Poison Flower (25 page)

From time to time Jane stopped her preparations and looked out each of the upper windows, standing still and silent as though frozen, watching the world around the house. She had no reason to imagine anyone could have found her this soon, but the men chasing her now were completely unknown to her. She had no idea what they could do. The thought reminded her that there were many more things she wanted to do before nightfall.

She went to the unoccupied room just beyond hers, tied the rope to the steel frame of the bed, took the screen out of the window, opened the window, and looked down. Directly below the window was clear grass, but on either side there was shrubbery.

In the room she had selected for sleeping, she loaded her shotgun. She dragged the mattress off the bed and put it right at the door, then cycled the shotgun to put a double-ought shell in the chamber, and laid the shotgun on the mattress. She took ten more shotgun shells out of the box, put them in the pockets of her black jacket, and left the jacket there.

She stood still, looked, and thought. The house was stone, impervious to gunfire except through the windows. If people got inside, they would search downstairs, and then they would climb the stairway to the second-floor hall. They might go to investigate the dimly lighted master bedroom where she had left the dummy, or they would come up the hallway and knock over the bottles. Either way, they would warn Jane. If she was stationed in the doorway on her mattress, she could fire eight double-ought blasts into the narrow, dark hallway, reload, and probably fire eight more. She made a few alterations. She adjusted the mattress so she could lie on it and fire, showing only her right eye and right shoulder to the intruders. She walked to the staircase, descended to the ground floor, and counted windows. There were eight. She went down into the basement and found the eight precut and painted two-by-fours, barred the shutters, and latched the windows.

The front and rear doors each had an assortment of locks and dead bolts. She was a bit uncomfortable with them, because she didn't want it to be impossible to get in. She wanted the shooters to get inside. She wanted them to climb the stairs.

Jane walked the paths through the woods and then among the man-tall reeds at the edge of the lake, memorizing the contours of the land and the marshy places. She stayed out while the sun went low and she could see the water of the lake as a copper-colored mirror shining through the foliage. She knew it was very unlikely that anyone could find her in one day, so she was in no hurry to fortify herself in the house. She walked the deer trails quietly, and heard the deer stir ahead of her, then go crashing through the underbrush and away. She walked out to the highway and stared into the trees to be sure she couldn't detect light emanating from the house. She walked along the grassy shoulder of the dirt road to the house so her footprints wouldn't show.

She picked out landmarks as she walked. The tall pine that rose above the hardwoods stood about halfway to the house. The clearing where the trees had died out was three quarters of the way. As she walked, she heard something big moving through the underbrush, and she suspected it was a bear. She stopped to gauge the wind direction. It was blowing toward her from the lake, so she would probably be safe if she waited for the bear to move on. In a few minutes, she heard it moving off toward the water.

She went inside the house and turned on the downstairs lights. The shutters were all closed, so the light could not be seen from a distance. She made herself some dinner, and washed the dishes. She went to the front door and disengaged the dead bolts. Then she went to the back door and did the same, but left the standard locks on each door locked. If she unlocked a door they would suspect the truth-that she wanted them to come in.

She turned off the downstairs lights, climbed the stairs, and stopped at the top. She turned on her dummy's reading light in the master bedroom, shut the door, and made her way down the hall, stepping over the nylon fishing line tied to the bottles. She showered, brushed her teeth, and dressed for sleep. She wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and her black jacket. She had a Beretta pistol in her pocket, and the K-Bar knife in its sheath at her back. The shotgun was on the mattress beside her. She lay there in the silence and darkness, and was surprised at how comfortable she felt, with all the physical work done, her hair and body clean, and lying on the firm mattress. It was only a few minutes before she was asleep and dreaming.

16.

