by Thomas Perry
Jane said, "There won't be any more stops for a while, so if you want to sleep, you can."
"I'm really not very sleepy right now. I slept most of the afternoon because I had been up the night before. Then, when I saw Steve Demming walking past the door of my room, it was like an electric shock. From then on I haven't been able to calm down."
"Steve Demming. That's the name of the man with the flowers in the hallway? Tell me about Steve Demming."
"He's one of the six, and he seems to do most of the talking, sort of like the foreman of a crew, not like an employer. None of them seems to be a boss or anything. I saw him at the office now and then. Until I was promoted to being Richard's assistant I didn't know who Demming was, and then when I happened to learn, what I learned wasn't even true. I was supposed to cut him a check, and the notation on the stub was that the money was for electrical contracting. Another time I did the same thing, and the check was to one of the others—one of the women—for interior decorating. Every few months, one or another of the six might come by, and maybe they would get a check, or maybe not."
"What about the other five? Do you know their names, too?"
"Yes. Over time, I started to pay attention and remember. The two women are Sybil Landreau and Claudia Marshall. The four men are Steve Demming, Ronnie Sebrot—he's the one you hurt in the parking lot—Pete Tilton, Carl McGinnis."
Jane's telephone rang, and the sudden noise made Christine jump. Then she lifted Jane's purse from the floor and held it while Jane snatched the phone and looked at the number on the display. "This I've got to take." She pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road, got out, and walked to the front of the car before she answered it. "Hi. You got my message?"
"Yes. But I don't understand."
"I'm sorry, Carey. I know I promised, and I really meant it. But something happened." As she spoke she watched the pavement light up as the first of the cars that had been behind her on the road came closer and then whisked past, and a wake of warm night air hit her in a puff.
"I'm grateful for the five years when nothing happened. What's going on?"
"A young girl came to me because somebody I helped a long time ago told her I was worth a try. She ran away from her former boss, and he hired a team of six people to find her and drag her back. They seem to have set off the bomb just so she'd be evacuated from the hospital building, and—" Jane stopped herself.
"And?"
"She's alone, and she's pregnant."
"How pregnant?"
"I haven't asked yet, and she hasn't said, but I would guess five to six months. She's terrified, and I've been taking it slow, just asking what I need to know right now. It was just one of those times when you're only given two choices. I could try to get her out of there, or I could walk away and let those people drag her into a car and disappear."
"Okay. You've gotten her out of there. Now what?"
"You know."
"You're going with her?"
"I'll get her to a safe place and get her settled, and I'll come home. It should just take a few weeks."
"A few weeks?" he said. "Jane, you can't just disappear the way you used to. What am I supposed to tell people?"
"I'll have to trust you to think of something convincing. I got hurt, or I went to stay with a relative to get over the shock—any-thing. Whatever you make up, tell me later and I'll play along."
He sighed in frustration. "So this is the last call for a while, isn't it?"
"Yes. You know how it works."
"I remember."
"I hope you're not mad or hurt or something."
"I'm not happy about it, but what can I do?"
"Nothing."
"That's what I thought."
Jane saw the pavement ahead of her brightening again as the next car approached. It reminded her that while she was standing here with the car turned off she and Christine were vulnerable, and they would attract attention. "Carey, I've got to go. Please understand."
"Be safe."
"You, too." She looked back at the windshield of the car, and saw Christine staring at her. "I love you." She ended the call and put her phone into her jacket pocket, then hurried to the car and pulled out onto the road again. Christine seemed to sense that she wasn't in the mood to talk for the moment. Jane could see she was pretending to sleep, and she was grateful.
As she drove the long, dark highway, she thought about Carey. She kept falling into a circular series of thoughts. She felt guilty because she wasn't living up to her responsibility to him, but she would have felt much more guilty if she had refused to help Christine. She knew Carey's anger wasn't about his own convenience. It was that he genuinely loved her and didn't want her to risk her life. But what was her life if it consisted of little but being safe in the big old McKinnon house in Amherst, probably the safest of the suburbs on the eastern side of Buffalo?
When she had married Carey, she had been very conscious and deliberate about ending the period of her life when she was Jane Whitefield the guide before she assumed the next identity as Jane McKinnon, the pleasant, unremarkable local doctor's wife. She had assumed an identity that she believed would keep the old life away and keep Carey safe. She had kept up her old relationships with family, friends, and relatives, partly because being part of a community made an assumed identity more solid. She had taught the old language to Seneca children on the reservation, served in quiet ways in tribal life and government—the titles that brought unwelcome visibility were traditionally held by males—and had volunteered at the hospital.
One of the assumptions she'd had about marriage was that she would have babies. She had been careful not to let herself get pregnant for the first three years after her last client, until she was sure that some forgotten aspect of her past wasn't about to spill over into her new life, and Carey had understood. When the three years had passed, she had begun to feel that old dangers had become distant. She had told Carey she was ready, and they had stopped using birth control. The one thing she had never wasted much time worrying about was infertility. But after six months, nothing had happened. After a year had passed, Carey had arranged for them both to be examined and tested for physical problems, and they had both been declared problem-free. Still, nothing. After two years of trying, Jane's infertility was unexplained. What was unexplained couldn't be treated.
