Dance for the Dead (12 page)

Mary Perkins studied her
reflection. The effect wasn’t as bad as she had expected. The
woman who stared back at her wasn’t dowdy or mousy. She was
mildly, quietly attractive, and with a little makeup she could be
made better than that. What she looked most like was a woman who had
never existed; she looked like a grown-up version of Lily Smith. “All
right,” she said. “What do we change next?”

“That will have to do for
now. Come on.”

Checking out consisted of
sitting in the car while Jane went into the motel office and set the
key on the counter. When she returned, she started the car and said,
“All right. Now we start getting into the hard parts. Do you
have identification in any name besides Mary Perkins?”

“Lila Samuels,” said
Mary.

“Throw her away with Mary
Perkins. You’ve been in county jail. Although you haven’t
exactly said so, you’ve been investigated, and probably
arrested more than once. The authorities know your aliases, and so
can anybody else who wants to.”

Mary Perkins said, “I’ve
got to be somebody.”

“I’ve got some
papers with me that you can use. Your name is Donna Kester. You’re
thirty-five.”

Mary Perkins stared at her. “You
have fake I.D. with you? But you were arrested too. They went through
your purse.”

Jane pulled the car out of the
parking lot and drove up the street. “It wasn’t in my
purse.” Jane had brought the papers for Mona and kept them
taped under the dashboard of each car they had used while traveling
across the country. After Dennis had wrecked the last car, she had
gone to the lot where it had been towed and found the papers
untouched. “You can be Donna Kester without worrying about
anything for a while.”

They looked at three different
apartments before they found the right one. It was in a building in
the middle of a large modern apartment complex on Huron Street that
seemed to contain a high proportion of single people, but it was far
enough from the University of Michigan campus to be vacant. The fact
that Donna Kester had a credit card was enough to get her a lease
that began in two days. The fact that she had no local employer only
confirmed her story that she had just gotten to town.

That afternoon Jane checked them
into another motel at the edge of Ann Arbor, past the place where
Huron Street crossed Route 94 and became Liberty Road. Jane sat in
the motel room on the twin bed across from Mary. It was dusk, and the
cold wind was beginning to blow outside to announce that the short
fall days were fading into winter nights here. The tree branches that
scraped and rattled the gutters of the building were bare, and the
wet pavement of the parking lot outside the window would be frosted
by morning.

Jane said, “This is a good
place to be. There are about thirty-five thousand students here, just
about all of them strangers. Figure five thousand faculty, all from
other places. Most of them are married, so they’re really ten
thousand, and another five thousand staff. Most of those people just
returned here for fall semester. You’re one of fifty thousand
people who just got to town in a community with a year-round
population that can’t be much over a hundred thousand.”

“Are you trying to sell me
a condo?” asked Mary.

“No,” said Jane.
“I’m trying to teach you something. If you’re going
to be a fugitive you’d better get good at it. I’ve heard
a couple of versions of who isn’t chasing you, but not who is.
It doesn’t matter. This isn’t the sort of place where
they’ll look first. That’s the best you can do in
choosing a place to be invisible. There are always about five likely
places to look for anybody. If you’re stupid, you’ll be
in one. Once you move beyond those, every place is about as likely as
any other, so the odds of finding you drop dramatically.”

“Where would you look? You
said five places.”

“J haven’t studied
Mary Perkins as thoroughly as they have. You’ve been to Las
Vegas and liked it. You’d be too smart to go back, and Reno’s
too close, so I might try looking in Atlantic City. You said you had
worked in Texas and California, so people know you. But that leaves
lots of cities in between that would appeal to Mary Perkins: I’d
try Scottsdale, Sedona, Santa Fe. You like to be around money and
sunshine.” As she watched Mary, she could see that the list was
making her frightened. “The fifth place is somewhere in the
South.”

Mary Perkins looked like a woman
who had paid to have her palm read and heard that she had no life
line. “Where?”

