Shadow Woman (23 page)

He got into the car, opened all
the windows, and drove out into the night. He was not going to stick
a knife into the Miraculous Miranda. He was not even going to
fabricate anything about her to send to Vincent Bogliarese. He was
going to forget her. All she had ever been was one avenue to find the
dark-haired woman who had made Pete Hatcher disappear. There were
others.

Jane
flew to Chicago as Karen Roth, then shopped for her next flight by
walking along the concourse at O’Hare looking at the television
monitors that listed scheduled departures. Hatcher had called her at
around ten on Tuesday night, and she had not heard the message until
seven the next evening, so he was already in Billings. She diverted
her course to a pay telephone, called her answering machine, pressed
56, and listened. “Two messages,” said the mechanical
voice. The first was Hatcher’s voice saying, “It’s
just me again.” She clapped her hand over her free ear to block
out the noise around her and waited, but there was a pause, then a
click to signify that the call had ended. The second message was just
the pause and then another click. Jane put the receiver back on the
hook and went to buy her next ticket. Either Hatcher had not settled
anywhere yet, or he had decided it was not safe to leave a number, or
something had gone wrong with her machine to make it stop recording.
Maybe it had failed to disconnect after the first call, and used up
all the blank tape recording nothing. Maybe the clock battery had
died, or the tape had tangled, or… she might as well stop
kidding herself. Or when Pete Hatcher had made the first call,
standing in a lighted phone booth at a rest stop on Route 25, he had
hung up the phone, turned around, and had a .357 Magnum stuck in his
face.

She flew to Missoula as
Katherine Webster on a smaller plane and arrived at seven in the
morning, then went shopping for a car as Wendy Wasserman. The car
Wendy Wasserman selected was a two-year-old Nissan Maxima with low
mileage and a finish that had been dulled by the first owner’s
failure to protect it from the winter weather. The owner had left on
it a parking sticker that said University of Montana. Jane drove it
to the campus and left it in a covered parking structure surrounded
by busy dormitories, then walked northwest up Broadway until she
found a car-rental agency.

She called her answering machine
three times during the day, and each time the machine said, “Two
messages.” She drove the three hundred and forty miles eastward
on Route 90 to Billings as the sun made its way toward the mountains
behind her. The eastern side of the Rocky Mountains was high country
and forested, but it was dry and hot, the very edge of the Great
Plains. As she drove, the forests dwindled and were replaced by huge
fields of wheat growing tall in the late summer sunset.

Jane arrived in Billings after
dark. She drove the streets for two hours to get a sense of the city,
then left her rented car in the parking lot at Deaconess Medical
Center and began to walk. She bought a newspaper at a machine on a
corner and studied it. There was no mention of a David Keller being
found, no Pete Hatcher, and no John Does. If he wasn’t alive,
the police didn’t know it yet.

She tried to imagine his steps.
He would have come up on Route 25 until it merged with Route 90 and
arrived in the middle of the night. He had probably checked into a
hotel at noon. He would have been exhausted by then, and slept until
dark. He would have gotten up, dressed, and then realized that he
didn’t have a good enough reason to go out there in the strange
city at night. He would have eaten in the hotel, then returned to his
room. He would know that the only place she could hope to find him
was in a hotel, so he would stay there. If there was a problem with
her answering machine, then he would send her a note in the mail. He
would stay put and hope that she could get to him before anybody else
did.

If she wanted to get to him and
take him out without attracting attention, she would have to look as
though she belonged here. Jane went to a shopping mall and studied
the women around her. In the twelve years since she had begun doing
this, fading in had gotten easier. She had read somewhere that
between 1970 and 1990 a mall had opened somewhere in the country
every seven hours. One of the changes this had brought was that women
in one part of the country dressed pretty much the way they did in
all of the others. Her clothes would do for a few days in Billings,
but she could still make some purchases to improve her chances.

She found a store that sold
T-shirts and bought one with university of Montana printed on it. She
bought a pair of hiking boots like ones she saw on some other women.

