Vanishing Act (3 page)

3

As Jane drove to the west along the New York State Thruway toward Deganawida, it didn’t bother her that in the cars she passed, few of the drivers had any idea where they were or where they were going. If that little girl in the next car said, "Were there Indians here?" the daddy, the serious-looking guy with the glasses, would say, "Sure, and before them, mammoths, and before that, dinosaurs." He looked like a kind, patient father who had answered a lot of questions on this long drive. It didn’t matter if he didn’t know that the flat, grassy country from Sodus Bay to the Niagara River was part of Nundawaonoga. He couldn’t see it any more than he could see who Jane was. It looked different from the way it really was.

Jane drove until she saw the sign that said DEGANAWIDA, veered off the Thruway at Delaware Avenue, and turned up the long block to Main Street, then turned again off Main at Campbell Street, near the old cemetery. The cemetery had run out of vacancies sometime around the Civil War, and most of the graves in it were those of soldiers. The houses in this part of town were all two stories high, built before the turn of the century, when the lumber business was thriving.

She pulled into the driveway, and old Jake Reinert stopped painting the white trim on his porch next door, carefully laid his brush down, picked up a clean rag to wipe the nonexistent drops of paint from his square, pink hands, and walked to the edge of his lawn to watch her. She opened the car door and got out. "Hi, Jake."

"Hello, Janie," he said. "Can I help you haul your bags in?"

"No, thank you," she said with a smile. "It doesn’t take two." She swung out Mrs. Eckerly’s suitcase. A day ago Jack Killigan would have been surprised to see her pluck it off the car seat and set it down. She had told Rhonda Eckerly to put it on the bathroom scale to be sure it weighed no more than ten pounds before she left her house in Indiana. A fifty-pound suitcase was a burden; a ten-pound suitcase was a weapon.

Jake stepped inside his front door, then came back and walked around the privet hedge. She saw he was holding something in his hand besides the rag. "Here’s your mail," he said.

In the winter, if Jane didn’t get up in time to shovel her snow, she would wake up and see Jake give his bright red snowblower a pull and happily run it up her driveway and sidewalks before he did his own. She was always loudly grateful, not because she needed an old man to move the snow, but because the circumstances of the universe had given her the gift of a neighbor who would want to do it, and given Jake the pleasure of being able to do such things in his old age.

She glanced at the little pile of envelopes, her eyebrows raised. "Did I get anything interesting?"

He shook his head. "You know I just look for the magazines, but it looks like old Barney got to them first this time." Jake was the chief perpetuator of the myth that magazines in Deganawida arrived later than they did in other towns because Barney Schwick, the mail-man, read them before he delivered them. "Oh, I forgot," he said. "There was a fellow here to see you yesterday. Tall, fit, dark hair, dark eyes."

"An Indian?" She felt a slight alarm, although she couldn’t imagine why it felt like bad news.

"Well now, I couldn’t say," said Jake.

Yesterday was too soon for anybody Eckerly might have sent after her. She had taken a taxi to Burbank to fly back to New York City under the name Helen Freeman. She had used Lila Warren to fly to Rochester, then rented the car under her own name. "Did he say anything?"

"Not to me," said Reinert. "I didn’t talk to him."

"Well, thanks," she said. "I’m tired. I just spent the morning staring at the white line on the Thruway." She walked up the steps and unlocked her door, then rushed to punch in the code on her alarm system before the bell went off. People in Deganawida didn’t believe in alarm systems, but they respected personal eccentricity. They didn’t mind their own business, exactly, but they pretended to, and that was just as good. An unmarried woman who lived alone like Jane Whitefield was expected to be fearful, and could do what she wanted to preserve the calm that was the only defensible reason for living in Deganawida.

She walked into the living room and sniffed the air. She had been gone for two days and the house had been sealed to keep out the wet, cold winds of spring. The air in the house should have been dead and stale, but it wasn’t. It was fresh and clean and alive.

Jane stayed where she was and listened. She had opened the front door to come in, so in a few seconds the first cool air would reach the thermostat in the hallway by the bedroom and the oil furnace in the basement would kick on. She glanced again at the keypad of her alarm system on the wall. The little red letters said RDY: ready.

