A String of Beads (24 page)

Mattie eyed her. “Ellen Dickerson told me you said he was okay a couple of days ago,
but I didn’t know how much confidence to put in that. Things could have changed.”

“He would call me if they did.”

“You’re not going to say exactly where he is?”

Jane said, “I want you to be able to take a lie detector test and say you don’t know.
And the time may come when somebody asks you under oath.”

Mattie smiled sadly, and her beautiful brown skin seemed to tighten. “And if I get
tempted to go see my son, I can’t lead anybody to him.”

Jane frowned. “I’m sorry. But there are easy ways for anybody to track your car, or
use the GPS on your cell phone, or half a dozen other things to track you. I can’t
even be sure I know all the ways, so I can’t warn you about them.”

“I found a little gadget stuck to the bottom of my gas tank with a magnet two days
ago.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I left it there,” said Mattie. “If I threw it away, I figure they’ll do something
else next time that I don’t know about. And I don’t care if they track me to the market.
If I want to sneak off, I’ll get rid of it then.”

“That’s right,” said Jane. “Maybe we should wait a few days until the battery gets
weak and watch your car to see who comes to replace it. To tell you the truth, one
of the reasons I came by was to see who was watching you these days.”

They walked along for a few more paces, and then Jane took Mattie’s hand and put a
stack of bills into it. “Another reason was to give you this.”

“What’s the money for?”

“We needed to be sure you’re provided for.”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s important that I be able to tell Jimmy that I saw you and made sure. What he’s
doing isn’t easy, and it helps if he’s not trying to check on you himself.”

“That phone call.”

“Yes,” said Jane. “He didn’t know what a bad idea it was. I’m hoping he won’t make
a mistake like that again. Somebody was monitoring your phone, so they got his number
and the cell tower where his signal was picked up and transmitted.”

“The police?”

“I think they were something else. They shot at us, and police wouldn’t do that at
first sight.” The two women walked for a time, and then Jane said, “We should probably
get back to your house. My nights are kind of busy right now. It’s when I can see
people, but they can’t see me.”

“All right,” said Mattie. “It was really sweet of you to check on me and let me know
what’s happening—that he’s all right.”

“I wish—” She stopped and stood perfectly still. “Hear it?”

Mattie was still too. “Cars.”

“They sound like they’re heading up your road.”

“Police?”

“I don’t think they’d come to ask questions at night without calling, and this sounds
like two or three cars.”

“Who, then?”

“I’m wondering if the people who have been trying to kill Jimmy got tired of waiting
for him to come to them,” Jane said. “Where’s your car?”

“It’s beside the house. Didn’t you see it?”

“I came through the woods from the cemetery by the council house.”

“The car’s on the other side, up the driveway.”

“You have the keys with you?”

Mattie held them up. “My house key is on the same ring.”

“This is going to be tricky. Give them to me, and you take these.” She handed Mattie
her keys and took Mattie’s. “Stay in the woods off the trail for a few minutes, until
you hear the cars leaving. Then go through the woods to the council house cemetery.
You’ll find a blue VW Passat parked there. Take it. Drive to Rochester. There’s a
big Hyatt Hotel on East Main Street by the Convention Center. Drive into the underground
garage, take a ticket from the machine, and park. I’ll meet you there as soon as I
can.”

“But what if it’s only the police?”

“If it is the police, I’ll see them and come back here for you. If I don’t come back
right away, go. Do you have your cell phone with you?”

“No. It’s in the kitchen.”

“Good. Leave it.”

Jane took a step off the path, but Mattie stopped her. “Are you sure you want to do
this?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “Positive. Listen for the cars, and I’ll see you later in Rochester.”

“See you.”

Jane melted into the woods. She moved swiftly at first, gliding between the tall trees
toward the house. When she reached a thicket of saplings growing beside a stand of
oaks, she crouched in the thicket and watched.

There were three cars, all of them big and dark, two of them SUVs with tinted side
windows. A black sedan stopped just ahead of the intersection of Mattie’s road and
Council House Road, where it could guard the crossroads without drawing much attention.
The other two stopped at the Sanders house, one across the driveway, and the other
in front of Mattie’s front door.

