A String of Beads (5 page)

6

J
ane traveled for several hours that night. Once she had divested herself of her cell
phone, she began to change her
course. Until the rest stop she had followed the exact route that she and Jimmy had
followed at fourteen. It had led them to the Juniata River in eastern Pennsylvania,
because t
hat was the place where archaeological finds had placed the
Iroquoian speakers before most of them had migrated
north to the land that became New York State. That had been an old place. But it had
not been the
oldest
place. The one they’d called the oldest place, one of the oldest sites in North America,
was the Meadowcroft Rockshelter near Avella, Pennsylvania, southwest of Pittsburgh.
Carbon dating on baskets and animal remains in the shelter showed that people had
been there sixteen thousand years ago.

The Meadowcroft shelter was an overhang in the side of a sandstone cliff where small
groups of Paleo-Indians had stayed for short periods of time, probably following the
caribou herds at first. But others in later millennia stopped to wait out a storm,
rest from a journey, hunt for meat in the surrounding woods, or fish in Cross Creek.
Many groups had stopped at Meadowcroft, including Senecas, who regularly traveled
though the upper Ohio valley until at least the 1780s.

To reach the shelter Jane headed south. All night long as she alternately ran and
walked, she thought about her husband, Carey. They had known each other since sophomore
year at college. She had not been a guide in those days, had never taken a person
away from his troubles—never even thought of it until she was a junior and a friend
needed that kind of help. But years later when Carey had reappeared in her life and
they’d fallen in love, she had told him all about her past before she’d agreed to
marry him. In fact, at first she had told him to explain why she wouldn’t marry him,
but he had kept after her until she had agreed. When they married, she stopped taking
on runners and their troubles, and concentrated on being a good wife, a doctor’s wife.
But people still came sometimes. Runners she had made to disappear and who were living
new lives met other people in the same kinds of trouble, and sent them to Jane. Usually
she had resisted and found other ways to help, but now and again she’d made exceptions
and gone on the road again. This was one of the exceptions. She had discussed the
reasons with Carey, and she had thought about them over and over while she’d been
traveling on foot down deserted Pennsylvania roads. Now Carey was angry, and disappointed,
and acted as though he’d been betrayed.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans and took out the ote-ko-a, running her thumb
along the strand, feeling each of the polished shell beads in the dark. Two white,
two purple, two white, two purple, and on down to the end. The string of shell beads
was one of the things Carey couldn’t possibly understand. The string of beads was
an appointment to act as the agent of her people. It was a license, an assignment,
a contract, a physical symbol of an agreement. It was all of these and none of them,
but having it gave her a responsibility she couldn’t duck or amend. She put it back
in the pocket where she had been carrying it since she’d started her journey. A small
part of her brain reminded her that she had never shown it to Carey, never tried to
explain to him what it meant. The ote-ko-a was a burden, but at the same time, it
was a proof of her acceptance by the women, people whose opinions mattered. The time
had come when the tribe needed the specialized kind of help that she could give. How
could she have refused?

Jane thought about what she wished she had said to Carey, how she should frame her
sentences when she talked to him again. At last she fell asleep in a cornfield, and
slept uninterruptedly until afternoon when the heat of the sun woke her. She got up,
rolled up her sleeping bag, shouldered her pack, and began to walk.

She kept moving south. Each night she wished she could call Carey, but as cell phones
had become nearly universal, it had gotten harder and harder to find a pay phone.
But one night she came to a diner in a small village along the road. She ate, and
then found a pay phone on the wall outside the diner by the parking lot. Carey didn’t
answer, so she left a message. “Hi, honey. I’m still on the trip, but I’m not anywhere
I can call very often. I don’t have my cell phone anymore, so don’t try that.” She
paused for a second. “I’m afraid I’ve got nothing to say but I love you, so here it
comes. I love you.” She hung up.

She kept moving south, mostly at night. Sometimes her road ran through small towns,
where it was transformed into a main street, and ran past churches and schools. At
times she would go up on a sidewalk and jog along beside the display windows of stores,
and then the road left the town behind and became rural again.

She wished she had gotten to talk to Carey on the phone, and not just leave him a
message. The anger she felt at his lack of understanding had faded, and now when she
thought about him she simply missed him.

