Dance for the Dead (22 page)

Jane placed her fingers on the
lip and the top of the panel and slowly pushed upward. The panel slid
up a quarter inch, when suddenly there was a flash and a click, and
the pilot light came on. The burners just above her head began to
hiss as the gas came out of them. She ducked down quickly and lay on
her back as the gas ignited and the level blue flame spread across
the top of the row of burners. Now she could see in the weird blue
light. She could tell that she had estimated the shape and structure
of the furnace only slightly wrong. She studied it, moving her head
from side to side and lifting it as far as she dared.

There had to be some kind of
safety button to kill the furnace when the door was off so that it
didn’t start up and burn the house down. As she searched, the
blower motor went on and the fire grew hotter. She couldn’t let
it run for long, or all the metal around it would get hot too. She
kept her head low, slipped her fingers under the bottom of the panel,
and pushed upward again. The panel lip was freed, and the furnace
went off. Carefully she pushed the panel higher until it came off,
then leaned it on its side to keep from making noise, and lay down
again.

A few minutes later she judged
the air was cool enough to let her reach up through the space where
the panel had been and feel around. There was a wooden door in front
of the panel: the furnace must be in a space disguised as a closet.
She ran her fingers up the side of it until she felt a hinge.

She sat on the ground and waited
until she could touch the burners with her fingers before she made
her attempt. She squatted cautiously, rose to a crouch, straightened
to raise the upper part of her body into the furnace, reached out the
front to find the doorknob, and opened the door a crack. She pulled
herself up, slithered under the burners and out the front of the
furnace, crawled out of the closet, and closed the door behind her.

She was in a dim hallway with a
bleached oak floor and a long row of small framed drawings of sailing
ships on the white walls. As she looked down the hall she could see
the foyer. There was an alarm keypad on the wall near the front door.
A small red light was glowing to indicate that the system was armed.
At the other end of the hall was a staircase. If she herself had
installed the security system, this was where she would have put an
interior trap. Whatever a burglar stole down here, you didn’t
want him getting up those stairs where the bedrooms were. She stepped
slowly to the side of the staircase, grasped the railing, and
sidestepped between the posts up along the outside of it. She was ten
feet up, just below the center of the staircase, before she found the
electric eye mechanism. It was a foot above a step, so a crawling
intruder couldn’t slide under it, and even one who took three
steps in a stride would break the beam. There were probably pressure
pads under the carpet on some of the steps in case an intruder saw it
in time.

She kept outside the railing
beyond the top of the stairs and then climbed over the railing into
the hallway. There might be other traps on the second floor, but if
Turner was up here, this alarm zone was probably turned off.

There were lighted rooms on both
ends of the second-floor hallway. The house was absolutely quiet. She
could hear no movement or snoring or the shifting of a person in a
chair. She wondered for a moment if she had been lucky and entered
while he was out, but then she remembered the car in the garage.

She looked at the glowing
doorway of each room and chose the one to her left. It was slightly
closer to the stairway, and if she had to run she didn’t want
to have Turner three steps closer to the only way out. Slowly she
edged along the hallway with her shoulder almost touching the wall.
When hardwood floorboards creaked, it was usually the ones in the
center.

At the doorway she leaned out
just far enough to use the dark windows in the room as mirrors to
search for Turner. When she found him she jerked backward. She had
been looking for a human form, and when she found it lower and closer
to her than she had expected, her reflex was to duck back quickly to
evade the blow or the shot. But even as her body was protecting
itself, the feeling had already turned into something else.

His blond hair was wet with
blood, and under the body, the thick beige rug had soaked up the
first of it and saturated, then let a pool of it form and spread. She
could see that the outer edge of the pool was already drying into a
dark maroon ring, the carpet tufts hardening into twisted bristles.
She craned her neck to look for the gun, and found it where it was
supposed to be, beside the right hand. She knew enough about the way
policemen treated the scenes of suicides to know it was a bad idea to
enter the room. If she lost a strand of hair or a fiber from her
clothes, she would be somebody they wanted to talk to.

She leaned inward far enough to
verify that there was a discoloration that looked like a powder burn
on Turner’s right temple around the entry hole. The other
temple was pressed to the carpet, and she decided it was just as
well. The exit hole would be bigger and harder to look at.

It hadn’t occurred to her
that he would kill himself. If he hadn’t doctored the records
well enough he was about to be revealed as a thief, but a lot of
people in his business had suffered that kind of publicity, and a
fair percentage of them had never gone to jail. If he had been likely
to be charged with the murders it would have made more sense, but the
authorities had made no progress on the first ones in over two years,
and they hadn’t even been able to hold the men who had broken
Dennis’s neck and thrown Mona down the stairwell. Nobody was
offering those men a deal in exchange for his name.

The raid on Turner’s
office must have made him panic. She looked down at him and felt
something like sympathy for his fear and his forlorn death, but then
she decided that she was only feeling the immediacy of it. The sweat
and blood were still fresh, and the smell of his fear was probably
still trapped in the air of the room and had set off some basic
physical reaction in her brain that was stronger than the disgust he
had aroused when he was alive.

She took off her shoes and
stepped back along the same path that she had taken to reach the
door, shuffling her feet a little to obscure any invisible marks her
sneakers had made. At the stairway she hesitated and looked at the
second room on the far end of the hallway. Why was the light on in
there too? She reminded herself that he was beyond caring about
electric bills, but then why had he turned off all the lights
downstairs?

As soon as she was at the door,
she could see the two sheets of paper on the desk. They were placed
on the surface in the pool of light from the desk lamp like an
exhibit. She stepped into the room.

They had been typed on the
computer in the corner of the room and printed on the printer beside
it. She looked at the second sheet, the one with the signature. All
it said was “I take full responsibility for my actions. Alan
Turner.”

