Vanishing Act jw-1

by Thomas Perry

  At three in the morning, she was stopped by a big old tree that had fallen into the water across the channel. She let the current carry her a few yards backward and then headed her canoe into the opposite bank. She pulled the craft up on the mud into the weeds and found a flat place in the trees to lay out her nylon tarp. She wrapped herself in her down jacket, rested her head on her backpack, and went to sleep with her hand touching the stock of the rifle.

  Dawn came three hours later, with the chirping of chickadees and the rap of a woodpecker back in the woods. It was still blue half-light in the forest, but she found that objects around her were beginning to have clear edges. She sat by the side of the water to eat her packaged breakfast of dried beef and eggs. She had brought nothing that she couldn’t eat uncooked, but she would have liked a fire now for the warmth. In the night she had kept up a sweat, but during the three hours of sleep she had stiffened and the cold and damp had settled on her.

  When she had finished eating, she loaded her canoe and dragged it around the fallen tree, staring at the ground. There were no keel marks, no footprints. She launched her canoe and paddled to the opposite bank, then stepped ashore again. She walked to the place where the roots of the tree had lifted a piece of the bank and found no signs there, either. She widened her search until she found one. He had pulled his canoe up onto the bank at least a hundred feet downstream from the fallen tree trunk. He had caved in the bank a little to destroy his keel mark. Then he could only have walked into the forest. It took her a few more minutes before she found his footprint in the dirt: the ripple-soled hiking boots he had bought in Lake Placid. She moved ahead in the direction the toe was pointing, but she lost him again.

  She walked back to the place where she had found the print. It was a single mark, a misstep maybe, but it was disturbing. There were no tracks going back: He had made only one trip. He had managed to pack all the gear and supplies he had bought onto his back, lift the canoe, and walk through the woods around the barrier. It made her feel small and weak and alone. He was so much bigger and stronger, and he wasn’t using his size to make mistakes but to be more careful. He had started to walk long before a tracker would look for footprints, and gone into the woods instead of staying on the bank. The only reason she had found any mark at all was because she had known there had to be one.

  She walked back to her canoe and stepped in. This time she didn’t wrap the rifle in the tarp but kept it beside her as she pushed out into the stream and began to paddle. It was after 10:00 A.M. when she reached the mouth of the stream at Round Lake. As soon as she recognized what it was, she went back down the river a hundred yards, pulled her canoe up into the woods, and brought the rifle back with her. She hid in some bushes near the edge of the lake and scanned the shoreline through the rifle scope.

  There was no smoke, no canoe, no sign of human life anywhere along the margin of the lake. She opened her map and studied it. There was a small circular road marked 421 that went west at the other end of Round Lake, leading to a little town called Sabattis and back. After that, there was nothing. The logic of it said he wasn’t waiting for her here. He had started out in the tourist spots, where strangers were a common sight, and he had laboriously made his way down here. He wasn’t going to stop until he had left even that road behind him.

  Jane went back to her canoe and put it into the water again. She spent the afternoon going across the lake and down the stream to the bridge where the road crossed it. She searched the area around the bridge for a half hour but found no sign that he had been here, or that anyone else had, either. She made it to the edge of Little Tupper Lake in late afternoon and stopped to eat dinner and watch the water. The lake was oblong like big Tupper, formed by glaciers moving south and scraping the mountains. She used the rifle scope to look for the usual signs of life, and she began to feel a foreboding.

  She had been paddling deeper and deeper into the western reaches of the forest, away from the dramatic, scenic peaks and the resort hotels built below them and, finally, away from even the smallest roads. Now she was at the edge of a five-mile lake, and it looked enormous, with thick forests beyond and jagged mountains as a backdrop. The quiet was overwhelming. In the night the quiet had seemed like a cloak to her, protecting her, but now in the clear, bright late afternoon it seemed like an emptiness waiting for something to fill it. She could hear birds in the forest and a buzzing blackfly that kept making spirals in the air behind her ear. Beyond those constant, unchanging noises there was no sound. When she moved, the crunch of a twig made her spine stiffen.

