She puts the certified copy of Jennifer’s birth certificate in her bag in the same compartment with the birth certificate she obtained two days ago in Albuquerque for Dorothy (NMI) Holder, who died in 1955 at the age of 22 months. The traffic accident killed the little girl’s parents as well. The Albuquerque newspaper gave up a grisly photo of the wreck and the information that the father was studying agricultural science on the GI Bill: poor bastard survived two years in the Korean war only to be wiped out by an oil-slippery road surface.
She parks in a shopping mall, zips up the compartment in her handbag and goes from one big department store to another, buying clothes off the rack. Jeans, blouses, two skirts, shoes, toiletries and cosmetics-even underwear: she wants nothing on her person that can be traced back more than five days.
In a cheap cluttered surplus store she buys an inexpensive suitcase. She carries it out in her left hand, the shoulder bag snug in her right.
She won’t be remembered. She’s paid cash for everything and she stays hidden behind the big sunglasses and the dark wig she bought three days ago in Denver.
The plan seemed to take shape overnight and the details have dropped into place with a speed that still bewilders her because she wasn’t aware she was capable of such cunning.
Now an instinct for thoroughness keeps nagging her to remember every item of the scheme.
In a dusty hot alley behind a restaurant she finds a garbage bin higher than her eye-line. She transfers the cash and the diamonds to the new bag and then searches through her old suitcase, trying to force herself to be dispassionate but when she comes to the photograph of Ellen it is not possible to disregard the lump that fixes itself high in her chest. It won’t go up and it won’t go down.
With dread reluctance she puts the snapshot back where she found it, closes the suitcase and boosts it onto the lip of the garbage bin until it tips over and drops out of sight inside. She hears it dislodge glass bottles as it falls.
Probably it will be crushed in the mechanism of a garbage truck-buried under half a ton of waste in a county dump where nobody will ever find it.
Even if someone does, most likely this will be as far as they’ll be able to trace her.
She drives away, seeking the Interstate. Her tears, she thinks at first, are for Ellen-for the photograph. But eventually she realizes it is more than that.
The suitcase contained the last of her belongings from home. Everything personal: everything but a ring of keys and a driver’s license and a valise full of diamonds and cash.
On your own now, Jennifer Corfu Hartman A/K/A Dorothy Holder. Starting newborn. Might as well be stark naked.