She decided she must have left something open. No, if she had, the furnace would have been churning away down there, trying valiantly to heat up the whole outside world to sixty-eight. It must be a crack somewhere, a tiny one that she wouldn’t have noticed if she had been here.

It was an old house, and twenty or thirty layers of paint had a way of making things fit too snugly to let air in. She felt a little tightness on the sides of her face as a chill passed on its way to the back of her neck. What was she thinking of excuses for? Somebody had been in here.

She backed to the umbrella stand and picked up her black umbrella with the metal tip on the end. She was prepared to admit that there were people on the planet who were capable of fooling any alarm system, but hers was a pretty good one. Had the power been turned off? The digital clock on the kitchen counter would have flashed twelve o’clock if the power was off. But he would have seen that too, and reset it. She quietly moved to the television table in the comer and opened the cabinet to look at the VCR. That too was glowing steadily with the almost-correct time. By her watch it was 3:47, and the display said 3:45. It had always been two minutes off. This should have reassured her, she knew, because he might have been alert enough to reset it, but he wouldn’t do it wrong. But she only wondered how he had thought of it.

The rational thing to do right now was to step back out the front door and walk around the outside of the house to look for the broken window or the scarred doorjamb, and when she found it, she could wait for the police at Jake’s house. That was what she would have told someone else to do, so why wasn’t she doing it?

It was because he was still here. He was hiding in a closet or behind a door or in the basement, or maybe just beyond a doorway. She stepped around the comer of the dining room, keeping her back to the wall, but her mind kept sending her bulletins of alarm. He had to be waiting for some reason, and the only part of the establishment that hadn’t been laid out in plain sight for his leisurely inspection was the woman who lived here.

She stepped into the kitchen and saw the gun on the table. It was wide and black and squat and ugly, with crosshatched grips that looked too big for a human hand. The cylinder was open and she could see five fat bullets inside like hornets in a nest. She froze for a second. Why would he leave it there? He was a psychopath. As she stepped closer, she could see the little colt etched on the blue metal above the handgrips. It was either a Diamondback or a Trooper. It was not a good sign when they spontaneously chose standard-issue cop equipment. It was a hint that their confusion had reached the who’s-who? stage. Maybe he was crazy enough to be the kind that took possession—ate all the food in the refrigerator, went to sleep upstairs on her bed, and forgot about the gun. That wasn’t something she felt like betting anything important on, and it set off another little alarm in her brain. If he wanted to put his mark on everything, there was one thing left that he would be waiting for. He wanted her to rush in, try to take the four steps to grasp it, and that would be when he jumped on her from behind.

If he had spent this much time looking around, he would have at least glanced into a closet and seen that she was tall or found a photograph of her. And if he was that sure he could instantly subdue a five-foot-ten woman without her making a sound, he was going to be big and strong. Maybe he had a kitchen knife and was ready to bring it across her throat while she was inhaling for the scream.

In order to do that, he had to be on the other side of the refrigerator. There was no other place. Okay, she thought. Time for a surprise. She took a deep breath and let it out to calm her nerves. When she moved, it was fast. She threw her shoulder into the side of the refrigerator and kept digging in with her feet. It rolled an inch on its casters, hit a crack in the tile, and tipped.

As it toppled, she swept the gun toward her across the table with the crook of the umbrella, snatched it up, flicked her wrist to snap the cylinder into place, ducked down, and aimed.

To her surprise, the refrigerator fell only as far as the counter and caught with a thump and a muffled sound of breaking glass. To her greater surprise, the man wasn’t crouching on the other side of it.

The voice came from the living room. "Do you have the gun?" He must have come down from upstairs.

She couldn’t think of a reason to deny it. "Yes," she said.

"I left it there."

"I know that."

"I mean, I did this so you wouldn’t be afraid."

A part of her mind wanted to call out, "It didn’t work," but she controlled it and said, "What do you want here?"

This time his voice was nearly at the kitchen door. "I need your help." Why had she assumed there was only one? Maybe he had let Jake see him just to give that impression. He was coming closer. This was her last chance to look behind her, so she took it. She swirled her head, her eyes searching hungrily for the shape of a man, but there was none.

"Can I come in?" he asked quietly.

She hesitated, slipped to the side of the door by the tilted refrigerator as quietly as she could, and turned her head to the side to let her voice come to him from the center of the room. She cocked the hammer and said, "Come in."