“You have just a trace of
a southern accent. Since I know you’ve been arrested, I’d
check the arrest record to find the city where you were born. That’s
always the fifth place.”

Mary looked at Jane with an
expression that was meant to be intrigued puzzlement, but the surface
never set properly; her face only formed itself into pie-faced hurt.
“Why is that?”

Jane’s eyes were tired and
sad. “I don’t know. Some people will tell you it’s
because they know the territory better than a stranger could, but
they say that even if every inch of the place was bulldozed and
rebuilt the day they left. Some of them say it’s because they
can get help from friends and relatives, but half the time they don’t
ask for it when they’re there. They go there even if everybody
they ever knew is dead and buried.”

“You’re telling me
what you don’t believe. What do you believe makes them go
back?”

“I’m telling you I
don’t think the people who do it know why. Maybe it’s
just some feeling that people have because we’re animals too.
You go to ground where you once felt most safe, and that’s
wherever your mother was.” She watched Mary Perkins for a
moment. “It’s a lousy instinct, and it will get you
killed.”

“So what now?”

“This is a place where
nobody is searching for you. You look a little different, and if you
work at it you can change more. You have identification as Donna
Kester that should hold up. The credit cards are real. You’ll
get the bills. The driver’s license is from New York, but it’s
good too. Somebody actually took the road test. You can get a new one
here with the old one and the birth certificate. That’s real
too.” A man Jane knew had found a job in a small-town
courthouse and added forty or fifty birth records that hadn’t
been there before. He sold about one name a year, so the odds were
good that nobody would catch one and start looking into the rest.

Mary Perkins looked increasingly
alarmed. “How long do we have to stay here?”

“It’s up to you. If
you want my advice, I’ll give it to you. Spend your time around
the university, where there are crowds of strangers of every
description and all the thugs wear helmets and shoulder pads. Buy
yourself a long, warm coat with a high collar and wear a hat and
scarf.”

“You’re telling me
you’re cutting me loose, aren’t you?” said Mary
Perkins with growing anxiety. “I thought you were going to
protect me and get me settled.”

Jane framed her words carefully,
making an effort to keep the frustration out of her voice. “You
came to me in trouble, with two men on your back. I got you out of
that trouble because you asked me to and I didn’t think you
could do it yourself. Now you’re reasonably safe if you want to
be. That’s as far as I go with you.”

“It’s because you
think I can’t pay, right? Well, I can. I’ve got money
with me, and I can get more when it’s safe to travel. Enough to
make it worth your time, anyway.”

“Keep it,” said
Jane. She picked up her purse and the keys to the car. “The
more you have, the longer it will be before you do something
foolish.” She walked to the door, stopped, and added, “Take
care.”

“I have a right to know
why.”

“No, you don’t,”
said Jane. She stepped outside, closed the door, and walked across
the cold lot to the car. She started it and drove around the block
and past the motel twice. When she was certain that nobody was
watching the motel and nobody had followed the car, she continued
straight to Route 94 and headed east toward the junction with 23 to
Ohio.

When
Jane reached Toledo she swung east across the vast flat lake country
toward home, In the morning when she passed into the southwestern tip
of New York, she felt as though she had left enemy territory. Three
hours later, she drove the rented car to the Rochester airport and
turned it in at the lot to make it look as though the driver had
continued east on a plane. Then she took a commuter flight seventy
miles west to the Buffalo airport, where she had left her own car.

She drove up the Youngmann
Expressway to Delaware Avenue and turned north into the city of
Deganawida in the late afternoon. The sun had already moved to a
position in the west where its feeble glow did little to blunt the
bite of the wind off the Niagara River. She drove onto Main Street
near the old cemetery that had filled up before the Spanish-American
War, took the shortcut along the railroad tracks and down Erie to
Ogden Street, then turned again to her block. The house was one of a
hundred or more narrow two-story wooden buildings placed beside the
street that ran the length of the city from one creek to the next
one, two miles away.

