Shadow Woman (21 page)

Jane had found an insurance
company that did not require a physical exam for a life insurance
policy under two hundred thousand dollars, so she had bought him one
for a hundred thousand. She had kept building Weiss’s identity
in small ways over the years, just as she had a number of others.

For most of the people she had
taken out of the world, Jane had bought false identities from
professionals. But she had always been aware that professional
forgers were not permanent fixtures on the landscape. Lewis Feng in
Vancouver had been murdered. George Karanjian in New York had gotten
too rich to take chances and retired.

Jane bought and used identities
for herself by the dozen so she could travel unimpeded, then
destroyed the ones that might have been compromised. But she also
kept about fifteen that she had built on her own – some here at
her house, some in safe-deposit boxes in banks in New York, Chicago,
Los Angeles, and Toronto.

She selected six matched sets of
papers for couples, added them to James Weiss, put the heating duct
back together, and went upstairs to make her telephone calls. She
called the airline first. The flight to Chicago would leave in two
hours. Then she took a deep breath, let it out, and dialed her home
number.

Carey answered. “Hello?”

“Hi, Carey,” she
said. “I want you to do something for me and not ask any
questions until you get here.”

“Get where?”

“Can you meet me at the
house in Deganawida?”

He hesitated. “Well, sure.
Do you want me to call somebody? Dress for dinner? Bring bail money?”

“Just come.” She
hung up. She wished she had laughed when he had mentioned bail money.
It should have been funny. If she had been the wife she wanted to be,
it would have been. She went downstairs to find the small brown
suitcase she had left in the little office that had been her mother’s
sewing room. Then she checked the latches on the first-floor windows,
changed the light bulbs of the two lamps that were on timers, and
hurried upstairs.

She was packing the suitcase
when Carey came into the bedroom. He looked at the suitcase, then
looked at Jane. He said, “I hope you called because you needed
me to help you carry a few things home.”

Jane smiled a sad little smile.
“There’s something I want you to hear.” She stepped
to the answering machine, pressed the button, and watched Carey’s
face while Pete Hatcher’s voice came on, scared, dazed, and
breathless. “Jane? Jane?” When Carey had heard the
message and there was the clatter of the telephone receiver being
hurriedly set back in its cradle, she pressed the other button to
erase the message, then stepped close to him. She touched his arm and
it felt hard and stiff, but when she tugged it, he sat on the bed
with her.

He said, “I can’t
believe this is happening.”

She sighed and tried to find a
way to begin. “I love you.” That was the best way. “I
love you. I don’t want this to happen either.”

“But you made a promise.
You said it wouldn’t. Not that you would be sorry if it did,
but that you would do what was necessary so it didn’t.”

“This is something else.”

“Jane,” he said.
“Everything is something else.”

“Let me try to explain,”
she said quietly. “This is going to sound like some kind of
legalistic excuse, but it isn’t. I said that if somebody came
to me and asked for this kind of help, I would tell them I wasn’t
able to do that anymore. I would have. This is a time when I need you
to help me. I want to be honest and tell you everything, so you
understand. You heard his voice. His name is… used to be Pete
Hatcher. He worked for a big casino company in Las Vegas. They
weren’t honest. He learned too many details. He also made them
suspicious. They were busy preparing to kill him when I took him
out.”

Carey shook his head. “What
a shock – something so unprecedented. A gambling outfit that
turns out to be dishonest. Boy, I’ll bet Pete Hatcher was
surprised. Who would have guessed?”

She looked at him
apologetically. “That’s part of being a guide. Some of
the people I’ve taken out of their troubles weren’t
innocent, or weren’t smart, or caused their own misery. Pete
Hatcher is probably one of them. But he hasn’t done anything
that I consider a capital offense.”

“You’d be amazed at
how many people like that there are,” said Carey. “Billions.
Some of them haven’t even committed a felony.”

Inside, she winced, but she
forced herself to say, “If Pete Hatcher came to me out of
nowhere tonight, I would tell him no. But he happened before I made
that promise. He could be about to die because I didn’t do a
good enough job. This isn’t something I can ignore. It’s
as though you operated on somebody and left a sponge in his belly.”

