Shadow Woman

13

“Jane? Jane? It’s me. I’m in trouble. Somehow they found me. A woman tried to kill me tonight. I’ve got to get out. I’m going to head north, to Cheyenne. No, too close. Billings. I’ll try to make it to Billings, Montana. I’ll call again when I get there.”

The shock in his voice made Jane’s scalp prickle, and a hot, sick sweat began to materialize on the back of her neck. The machine’s inhuman voice said, “End of messages,” and clicked off. She pressed the button again and heard Hatcher’s voice. “Jane? Jane?” She listened to the rest of it, each word of it giving her bits of information that Pete Hatcher probably didn’t know.

He had made a mistake, but even after he had seen the executioner, he had no idea what he had done wrong. He had stayed hidden for three months, so it had nothing to do with the escape route. He must have done something as David Keller that they had expected Pete Hatcher to do. He had gotten himself on some list.

“I’m going to head north, to Cheyenne. No, too close.” She felt something clutching her stomach. He had been sitting in his apartment in Denver all this time, gotten up a hundred mornings and gone to bed a hundred evenings, and it had never occurred to him to plan the best way to get out if they found him. It sounded as though he were running his finger up a road map while he was talking, looking for a route that sounded safe to his panicked brain.

She had told him to prepare contingency plans. After something happened, he wouldn’t be able to think clearly, he would forget details, leave things behind that he needed. But had she told him? She tried to remember their two conversations. She thought she had told him. She had tried to instill in him an attitude. Other people could make decisions at the last moment, but a fugitive could not. He had to know in advance the places where he was willing to show his face, what he was willing to do, what he was going to say when somebody asked him a question.

Jane slowly felt the suspicion harden into a certainty. She had not taught Pete Hatcher how to stay alive. The excuses began to flood her consciousness. Getting him out of Las Vegas had not been a question of redirecting a running man. It had been like staging a prison break. He had been watched, followed, suspected by people who seemed to have no other duties. She had needed to slip him out between the guards from a standing start, and then spend most of her energy delaying the pursuit. But repeating the circumstances to herself accomplished nothing. Words were enough to apologize for her haste, but not enough to absolve her if Pete Hatcher died.

Now he was on his way to Billings, Montana, a city with a population of no more than eighty thousand, where finding his car would probably be no harder than driving around for an afternoon and looking for it. She knew about the car from his telephone message too. If he had to decide in the middle of the night between stopping in Cheyenne and going on up Interstate 25, then he was driving a car he owned.

She looked around her at her bedroom. It occurred to her that she had taken very little out of here when she had gotten married. It was as though she had subconsciously tried to leave Jane Whitefield behind, where she could cause no trouble. There were most of her clothes, hanging in the closet with dry cleaners’ bags over them, and there was her old dresser.

She walked along the hall and down the staircase, then through the kitchen to the basement steps. She turned on the light and looked around. The house had been built in the days when they used stones for basements, the beams under a house were just rough-planed tree trunks, and the floorboards were held to them with square-headed spikes. She walked to the old set of shelves her great-grandmother had used to store her preserves—sweet peeled peaches and pears in sugary water, stewed tomatoes, applesauce, corn soup, and strawberries, all in big mason jars with rubber gaskets and glass tops with a steel-clamp contraption that held them tight. The fall canning had lasted through her grandmother’s time. Only the old jars had survived her mother’s.

Jane went to the oil furnace, moved the stepladder beside it, then disconnected a section of one of the heating ducts. This was a round one that was left over from the days when the house had been heated by an old coal furnace. It wasn’t connected to anything anymore, but it ran from the now-empty site of the coal bin, turned upward, and connected to the floor under the kitchen, where there had once been a wide brass grate. She looked inside, found the box, and set it on the top step.

She separated James Weiss’s papers from the others—his birth certificate, New York driver’s license, his credit cards, his Social Security card, his college diploma, the life insurance policy he had bought six years ago. James Weiss was one of the most credible identities she had ever assembled—certainly among the best of the adult males.