She knew a little bit about what
Pete Hatcher was going through. At times he would be sure that he had
completely, miraculously lost his pursuers. But every time he heard a
maid push her cleaning cart down the hotel hallway, he would feel all
the muscles in his body go tense. He would try to reassure himself,
then realize that he had no external way to tell whether he was
perfectly safe or in imminent danger. So he would sit for hours
looking out the window of his room for some piece of evidence that
had not come from inside his own skull.

As she searched for the store
where she would make her last purchases, she reconsidered what she
knew about Pete Hatcher. The first time she had heard his name had
been in a telephone call from Paula Dennis. Paula was an
intensive-care nurse from Kentucky, and it wasn’t until the
call that Jane had learned she was also a gambler, and she needed
help for a man she had met on a junket to Las Vegas. When Jane had
asked her what she knew about the man’s habits, she had said,
“Pete Hatcher is a ladies’ man.”

To Jane that had sounded like
trouble. Men who had that reputation left behind rivals and angry
husbands and women who knew too much about them and were bitter
enough to tell strangers. But Paula had said, “By that I mean
he is a man who could have been invented by and for ladies. He is a
perfect gentleman: attentive, thoughtful, kind, considerate at all
times and in every situation. You could take him to visit your aged
grandma in Charleston. He’s also a very naughty fellow, if you
know what I mean, but there are no hard feelings afterward. He’s
at his sweetest when he takes you to the airport. There are no lies,
no chances to make false assumptions with Pete Hatcher. You can be
sitting in a restaurant with him, and he will not pretend he’s
not looking at other women below the face. But the way he does it
doesn’t make you mad. It makes you squirm in your evening gown.
One night I saw him doing it and told him so, and we had quite a
conversation about a woman two tables over. He made me understand
what he saw when he looked at a woman, and honey, it made me like
myself better.”

Jane had not been moved to
enlist in Hatcher’s cause just yet, but her curiosity had been
piqued. “What, exactly, did he say?”

“He misses nothing –
and I mean nothing – and he likes all of it. This is a woman on
the downhill side of fifty. I’m thinking, ‘A kind face.
Nice clothes. Not impersonating a teenager, but not making up the
seating list for her wake, either.’ He starts telling me about
the smile lines at the corners of her eyes, and the calm glow of the
cornea that shows wisdom and receptiveness – which from Pete’s
side of the table seem to be the same thing – and the flecks
and color variations. This is just eyes, remember. I’m leaving
out the topographical features south of there, which he can talk
about well into next week, if you’re mature enough to stand it
without hyperventilating and falling into a swoon. But he’s
never exactly wrong, because what he sees is verifiably there if you
look for it. He sees what you wish they would all see. You’re
just this person getting by on whatever you have. You don’t
think about how you look most of the time. You think about what
you’re doing, and that’s probably just as well, because
it keeps us all out of trouble. Pete comes along and looks at you as
though you were an object. No question about that, but the object is
a flower or a bird or a tropical fish – something that has its
own rules and purposes, its own course in life that doesn’t
have anything to do with his. If you want to come closer, that’s
okay with him. But if you don’t, that’s fine too, because
he’s just glad to be there and see the pretty colors. This is
not a deep thinker. But if this is a man who deserves to die, I want
the others all killed off first.”

Remembering Paula’s call
made Jane irritable. It wasn’t Paula’s fault, and it
wasn’t even Pete Hatcher’s. It was her own. She was
already feeling a sick twinge in her stomach about Carey, and she was
not yet prepared to set aside time to think clearly about it. She had
no business leaving a husband of three months. She had no business
breaking her promise, so something in some primitive lobe of her
brain told her she was going to be punished. What Paula had said had
nothing to do with Carey. It should not have made her feel this way.

When Jane had met Pete Hatcher
she had understood what Paula had meant. He had been scared and
psychologically worn, but while he was standing up politely to shake
her hand, his eyes had taken the long route up to meet her eyes. What
he was saying at the time was something good-natured and
self-deprecating about needing her advice and help. It should have
been incongruous and discomforting, but somehow it wasn’t.