“It’s not exactly an
apt analogy,” said Carey. “If I had been operating on a
patient, I would have been doing it in the legitimate pursuit of my
lawful profession, doing what I was educated, trained, and certified
to do. I would perform surgery if it were the generally accepted way
of correcting a serious and possibly life-threatening condition. I’m
part of a system. I’m not just some guy who decided on his own
that real doctors aren’t doing enough surgery, or doing it well
enough, so I try to do a few at home.”

She hugged him. “You’re
right, Carey,” she said.

“I am?”

She stood up and went to her
closet. “Yep. When you’re right, you’re right.”

“And?”

“And I was right to choose
you. Not that there was any choice involved. We’re not talking
about some profession here, that I had to give up. It’s just a
trick I learned to do when I was too young and stupid to know any
better.”

“So you’ll stay home
– mail him another false ID and forget it?”

She looked at him in surprise.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Carey. I didn’t mean that.”
She went back to her packing.

“What did you mean?”

“I meant I’m much
sorrier about this than you will ever know. You’re my life now.
When I get this over with, I’ll spend the next few years trying
to make it up to you – trying to give you back the confidence
and peace of mind I just threw away, so you don’t think that
any time the phone rings I might go off to do something stupid.
Because I won’t. I just can’t start being smart tonight.
I can’t pretend I didn’t abandon a person out there where
I know he’ll be killed.”

Carey went to her and rocked her
gently in his arms. “Is there anything I haven’t said
that would talk you out of it?”

“No. You’ve done
pretty well.”

“You know how I feel about
it, right? No point in going into all the stuff about how a man feels
letting his beautiful young wife go off to some place where she might
get killed.”

“I know how you feel,”
she said. “I can’t help this.”

He brightened, then looked
dispirited. “Threats don’t work on you, do they?”

“Not very well,” she
said. “You could make me very, very sad without trying very
hard.”

“So whatever I do or say,
all I can do is make a bad time worse for both of us.” He
stared at his feet. “Need a ride to the airport?”

She threw her arms around him
and held him as tightly as she could, clutching him and letting the
tears run down her cheeks. “Thank you, Carey,” she said.
She turned and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Jane lifted the perfume bottle
out of the medicine cabinet, opened it, and sniffed. It had a sweet,
damp, earthy smell.

Periodically, for years, she had
collected the roots of water hemlock, mashed them for their juice,
then purified and concentrated it. This batch was fresh enough, and
maybe stronger than the last. In the old days, when an Iroquois
wanted to commit suicide, he would eat a hemlock root and die within
two hours. The perfume worked much faster. She put the bottle into
her purse and felt the tears coming again.

She rested her foot on the rim
of the bathtub and began to run adhesive tape around her thigh. She
wiped her eyes and carefully retrieved the boot knife she had hidden
on the underside of the drawer of her vanity. It was thin and
weightless and razor-edged, made of zircon-oxide ceramic instead of
steel so it wouldn’t set off metal detectors. She taped it to
her thigh, then put her foot down and let her dress fall to cover it.

She walked into the bedroom and
kissed her husband. “How do I look?”

The
lights came up to reveal the Miraculous Miranda in a Victorian gown,
standing behind tall glass windows in an octagonal set like a gazebo.
The back wall of the little room was covered with library shelves.
She stood on tiptoes to lift from a shelf a folio volume bound in
worn leather, opened it, and turned the old parchment pages as she
walked toward a small table. Finally she found a passage and read it
with interest. She closed the book, set it on the floor, and snapped
her fingers. A bottle of champagne appeared on the table. She snapped
them again and a stemmed glass appeared beside it. She stared at the
bottle with a scowl of concentration: nothing happened. She took a
deep breath, stared harder, and the cork popped fifteen feet into the
air. When it came down she caught it happily and held it while it
turned into a little bird. She opened the window and let it fly away
above the heads of the audience, then closed the window.

