Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  She never glanced at her watch, because time had a different pace now. She couldn’t measure mechanical time against a distance she had only guessed was seven or eight miles but might be five or ten, and wasn’t uniform and smooth and level like a track at the university. The pace of her feet was the only time that mattered, and she kept it steady and even, like the beat of a song without any tune and without any words.

  She saw Route 18 coming from a long way off. There were three streetlamps somewhere off to her right and, far beyond the road, the glow of more lights in the sky.

  The houses were coming more often now, and they were harder to avoid because they weren’t farms but suburban houses on smaller plots of land. Now was the time when she had to decide about the shotgun. Even when most people were asleep, she couldn’t take the risk of walking down a village street carrying a weapon. She said to Felker, "Stop here."

  He came closer. "What is it?" His breathing was hard and fast, and his voice was a little hoarse, like hers.

  "Let’s catch our breath."

  They walked along the fence of a big pasture, and she waited to let her heart stop pounding and her slower, deeper breathing come. She kept moving to fight off the cramps that were waiting to grip her calves and ham-strings. Felker swung his arms and walked along, trying to recover from the long run, but she could feel his eyes on her. She reached up behind her head and held up the long hair to cool the nape of her neck in the night air. Finally, she said quietly, "That road up there is Route 18. It’s the last big highway."

  He said, "What’s beyond that?"

  "A quiet little town."

  Jane decided she couldn’t get close enough to the highway to detect a parked car without its occupants seeing her too. The two shoulders would be at least ten feet each, and forty for the pavement itself. Then, after they were across that, the other side might not be the houses she was hoping for. It might be more open land. She said aloud, "How does the chicken cross the road?"

  "That’s it?" he said.

  "If they guessed right, they’ll be waiting for us here. They’ll take us in the open."

  "I guess I walk across and you cover me with the shotgun until something happens or I’m behind something. Then it’s your turn," he said.

  She looked at him for a minute. "Not very good, but I suppose it’s the only way."

  He shrugged. "It’s the only way they ever taught me."

  They walked along the field until they could see the road ahead of them. On the other side there was an open field, but the trees beyond it gave her some hope. At least there weren’t a lot of lights on this stretch. They crept closer and closer to the road until they reached an empty lot overgrown with tall weeds that ran up to the shoulder.

  She crawled forward in the weeds until she reached a shallow drainage ditch at the edge of the road, and looked hard to her right toward the lights, then down into the darkness to her left. There was nothing on the pavement in either direction, but she still didn’t feel right. Maybe it was just that the long run had made her light-headed. There never had been much chance that any four strangers would realize that she was heading north for Olcott.

  She had been driving eastward when they had caught up. When that had failed, it would have made most sense either to walk around their ambush and keep going east or try to go back the other way, toward Niagara Falls. Olcott was a tiny community on the shore of Lake Ontario, at least half of it summer cottages closed from October until May, when the wind off the lake lost some of its cruelty. Besides, Olcott was too far. Nobody would try to run eight miles across country at night, through cornfields and woods and over barbed-wire fences.

  She knew Felker was getting impatient. She looked in both directions again, letting her eyes stare at each tree, each distant building, each mailbox along the shoulder, then just looking, letting her eyes go unfocused to detect movement. It was foolish. The barrier was imaginary.

  Jane rolled onto her side to nod at Felker, then watched him take a step before she rolled back onto her belly to watch the road. She heard Felker coming through the weeds, then heard his feet hit faster, and then he was stepping onto the open pavement.

  Somewhere in the distance she heard the familiar sound of a car starting. She turned her head from side to side quickly, trying to hear the exact direction. Felker had heard it too. He quickened his pace, running now to get across before the car—any car—caught him in its lights. Jane still couldn’t see it, but now there was the sound of tires on gravel, and then the engine’s whispery hum, getting louder and louder as it accelerated. She pumped the shotgun.

