Vanishing Act (25 page)

"Harry!" she said. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to her, so she yelled, "Harry! It’s me!"

Harry looked up at her and then back down at the fire. "What—you think this is some kind of coincidence? Like I’m going to be surprised to see you?"

"I’m sorry," she said.

He held up his hand and nodded wearily, the way he used to. "No harm done." He bent closer to the fire. "Jesus, it’s cold out here."

"I’m sorry he killed you."

He shrugged and pointed to the place where the undertaker had stitched up his throat. The sewing was thick and crude, like the laces of a shoe. "It only took about a minute."

"It was my fault," she said. He seemed to oscillate, as though she was seeing him through water, and then she realized it was her tears.

"Yeah," he said. "But it doesn’t matter."

"What doesn’t matter?"

"None of it. People are born and they die. What any of them do in between doesn’t look like much from a distance. Viruses and rusty nails and people like Martin, they’re working all the time on the same side. Always were, always will be. If they didn’t exist, we’d die anyway." He scratched at his stitches gingerly, then looked back down at the fire and rubbed his hands together.

Jane could sense that some new rule was in place. Harry was waiting for her to ask the right question. "Did Martin kill Jerry Cappadocia, too?"

He turned his head to look to the right and the left, then at her. "Am I talking to myself, or what? I’m trying to tell you nobody gives a shit."

Maybe he needed to tell her something that nobody else could. A dead person wouldn’t come if a living one could give the same answer. "Do you know who hired Martin to do it?"

Harry seemed angry. "Of course I do. You still don’t get it, do you? What’s it going to get you if I tell you the name of one more criminal you never met and will never see?"

"I’ll get to know. That’s what the mind is for. It has to know."

Harry rolled his eyes and sighed. "Jerry was a scumbag. I told you that years ago. Another scumbag just like him paid some money so he could take his place with some girl."

Jane gasped. "Lenore Sanders. The one who hired Martin was Robert Cotton. Of course. The reason nobody figured it out was that it never occurred to them that it wasn’t about money and power. Cotton got the girl and nobody noticed."

"It doesn’t matter," said Harry. "Nothing happened. Hanegoategeh, the left-handed twin, took Jerry off the count and Hawenneyu, the right-handed, replaced him. The Creator creates, the Destroyer destroys, and it goes on like that. It was a harvest. Bobby Cotton is ripening too."

Jane said, "What you’re telling me is that it’s just good and evil in this constant fight and that there’s no outcome."

"Right. It’s a wash. You’re out here to get revenge, punish Martin. I’m telling you not to bother. I stopped caring when he got me. I’m just a dream." He looked up from the fire. "It’s you I feel sorry for."

Jane began to feel afraid. "Why?"

Harry pointed off into the woods toward the next lake. "He’s the real thing. Every time he kills somebody, it makes him stronger. He gets better at it—a little faster, a little less easy to surprise. He watches what we do to get away, how we try to fight back. Once he’s seen anything, he knows how to beat it; and every time he gets somebody, that’s one person who could have stopped him who can’t anymore. I’m telling you, he’s a monster. Killing me fed him."

"How can I turn a monster loose?"

Harry tugged at the laces on his throat. "Nice of you to think of that now, kid."

She stepped forward through the fire, but it didn’t burn her. She put her arms around Harry. He was cold and hard, like a side of beef in a freezer, and she could feel the water squeezing out of his suit and soaking into her clothes.

Harry sighed, then said grudgingly, "He’s going way back into the woods, as far as he can go. Make sure you see him before he sees you. Don’t feed him again."

Then her arms closed, because there was nothing between them. Harry was at the shore already, walking back into the water, up to his knees, his waist, his chest, and then she could just see the top of his head for a moment before it disappeared, leaving a little ripple.

26

She awoke feeling cold and wet, just as the day was beginning. She knew all of it now. Harry had told her the answer to the question that the police and half of the no-neck population of the Midwest had been asking for five years. She already had traced the conspiracy all the way back to its source, but the words had not come to her until she had imagined Harry saying them. A criminal with a name she had never heard until a couple of days ago had wanted Jerry Cappadocia’s girlfriend.

Harry had told her the first time he mentioned Lenore Sanders, five years ago, that Jerry had a rival. Jane had never considered what that meant, and she was not the only one. Everyone who had heard the story of the massacre at the poker game had known immediately that whoever had paid for Jerry’s murder had to be another criminal. He was a criminal by definition: A man who hired killers to kill his enemy was a killer. It had not occurred to any of the others that the motive could be anything except taking over Jerry’s territory, because that was what criminals did. But Bobby Cotton was a criminal who lived in St. Louis. He had no practical way of taking Jerry Cappadocia’s holdings in Chicago, so he never tried and never revealed himself. All he had wanted was the girl.