In her dream, Jane did something she had done a hundred times during the day. She went to her open window and looked outside. This window faced in the direction of the lake. She looked out over the glassy black surface, and saw nothing but the undistorted reflection of the moon and a few stars. Near the shore, where the cold water met the warm earth, there was a layer of fog a few feet thick. She heard a faint sloshing sound and saw the tall reeds forty feet beyond the shore moving a little. A man slowly rose from under the lake and walked with slow determination among the reeds toward the shore, the fog hiding all but his human shape at first. As he approached the shore, the muddy water ran off his head and down his face in streams. He was wearing a coat, and water ran from the sleeves to make ripples on the surface. She knew him, and she felt a deep dread. He was dead because of the worst mistake Jane had ever made-Jane had once been fooled into leading a killer named John Felker practically to his door. And Harry didn't haunt her dreams to bring her good news.

When the man was fully up and out of the water, he stood still for a moment, slowly raising his head to look up at her window as though he had heard her thinking. His eyes focused on hers. There were a few long, mossy strands of water plants on his shoulders. Without moving his eyes from Jane's, he reached up and brushed them off, then began to walk toward the house.

Jane shut the window and barred it, then put her eye to the shutter and watched him walking toward the kitchen door. As he came, water ran down from his clothes, and his shoes made a squish noise with each step. He stopped on the slab of concrete at the back door, and she could see the wet footprints there. He looked up at her again for a moment as though determining whether she would come down to let him in. Then he simply opened the locked door and stepped inside.

Jane slowly moved along the hallway and listened to the watery squish of his shoes as he ascended the stairs. He reached the top and stood on the landing. At his best, Harry Kemple had looked as though he had never cared for himself. He always wore the same sport coat with a very tight herringbone pattern. It must have started out gray, but the fabric had acquired a greenish tint, as though the years of poker table air thick with cigar smoke had reacted with the harsh light to work a chemical change. The elbows were a slightly lighter color because they were worn. He had a bony, unhealthy build, like a too-tall jockey, and his brown pants were too wide for him, gathered above his waist and cinched by a thin belt. His shoes looked as though he had sprayed them with floor wax and given them a varnish-like shine that preserved the scuffs.

"Hello, Harry," Jane said.

"I notice you didn't fall all over yourself to let me in."

"You're a ghost, Harry. Doors don't present the problem to you that stairs present to me. I'm sure you know I've been shot."

Harry nodded. "I know what you know. The nine--millimeter bullet missed the femur and the femoral artery, but it tore the muscle up a bit. In eleven months you'll be as fast as ever. . . ."

Jane's heart beat faster. She couldn't believe the good news.

". . . If your body is still alive."

"You always know how to raise my spirits."

"You raise us yourself," he said. "Me in particular. I get no rest because I'm your mistake. The minute you took John Felker to see Mr. Shaw in Vancouver to get a fake ID, I was a dead man. I could still walk around while he stole Shaw's record of the IDs he'd made and found my new name and address. But I was already on Hanegoategeh's to-do list."

"I wasn't being careless. I believed in John Felker."

"Enough to spend the previous two weeks fucking him, like it was a honeymoon."

"I was an idiot, Harry. I'm sorry. I've been saying it for fifteen years, and I know I'll never stop having these dreams." She reached out and touched his hand, but it was freezing cold from the mountain lake, and bloodless. She withdrew her hand, trying to hide her revulsion.

"What You can't be surprised I feel like a dead guy."

"No," she said. "I just forget all of that sometimes, Harry."

He looked at her impatiently, then turned his head and looked over his shoulder, taking in everything around him like a man who has suddenly had a blindfold removed. "Oh, shit," he said. "You're the One Who Stops, aren't you You were running away with the other fighters, and you're the one who stops and fights. That's why you're way up here alone."

"This is the place to do it," she said. "Nobody else can get hurt. The outer walls are stone, and the doors are split timbers. There won't be any innocent bystanders."

"Oh, there won't be," he said. "Not the ones who are after you, and not you."

"Innocent isn't what I want to be."

He looked around again, and she was aware he was seeing through walls and floors. "So this is the spot where you're choosing to block the trail and fight to the death."

"Not `the' death. Their death."

"Do you know who and how many there are"

"No. I'll know that when they come."

