Dance for the Dead (26 page)

“How did you manage it?”

“Did I mention it was a
two-door car?”

“Yes.”

“They kept the motor
running so they could get away fast if something went wrong. I waited
until the first one got back. He was the driver. He comes to the left
door to open it, and the other one opens the right-side door to get
out. I pushed the driver’s seat forward, flopped over on it on
my belly, set the transmission in gear, ducked down, and punched the
gas pedal with the palm of my hand. The car goes. Not real fast, just
jerks ahead and coasts at maybe ten miles an hour. The one trying to
get into the driver’s side gets his foot run over. The other
one jumps back into his seat. The car moves in this sort of stately
pace right into the front of the restaurant –
crash!
When
it hit, it kind of jammed me head-first under the dashboard onto my
elbows with the brake pedal pressing on my forehead and the steering
wheel holding my butt down and not enough room for a somersault
anyway. The one in the seat kind of belly-flopped next to me, only
his face hit the glove compartment.”

Jane frowned. “Why are you
making this up?”

Mary Perkins looked angry, but
she seemed to be holding her breath. Finally she let it out. “I’m
not sure. I guess I wanted to sound brave.”

“What really happened?”

“A Highway Patrol car
pulled in beside us. I was too scared to even look at them. The cop
saw I had been crying, so he knocked on my window and asked if there
was something wrong. I told the cop I was turning myself in –
that I left Los Angeles in violation of my parole.”

“Why did you tell him you
were on parole?”

“I thought it was a stroke
of genius. If I said I’d been kidnapped, they’d keep me
there to testify. They could do it; I really was out on parole. Even
if I did get these two convicted, what good was that going to do me?
They might not have been telling the truth about Barraclough, but
they were working for somebody. On their own, these two couldn’t
have known all that about my trial transcripts and everything. They
were maybe twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and dumb.”

“So what happened?”

“I figured the C.H.P.
would just ship me back to L.A. for a lecture, and when that was over
I could hop on a plane and disappear. Only wouldn’t you know
it, when they identified these two characters, they both turned out
to be convicted felons, so instead of a little scolding, I get to do
ninety in L.A. County Jail. Consorting with convicted felons is
apparently more serious than going out of town without telling your
parole officer.”

“That was what you were in
for when you saw me?”

“Yes. They let me out two
weeks early, or else those guys would have had me before I got to the
airport. But they must have a way of knowing when somebody is
released early.”

“Not them. Barraclough
does.” They sat for a time in silence, sipping their tea. The
cold wind outside the old house was stronger up here on the second
floor. The snow was falling harder now, as it sometimes did after
nightfall, and the white flakes came tumbling into the light and
ticked the window as though it were the windshield of a moving car.

Mary Perkins said, “What
do you know about Barraclough?”

Jane stopped watching the
snowflakes and turned to her. “He’s not what they all
think he is. They think he’s a hunter, so he’s entitled
to hunt. That’s the chance you take: if you run, there will be
somebody like him who gets paid to bring you back. But he’s not
that anymore. He’s a cannibal.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s not working
for the system anymore, catching people and bringing them in and then
getting his reward. He’s living by gobbling people up.”

“Who else?”

“The last one I know about
is an eight-year-old boy.”

“Why was he after a little
boy?”

“The boy inherited some
money and disappeared. Barraclough heard about it and killed at least
four people just because they were between him and the boy –
killed them just to get them out of his way so he could get the
money.”

“Did he get it?”

Jane shrugged. “The
lawyers still have to do their audits and studies and sort out at
least eight years of paper. When they finish, they’ll probably
learn enough to charge an accountant who’s already dead with
breach of trust or something. They’ll also find out that the
money is gone. They don’t know that yet, but it is. Barraclough
would never have killed the accountant if he didn’t already
have it.”

“Why did you come back
here?”

“Because I was one of the
people who let him do it. I don’t want him to do the same thing
to you.”

The
night was cold and the oil furnace hummed in the basement two stories
below them. Jane sat quietly in the comer of the room looking out the
window and watching the feathery snow falling, first to fill in the
icy ruts on the road and then to lay a blue-white blanket over it. No
cars passed on the street to disturb it, and nobody had been out to
leave human footprints, so it began to seem that she and Mary Perkins
were the only ones left, adrift in a place where there was no motion
and no time.

Mary stirred and walked into the
kitchen. After more snow fell, Jane could smell food cooking and hear
plates rattling onto the table. The roasting smell grew thicker in
the air, and steam that carried the scent of vegetables fogged the
window. There was the creak of the oven door opening and then the
thump of it closing. Mary’s footsteps reached the doorway and
she said, “Time to eat.”

On the table were a roasted
chicken, asparagus, carrots, and potatoes, an excess of food cooked
absentmindedly without regard to the number of people at the table.
They ate sparingly and with formality. When they were finished they
cleared the table and washed the dishes without speaking. They were
like two strangers stranded together in the only way station in the
empty wilderness, surrounded by hundreds of miles of howling winds
and drifting snow – not because they had decided to be together
but because there was no other shelter.

Mary walked into her bedroom for
a few minutes and came out to set a pillow and a thick quilt on the
couch, then went inside again and closed the door. Jane went back to
the window to watch. The snow fell for another two hours before she
stood up and walked to the couch, pulled the quilt over her, and fell
asleep.

In her dream a light, powdery
snow was falling while she trotted ahead of her companion through the
forest. It was cold, but she didn’t feel the cruelty of it
because she had worked up a light sweat. She ducked her head under
spidery branches frosted with snow, knowing that if she bumped one,
the snow would shower off onto the ground. Then pursuers would read
that as clearly as a track, and the wind would be slower to cover it.