  When she had come up here as a child with her parents, they had stayed on Cranberry Lake in a cabin and fished and gone east to hike up Mount Marcy because that was what tourists were supposed to do. But they had never left the marked trails. In those days the rangers used to tell people the Adirondacks were the oldest mountains on earth. Since then, the scientists had learned that they were young and still growing.

  Today the part about growing made them seem alive, capable of at least that much intention and therefore almost sentient, but with a brutal kind of sentience: the blind, brainless reflex of monstrous stomach-turning sea creatures that lived in the dark and rose toward sounds so they could eat. She knew that what she was feeling was a form of agoraphobia. If she didn’t shake it off, she was going to end up cowering somewhere, trembling and unable to take care of herself.

  She waited for the blackfly to settle, then slapped at it but missed, and this only seemed to wake others. She pushed her canoe into the water and headed for the middle of the lake. She told herself she was doing it to stay out where the blackflies weren’t swarming, but it was actually to stay in the open, away from the banks.

  She camped for the night at the tip of Little Tupper. She forced herself to do what she knew she had to do. She picked out a package of dried food, read on the label that it was designed for a hearty meal, and ate all of it. She walked knee-deep into the icy water to bathe and wash her clothes, then hung them on a low limb to dry. At the end of it, she was exhausted. She made her tarp into a lean-to and fell into a deep sleep beneath it.

  She was in dark emptiness for an hour, and then her mind began to work again. In her dream it was still night, but she became aware that there was a splash and then another and then a dripping sound. The splashes were footsteps. She sat up to reach for her rifle, but it wasn’t there. She turned and looked at the lake. A man was coming up out of it, walking toward her, the water dripping off his clothes as he sloshed to shore. He walked up onto the bank and stood across the campfire from her. For a moment she was angry at herself for having built a fire, but then she remembered that she hadn’t. It had just come. Then she recognized the man: He was Harry Kemple. He leaned down and warmed his hands at the fire, and she could see steam rising from the shoulders of his dripping suit.

  "Harry!" she said. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to her, so she yelled, "Harry! It’s me!"

  Harry looked up at her and then back down at the fire. "What—you think this is some kind of coincidence? Like I’m going to be surprised to see you?"

  "I’m sorry," she said.

  He held up his hand and nodded wearily, the way he used to. "No harm done." He bent closer to the fire. "Jesus, it’s cold out here."

  "I’m sorry he killed you."

  He shrugged and pointed to the place where the undertaker had stitched up his throat. The sewing was thick and crude, like the laces of a shoe. "It only took about a minute."

  "It was my fault," she said. He seemed to oscillate, as though she was seeing him through water, and then she realized it was her tears.

  "Yeah," he said. "But it doesn’t matter."

  "What doesn’t matter?"

  "None of it. People are born and they die. What any of them do in between doesn’t look like much from a distance. Viruses and rusty nails and people like Martin, they’re working all the time on the same side. Always were, always will be. If they didn’t exist, we’d die anyway." He scratched
at his stitches gingerly, then looked back down at the fire and rubbed his hands together.

  Jane could sense that some new rule was in place. Harry was waiting for her to ask the right question. "Did Martin kill Jerry Cappadocia, too?"

  He turned his head to look to the right and the left, then at her. "Am I talking to myself, or what? I’m trying to tell you nobody gives a shit."

  Maybe he needed to tell her something that nobody else could. A dead person wouldn’t come if a living one could give the same answer. "Do you know who hired Martin to do it?"

  Harry seemed angry. "Of course I do. You still don’t get it, do you? What’s it going to get you if I tell you the name of one more criminal you never met and will never see?"

  "I’ll get to know. That’s what the mind is for. It has to know."

  Harry rolled his eyes and sighed. "Jerry was a scumbag. I told you that years ago. Another scumbag just like him paid some money so he could take his place with some girl."

