Dance for the Dead

by Thomas Perry

  “How about your legs?”

  “What about them?”

  “Do they hurt?”

  She considered the implications. He couldn’t rub oil on her through a pair of blue jeans. He knew that. “Not at the moment.” when she had said it she felt a sense of loss that she didn’t have the time to analyze if she was going to fix it. “You can’t be too careful, though.” She reached under her stomach to unbutton the jeans and give a tug on the zipper.

  He slipped the jeans down her legs and off her ankles, and she felt tension in her throat. Then his hands were on the soles of her feet, squeezing them with tiny circular movements, until she began to imagine she was feeling him sending messages up the nerves to her shoulders and neck. The tension didn’t go away, but it wasn’t unpleasant anymore. He worked up the Achilles tendon, the calves, and very softly the backs of her knees, and then slowly and carefully up the hamstrings. She was calm and happy, and she wasn’t thinking at all anymore, just following his touch. But then the circular movement of his hand passed for a moment between her thighs and she caught herself arching her back to spread them apart the tiniest bit.

  He kept working on her legs and back, but she could feel that the hands weren’t alternating anymore, so he was undressing with the other. Then she felt the panties being peeled off, and he turned her over to gently kiss her bruised face, and they slowly joined in the embrace that she had always known would come.

  Everything began with a slow inevitability, a luxurious ease and simplicity that made her feel warm, then eager, and then glad. But the feeling didn’t fade. It built and intensified. After that, every second, every heartbeat expanded into a moment of its own. Suddenly she became aware that she was hearing a woman’s voice, and she wondered how long she had been doing that, moaning and making little cries that she couldn’t have silenced if she tried. Then she went beyond thinking into a place where every sensation seemed to go up one notch on the scale to the highest frequency—colors, sounds, movements. She was almost afraid when the intensity kept building, and the word angel came back to her, but this time she didn’t laugh, because everything was bright and fever-clear and immediate, with no distance left at all, no will inside her but his.

  The whole night passed without her knowing the time, because she had the sense that she would have to give up something in order to think. They would pause and let their heartbeats slow, lying together still clasped in the same embrace but not the same now, somehow friends simply passing together into sleep. But then one of them would stir, and the other would silently say yes, each time the question and the answer completely different, because every time the last time had not faded or gone away, so it was like going up another step on a stairway.

  At dawn they were lying on the bed, eyes closed, when he said, “What do you think about getting married?”

  Jane’s breath caught in her throat. Have beautiful tall children. Live here—not in this house, but at least close by, in the big old stone one in Amherst with him. Maybe that was where all of this had been taking her, leading her away from death the way she had taken other people. She would never have to tell him what a guide was because it would all be over—already was over when you started losing.

  “No answer?” he asked.

  “Every girl’s fondest wish,” she said. “Think the guy who owns the Buffalo Bills might be interested in marrying me? Maybe the one who fathered those quintuplets. There’s a guy who knows his way around a diaper.”

  “I mean it,” said Carey. “We should get married.”

  Jane sat up, then leaned over and kissed him, letting her hair hang down on both sides of their faces like a curtain. She lay back down. “Thank you,” she said. “I guess we ought to have a serious talk about it sometime.”

  “Does that mean yes? That’s what you said last night.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’ve always loved everything I knew about you.”

  “So why are you saying no?”

  “I didn’t say no.” She sat up again and ran her fingers through her hair to find imaginary tangles. “I said we should have a serious talk sometime. I’ll start any time you want to, but I’m not going to say yes right now.”

  He sat up too. “I can do that.”

  She sighed. “When was the last time you had sex, Carey?”

  He pursed his lips and said reluctantly, “The other night.”

  “You mean the night before last night. The last time you came off a shift.”

  “It was a colleague. It wasn’t a routine procedure. She’s a terrific diagnostician, a person of the highest—”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “What is this? You pry and then pretend you’re not interested?”

