Dance for the Dead (30 page)

“All right,” she
said. “I hope you’re strong, because I’ll need your
help.”

She ran to the corner of the
little compound, past the swing sets stored for the winter and the
playground merry-go-rounds and over to the slides. The first two had
frames of welded steel pipes that made them too heavy. The third was
made of thin fiberglass in the shape of a tube, and Jane could lift
the end of it by herself. They dragged it to the fence, lifted it so
that the ladder was on their side and the tube went over the barbed
wire and out to the street. “Want to go first?” asked
Jane.

Mary climbed the ladder, slipped
her legs into the tube, and flew out the other end onto the snow.
Then Jane slid down and fell in the same spot. Mary was impatient to
get away from the fence now, but Jane said, “If we don’t
move it, the cops will figure it out without having to get out of
their car. Help me.” They pushed the tube back over into the
compound, then started down the street.

“Where are we going?”
asked Mary.

“The university.”

They jogged the last mile in
silence. Jane set the pace again and listened for Mary’s
footsteps. She glanced at her watch. It was after two a.m. now, and
even close to the university there were no pedestrians. Twice she saw
headlights far down the street and pulled Mary with her into the dark
space between two houses until the car had passed. When they finally
reached the university campus, Jane slowed to a walk. She heard
Mary’s footsteps hit hard for two or three more steps, and then
they sounded softer and slower too.

Jane walked on, studying the
buildings for a long time. Finally she pointed to a long four-story
building. The name on the facade was Helen Mileham Hall. Jane stopped
a hundred feet away. “That wouldn’t be a bad place to get
out of the cold.”

Mary Perkins said, “What
is it?” She was so exhausted that her voice sounded almost
detached.

“I think it’s a
women’s dormitory,” said Jane.

“It’s the middle of
the night. Won’t it be locked?”

“Of course,” said
Jane. She wished she hadn’t mentioned the cold. They were both
heated from their run, but the night air was already beginning to dry
the sweat on her face and leave it numb. The front door was out of
the question. It led into a reception area that looked like a hotel
lobby. She could see that there was an intercom and some kind of
electronic locking system on the glass door. She supposed she had
been in the last generation of coeds who had curfews, so probably
there was no old bat to take the names of girls who came in late, but
the world had gotten more dangerous for women since then, so they
would have something worse, like an old bat in a guard’s
uniform with a .357 Magnum strapped to her hip. She walked around the
building once looking for the fire doors while Mary waited. Then she
heard the sound of the dryer.

As Jane walked toward it she
walked into her memory. When a girl was eighteen and away from home
for the first time, nights like this came now and again. The term
papers and the laundry had piled up at about the same rate, and it
was a Friday night near the end of the fall semester. The music and
the shouting in the dorm had died out, but she wasn’t ready to
lie in the dark yet because even though morning would come with
nauseating punctuality in a few hours, she was still eighteen and
restless. She would convince herself that what she was doing was
eminently practical. She could use all the laundry machines at once
if she had enough quarters, and the silence and the solitude would
make the term paper better.

The girl was sitting across from
the dryers with her feet on a chair, underlining passages in a
textbook. The laundry room was hot and humid from the washers and
dryers, and she had the door propped open to let the steamy air out.

Jane hurried to the corner of
the building and beckoned to Mary. Then she moved to the wall of the
building, stepped close to the door, and looked at it. There was a
crash bar that pulled a dead bolt out of a hole in the floor, and
there was a standard spring latch that fit into the jamb. She opened
her purse, pulled six dimes out of her wallet, and leaned behind the
door to reach out and slide them into the hole in the floor. Then she
came over to Mary and whispered. “What did you do with the tape
they put over your mouth?”

“What?” whispered
Mary.

“I didn’t see you
throw it away. Where is it?”

Mary said, “I don’t
know. I guess I…” She reached into her pocket. “Here
it is.” It was in a wad.

