone. People who brought along weapons without knowing why had a tendency to find out why after they arrived.

She ran a quick inventory of the thoughts she had about Turner. She suspected that he was a man who stole from children, but she had not discovered any evidence that he had ordered the deaths of Timmy and his parents, or told anybody to kill Mona and Dennis rather than let them into the courtroom. She wanted to watch him and study him. He didn't seem to be a physical threat, and she was not suddenly feeling the urge to go and supply herself with a gun; that would have been a bad sign. The poison proved nothing. Over the years she had promised clients that she would die rather than reveal where she had taken them. To say this without keeping within reach the means to accomplish it would have made it a lie.

Jane drove down Morales Prospect past the address and took a long, careful look. The house was set far back on the deep lot, partly concealed by a few tall pine trees that had been left standing when the house was built. The second floor was fake Tudor, with a high, steep mansard roof that didn't go with it, and the ground floor had a brick facade about six feet high. There were dim lights on in the second-story windows, but the bottom-floor windows were dark. Even the porch light was off. As she passed, she could see that the house was sheltered on three sides by the remnants of the pine grove. The trees ran right up to the edge of the driveway and nearly touched the garage.

She drove up the road looking for a place to leave her car. A half mile farther she found a closed gas station with five or six cars lined up along the side waiting to be fixed. One of them had its hood off and in its place was a tarp of heavy-gauge plastic taped down to keep the sea air out of its engine. She pulled into the lot with her lights off, parked next to this car, and moved the tarp to her own hood.

She walked back along the road, keeping in the shadows of hedges and trees inside the property lines of the big front yards so that any headlights unexpectedly shining on her would fall on her black hair and black clothes and not on her face and hands. But this part of Monterey was a winding seventeen-mile scenic route, so people probably drove it in the daytime when they could see it.

In ten minutes Jane was standing among the trees in the side yard of the house. She felt the soft, cushioned layer of long needles on the ground and smelled the pine scent in the dark, still air. She made her way to the garage and looked in the window. She could see the gleaming finish of the black BMW inside. This was the place where Turner had come to wait out the scandal, leaving the questions and cameras to his lawyer. She walked slowly and quietly around the house, staying back among the trees.

She studied the lower windows, then the upper ones. She scanned the eaves and gutters for spotlights that might automatically come on if she made a noise, but she saw nothing that worried her.

She wanted to see Alan Turner. She returned to the spot where she felt most sheltered by the trees, at the back corner, and watched the lighted upper windows on two sides of the house. There was no glow of a television set, no shadows on the ceiling from anyone walking across any of the rooms. She felt a strong urge to see what he was doing and what he looked like tonight.

Maybe she had come too late, and he had lain down to rest with the lights on and fallen asleep. He had driven much farther than she had, and had probably done a lot of it at night, so he would be tired.

She felt drawn to the light. When she walked to the side of the house to peer into a window, she saw the little yellow-and-blue sticker of Intercontinental Security. It made her take a step backward while she tried to analyze the uneasiness this gave her. It had begun to seem that every building she had seen since she started looking into Timmy's problems had one of these stickers on its window. Alarm systems didn't surprise her - she had one herself - but California seemed to be blanketed with Intercontinental stickers. Had it been that way for years without her seeing it?

But of course Turner's houses would be protected by the same company that Hoffen-Bayne used. He probably hid the cost of the alarm systems for both houses in the monthly fee for Hoffen-Bayne. She decided that her uneasiness was only the result of having her attention focused on the signs. If somebody she knew got a disease she had never heard of, suddenly she would notice articles in the newspapers about it and overhear people talking about it until it seemed that the whole world had been infected.

She pushed the security company out of her mind and forced herself to think about the sticker in a way that was of more immediate use. It warned her that Turner had an alarm system. Whatever interior traps and gadgets the system had, they would probably be turned off if he was still up and walking around, or he would risk setting them off himself. The perimeter circuits would certainly be turned on.