  “You’d make a lousy husband.”

  “Jane, this thing with my colleague. It’s not anything to get jealous about. It was a single, isolated event. Two patients died at the end of the shift after we did everything we could. I think we were just comforting each other. There’s something buried deep in the cerebral cortex that gets triggered when you lose a life, some primitive forgotten instinct that says ‘Fuck while you can, because one of these times that is going to be you.’ It’s the practical animal reaction that evolved to keep the species alive after prehistoric kill-offs. She’s probably mystified that we did it. Next time we do a shift together we’ll be perfectly professional.”

  “I’m sure you will. You’re a good doctor, and you’d know if she weren’t. But I assure you, if you had her in the sack, she’s not going to let herself get too mystified. She’s probably waiting on your doorstep. If she isn’t, it doesn’t matter, because there will be another along shortly. There is, in fact, isn’t there? Me. The world is full of women—an endless supply—and every last one of them has something about her: a little smile that makes you want to smile too, or breasts like two perfect grapefruits. Remember her? That’s probably why she hung around your supermarket—so you could make the comparison.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said. “You want me to start quoting you?”

  “No,” Jane answered. “It isn’t fair. That’s part of what I’m talking about. What we know about each other looks a little different if marriage rears its ugly head. And I’m not criticizing you.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “No. I never thought for a second that there was anything wrong with anything you do. I still don’t. But the only way it would make any sense to marry you is if I had some reason to believe you had become monogamous.”

  “You actually think I can’t do that?” Carey asked.

  She smiled and lay down with her head on his shoulder. It was surprising how good it felt. In a moment she said, “Want some breakfast?” and was up and heading for the kitchen. She slipped her bathrobe on as she walked down the hall. Then she heard the beep-beep-beep-beep, stopped, and walked back to the bedroom doorway. He was sitting on the bed staring sadly at the pager attached to the belt on the floor. “Your alarm’s going off,” she said. “Somebody seems to be breaking into your pants.”

  Carey picked up the beeper, slipped on his pants, walked to the telephone by the bed, and cradled the receiver under his chin as he dialed. “It’s the hospital,” he said, and buckled his belt. As she walked back down the hallway she heard him say, “Dr. McKinnon.”

  Jane went into the kitchen and packed him a little lunch while he talked on the telephone. She could hear him thumping around up there, probably not doing a very good job of making himself presentable. When she heard his feet on the stairs she came out and handed him the little brown bag.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m off and get some sleep.”

  “Thanks,” she answered, then added, “If I’m not around, don’t worry. I may have to go out of town.”

  “See?” He grinned. “Nothing’s changed. You always say that.” He gave her a long, gentle kiss, picked up his black bag, and hurried out to his car
.

  Jane thought about what she had said. She had no plans to go anywhere. It was simply the old habit: never give anyone a reason to ask the police to look for you.

  She considered going back to bed, but if she did she would be out of step with the sun and moon, and she hated that feeling more than being tired. She spent the day cleaning her clean house, cutting her lawn, and weeding her flower beds. She tried not to think about what Carey McKinnon was doing, or about being Mrs. Carey McKinnon, or about finding the right way of loving a particular person. What she needed to know wasn’t something that could be figured out in advance. She had to wait until she was sure she wasn’t taking an old friend and converting him into the consolation prize for failure. It was only after night had come that she went back up to bed and allowed herself to sleep.

  Jane sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. The sun was beginning to come up, the light now diffused and gray beyond the window. She wasn’t sure how long she had been hearing the birds, but they were flitting from limb to limb now, making chirrups. She used the hot coffee and the silence to work her way back through her dream, and she knew where every bit of it had come from.

  She had been running at night through the woods, trying to make it to the river. She must have been a child, because her parents were with her. There was something big and dark and ferocious chasing them, but she wasn’t able to catch a glimpse of it through the trees. Every time she tried to look over her shoulder it seemed to be closer, but she could only discern a shadow that blotted out some of the stars, or see branches shaking as it trampled through a thicket.