Jane took it, stepped far back
from the door and away from the light, came back to the doorjamb, and
stuffed it into the hole where the latch would go when the door shut.
Then she beckoned to Mary and they both went across the dormitory
lawn to sit on a curb and wait.

In fifteen minutes the girl’s
dryers stopped and she folded her clothes, kicked the doorstop up,
and closed the door slowly and quietly. It was almost three in the
morning and she didn’t need a couple of hundred neighbors
waking up angry.

Jane waited a few minutes longer
before she opened the door, pulled the adhesive tape out of the
doorjamb, dug the dimes out of the hole, and pulled Mary inside. She
shut the door, and they made their way up the back stairs to the
second floor, away from the public areas to the long corridors lined
with students’ rooms. Jane walked quietly through the halls of
the dormitory, looking at the doors of all of the rooms. At each
corner she stopped and listened for other footsteps, but she heard
none. Finally she stopped at a door where there was a folded note
taped at eye level. She pulled it off carefully and read it.

Cindy
– Your mother called like eight times!!! I told her you were in
the library. Call her as soon as you get back from Columbus.

Lauren

Jane slipped the Catherine
Snowdon credit card between the doorknob and the jamb until she found
the plunger, then bowed it a little to push the plunger aside and
open the door. Before she closed it behind Mary she put the note
back. Cindy was going to need time to prepare a comforting story for
her mother.

Jane felt for the single bed by
the wall, pulled the thick blanket off it and draped it over the rod
behind the curtains so that no light would escape, then turned the
switch on. She went to the closet and studied the clothes for a
moment, then started taking things out. “She’s about your
height, but she wears her tops big.” She tossed a sweater on
the bed. “Put it on.” She took off her own blouse and
slipped another sweater over her head. Then she glanced at Marys
rubber boots. “Those aren’t going to help us either. Try
some of hers.”

Within a few minutes they were
both dressed in Cindy’s clothes. There was one short fall coat
and one University of Michigan jacket. It was reversible, so Jane
pulled it inside out and put it on. There were places where she could
still pass as a college girl, but a college was not one of them. She
counted a thousand dollars out of her purse and set it on the desk.
“Sorry, Cindy,” she wrote on Cindy’s pad. “I
needed clothes.” She turned to Mary. “You look good,
considering. Let’s go.”

Jane led Mary out through the
laundry room, then found the Student Union by walking toward the
center of the campus. The Ride Board was something she remembered
from her college days, and she found it in a big hallway off the
entrance. There were index cards posted in long lines on a cork
bulletin board. She ignored the “Ride Wanted” cards and
looked closely at the “Going to…” cards. Most of
them offered rides for Thursday night or Friday, so they were
obsolete already. She selected one that said, “Going to Ohio
State. Leaving for Columbus Saturday 5:00 a.m. Return after game.
Share driving and gas. Doug,” and gave a phone number. She
glanced at her watch. It was four a.m. now. If Doug wasn’t an
idiot he was at least awake. She walked to the pay phone across the
hall and dialed the number.

At five o’clock the car
pulled up in front of the Student Union. Doug was big and smiled
easily. He was the sort of boy who would shortly flesh out and play a
lot of golf. His two passengers were a surprise to him. While he was
driving from his room to the campus he had planned to say he was glad
that they had turned up at the last minute because he loved company.
He also liked making a road trip without having to pay all of the
expenses himself, but better than either, he liked women. He liked
looking at them and hearing their voices and smelling the scents that
hung in the air around them. When he saw the two women walking down
the steps of the Student Union he thought that this was turning out
to be a very fortunate day. But when they got into the car and the
light came on he realized that they were old. They weren’t old
like somebody’s mother, but they were still too old to be any
more interested in Doug than his female professors were.

Near the ramp for the 23
Expressway at Geddes Avenue, Doug started to signal for a turn into
the all-night gas station, but the dark one said, “Can we stop
for gas later? There’s nobody on the road now and we can make
good time. Later on we’ll be dying to stop.”

