by Thomas Perry
“Good,” said Jane. “Then there are no extra people who know more than they should. What exactly did the note say?”
“I said in the note that I had met an older guy who was taking me to live with him in the Keys.”
Jane said, “I think you can be forgiven.”
“It was a lie.”
“You may be confessing to the wrong priest,” said Jane. “I’ve told a few myself.”
“I said a little bit more.”
“What was it?”
Rita said, “I left the note right by the cake where they’d both see it at the same time. He used to get off work at the hotel and then pick her up from her job, so they came in together. I knew he would read it first, because he always went straight to the refrigerator, but she would see him read it. The way I said it was that I was sorry to dump him, but I had met somebody else. I did it so that he would be stuck. He wouldn’t want her to read that. He couldn’t throw it in the garbage, because if he did, she would dig in and find it as soon as he turned his back. He couldn’t hide it, because then she would think he was trying to save it. If he tore it up, she would know he didn’t want her to read it, so she’d really be sure to dig out the pieces and put them together. See what I mean?”
Jane gazed at Rita with new interest. “I wonder what he decided. Do you suppose he ate it?”
Rita frowned at her, then abruptly giggled. “I don’t know.” Then she frowned again. “It was a mean thing to do. It was just pure meanness.”
Jane smiled. “What made you do it?”
“I didn’t start out to. I guess it was being in the store buying their dinner. I just kept thinking about how all they would ever buy was beer and pizza, or they’d eat out on the way home from work, and I would eat alone. I would buy regular food at the grocery store, and when I went to look for it in the refrigerator it was gone, or at least opened and partly eaten. Then I thought about how I was still paying half the rent even though there were two of them now. And they got the bed, while I was out on this couch with broken springs, and I couldn’t even go to sleep sometimes because they worked in the evening and sat on it to watch television. And a lot of other times it would be worse, because they would be in the bed and I could hear them until it was just about time for me to get up, because I worked early in the morning.”
Jane said, “Okay. You shouldn’t have done it, even though they probably deserved it. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because that was in another life. That wasn’t you.”
Rita gaped at Jane in disbelief. “Of course it was me.”
Jane shook her head. “I’ll say this another way. Rita Shelford’s life is like a book, and you just read the last page and closed the back cover. It’s over. You can’t go back in and fix anything to make it a prettier story. Starting now, you’re in the next life. In this one, you don’t just have a new future, you have a new past, too. You’re Diane Arthur, and you’ve always been Diane Arthur, so you have to make up what’s happened to Diane Arthur until now, and it will be the only truth.”
“Why can’t Diane Arthur stay with you and Bernie?”
Jane winced. “Why would you want to?”
“I didn’t tell you what it was like to work at his house. The house was big, so they had a nice maid’s room. It had its own bathroom and a window that looked out on the part of the back yard by the fence where nobody but me ever went. The job wasn’t hard. Bernie didn’t go out and get muddy shoes and walk on the carpet. And we liked each other.”
“What do you mean?”
“I would try to clean the places where he wasn’t, and then stay in the kitchen cooking, or at least be out of the living area. But a few times a day we would run into each other. He would drink a cup of coffee, and then bring it in himself and put it in the sink. He’d see me and say, ‘How’s it going, kid?’ If I was doing something big, like waxing this huge floor in the living room, he’d say, ‘It’s too hot to do that today. Why don’t you take a load off? Nobody sees how shiny that is but me.’ ”
Jane noticed that Rita had a good ear. The voice she gave Bernie was unmistakably his. “That’s not exactly a close relationship.”
“But it is,” Rita insisted. “Don’t you see? There were all these other men. There were the two who were always around, younger ones like Danny, but not nice. I don’t know what to call them … ”
“Bodyguards.”
“I guess so. They never talked to me. It was like being a ghost again. And whenever they talked to each other, it was ugly: fuckin’ this, and fuckin’ that, like the word didn’t mean anything at all, just a sound. And the others, the ones who came about once a month, they were worse. They always acted as though they didn’t trust anybody, even to be alive. If I walked through a room while they were in it, they would whirl around and glare at me.”
“They were probably bagmen. They had good reasons to be jumpy.”
“They were the enemy. Bernie and I were on one side, and they were on the other. They didn’t seem to like him any better than they liked me. It was almost as though we were prisoners in our own house.”
“You were,” said Jane. “You just didn’t know it because you didn’t try to leave.”
“But we did know it, sort of. That was how we got to be friends.”
“He said that too—called you his friend,” said Jane. “It’s kind of unusual to see two people so different who feel that way.”
“He’s a special person. He doesn’t seem to look down on you just for being young. He can tell you things—all kinds of things—that you wouldn’t find out unless you were as old as he is and remembered everything. I used to get him to play cards with me, just so he’d tell me stories. He’s so good at games that it doesn’t use up enough of his attention, so he talks and talks. And he remembers so much that it’s just like a movie, only you can stop it whenever you want, and he’ll show you another part that you’re curious about, or go back and let you see everything about one of the people, only it’s all true.” She chuckled at the memory of it. “Pretty true, anyway. And I could tell him things, too, and never worry that he would embarrass me, or tell anyone else. I would get him to go out in the yard with me, like he was taking exercise, and he would listen as long as I wanted, and never give me his opinion unless I asked for it.”