4

Jake Reinert applied the paint in long, even brush-strokes. He was not the sort of man who put too much paint on a brush and hoped that would keep him from having to do a second coat. Foolproof nondrip paint was still in the realm of the perpetual-motion machine and the philosopher’s stone. In fact, paint was one of many things that had actually gotten perceptibly worse in his lifetime. They had taken the lead out so the whole country didn’t get retarded at once, but whatever they had put in there to replace it was as good as money, because it meant you had to buy paint twice as often, and sometimes it seemed as though the whole world had gotten mentally damaged anyway. The only thing to be said for painting was that it helped a man keep his mind off things that worried him and that were none of his business. If Jane Whitefield wanted to tell him something, she knew where to find him.

Jane Whitefield had taken up a lot of watching time, because he had begun early and kept up with it. He had started worrying about her before she was born. He had felt a little trepidation about it. The old folks had been pretty reasonable about Henry Whitefield’s marrying an American woman, as near as Jake could tell. But he had seen situations before where everybody pretty much minded their own business until the babies started coming. Then there would be a lot of arguments that were deep and nasty about whether the kid was going to be Protestant or Catholic, who it looked like, who it would be named after, and all that. But with the Whitefields it hadn’t been like that. They didn’t seem to notice.

Her hair was as black and shiny as the lapel of a tuxedo, and it hung so straight it sometimes looked as though it were made of something heavier than hair. But Jake had seen at about six months that the eyes weren’t turning brown, not even darkening a little, and he had mentioned it to Henry.

Henry had laughed about it. He said the Seneca had captured so many white women over the years that the blue eyes might have come from him. Then he reminded Jake of something he hadn’t thought about since high school: that the last great Iroquois chiefs, Joseph Brant and Complanter, both had had white fathers. He said he had read somewhere that the more mongrelized a person was, the better the chance that he would be healthy and intelligent. Mongrels wasn’t a word Jake would have used, and it had shocked him, but he guessed Henry had a better opinion of dogs than he did.

Henry lived long enough to see that Jane had turned out all right: nice-looking, smart in school, fine athlete. Jake’s own girls, Amanda and Mary Ellen, who were a few years older, had doted on Jane until they had gone away to college. He had assumed that these were going to be lifelong friendships, but history had fooled him and made lifelong friendships obsolete. By the time all those kids had come back from school, there wasn’t really a whole lot that the town could offer them to do for a living. His had moved on; Jane had stayed.

There was a natural question in Jake’s mind as to how she was accomplishing that. Her mail was always full of stuff from stock brokers and banks and mutual funds, so she must have a little money from her folks. But that couldn’t be what she lived on. Henry had been shrewd, but he had never concentrated on getting rich. He had worked construction jobs for thirty years. A few years ago, when Jake had pried out of Jane what she was doing, it had sounded like a puff of air in his face. She had a research and consulting business. What the hell was that?

She went off a lot on sudden trips, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for sixty days. And now and then there would be strange people coming to her door. He had seen how she had looked when he had told her about the man. She didn’t even know who he was, but it didn’t strike her as a pleasant surprise. Jake didn’t know everything, but in his experience, people who had nothing to hide didn’t cringe when they heard somebody had come to see them.

His stomach felt hollow and queasy when he looked at the pure arithmetic of the situation. You had a very attractive young woman who spent a lot of money. When you asked her where it came from, she named a profession that didn’t involve making, buying, or selling anything and didn’t require her to leave the house on a regular basis. He had never met anybody who could be described as a call girl, so he didn’t really know how that business worked from the inside, but he suspected that from the outside it would look quiet and respectable and too good to be true, a lot like the way Jane Whitefield lived.

As he scrutinized his work and set aside his brushes, Jake felt a little sad. His generation—his wife, Margaret, his closest friends—were all gone. Amanda and Mary Ellen were grown-up and raising their own kids a thousand miles away. Here he was spending his time worrying about Jane Whitefield’s personal life. In his younger days Jake Reinert would have disdained the idea of being the next-to-last live person in a dying place. He would rather have put a gun to his head. But life had a way of presenting you with a dogshit sandwich and tailoring events perfectly so that you just had to hang around and eat it.