James Weiss had no pedigree, but his credentials had a long and complicated history. His birth certificate was genuine. Years ago, a man Jane knew had gotten a job in a county courthouse in Pennsylvania, where he had quietly added fifty birth records. Jane had bought twenty of them. She had liked the idea so much that she had allowed two women who worked in county clerks’ offices in Ohio and Illinois to repeat it. The woman in Ohio had offered to do it because she had known a little girl for whom Ohio had turned into a dangerous place and knew that Jane had been the one to make her disappear. The woman in Illinois had made the new people and sent their birth certificates to Jane as a present on the anniversary of her own disappearance from a tight spot in California.

James Weiss had been one of the Illinois woman’s creations. Jane had gotten him a Social Security card and a driver’s license by sending a young man who owed her a favor to apply for them. The college diploma was the product of another ruse she had invented at about the same time. She had searched alumni magazines until she found a James Weiss who had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She had run a credit check on him and gotten the information she needed to request a transcript and a duplicate of his diploma. Anyone who wished to could call and verify that they were genuine.

Jane had found an insurance company that did not require a physical exam for a life insurance policy under two hundred thousand dollars, so she had bought him one for a hundred thousand. She had kept building Weiss’s identity in small ways over the years, just as she had a number of others.

For most of the people she had taken out of the world, Jane had bought false identities from professionals. But she had always been aware that professional forgers were not permanent fixtures on the landscape. Lewis Feng in Vancouver had been murdered. George Karanjian in New York had gotten too rich to take chances and retired.

Jane bought and used identities for herself by the dozen so she could travel unimpeded, then destroyed the ones that might have been compromised. But she also kept about fifteen that she had built on her own—some here at her house, some in safe-deposit boxes in banks in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Toronto.

She selected six matched sets of papers for couples, added them to James Weiss, put the heating duct back together, and went upstairs to make her telephone calls. She called the airline first. The flight to Chicago would leave in two hours. Then she took a deep breath, let it out, and dialed her home number.

Carey answered. “Hello?”

“Hi, Carey,” she said. “I want you to do something for me and not ask any questions until you get here.”

“Get where?”

“Can you meet me at the house in Deganawida?”

He hesitated. “Well, sure. Do you want me to call somebody? Dress for dinner? Bring bail money?”

“Just come.” She hung up. She wished she had laughed when he had mentioned bail money. It should have been funny. If she had been the wife she wanted to be, it would have been. She went downstairs to find the small brown suitcase she had left in the little office that had been her mother’s sewing room. Then she checked the latches on the first-floor windows, changed the light bulbs of the two lamps that were on timers, and hurried upstairs.

She was packing the suitcase when Carey came into the bedroom. He looked at the suitcase, then looked at Jane. He said, “I hope you called because you needed me to help you carry a few things home.”

Jane smiled a sad little smile. “There’s something I want you to hear.” She stepped to the answering machine, pressed the button, and watched Carey’s face while Pete Hatcher’s voice came on, scared, dazed, and breathless. “Jane? Jane?” When Carey had heard the message and there was the clatter of the telephone receiver being hurriedly set back in its cradle, she pressed the other button to erase the message, then stepped close to him. She touched his arm and it felt hard and stiff, but when she tugged it, he sat on the bed with her.

He said, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

She sighed and tried to find a way to begin. “I love you.” That was the best way. “I love you. I don’t want this to happen either.”

“But you made a promise. You said it wouldn’t. Not that you would be sorry if it did, but that you would do what was necessary so it didn’t.”

“This is something else.”

“Jane,” he said. “Everything is something else.”

“Let me try to explain,” she said quietly. “This is going to sound like some kind of legalistic excuse, but it isn’t. I said that if somebody came to me and asked for this kind of help, I would tell them I wasn’t able to do that anymore. I would have. This is a time when I need you to help me. I want to be honest and tell you everything, so you understand. You heard his voice. His name is … used to be Pete Hatcher. He worked for a big casino company in Las Vegas. They weren’t honest. He learned too many details. He also made them suspicious. They were busy preparing to kill him when I took him out.”