  She walked to the middle of the living room and cleared her mind while she began the one hundred and twenty-eight movements of Tai Chi, one flowing into the next without interruption. She decided her muscles weren’t as sore as they had been yesterday. Maybe Carey’s liniment had worked after all—or something else had. Her body borrowed part of her consciousness as it had learned to do through long years to move through positions with names like “Grasp Sparrow’s Tail” and “Cross Hands and Carry Tiger to Mountain,” and ended as it had begun, almost floating. Then she slipped on a sweat suit, hung her house key on a chain around her neck, went down the front steps, and began to run.

  She started slowly and easily in the cold dawn air and gradually lengthened her strides as her body warmed and her muscles relaxed. She ran down to the river and along the open grassy strip toward the south. Deganawida was alive this morning with people just up and driving along Niagara Street toward their jobs, he men’s hair wet from their showers and plastered to their heads, the children dressed in their second-heaviest coats already, their mothers hustling them down the sidewalk and making sure they were at least pointed in the direction of the school when they started off. She ran up as far as the Grand Island bridge and then turned back. The run home would give her just the right stretch of time to shower, change, and eat before the library opened.

  Inside the library she walked to the desk and collected all of the past month’s issues of the Los Angeles Times, then hid in the small room in the corner surrounded by the reference books that nobody ever used unless they wanted to settle a bet, and sat down to read.

  The first one that caught her eye was two days old.

  INVESTIGATION OF COURTHOUSE DEATHS IS

  INCONCLUSIVE

  VAN NUYS—In the latest development in the strange saga of Timothy Phillips, kidnap victim and heir to a San Francisco fortune, an L.A. Police spokesman conceded today that the investigation has so far produced no charges against anyone. The bizarre events at the Van Nuys courthouse which caused the deaths of two persons and the arrests of five others last month are still under investigation, said Captain Daniel Brice.

  Details are still sketchy, but the police have put together this much of the puzzle: Just as the courts began session on the morning of the 15th, attorney Dennis Morgan, 38, of Washington, D.C., stopped his car in front of the courthouse to let off his eight-year-old client, Timothy Phillips, and Mona Turley, 29, the woman posing as Phillips’s mother. The rented car then apparently slipped into reverse and slammed into an oncoming vehicle. Driver Harold Kern, 23, and passenger James Curtain, 26, both of Los Angeles, suffered minor injuries, but Morgan was (See Inconclusive, A 29)

  Jane impatiently searched this page and found the rest of the article in the lower left corner.

  pronounced dead at the scene.

  Kern and Curtain ran into the courthouse, apparently seeking assistance for Morgan. Mona Turley, police theorize, may have believed the two men were pursuing her with hostile intent. A struggle ensued, in which numerous bystanders took sides. The confrontation erupted into a fight in a fifth-floor hallway, where bailiffs in a nearby courtroom responded to the disturbance.

  Arrested with Curtain and Kern were Roscoe Hull, 22, Max Corto, 28, both of Burbank, and Colleen Mahoney, 29, of Orlando, Florida.

  After police restored order, the body of Mona Turley was discovered at the bottom of a stairwell, an apparent victim of a fall from an upper floor. Police sources confirm that a maze of conflicting allegations have been made, but eyewitnesses have established that none of the five persons arrested could have left the hallway once the fighting began.

  Captain Brice explained that in the absence of evidence that any of the combatants had ever met the deceased, had any motive to harm her, or were in the stairwell at the time of her death, they could not be considered suspects. He said that foul play has not been ruled out, but that Turley might have been overcome with anxiety or remorse because of possible kidnapping charges and taken her own life.

  Jane sat and stared at the orderly rows of thick volumes on the shelves in front of her. They had killed Mona, but the best she could do was to go into court as Colleen Mahoney, lie and say she saw them, then watch twenty witnesses parade to the stand and say she was wrong. The ones who had been in the car had certainly broken Dennis’s neck with a choke-hold after the crash, but she hadn’t seen that either.