As soon as she had seen Christine tonight, a hundred contradictory thoughts and feelings had flooded her brain, and she was sure they had affected everything that happened in the past few hours—her concern for Christine, her reluctance to tire her out with pointed questions, certainly. But she felt a hurt, too. She had wanted a child more each month, and when the longing was beginning to be unbearable, who had turned up but a teenager with an accidental pregnancy? It was a cruel joke.
Jane looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was after one A.M. The windows along the road were all dark, and she was seeing fewer cars now. For miles between small towns there were only a few houses placed at long intervals, far back from the highway. She noticed how many of them had big toys beside them—recreational vehicles, motorcycles, boats on trailers.
After a time Christine spoke. "I'm not asleep."
"If you keep trying, maybe you'll doze off."
"No."
"Worrying isn't going to help. What helps is putting miles of road between us and them, and we're doing that."
"I know. I keep thinking about them."
"The six?"
"Yes. I don't know why there are six. When I first noticed them one or two were different people. They disappeared and new ones took their places. But it's always six."
Jane said, "To be honest with you, it's one of the reasons they worry me. It's the largest number who can ride in a car—just about any car. Or they can split into three separate teams and still work twenty-four hours a day—one on, one off. No doubt it gives them a chance to use a lot of different skills at once—a lot of ways to catch us."
"Now there are only
five."
"Now there are five," Jane said. Her voice was not as hopeful as Christine's.
"What are you thinking?"
"We know who hired them—Richard Beale. We know their names. When you were in San Diego, why didn't you just talk this over with the police?"
"I couldn't," said Christine.
"What was stopping you?"
"I can't prove they work for Richard. When he did anything he didn't want known, he used to make up a corporation name, get a bank account, use it for a few months, and then close it. But the one who opened the account and had signature power wasn't him. When I worked for him, a lot of the time it was me."
"So if the police connect these people with a crime—the bombing—when they trace the money to the person who wrote the check or withdrew the cash to pay them, it will be you. Your name, your fingerprints on the checks."
"A lot of the time, I said. Not all of the time. But it will never be Richard."
Jane turned to study Christine's face. "Didn't this strike you as an odd way to run a business?"
"What did I know about business?"
"What did you know?"
"I knew what Richard chose to teach me. It was my first grownup job. I was sixteen when I started, and Richard told me what he wanted me to do. He didn't make a fuss over any of this. He didn't say something like 'This is illegal so don't tell anybody.' And I figured that the presidents of Microsoft or General Electric certainly didn't sign all the checks for their companies. They wouldn't be able to do all of them in a lifetime even if they did nothing else. So why should Richard? So I did what Richard said was my job, and I was secretly grateful that he was patient enough to explain how to do things. And also relieved that he didn't know I wasn't actually eighteen, which is what I had said."
"How long did you work at his company?"
"Three and a half years. Not all of it was working for him, though. The man who hired me ran the apartment rental business for Richard. I was actually looking in the newspaper ads for an apartment, and their ad for apartments had a little box in the corner that said the company was hiring. I came in and asked for an application, and he interviewed me while I was filling it out. His name was Dave. He was a big, heavy guy about fifty. You know how with some people when you look at them you know exactly what they looked like when they were babies?"
"Sure. He was one of them?"
"Yes. He had that look, as though one day he was in his crib, and the next he was in the office going over a rental agreement."
"What I'm wondering was why, at the age of sixteen, you needed a grown-up job and an apartment."
"It's just another thing that happened to make me feel like a fairytale princess," she said. "I got evicted by my wicked stepmother."
"Tell me about her."
"The Divine Delia and I didn't really get along when I was growing up. I was the oldest, a leftover from an earlier marriage, and my father and I spent a lot of time together. He would take me places sometimes and leave my brother and sister home. It was because they were too young for where we were going, but what Delia said was, 'So change where you're going and bring all the kids, or go someplace that's really for adults, and take me.' It makes a certain amount of sense, doesn't it?"
"On a first hearing."
"We liked to be alone now and then. I was a preteen and then a teenager, and needed to talk to somebody, and the Divine Delia was a genuine bitch, so my father was the only candidate. And when their marriage started to turn sour, I was the only one my father could talk to. So when she started in on us, we were more drawn to each other, and also to the door. And that pissed her off even more, and probably accelerated things."
"I take it the marriage ended."
"Not in the simple way. First it kind of built up to one of those big moments, a blaze of clarity. She kept wanting more and more expensive things—cars, a boat, a lot of vacations, lots of walking-around money. We ate in restaurants so often that my friends stopped calling me before ten because they knew I'd be out. My father was miserable. He was getting more and more desperate."
"Desperate?"