Carey shook his head. “What a shock—something so unprecedented. A gambling outfit that turns out to be dishonest. Boy, I’ll bet Pete Hatcher was surprised. Who would have guessed?”

She looked at him apologetically. “That’s part of being a guide. Some of the people I’ve taken out of their troubles weren’t innocent, or weren’t smart, or caused their own misery. Pete Hatcher is probably one of them. But he hasn’t done anything that I consider a capital offense.”

“You’d be amazed at how many people like that there are,” said Carey. “Billions. Some of them haven’t even committed a felony.”

Inside, she winced, but she forced herself to say, “If Pete Hatcher came to me out of nowhere tonight, I would tell him no. But he happened before I made that promise. He could be about to die because I didn’t do a good enough job. This isn’t something I can ignore. It’s as though you operated on somebody and left a sponge in his belly.”

“It’s not exactly an apt analogy,” said Carey. “If I had been operating on a patient, I would have been doing it in the legitimate pursuit of my lawful profession, doing what I was educated, trained, and certified to do. I would perform surgery if it were the generally accepted way of correcting a serious and possibly life-threatening condition. I’m part of a system. I’m not just some guy who decided on his own that real doctors aren’t doing enough surgery, or doing it well enough, so I try to do a few at home.”

She hugged him. “You’re right, Carey,” she said.

“I am?”

She stood up and went to her closet. “Yep. When you’re right, you’re right.”

“And?”

“And I was right to choose you. Not that there was any choice involved. We’re not talking about some profession here, that I had to give up. It’s just a trick I learned to do when I was too young and stupid to know any better.”

“So you’ll stay home—mail him another false ID and forget it?”

She looked at him in surprise. “Oh, I’m sorry, Carey. I didn’t mean that.” She went back to her packing.

“What did you mean?”

“I meant I’m much sorrier about this than you will ever know. You’re my life now. When I get this over with, I’ll spend the next few years trying to make it up to you—trying to give you back the confidence and peace of mind I just threw away, so you don’t think that any time the phone rings I might go off to do something stupid. Because I won’t. I just can’t start being smart tonight. I can’t pretend I didn’t abandon a person out there where I know he’ll be killed.”

Carey went to her and rocked her gently in his arms. “Is there anything I haven’t said that would talk you out of it?”

“No. You’ve done pretty well.”

“You know how I feel about it, right? No point in going into all the stuff about how a man feels letting his beautiful young wife go off to some place where she might get killed.”

“I know how you feel,” she said. “I can’t help this.”

He brightened, then looked dispirited. “Threats don’t work on you, do they?”

“Not very well,” she said. “You could make me very, very sad without trying very hard.”

“So whatever I do or say, all I can do is make a bad time worse for both of us.” He stared at his feet. “Need a ride to the airport?”

She threw her arms around him and held him as tightly as she could, clutching him and letting the tears run down her cheeks. “Thank you, Carey,” she said. She turned and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Jane lifted the perfume bottle out of the medicine cabinet, opened it, and sniffed. It had a sweet, damp, earthy smell. Periodically, for years, she had collected the roots of water hemlock, mashed them for their juice, then purified and concentrated it. This batch was fresh enough, and maybe stronger than the last. In the old days, when an Iroquois wanted to commit suicide, he would eat a hemlock root and die within two hours. The perfume worked much faster. She put the bottle into her purse and felt the tears coming again.

She rested her foot on the rim of the bathtub and began to run adhesive tape around her thigh. She wiped her eyes and carefully retrieved the boot knife she had hidden on the underside of the drawer of her vanity. It was thin and weightless and razor-edged, made of zircon-oxide ceramic instead of steel so it wouldn’t set off metal detectors. She taped it to her thigh, then put her foot down and let her dress fall to cover it.

She walked into the bedroom and kissed her husband. “How do I look?”