Jane pulled the car into the
driveway and her eyes instantly took in the state of the
neighborhood. She had been looking at these same sights since she had
first stood upright and been able to see over the hedges to survey
the world while she was playing. The houses in this block had been
built before the turn of the century for the people who worked in the
factories and shipyards that were no longer here, and the trees were
tall and thick, their roots pushing the blocks of the sidewalks up
into rakish tilts that had made roller skating dangerous. Her front
yard looked lush and green and needed cutting, the blades thick and
wet from the rain she had missed while she was away. The clapboards
of the narrow two-story house always had looked soft and organic to
her because the dozens of layers of paint spread on by generations of
Whitefields had made the corners rounded. She saw the curtain on Jake
Reinert’s corner window twitch aside and she knew he had heard
the car’s engine in the driveway next door.

She walked to her front door,
unlocked it, and slipped inside to punch the code on her alarm keypad
before the alarm could go off. She left her front door open so Jake
would know that she was willing to talk. She walked into the kitchen,
poured coffee into the filter of the coffee-maker, opened the freezer
and unwrapped a frozen square of corn bread and a package of
blueberries, and started to defrost them in the microwave oven.

Jane heard Jake on the porch,
his footsteps heavy and a little stiff. “Come on in,” she
called, then went back to the cupboard for honey. The microwave bell
chimed, and she had the corn bread, berries, and honey on the kitchen
table before Jake was comfortably seated. She heard him strain a
little to ease himself down with his arms.

“I brought your mail,”
said Jake. He set a pile of letters on the table.

“Thanks. Arthritis acting
up?”

“It’s just the
winters,” said Jake.

“Cold nights getting to
you?”

“Yeah, too damned many of
them.”

He watched her bustling around
getting cups, plates, and silverware. Nothing escaped his notice. She
was wearing heavier makeup than usual, and her right eye was half
closed and the high cheekbone on that side seemed tight – not
puffy, exactly, but swollen. She still moved quickly and gracefully,
but she didn’t pick up things in groups: she lifted each one
and set it down before she picked up the next. He judged it was
probably a sprained wrist.

Jake had known Jane Whitefield
for all of her thirty-two years, had known her mother for a few years
before that, and her father all his life. He had come into this same
kitchen as a child and watched her grandmother lay out corn bread,
berries, and honey for him on this same table. Seneca women obeyed
some ancient law that said that anybody who came in at any time of
the day or night got fed.

He had not merely known Jane
Whitefield, he had been around to see her coming, but it had been
only two years ago that he had accidentally discovered what little
Janie had grown up to do with herself. From the look of her, it had
gotten harder lately. He said, “Rough trip this time?” He
had suspected he would feel like an idiot if he said it this way, and
he did; a woman who made her living by taking fugitives away from
their troubles and into hiding probably didn’t have any kind of
trips but rough ones. He had said it that way because it acknowledged
that he knew the nature of her business and implied that he wasn’t
shocked by it anymore. He considered this a necessary piece of
hypocrisy.

To Jake’s surprise Jane
didn’t take the chance he had given her to shrug it off or make
a joke out of it. “Yeah,” she said. “It was awful.”
She set a plate of corn bread in front of him and started to eat her
own, but then set the fork back down. “I always thought the way
it would end was that one day I would get sick of people and decide
they weren’t worth the trouble anymore. That probably won’t
be how it happens. I lost two of them, Jake.”

“Lost them?” he
said. “You mean you can’t find them?”

“No.” She spoke
clearly but with the quiet voice that made him know what she was
going to say, because people spoke in low voices about the dead. “I
got them killed.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,
exactly. I mean, I know what happened, but not how. We – the
three of us – were taking a little boy to California. There was
an ambush. I didn’t read it in time because it wasn’t a
dark alley or a lonely road. It was a courthouse. The other two had
to stop and buy me time to get the boy inside where he would be
safe.”