  The car swung out of the dark driveway of a house a couple of hundred yards off. Its lights were still off, and the hum grew into a deeper roar. It was too dark to see clearly, so the car seemed not to be coming nearer as much as growing in intensity and anger.

  She rested on her elbows and hugged the shotgun tightly to her shoulder. She could feel the smooth, familiar stock against her right cheek. She stared down the barrel past the groove cut into the top of the receiver, but she couldn’t see the little ball that formed the front sight above the muzzle. Her finger pushed the safety. "Not yet," she whispered. "Not yet, not yet, not—" and she saw the dark shape of the car that seemed to materialize out of the darkness like something congealing.

  She blew out a breath and held it, keeping her forefinger on the trigger just enough so she could feel it. She could sense Felker’s progress without looking at him as she strained to judge the car’s momentum. He was almost across the road now. She whispered, "Run, damn you."

  The lights came on like a splash of caustic liquid thrown into her face. It was a flash that didn’t go away but burned brighter as the car approached. Suddenly, the car swerved away from her to the left side of the road, trying to hit Felker, but she knew it was too late. There was no Felker. The wind from the car’s backwash whipped the weeds around her as it passed, leaving the road in darkness again.

  Jane was up and running now, sprinting for the other side in the dark. She watched the red taillights out of the comer of her eye as she ran. They seemed to expand when the brakes went on, like a pair of eyes widening. There was a squeal of tires, but the driver was good enough not to lock his brakes on a rural highway. As Jane left the pavement and felt the gravel under her feet, the car made a fast turn.

  She made her legs pump hard, and slipped between the rails inside the fence, then lay there to look back at the road. The car started to accelerate again, then slowed and veered toward her. This is it, she thought. They were trying to get the lights onto her to pin her to the ground with them. She raised the shotgun again, and this time the front sight seemed to glow, then disappear as she pulled the trigger. There was a deafening boom! and the left headlight was gone.

  As she pumped again and leveled the sight, she heard Felker’s pistol. There were three shots, and the car skidded away from her and gained speed. She went to her knees and leveled the shotgun on it, but it kept going down the road, faster and faster.

  Felker was at her elbow. "You okay?"

  She stood up. "We’ve got to get out of here." She ran northward again, through the field. She could see a light go on in a window of a farmhouse on the other side of the intersection, but it was at least a quarter mile away. The shots had awakened somebody. If the farmer was turning on his light, at least he wasn’t outside with a deer rifle. But he might very well be trying to see the dial of his telephone, arid that was probably worse. She ran through a muddy slough that smelled like a chicken yard. She kept going, trying to outrun the police car that might be on its way to the first real street on the southern edge of Olcott.

  Then it occurred to her that she had not been thinking clearly. It had been dark, and the house was too far away. People had probably heard the shots in the middle of town. But the farmer would have heard it best, looked out his window and seen—what? A car with one headlight squealing off down the highway. Felker had been hiding out of sight of the car, and Jane had been
lying on her belly inside the wire fence in somebody’s alfalfa. When the farmer called, he was going to report some drunks driving around and shooting road signs. She made it to the next fence and stopped. "Fence," she said, and heard Felker stop too.

  The fence was a cordon of old wooden posts with little porcelain electrical insulators on them to hold the invisible wires. They had gone through a dozen like this in their eight-mile run. Jane had stopped at the first one and patted the wire, half expecting a jolt that would feel like a punch in the arm. It had been turned off, and so had all the others. Farmers in this part of the world didn’t leave their cattle in the fields at night. She tested this one too, but felt only the cold strand of metal on the tips of her fingers. "Dead," she said.

  They ducked to step between the strands of wire and then entered a big apple orchard. As she trotted through it with Felker at her heels, she wondered if she had stumbled on one of the old places. The trees weren’t planted in the usual long, straight lines. They were just growing haphazardly at fairly regular intervals here and there. They were old. They couldn’t be old enough, but they could have been descendants. The Seneca had planted orchards wherever they lived: apples, pears, plums.