She studied the building for its weakness. The alarm system would protect the windows and doors. The high, steep roof didn't have skylights or big vents, and if he were in an upstairs room, he would hear her walking up there. She looked down. This house was like most in California. The ground never froze, so they had no basements. Houses were bolted to three-foot foundations with a crawl space under the floors for pipes and wires. Near the side door by the kitchen was a little wooden trap to cover a two-by-three-foot concrete access well. She lifted the cover off quietly. As she looked down she had a momentary foreboding of spiders and rats, but she pretended there were no such things. She crawled under the house and pulled the trap back over the opening.

Beneath her was bare, powdery dirt. It was dark under the house, but she could see moonlight coming through little screened openings placed at intervals in the foundation. She found the gas pipe from the kitchen overhead and followed it slowly toward the center of the house, making out thick drain pipes and thinner water pipes here and there. Finally she reached the place where the gas pipe jointed and went upward. There was a square opening in the floor beside it about three feet wide.

She reached up to touch the place where the opening ended. It was a big square fabric filter. She pushed up on it and tilted it, then brought it down under the house with her. She reached up again and felt the row of burners. There was only about a foot and a half of space between the business part of the gas furnace and the floor, but she estimated that she could probably fit. She felt carefully around the inside of the furnace until she found the panel that slipped off so the filter could be removed and cleaned. That must be the front.

Jane placed her fingers on the lip and the top of the panel and slowly pushed upward. The panel slid up a quarter inch, when suddenly there was a flash and a click, and the pilot light came on. The burners just above her head began to hiss as the gas came out of them. She ducked down quickly and lay on her back as the gas ignited and the level blue flame spread across the top of the row of burners. Now she could see in the weird blue light. She could tell that she had estimated the shape and structure of the furnace only slightly wrong. She studied it, moving her head from side to side and lifting it as far as she dared.

There had to be some kind of safety button to kill the furnace when the door was off so that it didn't start up and burn the house down. As she searched, the blower motor went on and the fire grew hotter. She couldn't let it run for long, or all the metal around it would get hot too. She kept her head low, slipped her fingers under the bottom of the panel, and pushed upward again. The panel lip was freed, and the furnace went off. Carefully she pushed the panel higher until it came off, then leaned it on its side to keep from making noise, and lay down again.

A few minutes later she judged the air was cool enough to let her reach up through the space where the panel had been and feel around. There was a wooden door in front of the panel: the furnace must be in a space disguised as a closet. She ran her fingers up the side of it until she felt a hinge.

She sat on the ground and waited until she could touch the burners with her fingers before she made her attempt. She squatted cautiously, rose to a crouch, straightened to raise the upper part of her body into the furnace, reached out the front to find the doorknob, and opened the door a crack. She pulled herself up, slithered under the burners and out the front of the furnace, crawled out of the closet, and closed the door behind her.

She was in a dim hallway with a bleached oak floor and a long row of small framed drawings of sailing ships on the white walls. As she looked down the hall she could see the foyer. There was an alarm keypad on the wall near the front door. A small red light was glowing to indicate that the system was armed. At the other end of the hall was a staircase. If she herself had installed the security system, this was where she would have put an interior trap. Whatever a burglar stole down here, you didn't want him getting up those stairs where the bedrooms were. She stepped slowly to the side of the staircase, grasped the railing, and sidestepped between the posts up along the outside of it. She was ten feet up, just below the center of the staircase, before she found the electric eye mechanism. It was a foot above a step, so a crawling intruder couldn't slide under it, and even one who took three steps in a stride would break the beam. There were probably pressure pads under the carpet on some of the steps in case an intruder saw it in time.

She kept outside the railing beyond the top of the stairs and then climbed over the railing into the hallway. There might be other traps on the second floor, but if Turner was up here, this alarm zone was probably turned off.

There were lighted rooms on both ends of the second-floor hallway. The house was absolutely quiet. She could hear no movement or snoring or the shifting of a person in a chair. She wondered for a moment if she had been lucky and entered while he was out, but then she remembered the car in the garage.

She looked at the glowing doorway of each room and chose the one to her left. It was slightly closer to the stairway, and if she had to run she didn't want to have Turner three steps closer to the only way out. Slowly she edged along the hallway with her shoulder almost touching the wall. When hardwood floorboards creaked, it was usually the ones in the center.