  Jane gasped. "Lenore Sanders. The one who hired Martin was Robert Cotton. Of course. The reason nobody figured it out was that it never occurred to them that it wasn’t about money and power. Cotton got the girl and nobody noticed."

  "It doesn’t matter," said Harry. "Nothing happened. Hanegoategeh, the left-handed twin, took Jerry off the count and Hawenneyu, the right-handed, replaced him. The Creator creates, the Destroyer destroys, and it goes on like that. It was a harvest. Bobby Cotton is ripening too."

  Jane said, "What you’re telling me is that it’s just good and evil in this constant fight and that there’s no outcome."

  "Right. It’s a wash. You’re out here to get revenge, punish Martin. I’m telling you not to bother. I stopped caring when he got me. I’m just a dream." He looked up from the fire. "It’s you I feel sorry for."

  Jane began to feel afraid. "Why?"

  Harry pointed off into the woods toward the next lake. "He’s the real thing. Every time he kills somebody, it makes him stronger. He gets better at it—a little faster, a little less easy to surprise. He watches what we do to get away, how we try to fight back. Once he’s seen anything, he knows how to beat it; and every time he gets somebody, that’s one person who could have stopped him who can’t anymore. I’m telling you, he’s a monster. Killing me fed him."

  "How can I turn a monster loose?"

  Harry tugged at the laces on his throat. "Nice of you to think of that now, kid."

  She stepped forward through the fire, but it didn’t burn her. She put her arms around Harry. He was cold and hard, like a side of beef in a freezer, and she could feel the water squeezing out of his suit and soaking into her clothes.

  Harry sighed, then said grudgingly, "He’s going way back into the woods, as far as he can go. Make sure you see him before he sees you. Don’t feed him again."

  Then her arms closed, because there was nothing between them. Harry was at the shore already, walking back into the water, up to his knees, his waist, his chest, and then she could just see the top of his head for a moment before it disappeared, leaving a little ripple.

  26

  She awoke feeling cold and wet, just as the day was beginning. She knew all of it now. Harry had told her the answer to the question that the police and half of the no-neck population of the Midwest had been asking for five years. She already had traced the conspiracy all the way back to its source, but the words had not come to her until she had imagined Harry saying them. A criminal with a name she had never heard until a couple of days ago had wanted Jerry Cappadocia’s girlfriend.

  Harry had told her the first time he mentioned Lenore Sanders, five years ago, that Jerry had a rival. Jane had never considered what that meant, and she was not the only one. Everyone who had heard the story of the massacre at the poker game had known immediately that whoever had paid for Jerry’s murder had to be another criminal. He was a criminal by definition: A man who hired killers to kill his enemy was a killer. It had not occurred to any of the others that the motive could be anything except taking over Jerry’s territory, because that was what criminals did. But Bobby Cotton was a criminal who lived in St. Louis. He had no practical way of taking Jerry Cappadocia’s holdings in Chicago, so he never tried and never revealed himself. All he had wanted was the girl.

  Jane had been given all of the information she had needed, but it had lain in a jumble in the back of her mind until the dream. She should have wondered why St. Louis kept coming up. When Martin wanted to fool her, he had told her he was a cop from St. Louis. Why had he chosen St. Louis? It was because he knew the city and knew a lot of details about the cop who had arrested him there. But why had he been arrested in St. Louis in the first place? He had been there on business, killing somebody there. She should have known instantly that it was unlikely that anybody in St. Louis had been enough of an annoyance to Martin’s usual customers in Chicago to make them send him down there. Martin may very well have been working for Cotton that time; he had at least come to Cotton’s attention.

