Blood Money jw-5

by Thomas Perry

  They walked through the little entry into the big old kitchen, where Jane could hear the watery chugging of the dishwasher. She stepped into the dining room and ran her hand along the smooth surface of the table.

  “Checking for dust?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t need any dust right now, thanks. This feels more like one of those occasions for champagne, and I can’t remember if we have any.”

  “Of course we do,” he said. “I’ve always kept some in case somebody spills something on the carpet.” He pulled a bottle from the refrigerator and peeled off the foil.

  “Champagne doesn’t do that. You’re thinking of club soda.”

  “Oh?” He popped the cork. “This isn’t any good, then.” He stared at it sadly. “Might as well drink it or something.”

  Jane reached into the cupboard for a pair of tulip glasses. “I think we have to. Otherwise, when we put a note in the bottle, it’ll get wet.”

  They sipped their champagne and walked into the living room. She turned and faced him. “Have you seen these nice clothes I bought?”

  “Very fetching, as my grandmother would have said.”

  She began unbuttoning the blouse with her left hand, then glanced at him. “Have you been sufficiently fetched?”

  “More than enough,” he said. “I wouldn’t need to see them again for a long time.”

  “Good.” The blouse slipped off her shoulders. She undid the clasp of her slacks and stepped out of them, and Carey’s arms enveloped her again. There was the gentle touch of his fingers that gave her chills, then the warm, firm feeling of the palms of his hands, smoothing her skin, defining the shape of her body, always moving as though he needed to touch her everywhere at once. She needed it too, as she had needed to take off her clothes in the first minutes after she saw him.

  It wasn’t just because she felt she couldn’t wait, but because part of it was showing him that this was what she wanted. And she wanted to see and feel his joy at knowing that she did. Her own hands were nimbly, urgently undoing buttons and buckle and slipping off his clothes. They made love where they had stopped in the living room, then went upstairs to their bedroom and lay in the dark on the cool, clean sheets with the warm summer breeze pushing in the curtains to direct itself across their bodies. After that they lingered over each moment, letting the night reach its dark, unchanging no-time, pretending that night was permanent and they could stay like this forever. Hours later, Jane caught sight of the glowing red digits of the clock on the nightstand, and wasted a second hoping she had read them wrong.

  She said, “It’s nearly three A.M.,” but his lips pressed against her mouth to silence her, then stayed. His hand moved gently along her throat, and already her feelings were building again.

  When she was able to look at the clock again, she heard the first tentative chirps of a sparrow in a tree across the back yard. She turned away from it to look beside her at Carey, and she could see that he had fallen asleep. She very softly placed her hands under his heavy forearm and held it while she slipped out from under it, then set it down on the bed where she had been.

  She kept her eyes on him as she walked quietly toward the door. She let herself adore his long legs and his big feet and the peaceful little-boy look his face acquired when he was dreaming. I had this, she thought. If I die now, at least I recognized and accepted the best thing that life offered to me.

  She looked down to be sure her bare foot touched the two pieces of hardwood floor closest to the hinge of the door, where it never creaked, then slipped down the long second-floor hallway to the best of the spare bedrooms. She showered in the bathroom there, then put on an old sweatshirt and jeans and went downstairs to start making her husband’s breakfast.

  When Jane had let Carey sleep as long as she dared, she went back up to the bedroom and kissed his cheek. He didn’t move. She kissed his neck, then kept her lips pressed to his cheek and watched his eyelids. “Hypocrite,” she said. “You’re awake already.”

  “I’m playing dead,” he said. “Waiting to see just how far you’re willing to go.”

  She stood up. “Mother was right. Men are too dumb to do anything but keep going until you tell them to stop.” She dropped her pillow on his head. “The good ones, anyway.”

  He swung his feet to the floor and stood up. She pretended not to look at his long, lean body, and ached to hear him say she had made a mistake, that it was Saturday. He said, “I smell something good.”

  “That’s right. I want you to have time to taste it and wake up before you go to the hospital and try to cut something out of somebody.”

  “Very responsible of you,” he said.

  She put her arms around him and held him. He stood still, facing away. He said, “I was afraid I’d wake up and you would be gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m home now, and I’m going to be the wife of your dreams.”

  He turned, his face intrigued. “Oh?”

  She nodded. “It’s because you didn’t say anything about my hair. You hate it, but you didn’t say it. That means you’re too smart to just throw away.”

  She went downstairs and waited for him, then sat at the table with him and pretended to eat so she could be close to him. After a few minutes, he asked quietly, “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But there’s too much to tell now. It’s over and I’m home.”

  “Why didn’t you call again?”

  Here it was, so soon. No, this wasn’t soon. It seemed abrupt, because it was something that she should have said in the first seconds, and hadn’t. “Things turned out to be much … stranger than I expected. There wasn’t anything I could have said that would have made you less worried.”

  He stared at her for a second, then went back to his breakfast. She could sense what he wasn’t saying. She put her hand on his. “I love you,” she said. But that was just what people said when there was nothing else to say—like a dog nuzzling up to lick his face. “You know why I went. Somebody needed help. I felt I had to help her.”

  “Just like Richard Dahlman,” Carey said. “That wasn’t what you were going to say, because we both know it. I understand. I made you promise never to do this again, and then, when it was somebody I cared about, I asked you to save him.”

  Jane shook her head. “You’re wrong. We have to get this story straight right now, or it will be between us forever. You didn’t make me promise. I just promised. It wasn’t hard. I wasn’t giving up something. It was just part of being married to you, and I made it to myself before you ever thought of it—before you knew that there was going to be a need to ask for it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is what you want now. Today.”