At the doorway she leaned out just far enough to use the dark windows in the room as mirrors to search for Turner. When she found him she jerked backward. She had been looking for a human form, and when she found it lower and closer to her than she had expected, her reflex was to duck back quickly to evade the blow or the shot. But even as her body was protecting itself, the feeling had already turned into something else.

His blond hair was wet with blood, and under the body, the thick beige rug had soaked up the first of it and saturated, then let a pool of it form and spread. She could see that the outer edge of the pool was already drying into a dark maroon ring, the carpet tufts hardening into twisted bristles. She craned her neck to look for the gun, and found it where it was supposed to be, beside the right hand. She knew enough about the way policemen treated the scenes of suicides to know it was a bad idea to enter the room. If she lost a strand of hair or a fiber from her clothes, she would be somebody they wanted to talk to.

She leaned inward far enough to verify that there was a discoloration that looked like a powder burn on Turner's right temple around the entry hole. The other temple was pressed to the carpet, and she decided it was just as well. The exit hole would be bigger and harder to look at.

It hadn't occurred to her that he would kill himself. If he hadn't doctored the records well enough he was about to be revealed as a thief, but a lot of people in his business had suffered that kind of publicity, and a fair percentage of them had never gone to jail. If he had been likely to be charged with the murders it would have made more sense, but the authorities had made no progress on the first ones in over two years, and they hadn't even been able to hold the men who had broken Dennis's neck and thrown Mona down the stairwell. Nobody was offering those men a deal in exchange for his name.

The raid on Turner's office must have made him panic. She looked down at him and felt something like sympathy for his fear and his forlorn death, but then she decided that she was only feeling the immediacy of it. The sweat and blood were still fresh, and the smell of his fear was probably still trapped in the air of the room and had set off some basic physical reaction in her brain that was stronger than the disgust he had aroused when he was alive.

She took off her shoes and stepped back along the same path that she had taken to reach the door, shuffling her feet a little to obscure any invisible marks her sneakers had made. At the stairway she hesitated and looked at the second room on the far end of the hallway. Why was the light on in there too? She reminded herself that he was beyond caring about electric bills, but then why had he turned off all the lights downstairs?

As soon as she was at the door, she could see the two sheets of paper on the desk. They were placed on the surface in the pool of light from the desk lamp like an exhibit. She stepped into the room.

They had been typed on the computer in the corner of the room and printed on the printer beside it. She looked at the second sheet, the one with the signature. All it said was "I take full responsibility for my actions. Alan Turner."

Then she looked at the first page. It began, "This is my last message to the rest of the world. When you read it I'll be gone, out of your reach." She had never seen a suicide note before, but somehow she had assumed they were addressed to family members or friends, like personal letters.

"The reason I have decided to end my life is that I have not been able to resist the temptation to steal from one of my accounts. I believed Timothy Phillips would never be found alive, so I was harming no one. Later it became apparent that Timothy Phillips was not dead. The people who had been posing as his parents were sending letters, and I knew that if I allowed them to go on, I would be caught. I went to Washington, D.C. where the letters were coming from, and agreed to a meeting. I hired two men to follow the couple from the meeting and find out where they were living with the boy. I am not certain, to this day, what I would have done if they had followed my instructions, but they did not. They formed some plan of their own, probably to take the boy and use him to take control of his money. Whatever it was, it failed. The next thing I knew, the supposed parents were dead and the boy had disappeared. I regret having proceeded in this fashion. Because I hired those men, I was, and am, technically guilty of arranging two murders. I should mention that none of my associates or colleagues benefitted in any way from my actions, and none of them had any knowledge of my theft or any of the things I did to cover it up. I do not know the names of the two men I hired to find the boy in Washington. I met them in a bar and made the deal in the parking lot outside. There is nothing more to say."

Jane studied die sheet without touching it. The printing went right to the bottom of the page. Then there was the second page with "I take full responsibility for my actions" and the signature. The handwriting experts would certainly find that the signature was genuine. It was only the first page that she suspected was a forgery.