Miranda picked up the bottle and
poured champagne into the glass, lifting the bottle higher so the
stream of clear liquid caught in the spotlights appeared first green,
then red, then blue, then the golden color of her hair. She sipped
from the glass, then set it back on the small, graceful table, took a
step away, and faced the audience to resume her act. But she changed
her mind and returned to the table. She poured the liquid into the
glass again. The bubbly liquid foamed to the rim, but she kept
pouring. The foam frothed over the side of the glass and down the
stem, off the table and onto the floor. She seemed to be intrigued by
the way the foam kept bubbling and growing. Soon there was a sudsy
puddle at her feet that threatened to cover the floor of the little
pavilion.

Miranda seemed nonplussed. She
righted the bottle and scrutinized the label with curiosity. But
while she read it, she noticed that turning the bottle upright had
not stopped the liquid from gushing out. It came faster and faster,
first like a fountain, then like the eruption of a volcano. She set
it on the table and backed uneasily away from it, toward the tall
shelves of books.

The audience was enchanted, but
Miranda seemed concerned about her long nineteenth-century dress. She
held the skirts up with both hands as the sudsy champagne soaked her
dancing pumps and rose to her ankles. She looked around toward the
wings of the stage, but none of her helpers seemed to be able to see
her around the walls of books at the sides of the set. She waved
testily above the set at the lighting and music technicians in the
glass booth behind the audience, but the fans who turned their heads
to follow her gaze saw that the two men were shrugging and shaking
their heads in dismay. The lighting man seemed to be the only one
with any presence of mind, and he switched on a row of soft lights
above Miranda so she could see what she was doing.

As the flood from the bottle
rose higher, the audience could see that Miranda was on her own. She
turned to the bookshelves, placed one foot on the lowest shelf,
pushing the books back with her toe, and began to climb. On the sixth
shelf, her foot caught on the hem of the dress and slipped. She lost
her footing, dropped with a stomach-gripping jerk, grasped a shelf,
and dangled there.

Miranda’s toe found a
purchase, and that freed one hand. She quickly undid the buttons on
the front of the dress and let it fall to her ankles. She stepped out
of it with one foot and looked over her shoulder in frustration. With
her free hand she gave a hasty gesture, and conjured a wooden hanger
floating in the air. She gave the dress a kick and it promptly flew
through the air and hung itself on the hanger. She snapped her
fingers and it vanished from sight.

Now that Miranda was dressed
only in a corset, petticoat, and white stockings, her unnaturally
strong and nimble acrobat’s body seemed to scale the
bookshelves effortlessly. She reached the top shelf at the rim of the
structure as the foaming torrent sloshed behind the tall windows,
turning the room into an aquarium.

Just as the audience seemed to
make the analogy, the resemblance became inescapable. Brightly
colored foot-long fish began to flit and glide out of the
bookshelves, then swim down into the room to investigate the
furniture. The mind struggled to go through the processes it had been
trained to do: Are the fish alive, or mechanical, or holograms of
live fish projected from offstage into the liquid? But the cogitation
stumbled over itself and collapsed, because in Miranda’s little
pantomimes, guessing the method answered no question at all, and
something else was always coming in to change the mixture.

Miranda was visibly fascinated
by what she saw in the library below her. She seemed to forget the
audience for a moment. She slipped off her stockings and put a toe
in. She stood and paced along the top of the bookcase, looking into
the pool, and as she did she loosed herself from the corset and
stepped out of the petticoat to reveal a bright orange two-piece
bathing suit. Then she ran back along the top of the bookcase, sprang
into the air, executed a flip, and knifed into the water.

Through the row of tall windows
the audience could see her swimming underwater with the bright blue
and yellow fish. Suddenly, the unthinkable happened. There was a
creaking, tearing sound, the walls collapsed outward, and the water
poured onto the stage to be sucked away by invisible drains. Miranda
was left lying on the carpet near the table. She stirred, then stood
up suddenly, bowed, and blew kisses. Then she bowed very low. Her
face assumed that strange, playful, mischievous look as she picked up
something from the rubble on the floor and held it up.