The doors of the two vehicles opened and six men poured out, moving quickly onto the
porch. All were wearing street clothes, and none displayed badges or identification.
They didn’t call out or knock, just kicked in Mattie’s front door and stormed into
the house, spreading immediately from room to room as they filled the building from
bottom to top like a flood. The first man through each doorway had a pistol drawn.

Jane advanced to the rear of the house and then slipped around the corner to the garage
side just before two men opened the back door and stepped onto the back porch. Jane
dropped to her hands and knees to cross under the side windows and crawled to the
front of Mattie’s brown Toyota Camry. She stayed low to slide into the driver’s seat
with the keys already in her hand. She started the engine and slammed the door as
she swung backward onto the front lawn.

The SUV in front of the driveway moved to block her in, but she drove across the lawn
into the small garden Mattie kept, cutting through a row of squash and beans and onto
the road.

The sound of her engine drew the attention of the men in the house, and she heard
two shots, then one more, but didn’t hear or feel anything hit the car. Jane accelerated
toward the intersection where she could see the big black car waiting. The driver
started his engine and turned his headlights on, throwing a glare into Jane’s eyes
as she approached.

Jane switched on her high beams as the other driver pulled his car away from the shoulder
and tried to block the road. She kept speeding toward it, and she could see both men
in the car duck down to prepare for the collision that was coming. She took that moment
to veer to the left and off the road into a weedy field. As she bounced along she
heard and felt the drag of the tall weeds against the undercarriage of the car, then
accelerated up and over the shoulder onto the road again. She switched off her lights
just as she heard two more shots.

Jane knew that on this dark road she would see the glow of headlights in the intersection
ahead if a car were coming to the other road, and she saw nothing, so she went into
the turn without hitting her brakes. She accelerated out of the turn to keep control,
and pushed Mattie’s Camry to higher speeds as she hurtled along in the dark. She had
walked every one of these roads in childhood summers, so she drove them tonight by
memory and feel and moonlight.

She knew the drivers of the two SUVs would have to wait for the six men in the house
to pile into the vehicles before they attempted to pursue her. The lookout car’s headlights
were beginning to light up the intersection far behind her now, so she spun into the
next right turn blind, then took the next left and turned her lights on. At last she
had a chance to look at the dashboard, which had lit up too. Mattie’s Camry had over
a half tank of gas. Jane sent a silent thank-you to her. That would be enough.

At ninety miles an hour, Jane reached the Pembroke entrance to the New York State
Thruway in a few minutes. She slowed, drove onto the westbound side, and stopped at
the Pembroke rest stop. She coasted into the parking lot and parked between a tall
pickup truck and a camper, got out, hurried to the back of the car, and went down
on her side. She reached up under Mattie’s car, pulled the small black box off the
gas tank, and examined it. The black plastic part of the box said
FASTTRACK TRANSPONDER
in raised letters. Jane walked briskly toward the building, scanning the lot.

She selected a tour bus with Ontario plates at the side of the rest stop building,
reloading a line of tourists, most of them elderly and all of them speaking German.
She went to the left side of the bus away from the doors and stared into the bus’s
left side mirror. The driver wasn’t in his seat.

It took less than a second to squat, attach the little black transponder to a clean
spot under the bus’s chassis so its magnet held it there, stand, and keep walking.
She stepped into the building and stopped in the ladies’ room. When she came outside,
the bus had already moved down the entrance ramp. She could see it far ahead, diminishing
into the distance, probably toward a hotel so the tourists could go to sleep and get
up early to visit Niagara Falls.

Jane returned to Mattie’s Camry, pulled out onto the thruway and took the exit at
Depew, went on the cloverleaf over the thruway to the eastbound side, and drove toward
Rochester. She took exit 46, I-390 to Rochester. All the time while she was driving
she watched to be sure she had not been followed. She got off I-390 at the Greater
Rochester International Airport, parked Mattie’s Camry in the long-term lot, walked
to the terminal, and took a cab to the Hyatt Hotel on Main Street in Rochester.