She had sensed that it was odd to write a suicide note on a computer, but now she could see the purpose of it. Once Turner was dead, they had simply gone into the file, deleted whatever had been on the first page, typed a new one, and printed it out. Computer printers placed an extra step between the typist and the paper. There were no keys to hit unevenly, no distinctive characteristics to reveal that one page had been typed by Turner and the other by someone else. Maybe he had signed a blank sheet before they shot him, and they had simply run that through the printer too. It didn't matter. He had been shot in the right way and fallen in the right way. Everything was in the right place. The security system was on, so the police would assume there was no way anyone could have come in, killed him, and left. Unless they found something that wasn't perfect - a wrong chemical residue on his right hand, or a different set of prints on the brass casings of the bullets - he was a suicide.

She stood still for a moment. She could feel that the man who had done this was the one who had fooled her at the courthouse. Turner probably had earned his death, but he wasn't the one she should have been thinking about all this time. The one to worry about wasn't the inside man who took a share and didn't ask enough questions about what was going to happen if the plan didn't work. The one to look for would be the one who would still be left standing if everything went wrong. He had been in this room. If she had been smelling fear, she now knew it had been fear of him. His cunning had arranged everything around her to disguise his presence, but the perfect positions of the objects in the room only made his presence more pervasive.

Jane did not stop to form a clear, logical plan about what she was going to do. She simply knew that whatever arrangements the enemy had made must be to his benefit. She snatched up the forged suicide note, walked to the room where the body was lying, picked up the pistol, put it into her belt, and slid down the banister to the ground floor. Then she made her way back through the furnace to the crawl space, closed the closet door above her, replaced the metal panel, and crawled back out from under the house.

Within ten minutes she was back at the gas station taking the plastic tarp off her rented car. She dropped her room key in the mail slot at the motel office and drove south. She didn't know the enemy's name and she didn't know where he lived, but now she knew something about him. He wasn't some accountant who had hired a few head-bangers to block a courtroom so his embezzling wouldn't get noticed by the authorities. He was a pro.

15

Jane drove for the rest of the night. As soon as she was over the last big hill into Los Angeles County at Thousand Oaks, she ate breakfast at an enormous coffee shop surrounded by brown gumdrop-shaped hills. Just as she was taking her first sip of coffee the clock reached seven and men with heavy machinery began assaulting the mounds, shaving the tops to make level building lots.

She waited in a shopping mall until noon and then checked into a brick hotel in Burbank with a glass elevator that ran up the outside of the building to give future guests a view of whatever was going to be built in the empty, weed-tufted lot under it. She was glad that whatever was in the master plan for the lot had not yet been started, because she needed to sleep. She closed the curtains, undressed, and turned off the lamp. She knew that the dreams would probably come, but she was too tired now to fight them. She lay in the bed staring up at the single red light of the smoke detector on the ceiling, then relinquished her will and slept.

In her dream she found herself kneeling on a bare earth floor in a dark enclosure. Her ears told her that the space was about fifteen feet square. As her eyes slowly became more used to the dark she could see the texture of the inner side of the elm bark that had been shingled together to make the walls and roof of the ganosote. It was a large one built in the old style, about a hundred and twenty feet long with compartments like this one on either side. She counted ten cooking fires at intervals down the center aisle. She could see dark shapes of men, women, and children huddled at the fires or walking past them.

One of the children pushed aside the bearskin that was hanging at the east end of the longhouse to cover the door, and she had to look down to avoid the glare. She knew from the bright sunlight that it must be morning. When the child scampered out and the bearskin swung shut again she didn't raise her head because she was thinking about what the light had shown her. She was wearing a leather skirt and moccasins, and she could feel that the reason the bare ground didn't bother her knees was that they were protected by a pair of leggings. She reflected in a detached way that all of her clothes were soft deerskin, and this confirmed her impression that the day that was beginning was in the Old Time.

She could see that around her neck was a necklace woven from fragrant marsh grass, and she reached up to touch it. Every few inches there was a little disk of marsh grass covered with shell beads. She could smell the fresh, grassy scent, and she knew that the perfume made the smoke, cooking meat, and the twenty or thirty bodies in the ganosote easier on her nostrils.