Carey would never do anything
that simpleminded. He was much more… what? Highly evolved.
Pete Hatcher appealed to women because he was guileless and
optimistic. He made it clear that he was having a lot of fun, and
that was a form of flattery. His expression said, “You delight
me,” and delight was contagious and reciprocal. It created a
magnetic field around it stronger than gravity.

But women loved Carey because he
knew all their secrets, including the ones that weren’t any fun
– wear and aging and imperfections and scars – and he was
always on their side. It wasn’t that they seemed glamorous for
the moment, or something. His appeal was a quick and sensitive mind
but, more than that, an air that conveyed a knowledge that didn’t
exclude things found in books but was full of things that he knew
because of who he was.

Jane felt weak and foolish for
letting Carey enter her mind now. She knew it was because she was
about to do something that Carey would have had a right to object to.
The bathing suit she chose was relatively modest. It was one piece,
black, and not cut as high at the hips as the others in her size. She
could have worn it at home without feeling uncomfortable. But she was
buying it to wear for Pete Hatcher.

She had to be where the hunters
weren’t looking and Pete Hatcher was. They would be looking at
lobbies and parking lots, and he would be looking at women. He would
be hiding, he would be scared, but he had a lifelong addiction to
studying every woman who passed in front of his eyes. He would look,
because runners had a way of falling back into old comfortable habits
to calm themselves. She bought a canvas purse and a wraparound skirt,
a big pair of polarized sunglasses and a pair of slip-on rubber-soled
shoes that she could run in if she needed to.

The next day she allotted two
hours to each of the biggest hotels: the Rainbow, the Traveler’s
Rest, the Mountaineer. It was easy for a woman to get into the part
of a hotel where Jane wanted to go. She entered at the end of a
residential wing and walked down the corridor of rooms. She left it
near the center of the building, before she reached the lobby, and
stepped out into the courtyard. She knew that Pete Hatcher would not
be in a ground-floor room, because he would not feel safe in a room
where an intruder could walk up to the windows. If he had his choice
he would be on an upper floor in a room facing the courtyard, so he
could not be shot from the street.

At each hotel she walked to the
swimming pool, found a big lounge chair, greased herself with
sunblock, and lay back to feel the sun. At some point, Pete Hatcher
would look out his window, and he would see her. A lot of people
would notice that there was somebody out by the pool. Pete Hatcher
would not leave it at that. He would stare at her hard, just because
she was a woman between eighteen and fifty-five – and he would
recognize her.

By noon she was glad that she
had found some sunblock that was practically opaque. The sun came
down clear and sharp at this altitude. She lay on her stomach at the
Mountaineer and stared along the surface of the water in the pool,
watching the sunlight break into spots on the surface and ricochet up
against the concrete wall of the building.

She saw Pete Hatcher the second
he stepped into the bar overlooking the pool. She stood up, put on
her shoes, then wrapped the skirt around her and hooked her bag over
her left arm while she watched him through the sunglasses. He was
talking to a waiter. She walked quickly toward him.

She could see the waiter going
to a cappuccino machine behind the bar that looked like the
reassembled parts of a steam locomotive. Too late. The waiter was
pouring a pitcher of milk into the boiler and flipping levers. She
thought about what Paula had said. Pete Hatcher was standing there
with a pulse rate that was probably nearing two hundred. He had just
seen the arrival of what amounted to his last chance to blow out the
candles on his next birthday, and his response was to order coffee
for two. She stepped in the door. No, it was iced cappuccino for two,
somehow even more absurd and courtly, because it was the right thing
to order for a woman who had been lying in the sun.

He carried the glasses to the
table, but Jane took his arm and moved him on to another that was out
of sight of the door. The waiter was busying himself at the bar, so
she leaned close and gave Hatcher a peck on the cheek before she sat
down. “Very thoughtful,” she said. In a whisper, she
added, “Why didn’t you call again?”