At the hotel Jane went to her room, retrieved her small suitcase, wiped everything
for prints, and stopped at the front desk to check out. Then she walked across the
lobby to the elevator, took it to the first level of the underground garage, and found
the Volkswagen Passat with Mattie sitting behind the wheel looking uncomfortable.
When Mattie saw Jane walking toward her she smiled, opened the door, and got out.
“You’d better drive. I don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Happy to,” Jane said. She reached inside, popped the trunk open, put her suitcase
inside, and then closed the trunk and sat behind the wheel. She backed out, drove
to I-390, and turned south.

“They weren’t police, huh?” Mattie said.

“No,” said Jane. “I’m pretty sure they were men who wanted to kidnap you to force
Jimmy to come back.”

“Where are we going?”

“Hanover, New Hampshire.”

“What’s there?”

“Jimmy.”

18

J
ane drove along Route 20 to the east, going steadily through small towns where the
high school, town hall, and public library were yards from each other, all of them
dark. There were long stretches of open farmland. She had been this way dozens of
times, and each part was familiar to her, as were the many places where she could
turn down a barely marked cross street and disappear. Mattie was silent for a time,
and Jane concentrated on being sure that nobody was following. Then Mattie seemed
to decide she had waited long enough to talk.

“Where did you leave my car?”

“The long-term parking lot at the Rochester airport.” She reached into her pocket.
“Here are your keys, while I’m thinking about it.” She placed them in Mattie’s hand.

“Why the airport?”

“A few reasons,” Jane said. “People fly out of an airport and sometimes don’t come
back for a month or two, so your car won’t get towed before then. If the police find
it, or the men who were trying to kidnap you find it, they’ll come to the conclusion
that you drove it there and left town. They’ll waste valuable time finding out which
flight you might have taken, and where it was going. The longer it takes for them
to find the car, the more flights will have left Rochester. If they’re persistent,
they’ll get lists of people on each of those flights, but they won’t see your name.
They’ll try to figure out which names might be ones you could have used. You wouldn’t
pretend to be George, but you might have been Nancy or Maria. Or since you probably
didn’t plan this far in advance, they’ll try to investigate people who flew standby.
If they’re imaginative, they’ll think of all kinds of other things to look for. All
of it will keep them occupied. It will give them false hopes that will only result
in disappointment and frustration and fatigue.”

“Goodness.”

“The best, of course, would be if the men who were after you would decide to sit in
the parking lot and wait for you to come back, while the police did the same thing.
They could hardly help bumping heads, and I know which heads I’d bet on.”

“You’re really good at this, aren’t you?”

“I hope so,” said Jane. She’d said too much. She prepared herself for the next few
questions, dreading the prospect of lying to Mattie Sanders.

“Would you mind if I drove for a while?” Mattie said. “This much inactivity begins
to get to me after a while. It makes me anxious. You could even get some sleep.”

“A good offer,” said Jane. “I’ll take it. Just stay on Route 20. It goes all the way
to Kenmore Square in Boston.”

“We’re not going there, are we?”

“No. If you see Interstate Ninety-One north, take it. That should be in three hundred
miles or so, and I’d better be up long before then.”

Jane pulled off the highway onto the shoulder and they traded places. She lay back
in the passenger seat while Mattie adjusted the seat and mirrors, then pulled out
onto the road. Jane pretended to be asleep for a few minutes while she watched the
speedometer and the road with one eye. When she was satisfied that Mattie was still
a competent driver, real sleep overtook her.

She woke when it was still dark, but she could tell that it would be morning before
long. The window beside her felt cold, and there was a fog that had gathered in the
bottoms of the valleys and put rainbow auras around the streetlamps they passed. There
were already a few delivery trucks out unloading supplies of various sorts, and lights
in a few house windows. She stretched, rubbed her eyes, and said, “How are you doing,
Mattie?”

“Fine. It’s been a nice, easy trip with so little traffic.”

“I’m feeling rested. I’m ready to take over when you feel like it.”

“I’d like to stop for breakfast somewhere.”