Jane had been given all of the information she had needed, but it had lain in a jumble in the back of her mind until the dream. She should have wondered why St. Louis kept coming up. When Martin wanted to fool her, he had told her he was a cop from St. Louis. Why had he chosen St. Louis? It was because he knew the city and knew a lot of details about the cop who had arrested him there. But why had he been arrested in St. Louis in the first place? He had been there on business, killing somebody there. She should have known instantly that it was unlikely that anybody in St. Louis had been enough of an annoyance to Martin’s usual customers in Chicago to make them send him down there. Martin may very well have been working for Cotton that time; he had at least come to Cotton’s attention.

Harry had told Jane so much about the girl that she should have wondered what had happened to her. It was ironic that nobody had spent any time thinking about the girl in five years—probably since she showed up at the funeral wearing a black dress she had bought at Dennaway’s. Most murders weren’t about money. They were about love. Whenever the cops found a body, the first thing they did was go out to look for the wife or the husband or the lover. She opened her eyes, looked up at the sky, and held the story in her mind to determine whether it felt like the truth. Yes, she had put the issue to rest. She was satisfied that she knew what had happened five years ago. As Harry had warned her, it did her no good at all.

She looked out at the surface of the lake before she stood up. At first she thought she was just looking to be sure that Harry had only been a dream, but then she sensed that she had wanted to ask him something. It was something she had thought of after he was gone. There was something she had figured out after what Harry had said. She opened the map and looked at it, and it was as though her mind had been wandering across it as she slept. She looked at the string of lakes and was sure. She folded the map and set to work. When she loaded her possessions and paddled up the next stream to Big Rock Lake, she knew he wouldn’t be there. She knew that he wouldn’t paddle on up the next stream to Bottle Lake, either. It was too small.

Martin had told her what he was going to do, if she just had the sense to read it. He had made a big deal out of lifting the canoe and walking around the parking lot with it before he would buy it. He was going to portage. Nothing else made sense. He wasn’t going to take the easy way up the whole string of lakes. He was going to stop at Big Rock Lake, lift his canoe and all the provisions and gear he had bought, and walk through the woods with them to the next chain of lakes. He had put the roads far behind him, and now he was going to leave the water, too.

He was going to a place where there was no easy way, where his strength and his stamina would separate him from any likely challenger. He had passed here three days ahead of her—maybe four now—and he hadn’t needed to go cautiously. He was wearing out his pursuers, so that when he met them he would have had four days to rest, hide his camp, and survey every inch of the surrounding country. Anybody who came after him would arrive with a canoe on his back that he had carried for miles, and would probably be in a state of exhaustion—fly-bitten, scratched, and half dead.

She looked at her map as she paddled. He would go west from Big Rock Lake to Charley Pond, then down into Lake Lila or even Lake Nehasane, and there he would stop and wait. He had come so far already that it was highly unlikely that anyone at all would follow. It was May, and the weather from now on would be tolerable, if not balmy. He had enough food to last for a long time, maybe into the summer if he was any good with the fishing gear he had bought in Lake Placid.

Jane Whitefield had spent ten years of her life hiding people. If a chaser was coming, usually he came hard and fast. If you could disappear without leaving any trail and stay hidden for two or three months, the chance of ever being found dropped close to zero. James Michael Martin had nothing to worry about from the police. They didn’t know he had killed Harry, and weren’t looking. He had little to fear from the friends of Jerry Cappadocia, who wouldn’t have any way to know that he would come to the mountains. The only possibility he had to fear was that Jane Whitefield would overcome her self-deception and be able to track him this far.

She spent an hour looking for his trail up from Big Rock Lake. She never found it. She tried to match his premeditation. It was mid-afternoon. If she could make the portage today and camp at the head of the chain, she could start the day fresh and maybe even find him before he expected her to arrive. She considered hiding the canoe in the woods and taking only the rifle and pack, but another look at the map made her reject the idea. The next chain of lakes was longer than the last, and the woods here were old and thick. She would lose time, and time meant exhausting her provisions and her strength.

The portage was about ten miles on the map, but there was no telling how long it would be on a winding trail. She took an approximate compass heading, packed her gear tightly, lifted the prow of her canoe, walked under it until she could lift it, and set off up the bank of Big Rock Lake to the west.

The canoe was light, and she had decided to travel with only the gear that she could carry strapped to her back. But the weight of it all together was seventy or eighty pounds. She walked westward for an hour, then set all of it down and lay on the forest floor, staring up at the dappling of the sunlight far above on the translucent leaves. At the end of fifteen minutes she slowly raised her body, set the burden on her shoulders again, and strained to lift the canoe. By the end of the second hour, she was staggering under the weight, her arms aching and her breaths labored and hoarse. She kept from looking at her watch while she rested, not wanting the rest to end.