Doug could live with that. The
gauge said they had half a tank, so it didn’t really matter.
But for a second it seemed to him that she had some other reason for
not wanting to stop until she was out of Ann Arbor. It was as though
her husband was cruising around looking for her or something. They
didn’t stop until Toledo, and then the dark one insisted on
paying for the gas and driving the next hundred miles.

It turned out that the one in
the back was a graduate student in the business school. She had
worked for ten years and then decided to go back. She was asleep most
of the time. The dark one was a lot more talkative. She was a friend
of the graduate student, and had talked her into going down for the
game. Maybe she wasn’t really that talkative, because afterward
he couldn’t remember learning anything else about her in the
four-hour drive. Maybe she had just prompted Doug to talk and smiled
a lot.

When they were on the outskirts
of Columbus, the dark one announced that they still had to go
scrounge tickets to the game, because she had talked Alene into
coming at the last minute on a whim. She had him drop them off on the
Ohio State campus so they could check the bulletin boards for offers
of unused tickets.

Doug hated to relinquish the
fantasy he had been developing for four hours, revising and refining
it at each turn in the long road. He had envisioned himself ending up
in a hotel in Columbus with the two older women, celebrating
Michigan’s victory on a king-sized bed. But he had not been
able to invent any plausible set of circumstances that might lead to
the fulfillment of this fantasy, nor could he imagine how one went
about proposing such a thing. He left them with a regret that hung
about him until later in the day, when he met a girl named Michele
who called herself Micki with an
i.
She had seen him on the
Ohio State campus with the two older women and convinced herself that
there was a melancholy sophistication about him. He did not think
about the two older women again until Sunday night, when he was
driving back to Michigan with Micki. It had occurred to him that they
might not have been able to get tickets to the game, but he would not
have guessed that instead they had bought airline tickets from
Columbus to Boston under assumed names and disappeared during the
stopover in Cleveland.

Mary
lay on her bed in the motel room and listened to the airplanes
passing overhead. She had already unconsciously perceived their
rhythm. They would growl along for four minutes somewhere far beyond
the eastern end of the building, then roar overhead and into
nothingness. There would be a pause of forty-five seconds before she
heard the next one growling and muttering at the starting line.

Mary was tired of waiting for
the question. She turned her head to look at Jane. “It was the
medical records,” she said.

Jane was sitting at the round
table under the hideous hanging lamp sorting small items she had
taken from her purse. There was a lot of cash, and cards that seemed
to have been taped to the lining in rows. “What medical
records?” She didn’t look up.

“You were the one who made
me think of it. I wanted to do it the way you would. I went to a
doctor in Ann Arbor. I asked for the form people send to their old
doctors to get their records forwarded. I signed it and changed the
doctor’s address so they would send it to me.”

“Why did you do that?”
asked Jane. “Do you have some condition that needs to be
watched?”

Mary Perkins shook her head. “It
just seemed like the right thing to do – to have them. Now,
before something happened. I was going to change my name on them and
bring them to the new doctor on the first visit. I couldn't think of
a reason why a woman my age wouldn’t have records somewhere,
and I knew I could never make some up. And they’re
confidential; they’re supposed to be protected.”

Jane sighed. “They are.
The address where they’re sent isn’t.”

“Oh. But how did
Barraclough’s people get it?”

“There are a lot of ways.
You pose as Mary Perkins’s probation officer and ask. Or you
get a person hired to work in the office so she can watch for the
right piece of paper to come in the mail. They might have wanted a
copy of your records anyway to see if you had a condition that meant
you had to keep seeing one of fifteen specialists in the country, or
needed a particular kind of surgery or something. They could even do
the same thing you did: send a note from a real doctor requesting the
records. The old doctor’s secretary would say they’d
already been sent to such and such an address. I don’t know,
and it doesn’t matter very much. Did you get them?”