She heard a noise and turned to see that behind her there was the big shape of a man on the lower platform along the wall of the compartment, and that he was stirring, about to wake up. She didn't know who he was, but stored on the platform five feet above him were her things - the extra moccasins she would use to replace the ones on her feet now, the elm bark gaowo tray she used to prepare corn bread, her collection of ahdoquasa with the bowl ends polished smooth for eating soup and the handles carved in the shapes of men and women embracing. She knew he must be her husband, but he stayed asleep in the shadows with his face to the wall because it was not time for her to see him yet.

She heard someone calling her name outside, and in the logic of dreams, she knew that the voice was the reason she was here. She stood up and walked past the fires to the bearskin flap. A strong hand gripped her arm, and she turned. A man whose face she did not quite see in the dim light said in Seneca, "If you don't want to dream about the dead, you don't have to. If the women sing the Ohgiwe, they'll leave." She knew this voice.

"I know, Jake," said Jane. She lifted the corner of the bearskin and ducked out into the light.

"Jane!" said a voice. It was harsh and high, not quite human, like the screech of a parrot. "Jane!"

She looked around her, and her eye caught a flash of deep blue above her on a maple tree, and then another flitted across the open air from an old sycamore. It flew in spurts, a dip and a wing-flap to bring the bird up, then a dip and a wing-flap and claws clutching the branch of the tree beside the first one. Jane could tell they were the two scrub jays she had captured in California.

The two birds dropped to the lowest branch of the maple just above her. The male tilted his head to the side and glared at her with one shiny black eye. "Jane!"

"What?" she asked.

The female jay hopped to reverse her position on the branch, her head where her tail had been, and leaned down. "We did what you asked," she said. "We took Dennis and Mona to Hawenneyugeh."

"Thank you," said Jane. "But you have to go home now. You can't survive in this climate, and winter is coming."

The male shifted back and forth on the branch nervously, and she could hear its claws scratching the bark. "We came for you."

The jays eyed her without moving. Jane felt a small, growing fear. "Am I going to die too? So many people, all dying for nothing."

The female dropped to the grass at her feet and jerked her head from side to side to bring first one eye and then the other to bear on Jane. "It's not supposed to be for anything," she said. "It's what we are."

"What we are?"

"Hawenneyu, the Right-Handed Twin, creates people, birds, trees. Hanegoategeh, the Left-Handed Twin, makes cancer, number-six birdshot, Dutch Elm disease. For every measure, a countermeasure: Hawenneyu creates the air, Hanegoategeh churns it into the cold wind; Hawenneyu makes fire and houses, Hanegoategeh makes the fire burn the houses."

"Are you here to tell me it's my turn to be used up?" asked Jane.

"To warn you. If you want to be alive and breathe the air and drink the water, then look and listen. Nothing has changed since the beginning of the world. You're still walking through wild country. No sight or sound is irrelevant. Learn about your enemy."

She studied the two birds. "Who is my enemy?"

"Think about how he works," said the female jay.

"He's been killing people," Jane said. "There's nothing special about it at all. It's just brutal: cutting up the Deckers - "

"Without leaving any sign in the house that a little boy had ever lived there," the male reminded her.

"How about Mona and Dennis?" she asked. "He hired some men to beat Dennis to death and throw Mona down a stairwell."

"He waited until you had made your preparations for one building, and got the case moved to another. You had to go to a new place where a dozen men were waiting for you and court was already in session."

"And what about Alan Turner?" asked the female jay.

"What about him?" Jane asked.

"We know how you got into Turner's house past the alarm system and out again. How did he do it?"

"I don't know," said Jane. "I suppose he rang the doorbell. Alan Turner let him in. They must have known each other."

"You're not listening," said the female jay. "Anybody could get in by ringing the doorbell. How did he get out without tripping the alarm after Turner was dead?"

"How?" she asked.

Jane awoke and listened to the sounds of the cars on the freeway a few blocks away. Rush hour must have begun, but then she remembered that the term had no meaning around Los Angeles. There were cars clogging the roads every hour of every day. She sat up and looked around her, then stood and walked into the shower.

She had only needed some sleep. She still didn't know the man's name, but while she slept she had figured out something else about him. He might have gotten into the house in Monterey without setting off the alarm because Turner had let him in. But the only way he could have gotten out and left the alarm on after he had killed Turner was to know the alarm code.