"He had already blown two marriages—the one that didn't produce anything but me, and another one to a woman named Roz who would drive me to school in her nightgown and bathrobe and then go to some boyfriend's apartment and hop back in bed. My dad was already getting fat and worn-out looking and he knew it. I think he was afraid nobody else would ever love him. So he gave Delia everything, and he ran out of money earlier each month and charged the rest of the expenses to credit cards. I noticed at one point that whenever he got an offer for another credit card in the mail, he put it in his briefcase. Afterward I learned he filled them all out. How could he not end up borrowing some money from his company? Later, at his trial, the prosecutor went down a big long list of all the things he had bought and charged to his credit cards. It all sounded just awful, and he seemed to be this pig who stole money from his company because he wanted trips and dinners and luxuries. He didn't want all that stuff. He never wanted any of it. He wanted love."
"There was a trial? So the company caught him and called the police?"
"Not right away. The bookkeepers noticed that he had made out a transfer, and the account the money went to didn't seem to belong to the company. They found more, and found my father had requested all of them. The head bookkeeper told the president. He was a friend. He had known my father for twenty-five years, and he knew this wasn't what it looked like. He told my dad that he would postpone the regular outside audit for a month so my dad could get the money and pay the company back."
"That was quite a generous offer."
"It was a gamble," said Christine. "It meant the president was doing something just as illegal as what my father did, just because he trusted my father and wanted to save him. He also thought he would be saving the company from a scandal, but there wasn't much in it for him personally."
"Since you said there was a trial, I assume the plan didn't work."
"My father collected everything he could and tried to sell it or get his money back. He took pictures of the cars, the boat, the house, and put them on the Internet. He tried to take back a lot of the things he or Delia had just bought. He cashed in his insurance and his retirement and went to the banks for loans. For the first time in years I was proud of him, because he was doing something to pull himself together. What he hadn't planned on was the Delightful Delia."
"What did she do?"
"Nothing. She wouldn't sign off on anything. The house was in both their names, and she wouldn't sell it. One of the cars was in her name and another in both their names, and she wouldn't sign the pink slips. She got a safe-deposit box by herself and put all the jewelry in it, and probably all the cash she had been skimming off and hiding from him. She wouldn't cosign a loan, get a job, or even stop charging things."
"How well did he do without her?"
"At the end of the month he had sold one of the cars—his car, with her name forged on the pink slip—for about twenty thousand, which was half what he had paid for it a year earlier. He sold his watch, a TAG Heuer my mother had bought him as a present about fifteen years earlier. He sold my laptop and my iPod and my DVD player for about six hundred. There were a lot of other odds and ends, mostly things he'd had before the marriage. The final count of what he had taken from the company was about a hundred and twenty thousand, and he came up with about seventy."
"Not enough."
"No," said Christine. "It was a horrible thing to watch. He was defeated from the moment he told Delia and saw the cold, ugly look on her face. He knew it, but he kept trying. He was wounded, bleeding inside, but he kept scrambling as hard as he could to get himself and us out of this mess. He had to keep working full-time, of course, or people would notice and start wondering what was up. He would sleep a couple of hours a night, then go to his computer again to check on the bids and put up more stuff for sale. It was all impossible, one of those situations where you know you can't
get there from here. At the end of the month he brought the seventy thousand he had raised and begged for more time. But the president didn't have any more to give him."
"He couldn't do anything?"
"It was a public company—you know, with stockholders and directors and everything—and there were federal rules about how often they had to have the outside auditors in. He couldn't hold up any longer, or he might be fired, too. Or worse. The president was a friend, as I said. He took the other fifty thousand out of his own pocket—cashed in some of his retirement money—and added it to my father's seventy."
"That's a real friend."
"It didn't work. The money was paid back, but it was too late. The bookkeepers had ratted him out to the auditors, or thought putting the money back was dishonest, or something. It came out, and my father was arrested."
"I'm sorry."
"Well, it wasn't as though he didn't take the money. And the reason he did it was that he didn't want his wife to realize he was running out of money before the end of every month. I mean, I'm sure she knew what his salary was. So what was he protecting her from? Arithmetic? God. But in the process, he got his giant flash of clarity. The Delectable Delia wouldn't help him save himself, even by signing a paper to give him back a little of the money he'd spent on her."
"She never relented?"
"Even I was surprised, and I didn't expect much from her. She said, 'I just can't throw away everything I've built and leave my children destitute'—meaning the children other than me. I was his child. She was right, in a way. All the money he got by selling his things he had to give to the company. It did him no good. All the things he or she had bought on credit that he returned to stores just went to lower the amount he still owed the credit card companies. That did nothing for him, either."
"Did she pay for his defense lawyer?"
"No. What she did was hire a lawyer to separate her assets from his, and she did that right away, so it would be a done deal before he was charged. That way, his creditors could come after her all they wanted, but get zero. This, you see, is a neat trick, because she'd never had a job. Her assets were all money he had earned, and probably even some of the money he stole. From her, Dad couldn't even get bail money."