Martin had been right. A person couldn’t come four days into the forest without carrying four days’ food, some fresh water, a canoe, and enough clothing to stave off hypothermia; and if she did, she had to carry it all on this portage. Some thug from Chicago would probably be lost by now, and begin to think about himself, not Martin.

Her footsteps converged with the deer run at four in the afternoon. It was narrow and went through glades and up hills, but it was clear. The hoofprints were usually obscured by the leaves, but the weeds were trampled down, and so it was easy to follow. She stopped now and then to glance at her compass, but it was difficult to tell on the winding trail whether most of the straight stretches tended to the west or the south. Finally, she put the compass into her pocket and trusted the deer. They would know how to get to water.

She had been on the deer run for a long time when she saw the second track. The deer path went down a little hill and crossed a small muddy patch, where their hoofs sunk two inches into it and a trickle of a stream ran. But among the marks of delicate cloven hoofs was the wide, deep imprint of the ripple-soled boot. He had found the deer run, too. Maybe he had known about it from the time when he was a teenager, and remembered.

She set down her gear and studied the print. It was difficult to tell how fresh it was because the constant flow of the little rivulet kept the mud damp all the time. She had a small feeling of dread that began to grow. If she followed the trail the rest of the way to the lake, there was a risk of coming on him somewhere ahead. He would have seen the tracks too, and he might even be still-hunting, sitting in the brush with his rifle ready, waiting for the deer to come along this path that they had trampled with long use.

She dropped a leaf into the little stream and watched it float down to her left. She lifted her canoe and followed it. She kept her steps up along the crest of the hill, where she wouldn’t leave a print in the mud, but kept the trickle in view. The going was harder because the constant supply of water had coaxed the brush to grow into almost impenetrable thickets wherever the ground was flat, but she managed to get around them and find the stream again and again. After a few hundred yards, the stream joined another and grew. It still wasn’t big enough to float her canoe, but it was heading somewhere.

At last, as she was beginning to lose the sunlight, the stream emerged from the woods where she had hoped it would, where it had to, in the place where streams emptied: the nearest lake. She eased the canoe to the ground, slipped off her pack, and sat staring at the water. Somebody had named it Charley Pond, but there was no telling when or who Charley had been.

She stayed back in the trees and kept low to take in what she could see of the pond. He had been here. The track proved it. He had led her along a chain of four lakes, and now he might think he had gone far enough. From here on, he could be anywhere.

She had done all of her tracking with her mind. He had bought a canoe, so he must plan to travel by water. He had hidden the Bronco at the edge of big Tupper Lake, so she had followed. He had chosen a canoe that was light enough to carry, so he must plan to portage to the next chain of lakes. From now on she would not be able to do it by reasoning; she was going to have to rely on her eyes and ears.

Jane made her camp in a deep thicket a hundred yards back from the lake. She finished just as the sun went down. Without artificial light or even a fire, she had now taken on the rhythm of the forest, and she lay down with the sun.

This time when she awoke it was late, nearly midnight. She lay still, but slowly touched the smooth stock of her rifle. She used the next two minutes to listen for the sound that had awakened her. There was a wind in the treetops, millions of leaves fluttering softly, but it felt cold. In another minute, she heard the first rain-drops. She had chosen the thicket in the little hollow so she couldn’t be seen, but it was a terrible place to be in a downpour. In the darkness she quickly hauled her gear up the slope to a spot under some tall trees, overturned the canoe, put the pack and rifle under it, stretched the nylon tarp from the canoe’s gunwale to the lowest branch of the closest tree, and used the sling from the rifle to lash it there.

She curled up with the canoe over her like a shell as far from the open side as she could go. The rain came harder now, pelting down steadily. In the distance she heard the rumble of thunder. She lay there for a long time, not exactly comfortable, but not wet, and then she fell asleep.

Sometime in the night she woke up to loud thunder-claps and then she could see the next flash, lighting up the forest around her for a second, and then the crash came, shaking the earth. The storm kept on until three in the morning, until the rain slowed and then stopped. She rolled out from under her canoe, crawled out of the lean-to, and stood up. She had not caught much of the rain, but the moisture had leached up from the ground into her clothes and she was wet and cold.

When she saw the moon, she knew it was time to move. It took her only a few minutes to stow her gear, and then she lifted the canoe once again. She slipped and slid as she carried it down the slope, but then she reached the water. Once she was launched and paddling on the dark pond, she felt strong again.