  If the police hadn’t found a connection between any of them and the Timothy Phillips case, then they were hired hands. No doubt the police and the F.B.I. were quietly looking for Colleen Mahoney, but there was no reason to let them find her. She was finished.

  She looked through the newspapers for more articles about Timothy Phillips. Finally she found one that was only a day old.

  HOFFEN-BAYNE NOT SUSPECTED OF

  WRONGDOING, D.A. SAYS

  A spokesman for the District Attorney’s office issued a statement today denying rumors that Hoffen-Bayne Financial, Inc., is under suspicion of attempting to defraud kidnapped heir Timothy Phillips of the multimillion-dollar estate of his late grandmother.

  “The rumor has no merit,” said Deputy D.A. Kyle Ambrose. “All you have to do is read the conditions of the trust. If Mr. Phillips were deceased, Hoffen-Bayne did not stand to benefit. All the money was to be donated to charities. I’m convinced that they filed to have the child declared dead because it was the proper procedure under the trust instructions, and consistent with the behavior of a good corporate citizen. There’s very little benefit to society from having vast fortunes tied up in trusts with no beneficiaries. The intent of the grandmother was to provide for her grandson, not to build a perpetually-growing pyramid of unused money.” Ambrose noted that Hoffen-Bayne had reason to be delighted with the news that Timothy Phillips had been found. “If the estate went to charities, the company would have lost large annual fees as trustee and executor, which now legally must continue until the boy reaches eighteen, and could continue as long as he wishes.”

  Jane read the article twice. Dennis had been certain that the men who were after Timmy had been hired by Hoffen-Bayne. Dennis was a lawyer, and there had been something in the documents that had convinced him that Hoffen-Bayne had a rational reason for doing it. But the Los Angeles D.A.’s office was full of lawyers, criminal lawyers at that. Were they just convinced that companies like Hoffen-Bayne weren’t in the business of killing their clie
nts?

  She tried to look at it in a logical way. Hoffen-Bayne had chosen this time to have Timmy declared dead. If they were capable of murder, they could have waited until they had actually killed him, left his body where it would be found, and let the coroner do the paperwork. Or they could have waited and filed the papers at the best possible time for them. No, she had to assume that they had already waited, and that this was the perfect time. There was nothing external to make them do it now. There were ten more years until Timmy could take control of the money and fire them, ten more years of the “large annual fee” the D.A. had mentioned.

  Jane stood up, walked out to the librarian’s counter, and caught Amy Folliger’s eye. “Can I make a couple of copies on the machine?”

  “Sure,” said Amy. “A dime a copy. But I’m afraid you’ll have to sign this sheet,” she added apologetically. “It relieves the library of liability if you violate a copyright.”

  Jane glanced at the papers on the clipboard. The first page was a summary of the copyright law of 1978. She signed the second page and handed it back.

  “Sorry,” said Amy. “Did you ever wonder how we ever got to this point?”

  “What point?”

  Amy’s big eyes widened behind the silver-framed glasses that Jane had never seen her wear except on duty at the library. “Where everything is lawyers. Of course they get to write the laws. Did you ever hear of a lawyer missing the chance to give himself perpetual fees?”

  “Once or twice,” said Jane. “Maybe if we all behave ourselves for a hundred years, they’ll go away.” She copied the articles, then walked to the newspaper rack and carefully replaced the stack of L.A. Times.

  Jane put the copies into her purse and walked out of the library. As she approached her car, she composed the note that she would write to Karen the lawyer to explain what was bothering her, but it didn’t feel right. What was bothering her was that she wanted to know now.

  Jane passed the telephone booth beside the building and then walked back to it. She dialed the number and said to the secretary who answered, “This is Jane Whitefield. She knows me. Tell her I’m going to fax something to her.”