  When the white people had taken the land after the Revolution, they had cut the hardwood trees and burned the stumps so they could plow, but not the orchards. She wished she had been here in daylight, so she could get a better look at the trees. Maybe she would come back when the fruit was on them and verify that they weren’t Macintosh or Rome but the small, hard apples that the women had planted in patterns like this.

  She didn’t really need to, though, because she knew that this was a Seneca place. The lake was so close she could smell the change in the air and the Waagwenneyu was just a few miles to the south, down Black Creek or Eighteen-Mile Creek. The women who had planted the trees and tended them were asleep somewhere nearby. Maybe one of them had stirred as Jane Whitefield passed. "It’s only me," she whispered.

  "What?" said Felker.

  "Just talking to myself."

  She moved along in silence, trying to choose what was best to do. The police would come and they would be looking for the one-lighted car. If they didn’t, the four men would at least have that to think about, and it would make them search for Felker on foot. She had to get him into town before the men got there.

  They jogged between houses and through yards, listening for watchdogs and policemen more carefully than for the four men. At last they reached the lake road. There were arcades and small shops, all still boarded up from the winter, and little cottages built low and sturdy because the storms coming in off the lake could be fierce. She considered breaking into one of them and hiding until daylight came and the four men had to leave.

  "That one," she whispered.

  He said, "Let’s take a look."

  She watched him dart across the road, and then followed. He stepped to the side and looked into the window of the garage. "No car," he whispered.

  Jane looked into the garage window. She cupped her hands against the glass to keep out the reflections and tried to make out shapes. It took her a few seconds to be sure, and then she spun around. Felker was gone.

  Jane walked around to the back of the house and found him. He was standing with his face beside the electric meter, staring at it in the dim light. "What are you doing?" she asked.

  "If anybody’s here, the house uses electricity— refrigerator, furnace, clocks."

  "No," she said. "Come back."

  He followed her to the garage. There was a big, thick padlock that held a sliding bolt that went into the woods beside the door. She tugged on it. "Do you have a knife?"

  He nodded and pulled a lock-blade pocketknife with a four-inch blade out of his pocket.

  "Try to carve it out," she said. As he started to gouge the wood, Jane went to the front comer of the house to keep watch.

  In thirty seconds he was beside her. He held up the bolt with the lock still attached. "The screws popped. It was old."

  They dragged the aluminum boat out of the garage. Jane could tell that the owner had done this often, because as soon as they had cleared the noisy gravel of the driveway, the boat found its own keel mark worn into the ground. They pushed it down the sloping path to the edge of the water, climbed back up, and went into the garage.

  It was dark and dusty. In the summer the owner probably kept his boat on the shore and parked his car in here, but now it was a storage shed for all the equipment that had to be protected from the weather.

  Jane found the oars leaning upright in a corner, and a couple of life jackets hanging from a six-penny nail driven into a stud. There was a crude stand made of a two-by-ten nailed upright on a sawhorse for the ten-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. Felker began to unscrew the clamps, but Jane stopped him. "Take this stuff down while I look for the gas can. If we don’t find that, it won’t be worth much."

  Felker took the oars and life jackets and hurried down to the boat, then returned. She held up the red five-gallon can with the double hose attached and shook it. "Empty. I was afraid of that. Everything’s too neat, too squared away. This guy wouldn’t leave gas in a wooden garage for six months. If he had, we would have smelled it. Let me think for a minute."

  Felker said, "We could row."

  They went outside again and stared up and down the road. There were several buildings that weren’t really cottages. They were houses, and they looked occupied. There were cars in some driveways, and big yards. "Somebody’s cutting the lawns," she said. "Lawnmowers."

  "Do we have time?" he asked.

  "Let’s give it one try. If we don’t find it right away, we leave."