They stopped at a diner in the next town. There were a surprising number of customers,
most of them men who wore jeans or work uniforms, and sat at the counter. Jane and
Mattie sat in a booth and ordered fried eggs, hash browns, and toast, but ate mostly
in silence because they didn’t want to attract attention. After about twenty minutes
a pair of police officers came in, a man and woman who were both about thirty years
old and were hard to see as anything but a couple. Jane and Mattie finished their
food, paid in cash, and went back to their car. This time Jane took the wheel.

They crossed the Hudson into Massachusetts in the morning sunshine and drove north
up Interstate 91 into New Hampshire, and then switched to Interstate 89 at Manchester.
The rolling mountains of New Hampshire made Jane think of huge sleeping prehistoric
creatures, their big rounded bodies covered over the centuries of sleep with windblown
leaves, then humus, then trees. The fog had burned off while Jane and Mattie were
still in New York State, and now the sky was a fresh, robin’s egg blue with small
puffs of white cloud in rows like the letters of an unknown language. Every ten minutes
Jane and Mattie seemed to cross a bridge over a dark river that ran out of the forest.
There were several with signs that said,
BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE THE ROAD
, a warning that this was a different sort of country in the winter, and soon there
were signs in swampy places that said
MOOSE CROSSING
.

Every town had its eighteenth-century churches and cemeteries, and a few had outlying
margins of malls and discount stores and fast-food outlets. But most of the route
was forest, and from the road Jane could see deep into shady spaces between white
pine, maple, white oak and hickory, beech and birch trees. They got off at exit 18,
and drove into Hanover on Route 120 past the hospital, into the center of town, and
found themselves on the Dartmouth campus. There was no clear separation between the
town and the college, only the realization at some point that the buildings had gotten
bigger and fancier. In the center was a vast expanse of grass leading to a long brick
building with a white steeple.

When they reached the apartment house where Jimmy Sanders was staying Jane parked
the car and knocked on the door. She saw no movement, only felt a vague impression
that the curtain had been disturbed. The door opened and Jimmy was visible a few feet
back from the open door, where he would not be seen from the street.

When Mattie stepped in, she and Jimmy stood in silence and hugged each other for a
few seconds while Jane closed the door and slipped the bolt. Jimmy said, “What are
you doing here, Mom?” Then he turned to Jane. “This can’t be safe.”

Mattie said, “Safer than home. A bunch of men came to get me.”

“Came to get you?”

“Bad men. Jane thinks they’ve gotten tired of waiting for you to come home, so they
decided to grab me and see if they could get you to come back.”

Jimmy looked at Jane, his eyes troubled.

Jane said, “They were in three cars—one lookout car with two men to control the street,
one SUV to block the driveway, and another SUV to take her away. Six men rushed the
house with guns drawn. The only thing to do was get her out of there. I should have
done it before. Your mother is the most obvious way to get to you.”

“I can’t believe this,” said Jimmy. “Two months ago I had no enemies, and my mother
was as safe as anybody could be, surrounded by a couple hundred families, nearly all
relatives—brothers and sisters, practically.”

Jane stepped to the refrigerator, opened it, and then closed it again. “You two can
catch each other up on things,” she said. “I’m going out to stock up on groceries.
When I come back I’ll make us some dinner and tell you what I’ve learned so far.”

She saw Jimmy’s keys on the kitchen counter, took them, and put the Passat’s keys
in their place, then went out the front door. She drove back out on Route 120, filled
Jimmy’s Chevrolet Malibu with gas, then stopped at the Co-op. She bought lots of fresh
meat, fish, vegetables, and fruit, and then filled her cart the rest of the way with
a hoard of canned and frozen food so Jimmy and Mattie would not have to go out for
a while.

When she returned she could see that mother and son had been talking. As she and Mattie
worked together to make a dinner of chicken and vegetables and corn soup, Mattie seemed
to be studying her whenever she wasn’t looking. Finally, while they were setting the
table, Jane said, “So Jimmy told you about me.”

“Yes,” said Mattie. “Why didn’t you? I can keep a secret.”

“I don’t have only one secret.”

“I don’t understand.”

Jane said, “Over the years I’ve taken a lot of people out of lives that had gotten
too dangerous. Who every one of those people used to be, who he is now, and where
he lives, are all secrets. I may have made those secrets, but they don’t belong to
me. Because I know them, I have a responsibility to keep myself from getting discovered
and caught.” She held Mattie with her strange blue eyes. “Otherwise, there won’t be
any more.”