"What part of the wars is this"

"What do you mean"

"Shelby and his sister don't know anything, and neither does Iris. But you know it's about Sky Woman's twin grandsons, the right-handed and the left-handed, Hawenneyu the Creator and Hanegoategeh the Destroyer. So whose work are you doing up here"

"Hawenneyu's."

"You've made sure that killers will come here for you, and that somebody is never going home. Can you kill for the Creator"

"I think you can," she said. "If you stop the heart of someone who kills and kills, you can."

"If you're sure, then before they come, do all your thinking. See everything from every direction and tell yourself every story of the fight. Plan what you'll do in every story, so when you see it beginning to happen, you can move. Trade your life for something. Don't throw it at them because you're angry."

"Is that it, Harry You've finally come to tell me this is my time"

"Maybe one of the twins knows when you're going to die, and maybe both do. I don't. I exist only in your head. I'm a synapse in your brain that fires when you're anxious."

"Come on, Harry. Am I doing the right thing"

"You're stopping on the path, turning your face toward the enemy, and preparing to fight alone. The old ones, the warriors and clan mothers from that time, would recognize it, and see you as one of them. I don't know if that makes you right."

"You're hedging, Harry. Are you saying I should do this, or go back to the others and run"

"You've decided to be Hawenneyu's warrior, fighting death for lives. You'll die this time or another, at this turn in the trail or another." He lifted his head as though he were listening to something only he could hear. Then he said, "Rest tonight. It's too early for them. But tomorrow night, be ready."

Jane slept soundly, then woke at dawn. She rose and walked from one window to the next on the upper floor of the house, looking out. It was cooler this morning, the reminder in the air that it was not going to be summer for much longer. Above the mirror surface of the lake she could see the wispy white fog that she had dreamed of, deep as a man's waist and stretching out past the reedy shore. She saw the first few waterbirds. There was a great blue heron that stepped out from the reeds in the fog, striding in the shallows, then standing still again.

She felt strong. She still had a day, a whole day that would go on until dark. She had realized in the night that time was something she needed, and now she had it. Even if the men were off their flight by now and driving this way, they would not come close enough to be seen until nightfall. They would be searching for the address she had given Stewart, not for a place that could be known and explored. Jane ate breakfast, then took the knife, the hatchet, the spade, and the rolled-up plastic camouflage tarp she'd bought into the weedy fields between the house and the dirt road.

She walked toward the first bend in the road that was also its halfway point, the tall pine. She stayed on the game trail, only a narrow line where the deer had stamped down the weeds on their way to and from the lake. When she found the right spot, she knew it. There was a slight depression in the level field that put it below the surrounding weeds. She moved carefully to the right of the path, and began to dig. The ground here was damp, black with centuries of rotted humus, so it was soft and heavy. She first removed the layer of weeds in clumps, set them away from the hole, and then dug. She used her uninjured left leg to push the spade into the earth, and stood on the right. She dug for four hours, beginning in the cool morning. After a while she discarded her sweatshirt and dug in her T-shirt, feeling the sweat cooling her. The hole was about ten or twelve feet long, and six or seven feet wide. At the end of four hours it was over six feet deep.

She went to work on the long mound of dirt she had shoveled out. She would cause a small avalanche to get a pile of it onto her tarp, and then drag it to a spot at the edge of the woods near the lake. Then she would repeat the process. It took her two more hours to move it all.

Near the pile of dirt she found a stand of hardwood saplings, mostly oak and maple, and used her hatchet to cut ten of them, then cut them into about a hundred inch-thick stakes. With her K-Bar knife she whittled sharp points on both ends of each. She used the foliage to cover the mounds of dirt, then took her stakes to the hole in the field.

She sank each of the stakes into the ground at the bottom of the pit in a pattern that left nowhere for her to stand, then dug her way out. She went back to the stand of saplings and cut two dozen lengths of thin, five-foot saplings, leaving the network of spreading branches on. In the field she laid some of them across the width of the pit, then placed others at angles, weaving some of the smallest branches with others so she had almost a net covering the pit. She placed the camouflage plastic tarp over it.