  They sneaked across the road to a house with a big, well-trimmed front lawn. The wide sliding garage door was closed, but the side door was unlocked. Jane slipped inside. There was a big car, an old Oldsmobile that took up most of the space, and there was a lawnmower against the wall. Jane moved closer to it and sniffed. There was no smell of gas. She touched it, and felt the long, coiled cord. Her luck tonight was unbelievable. How many people had an electric lawnmower? She stepped back and her bottom touched the side of the car. She turned and looked at it closely. It was at least twenty years old, and that was promising. Maybe it was old enough not to have a lock to protect the gas.

  Jane opened the gas door and felt for the gas cap It unscrewed. She hurried to the door of the garage and took the gas can from Felker. She found some duct tape on the shelf at the back wall of the garage and taped down the thumb release on the motor end of the hose, then draped it into the car’s gas tank, unscrewed the cap on the five-gallon can, and started pumping the rubber bulb on the hose. As she pumped, she thought it through again. It should work. The mechanism was supposed to pump air into the gas tank from one hose to increase the pressure, so the gas would flow into the outboard motor through the other hose. With the cap off and the hoses in the car’s gas tank, the gas should come through the air hose into the— It worked. She could hear a squishing sound and feel the change as the rubber bulb filled with gasoline. Then she was milking gasoline into the can. As she worked, she looked at the floor under the car. She could see a shine that indicated the Oldsmobile was also old enough to leak oil. It took her a moment to spot a yellow plastic pint bottle with the Pennzoil logo on the shelf above the car. She unscrewed it and poured that into the gas tank as she pumped. The oil might not be the right weight, but it would probably keep an outboard motor from seizing up for one night.

  Suddenly, Felker was beside her again. "They’re out there," he whispered. "In the street. Better get ready."

  Jane stopped pumping, picked up her shotgun, and stepped to the side door of the garage. She opened it a crack and saw them. They had spread out, and two were walking on one side of the street and two on the other. Each time they passed an empty cottage, one of them would leave the road and walk around the back, only to emerge again and go on to the next one. She closed the door the rest of the way and smiled. The
y had the right street, but this was one of the few houses they would avoid, because it was occupied.

  She waited a few minutes to let them get far enough away, then left Felker at the door and went back to pumping gasoline. When the can was full, she capped it and handed it to Felker. She went across the street first this time, then stopped by the comer of the cottage to stare in the direction the four men had taken. When Felker had loaded the can into the boat and carried the heavy outboard motor down the slope, she slowly backed around the cottage and went to the garage. She fitted the padlock and hasp to the door and pushed the screws back into the holes, took a last look, and hurried down to the lake.

  She and Felker pushed the boat a few feet forward until the bow began to bob in the quiet waves. "Gentlemen first," she said.

  Felker stepped into the boat and set the oars in the oarlocks. Jane handed him her shotgun and said, "Go up in the bow." When he did, his weight raised the stem of the boat off the shore. She gave the boat a hard push, scrambled past the motor over the transom, and they glided out a few feet, bobbing in the gentle waves.

  Felker came aft to the oar seat, handed Jane her shotgun, and began to row. The aluminum boat was no more than fourteen feet long, and built to be light. Felker was not a great oarsman, but he was strong. A few powerful strokes propelled them past the hissing one-foot breakers out onto the long, rolling swells. She busied herself with the outboard motor, connecting the fuel hose to it, checking to be sure Felker had screwed it onto the transom tightly enough, and getting it ready to start. If the four men happened to be looking at the lake, then it wouldn’t matter how loud the motor was. She was going to have to get them moving.

  They pushed out into the darkness in silence. Jane faced the stem, her shotgun across her lap, staring back at the shore. All of the cottages along the waterline were dark. The only light came from farther back, where the streetlights were. The only noises now were an occasional squeak of the oars in the oarlocks and the quiet swish of the blades in the water. If they could just get out far enough onto the lake without the four men seeing or hearing them, this would work. The four men would lose them completely. They might go back and search her house in Deganawida. They might even get caught doing it.