“Any more what? People like Jimmy?”

She nodded. “If my own secret gets out, I’ll be useless to those people—the ones yet
to come, the ones who may already be trying to find the way to me. There will be people
who are running for their lives and need a door out of the world. The door won’t be
there anymore.”

Mattie said, “He told me the clan mothers knew. I’d cut my throat before I told anyone
else.”

“So would they,” said Jane. “Let’s hope nobody has to.”

They served the food, sat at the table, and ate together. When they had finished they
said, “Nia:wen,” and Mattie and Jimmy stood to begin clearing the table.

“Sit,” said Jane. “I’ve learned some things, and you should know them too.”

They resumed their places, and Jane began to talk. She told them about Chelsea Schnell
and the small house where Nick Bauermeister had been shot, about Bauermeister’s burglary
kit and his cache of jewelry inside the salt sacks. She told them about Chelsea’s
relationship with her dead boyfriend’s boss, Daniel Crane. She told them about the
witness who said he’d sold Jimmy the murder weapon and his sudden show of wealth.
Finally she told them she had retained Allison the lawyer and her partner Karen Alvarez.
When she had finished, she smiled. “Dah-ne-hoh.” It was what Seneca storytellers said
at the end of a story, and it meant “I have spoken.”

Mattie and Jimmy looked at her, then at each other, and then at Jane again. “Isn’t
all that enough to get me off?” said Jimmy.

“Allison didn’t say it was,” Jane said. “And she’s the expert. A lot of people whose
cases had what any sensible person would call reasonable doubt are sitting in prisons.”

“Well sure, but—”

“The victim was a burglar, but that doesn’t mean it was okay to kill him. His girlfriend
is having an affair with his boss. That doesn’t prove that she or he wanted him dead,
and certainly not that either of them killed him. If it came out, they would probably
say they were comforting each other for their mutual loss. And it might be true. The
witness who says he sold you the rifle has come up with money for new things, but
nobody has demanded to know where he got it, and he seems to be a convincing liar.
I wouldn’t want to go to court with that. Do you?”

“I guess not,” said Jimmy.

“Of course not,” Mattie said to him.

Jane said quietly, “And we still don’t know who these other people are who are so
interested in getting rid of you. Until we know, I don’t think you can turn yourself
in.”

Mattie said, “So what do we do now?”

Jane shrugged. “Jimmy has learned a lot about how to keep from being noticed. For
the moment, the one who goes out and shops, or shows a face to the world, has to be
you. And you shouldn’t do it very often.”

“Is that enough?” said Mattie. “Just sit here and hide?”

“For the moment. Keep to yourselves, live quietly, and let Jimmy stay out of sight
most of the time. You’ve got gas in the car, a pantry full of food, and some money
for when it runs out. Tomorrow I’m going to pay the rent that comes due next week,
and the utility bills.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to where the murder happened,” Jane said. “It’s the only place I can find anything
out.” She got up and carried some dishes to the sink, and the others joined her. In
a few minutes, they had loaded and started the dishwasher, and they could hear the
water rushing into it. She reached into her pocket and pulled out one of the small
leather pouches. “Ellen Dickerson sent you this.” She handed Jimmy the pouch.

He looked inside, then poured a little tobacco out into his hand and looked at it,
and then returned it to the pouch. “That was nice of her. Maybe we should burn some
before you go.”

“She gave me some too,” Jane said. “I put a little on my tires before I left her house.”

“You really did that?” said Jimmy.

Jane said, “It didn’t hurt to remind myself that we have friends and relatives, and
they’re in this too.”

“And maybe friends who aren’t people?”

Jane shrugged. “I’ll take the help.”

The next morning when Mattie got up, she walked quietly and carefully from the spare
room into the living room to keep from waking Jane. She looked at the couch and saw
that the blanket was neatly folded and the pillow was on top of it. She looked at
the spot where Jane had left the keys to the Passat. They were gone, replaced by the
keys to the Chevrolet Malibu.