They were making their way south
from Ann Arbor and she was watching for the rivers that fed into Lake
Erie. First would be the Raisin, then the Maumee, then the Sandusky.
This forest was wild country. Hunters from tribes from every
direction came to get bear, deer, and beaver in the winter and passed
through it in the summer on their way to kill each other. It had been
full of armed men for a thousand years.

She listened to the breaths of
the woman trotting along behind her, and at each breath there was
more of her voice, more of a cry. Jane stopped and looked back. Mary
Perkins had slowed down to a stagger, too tired to plant her feet in
the trail Jane had broken for her, and now and then meandering to
waste her strength fighting the deep drifts. Jane walked back in her
own tracks and held Mary’s arm as they walked. Mary tried to
say something, but Jane pulled her near and whispered, “They
could be close, so save your breath. Nothing does us any good but
moving.”

Mary didn’t try to answer,
so she returned her attention to the trail. It was important that
they cover as much ground as they could while the snow was still
falling to hide the signs of their passing. As soon as she had
completed the thought, the snow stopped. The air was frosty and
still, and their feet made loud crunching sounds each time they
stepped on the unbroken snow.

The ones who were following them
would be able to keep up a fast pace, running in their footsteps in
the flat places where the going was easy, and avoiding the
depressions where their tracks had sunk in deep. Jane was always
looking ahead, using the glow of the moon on the snow to search for
any irregularity in the terrain that she could use to hide their
trail – a thicket or a fallen log or a frozen streambed leading
to the next river.

Far behind, she heard the first
call of the hunters. “Coo-wigh!” reached her in the still
air, and it was answered by a whistle somewhere closer and to their
left.

“We’ve got to run
now,” she whispered to Mary Perkins.

They stepped into a jog with
Jane at the front again, keeping her strides short to push aside the
snow and make the going easier for Mary. She heard more whistles, and
then the report of a rifle off to the left, and there were faint
voices behind. She stepped into a deep drift and fell, then scrambled
out of it and saw the stream. They ran along it for about a mile. As
Jane came around a bend she saw the platform. It stood alone on the
bank, a row of poles lashed ten feet above the ground between two
saplings. She could see that its surface had something on it, so she
hurried to the thicker sapling and began to climb.

“What are you doing?”
hissed Mary impatiently. “They’re coming.”

“We can’t outrun
them,” Jane whispered. “They never get tired and they
never give up. All you can ever do is fool them.”

The sapling was smooth and half
frozen, with a layer of frost on the northwest side that held the
snow to it, but she hoisted herself up high enough to see what was on
the platform. There was a haunch of venison with the hide still on
it, and a fat chunk of flesh that could only be bear meat. Some
hunter had stored it there to keep it frozen and high enough to be
out of the reach of animals. Then she found the two pairs of
snowshoes. She tossed them to the ground and dropped beside them.

She knelt in the snow and tied
one pair on Mary Perkins backward, so the long narrow shaft was at
the toe end. “Stay here. Don’t move,” she said,
then ran along the streambed and into the woods where the hunters’
trail began. She tied her own snowshoes on backward, made her way
back to Mary Perkins and said, “Come on.”

They stepped along more easily
now, the snowshoes holding them on the surface of the snow. Jane
followed the stream to the right for a hundred yards to the first
place where the low plants penetrated the snowpack enough to
complicate their trail, then turned right again, toward the east.
They made a trail that looked as though it led in the opposite
direction and belonged to the hunters who had cached their game on
the platform.

When the first sunlight caught
them, they were in a flat, open valley. Their trail stretched behind
them for miles, and as soon as the sun was high enough to stir the
morning wind, much of it would be blown away. She said to Mary
Perkins, “Just one more run, to get out of the open before they
see us.”

They began to run due east,
where Jane could see a row of evergreen bushes tall enough to hide
the shape of a standing woman. She was tired now too. They had been
moving silently for the whole night, never speaking for hours at a
time, only concentrating on the awkward business of walking in snows
hoes. They could see the end now, and it made Jane run faster. As
soon as they reached the shelter of the bushes they would be able to
sit and rest, maybe even sleep in turns while the wind blew across
the valley and erased the shallow marks of their snowshoes. “Faster,”
she said to Mary. Everything would depend on how they behaved for the
next few minutes. They ran until their breath came in short gasps and
their legs were numb.

The sun was rising now right
behind the row of evergreens, glaring through the upper branches and
making it hard for Jane to focus her eyes on them to tell how far
they were. She clenched her teeth and kept running, and then they
were there. Jane dragged Mary between the first pair of trees, then
five more steps into thicker cover where the trees were small and
close together, and they both let themselves collapse into the soft
snow.

Jane lay there, breathing
deeply, feeling the cold flakes against her cheek but not caring. She
started to raise herself to her elbows, and her eyes rested on the
bushes. All around her, they began to topple over. The men who had
been holding them let go, and they fell to the snow with a low,
whispery. ugly swish. All of the bushes seemed to change into men as
warriors stood up from behind the clumps of brush they had tied into
blinds or shouldered aside the small trees they had stuck into the
snow.

Rough, hard hands clutched her
arms, a heavy, leather-clad body threw itself across her legs, and
another pressed her face into the snow so that she nearly smothered.
They bound her hands behind her, dragged her to her feet, and jerked
her ahead. One of her snowshoes came off, but when she tried to stop
and look down a push that felt like a punch propelled her forward, so
she limped along a few steps before the other one came off too. She
tried to glance behind her to see what had happened to Mary, but a
hand on the small of her back shoved her on with such force that for
an instant she saw the sky.

They marched them to a path that
led up over the hill into the next river valley. As Jane climbed, she
tried to get her strength back, but they kept her moving too fast.
She heard a language that meant nothing to her. The sounds were
gruff, guttural, and alien. When she reached the crest of the hill
her heart stopped for a moment, then began to beat hard.