  Harry had told Jane so much about the girl that she should have wondered what had happened to her. It was ironic that nobody had spent any time thinking about the girl in five years—probably since she showed up at the funeral wearing a black dress she had bought at Dennaway’s. Most murders weren’t about money. They were about love. Whenever the cops found a body, the first thing they did was go out to look for the wife or the husband or the lover. She opened her eyes, looked up at the sky, and held the story in her mind to determine whether it felt like the truth. Yes, she had put the issue to rest. She was satisfied that she knew what had happened five years ago. As Harry had warned her, it did her no good at all.

  She looked out at the surface of the lake before she stood up. At first she thought she was just looking to be sure that Harry had only been a dream, but then she sensed that she had wanted to ask him something. It was something she had thought of after he was gone. There was something she had figured out after what Harry had said. She opened the map and looked at it, and it was as though her mind had been wandering across it as she slept. She looked at the string of lakes and was sure. She folded the map and set to work. When she loaded her possessions and paddled up the next stream to Big Rock Lake, she knew he wouldn’t be there. She knew that he wouldn’t paddle on up the next stream to Bottle Lake, either. It was too small.

  Martin had told her what he was going to do, if she just had the sense to read it. He had made a big deal out of lifting the canoe and walking around the parking lot with it before he would buy it. He was going to portage. Nothing else made sense. He wasn’t going to take the easy way up the whole string of lakes. He was going to stop at Big Rock Lake, lift his canoe and all the provisions and gear he had bought, and walk through the woods with them to the next chain of lakes. He had put the roads far behind him, and now he was going to leave the water, too.

  He was going to a place where there was no easy way, where his strength and his stamina would separate him from any likely challenger. He had passed here three days ahead of her—maybe four now—and he hadn’t needed to go cautiously. He was wearing out his pursuers, so that when he met them he would have had four days to rest, hide his camp, and survey every inch of the surrounding country. Anybody who came after him would arrive with a canoe on his back that he had carried for miles, and would probably be in a state of exhaustion—fly-bitten, scratched, and half dead.

  She looked at her map as she paddled. He would go west from Big Rock Lake to Charley Pond, then down into Lake Lila or even Lake Nehasane, and there he would stop and wait. He had come so far already that it was highly unlikely that anyone at all would follow. It was May, and the weather from now on would be tolerable, if not balmy. He had enough food to last for a long time, maybe into the summer if he was any good with the fishing gear he had bought in Lake Placid.

  Jane Whitefield had spent ten years of her life hiding people. If a chaser was coming, usually he came hard and fast. If you could disappear without leaving any trail and stay hid
den for two or three months, the chance of ever being found dropped close to zero. James Michael Martin had nothing to worry about from the police. They didn’t know he had killed Harry, and weren’t looking. He had little to fear from the friends of Jerry Cappadocia, who wouldn’t have any way to know that he would come to the mountains. The only possibility he had to fear was that Jane Whitefield would overcome her self-deception and be able to track him this far.

  She spent an hour looking for his trail up from Big Rock Lake. She never found it. She tried to match his premeditation. It was mid-afternoon. If she could make the portage today and camp at the head of the chain, she could start the day fresh and maybe even find him before he expected her to arrive. She considered hiding the canoe in the woods and taking only the rifle and pack, but another look at the map made her reject the idea. The next chain of lakes was longer than the last, and the woods here were old and thick. She would lose time, and time meant exhausting her provisions and her strength.

  The portage was about ten miles on the map, but there was no telling how long it would be on a winding trail. She took an approximate compass heading, packed her gear tightly, lifted the prow of her canoe, walked under it until she could lift it, and set off up the bank of Big Rock Lake to the west.

  The canoe was light, and she had decided to travel with only the gear that she could carry strapped to her back. But the weight of it all together was seventy or eighty pounds. She walked westward for an hour, then set all of it down and lay on the forest floor, staring up at the dappling of the sunlight far above on the translucent leaves. At the end of fifteen minutes she slowly raised her body, set the burden on her shoulders again, and strained to lift the canoe. By the end of the second hour, she was staggering under the weight, her arms aching and her breaths labored and hoarse. She kept from looking at her watch while she rested, not wanting the rest to end.