Rita sat in silence for a long time, thinking. “He doesn’t want to act like it in front of you, but he’s the best friend I ever had. Look at the risk he took to find me. How many people would do that?”
“In his profession? Not many,” said Jane.
“Bernie doesn’t have a profession,” said Rita. “He has a good memory. That’s what’s so horrible about those people. They watch you to see what they can take away.” She fell suddenly silent.
“Did they harm you?” asked Jane.
“You mean did they make me have sex with them, don’t you?”
“I guess that’s what I mean,” said Jane.
“They didn’t. Most of them acted like I wasn’t human. One of them—one of the bodyguards—started talking to me, and I would see him staring at me sometimes. He would ask me questions, like whether I had a boyfriend, and stuff. I could tell he was thinking about it.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him about living with the boy from home in Tampa, only I added some things.”
“Like what?”
“That after I left I heard he had AIDS, so I was a little worried because I got tired so easily. After that he didn’t talk to me much.”
Jane said nothing, but she began to feel more optimistic. Rita had an instinct for trouble and an ability to think quickly. Some runners had lived for a long time on less than that.
“I never told Bernie. I didn’t want to worry him.” She sighed. “I miss him.”
“I understand.”
“Then we can go back now?”
“No,” said Jane.
10
Jane took the key out of her purse and unlocked the door of the apartment, th
en waited for Rita to push the door inward and enter. When Rita was inside, Jane walked to the refrigerator, opened a can of cola and handed it to her, then sat down to wait.
It was like moving a cat from one house to another. The trick was to put butter on the cat’s forepaws. While the cat licked it off, her keen senses would be working, assuring her with every second that the new place was not worse than the old, and was certainly superior to being in a moving car. By the time the butter was gone, she would have given the place her tentative approval.
Jane watched Rita sipping her cola as she walked the living room, examined the kitchen, then climbed the stairs to explore the bedroom. She heard her push aside the blinds in the upper window, and after a few seconds heard the blinds clack against the sill as she released them.
Rita came halfway down the stairs and sat, still sipping. “What am I supposed to say? You already rented it.”
“It’s not a lifetime lease,” Jane announced. “Unless you make a mistake. I was here a couple of years ago, and I remembered it as the sort of place for you. The manager told me there are young women in the other apartments in the building right now, most of them older than you, but not by much. You won’t stand out. There are no obvious attractions in the vicinity for people who might be aware that you’re worth money, or how to cash in: no prostitutes, no street drug sales, no bar scene. The draw is the view of the ocean, which you know, since I heard you move the blinds to look at it.”
“But who am I supposed to be?”
Jane said, “You’re Diane Arthur. You’re a young woman who just moved in. You’re looking for a job, but at least for the present, you’re picky, so you won’t do much except circle ads in the paper. If you talk to your neighbors, don’t exaggerate. You graduated from high school, but you haven’t decided what to do with yourself yet. You’re eighteen, not twenty-five. You’re not an heiress traveling incognito, or an Australian tennis champion recovering from a failed love affair.”
“So I’m supposed to stay dull.”
“Not dull, just not unusual enough to get in trouble. You want to be the sort of newcomer who doesn’t make a great topic of conversation. When people mention you, you’re cute, pleasant, funny. You don’t cause any phones to ring. You stay hidden without appearing to be hiding.”
“But what do I do? How do I spend my time?”
“In my experience, if you don’t get found within the first month, your chances go way up. So for the first month, you do very little. You arrange your furniture, look at magazines, watch the local news on TV. You read the newspapers to get to know San Diego. If there’s a stabbing every third night in some neighborhood, then you’ll know enough to stay away from it. Start to form a picture of the city in your mind.”
“And after a month?”
“Then you start going out, but cautiously. You can go to the university, where you won’t stand out, but anyone likely to be looking for you will. You can go to the beach, if you stay close to groups of women your age. You can go to a movie, if it’s an early showing in the right part of town.” Jane glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go out and do some errands.”
Rita stood and started up the stairs. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”
“I said I was going out, not we. I’ll be back around dark.”
When Jane returned, Rita wasn’t visible, but Jane could hear music coming from the bedroom upstairs. Jane was putting away groceries when Rita appeared. “Hi,” she said.
Jane glanced at her and returned to her work. “Hi.”
“I hate this place.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because it’s not mine. I didn’t do it.”
Jane looked at the can in her hand, set it on the counter, and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed. “It’s always like this.”
“It is?”
“It’s not much fun to be a runner. First you have to give up whoever you were—your job, your friends, even your name. Then you have to hand over your freedom. You have to let a total stranger tell you what to do, how to act, where to live. Some of the people I’ve taken out over the years have felt worse about it than you do. They were quite a bit older, and were used to ordering other people around—making decisions for them. All I can tell you is what I told them.”