Then she looked at the first
page. It began, “This is my last message to the rest of the
world. When you read it I’ll be gone, out of your reach.”
She had never seen a suicide note before, but somehow she had assumed
they were addressed to family members or friends, like personal
letters.

“The reason I have decided
to end my life is that I have not been able to resist the temptation
to steal from one of my accounts. I believed Timothy Phillips would
never be found alive, so I was harming no one. Later it became
apparent that Timothy Phillips was not dead. The people who had been
posing as his parents were sending letters, and I knew that if I
allowed them to go on, I would be caught. I went to Washington, D.C.
where the letters were coming from, and agreed to a meeting. I hired
two men to follow the couple from the meeting and find out where they
were living with the boy. I am not certain, to this day, what I would
have done if they had followed my instructions, but they did not.
They formed some plan of their own, probably to take the boy and use
him to take control of his money. Whatever it was, it failed. The
next thing I knew, the supposed parents were dead and the boy had
disappeared. I regret having proceeded in this fashion. Because I
hired those men, I was, and am, technically guilty of arranging two
murders. I should mention that none of my associates or colleagues
benefitted in any way from my actions, and none of them had any
knowledge of my theft or any of the things I did to cover it up. I do
not know the names of the two men I hired to find the boy in
Washington. I met them in a bar and made the deal in the parking lot
outside. There is nothing more to say.”

Jane studied die sheet without
touching it. The printing went right to the bottom of the page. Then
there was the second page with “I take full responsibility for
my actions” and the signature. The handwriting experts would
certainly find that the signature was genuine. It was only the first
page that she suspected was a forgery.

She had sensed that it was odd
to write a suicide note on a computer, but now she could see the
purpose of it. Once Turner was dead, they had simply gone into the
file, deleted whatever had been on the first page, typed a new one,
and printed it out. Computer printers placed an extra step between
the typist and the paper. There were no keys to hit unevenly, no
distinctive characteristics to reveal that one page had been typed by
Turner and the other by someone else. Maybe he had signed a blank
sheet before they shot him, and they had simply run that through the
printer too. It didn’t matter. He had been shot in the right
way and fallen in the right way. Everything was in the right place.
The security system was on, so the police would assume there was no
way anyone could have come in, killed him, and left. Unless they
found something that wasn’t perfect – a wrong chemical
residue on his right hand, or a different set of prints on the brass
casings of the bullets – he was a suicide.

She stood still for a moment.
She could feel that the man who had done this was the one who had
fooled her at the courthouse. Turner probably had earned his death,
but he wasn’t the one she should have been thinking about all
this time. The one to worry about wasn’t the inside man who
took a share and didn’t ask enough questions about what was
going to happen if the plan didn’t work. The one to look for
would be the one who would still be left standing if everything went
wrong. He had been in this room. If she had been smelling fear, she
now knew it had been fear of him. His cunning had arranged everything
around her to disguise his presence, but the perfect positions of the
objects in the room only made his presence more pervasive.

Jane did not stop to form a
clear, logical plan about what she was going to do. She simply knew
that whatever arrangements the enemy had made must be to his benefit.
She snatched up the forged suicide note, walked to the room where the
body was lying, picked up the pistol, put it into her belt, and slid
down the banister to the ground floor. Then she made her way back
through the furnace to the crawl space, closed the closet door above
her, replaced the metal panel, and crawled back out from under the
house.

Within ten minutes she was back
at the gas station taking the plastic tarp off her rented car. She
dropped her room key in the mail slot at the motel office and drove
south. She didn’t know the enemy’s name and she didn’t
know where he lived, but now she knew something about him. He wasn’t
some accountant who had hired a few head-bangers to block a courtroom
so his embezzling wouldn’t get noticed by the authorities. He
was a pro.

Jane
drove for the rest of the night. As soon as she was over the last big
hill into Los Angeles County at Thousand Oaks, she ate breakfast at
an enormous coffee shop surrounded by brown gumdrop-shaped hills.
Just as she was taking her first sip of coffee the clock reached
seven and men with heavy machinery began assaulting the mounds,
shaving the tops to make level building lots.

She waited in a shopping mall
until noon and then checked into a brick hotel in Burbank with a
glass elevator that ran up the outside of the building to give future
guests a view of whatever was going to be built in the empty,
weed-tufted lot under it. She was glad that whatever was in the
master plan for the lot had not yet been started, because she needed
to sleep. She closed the curtains, undressed, and turned off the
lamp. She knew that the dreams would probably come, but she was too
tired now to fight them. She lay in the bed staring up at the single
red light of the smoke detector on the ceiling, then relinquished her
will and slept.

In her dream she found herself
kneeling on a bare earth floor in a dark enclosure. Her ears told her
that the space was about fifteen feet square. As her eyes slowly
became more used to the dark she could see the texture of the inner
side of the elm bark that had been shingled together to make the
walls and roof of the ganosote. It was a large one built in the old
style, about a hundred and twenty feet long with compartments like
this one on either side. She counted ten cooking fires at intervals
down the center aisle. She could see dark shapes of men, women, and
children huddled at the fires or walking past them.

One of the children pushed aside
the bearskin that was hanging at the east end of the longhouse to
cover the door, and she had to look down to avoid the glare. She knew
from the bright sunlight that it must be morning. When the child
scampered out and the bearskin swung shut again she didn’t
raise her head because she was thinking about what the light had
shown her. She was wearing a leather skirt and moccasins, and she
could feel that the reason the bare ground didn’t bother her
knees was that they were protected by a pair of leggings. She
reflected in a detached way that all of her clothes were soft
deerskin, and this confirmed her impression that the day that was
beginning was in the Old Time.