  Jane took a deep, painful breath, and kept the tears out of her voice. “I want more than anything to stay here with you. I want to call Joy at your office and have her cancel your surgery and your afternoon appointments and maybe never let you out of my sight again. We’re thirty-four years old, and we might have forty or fifty years left. I want every day of that so much that I don’t want to let any of them slip by when I don’t reach out and touch you at night before I close my eyes.”

  “But this girl came along, and you heard her story, and off you went.”

  “The promises we made to ourselves about the nice life we were going to have were in place. They just had to be forgotten until I had done what was required to keep my self-respect.”

  “That’s what we said when we decided to help Richard Dahlman.”

  “I guess it is. They’re both proof that when you make rules about what’s going to happen in the future, the universe doesn’t always hear what you say.”

  “So a promise is like a wish,” he said. He stood up.

  Jane had tears in her eyes now. “No. Or I guess it’s yes. What I’m trying to say is that this isn’t fair. I did something good. I can’t forget what I know, or who I am. If the same thing happened
in the same way tomorrow, I would do it again. Just because I risked my life a year ago to save Dahlman, I shouldn’t lose the kind of closeness to my husband that I had.” The tears came, and she stood to face him. “Don’t you see? I don’t want you to shut up and stand aside. I want you to say what you think—that your breakfast tastes like soap, or my haircut looks funny, or—”

  “You’d drop me like a twelve-point buck on the first day of hunting season.”

  “No.” She threw her arms around his neck and held him. “No, I wouldn’t. Especially if it was that you loved me and would rather I didn’t go out and get killed. Maybe we’ll get to choose what will happen, and maybe we won’t. I told you what I wanted if I get to choose.”

  Carey pulled her closer and gave her a long, tender kiss. Suddenly, she put her hands on his chest and held him farther away. “Now get your hands off my ass and go to work. Honestly.”

  Carey smiled. “Sorry. I’m just a romantic at heart.”

  “More like that twelve-point buck,” she said. She hugged him again, then spun him around. “It’s twenty minutes to seven. Get going.”

  He took three long steps into the back entry, stopped, and looked at her once more. Then he was out the door. Jane walked through the dining room listening to the car engine, then watched through the living room window as he backed his black BMW out the driveway and drove off toward the hospital.

  Jane made her proprietary tour of the house. When she was not here, Carey seemed not even to pass through the rooms that weren’t in his way during his routine movements. He came in the back entrance near the garage, used the kitchen, climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, and went to sleep. He was not an especially neat person, but his profession had given him a cold-eyed view of microbes, so the kitchen was spotless. All she had to do was keep an eye out for the pots, pans, and utensils that he had put in the wrong places, and move them back where they belonged while she put away the dinner dishes and washed the new batch.

  An hour later she backed the rental car out of the long driveway. She drove west to the Niagara, turned and headed north looking at the river until she reached the house where she had grown up in Deganawida.

  Jane pulled the car all the way into the garage so it wouldn’t attract attention, then stepped to the front porch, unlocked the door, and used the next few seconds to scan the neighborhood for any sight she had not seen a thousand times before.

  She swung the door open and stepped inside to punch the code on her keypad to turn off the alarm. Then she lingered in the doorway for a few seconds. There was no sound. The air was still and a little stale because the house had been tightly sealed. She closed the door and lifted the telephone beside the couch off the hook to hear the dial tone reassure her that the wires had not been cut. She relaxed her muscles. Nobody had been here while she had been away.

  Jane walked the first floor of the house, glancing at each door and each window, then went upstairs. The house always seemed tiny after she’d spent a night in the McKinnon house. Jane stopped at the answering machine in her bedroom. The red glowing display said zero. Until she had looked at it, she had dreaded the possibility that there would be another call.

  She went to the vanity. She picked up the large perfume bottle on the end, unscrewed the little gold cap, and sniffed. It was still fresh enough. The juice of water hemlock and may-apple would still kill quickly. She set the bottle on the vanity with the others, and left the room.

  She went downstairs, through the kitchen to the cellar. Down here was the only place where the real age of the house was visible. The cellar had been dug with a shovel and built of blocks of stone, and the beams were just logs that had been cut near here. A few of the square-headed, hand-forged nails that held the floorboards could be seen here, pounded into the beams near the wall so somebody long ago could hang something there.

  Jane walked to the far end of the cellar, where the coal bin had once stood, and moved the stepladder under one of the old round heating ducts that led along the ceiling to a point where it had once curved upward to a big floor register. The coal furnace had been replaced long before Jane was born.

  She pulled apart two sections of the duct and reached inside for the metal box she kept there. She placed it on the top of the ladder and looked inside. There was the supply of identities she had grown for runners but never used—credit cards, birth certificates, licenses.

  Jane began to unload her purse. She put all of the false identities she had brought from Chicago into the box. Then she put the few thousand dollars she had not spent inside. She dug deeper into the purse and found the tissue paper Bernie had put there. She opened it once more, looked at the collection of sparkling stones, and hesitated. Mrs. Carey McKinnon could probably afford to have a few of those diamonds set, and even get away with wearing them. But Mrs. McKinnon couldn’t afford to forget that she was still Jane Whitefield. And Jane Whitefield lived in a world where the only practical use for diamonds was to transport a great deal of flight money in a small space. Jane folded the paper and put it into the bottom of the box, under the money, where she kept a special set of identities that nobody else knew existed. These were particularly good ones, grown in pairs and carefully renewed and tended so that all of the licenses, passports, and credit cards were kept current. The pictures on them were hers and Carey’s.

  Jane pushed the metal box into the dark duct, closed the two sides, and moved the ladder across the cellar to its space beside her father’s old workbench. She climbed the stairs. Before she turned off the light, she took a last look at the heating duct to reassure herself that the two sections had come together tightly to keep her hiding place secure and invisible.

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  Document authors :

  Thomas Perry

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