“What did you tell them?”
“It’s temporary. I’m temporary. I’m pretty good at one small, narrow function. I put big blank spaces between the place where you were last recognized and the place where you end up. I stay long enough to be sure it’s the right place, and to help you fit in quietly. Then, one morning, you’ll wake up and I’ll be packed and ready to leave. After that, you’ll be the one making all of the decisions. And you have a lot of advantages most of my other runners didn’t have.”
“Like what?”
“You’re young. You’re not a company president who’s going to start cleaning hotel rooms. You’re a hotel maid who might end up as a company president. That’s a distinction that’s bigger than you can imagine. And time will help.”
“What good is it?”
“You’re an eighteen-year-old who’s a late maturer. In a year, you’ll look very different. In five, you could be a different person. You’re just at the age when society starts paying attention to you—caring about your identity. You won’t start out with a long history—credit, work, education, and so on—but neither does any other eighteen-year-old girl. Your history will be as solid as most of theirs, even to an expert. In three years, nobody in the world will be able to pick it apart, because it won’t be fake. All of the things I made up will be backed up by a real record: real years of driving with that license and using those credit cards and paying the bills with that bank account.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“No,” said Jane. “I’ve thought of everything that has come up before, and everything that I know is likely to come up this time. That’s what I do. You can never think of everything. But you have a lot of advantages. The whole structure of society ensures that forty-year-old criminals don’t have much access to eighteen-year-old girls. You’re the perfect runner.”
“I don’t want to be the perfect runner. I don’t want to be a runner at all.”
“What do you want to be—dead?”
“No,” said Rita. She began to pace, agitated and angry. “I told you what I want. I want to be somebody who does things, not somebody who goes where people tell her, just to keep breathing. This is my chance to do something that matters, and I’m hiding.”
“What would you do?”
“Fight them.”
Jane stared at the floor and shook her head sadly. “I admire you. Really, I do. What you’re thinking isn’t wrong. It’s just not a strategy that can work this time. You can’t fight these people just by saying you’re not afraid and standing your ground. They would happily scoop you up and torture you to death while they asked you questions about Bernie that you can’t answer. If you were to fight them, here’s how you would go about it. We would drive to the local FBI office. There’s sure to be one in San Diego. You would tell them you want to testify against the people you met at Bernie’s. Let’s pretend you’re there now.”
“All right.”
“I’m the FBI agent. Tell me their names.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me the crimes you saw them commit.”
“Money laundering. Hiding money from the government, and not paying taxes on it.” Rita seemed proud of herself.
“What money? Did you see any money?”
“Well, no. But I saw them. And I know that’s what they were doing at Bernie’s.”
“So does the FBI, probably, but they didn’t catch them at it, and neither did you. Thank you very much for your help, Miss Shelford. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
“You’re saying they won’t believe me?”
“Do you remember the day I met you? I asked you a lot of questions that probably didn’t m
ake much sense to you at the time. As soon as I heard the name Delfina, I was hoping that you had seen something or found some evidence. But you never saw him, and didn’t even know who he was. You’re not lying, but you’re not a witness to anything.”
“I was there when they broke in and searched Bernie’s house.”
“Eight or nine nameless men you’d never seen before were in the house, probably with a key. That’s not even good evidence of breaking and entering, even if they didn’t all have alibis, which they certainly will, if anybody ever asks.”
“They tried to keep me from leaving.”
“Not hard enough to make it a crime.”
“They said they were taking me to Mr. Delfina.”
“Which proves nothing, because they didn’t do it.” Jane sighed. “Enough. The only way to fight them is to let the cops do it for you. If you haven’t got any evidence, you run.”
“But you’re not running.”
“I plan to. I’m just delaying it long enough to take away some of their motivation for chasing us. The second the money is gone, I’ll be running as hard as anyone.”
Rita stared at her for a few seconds, then turned, went upstairs, and quietly closed the door.
After midnight, Jane went to the door and heard soft, even breathing. She quietly opened the door and walked to the side of Rita’s bed. On the sheet around Rita, arranged against her sides from her armpits to her thighs, were a clutter of objects.
There was a small coin purse that had been thickened by a few folded bills. There was a dog-eared, smudged envelope with a flap that had come open to reveal part of an official paper with scrollwork around it like birth certificates and diplomas had. The cheap blue windbreaker Rita had retrieved from the hotel in Niagara Falls was folded neatly and placed with the other things, and there was a photograph in a plastic frame. Jane knelt by the bed to look at it.
It was a picture of Rita at the age of about twelve, sitting on a white beach bordered by palm trees, and above her, a blond woman who must be her mother. The mother had been in the process of walking away, then had half-turned to look when the photographer had called to her. She seemed no more than thirty, but her eyes were squinted into the sun to reveal the beginning of a collection of crow’s-feet beside the blue eyes. At first Jane thought there was a smudge on the picture, but then she saw it was part of a tattoo of a rose. The petals began just above the waistband of the bikini and extended downward, so the process of getting it must have been less an embellishment than a relationship.