Late on the fifth night of hard travel Jane reached the Meadowcroft Rockshelter. Since
she and Jimmy had been here long ago the state of Pennsylvania or some institution
had built a sturdy-looking wooden shelter to put a roof over the ancient outcropping
of rock. There were platforms and steps to the shelter now. She stopped in the woods
a hundred yards from the wooden structure, staying far enough away so that the security
cameras in or on the building wouldn’t pick up more than a slight thickening of the
darkness at the edge of the woods for a moment, and then nothing. She continued into
the woods above the building, went another hundred yards to a suitable thicket made
of sprouts and saplings of a vanished maple tree, and spread her sleeping bag in the
center of it.

She woke a few hours later already aware that she wasn’t alone. She carefully rolled
out of her sleeping bag and squatted to be ready to spring if she needed to. Jimmy?
No, he wouldn’t sneak up on her. But it could be a Pennsylvania park ranger looking
around to be sure she wasn’t somebody dangerous. She waited a few minutes in motionless
silence, and then saw the source of the movement. It was five deer, two bucks and
three does, moving along outside the edge of the woods where the foraging was best.
In a few more minutes they faded back into the forest, up some narrow trail that she
had not seen.

Jane packed up and walked toward the creek, but then realized that she hadn’t been
intended to go that way. She was supposed to think the way she and Jimmy had thought
when they were fourteen.

She took the path that had been marked and cleared above the creek, and then climbed
a bit to the broad opening of the wooden structure over the rock shelter. There sat
Jimmy Sanders in the mouth of it, smiling like a jovial stone god in a forest shrine.
He wore a gray-green T-shirt that showed his bulging biceps and a pair of cargo pants
with a zippered leg that could change the pants to shorts. His legs hung off the platform
at the cavernous entrance to the shelter, kicking happily. On his head was an olive
drab watch cap of the sort that Jane had brought to keep warm when she camped at night,
but she could see enough above his hairline to see his hair was cut very short. His
shoes were brown hiking boots made of netting and rubber like high-top sneakers. His
skin was like Jane’s, but it had been darkened by the sun to look like Jane’s father’s—like
a worn copper penny. His face was still handsome and a little boyish with the same
amusement showing in his black eyes.

“Hey, Janie,” Jimmy said, his cheerful smile growing. He looked down at her from the
platform and then stared up at the sky and took in a deep breath of morning air. Then
he looked down at her again. “I knew that if anybody would come and find me it would
be you.” He closed his eyes to the sunshine and then opened one eye. “I had hoped
for your sake that you’d look about that way at our present age.”

“You look pretty chipper yourself, Jimmy.”

“I wasn’t talking about chipper.”

“I know you weren’t,” she said. “I’m married. Happily.”

“I’d heard that. Good for you. It takes character. Another sign that you grew up just
the way I thought. He’s a doctor, right?”

“Yes, and a good man. How about you? Get married yet?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll bet you stopped off at my mom’s before you came, and she would
have said so if I had.”

“Probably,” said Jane. “But we didn’t get to talk much this time.”

“I would have been a better husband in the old times I think. I’d go off up the trail
with my friends to fight whoever we were fighting that month and the little woman
would stay in her clan’s longhouse and raise crops and babies with her friends. When
I came back we’d make her section of the longhouse a happy place for a while, and
then I’d go off again.”

“Very romantic. But I’ll hold on to some hope that you find a regular modern girl
and live a dull life.” She climbed the steps to the platform where he sat. She sat
down beside him and let her legs dangle from the edge of the platform.

“Maybe I’ll give it a try if I live.”

At last
, she thought. “Tell me why the police are after you.”

“It started, as a lot of stupid stories do, in a bar. I was there, and so was a guy
named Nick Bauermeister. I didn’t know his name at the time, but I noticed him. He
was about thirty I’d say, maybe a little older. He was drunk and loud. It was around
midnight and I was getting ready to go home, because I always figure if you haven’t
met somebody who will change your life by midnight, she isn’t coming.”

“Good policy,” said Jane.

“I thought it was fairly practical,” he said. “I was heading for the door and this
guy stepped in my way.”

“Why?”

“Stupid and drunk.”

“How big was this guy?”

“Slightly bigger than me.”

“Bigger than you? Wow.”

“Slightly. He looked like a bleary-eyed Viking. He took a poke at me and I sidestepped
and dropped him. He was one of those hopeless guys who does that, and then gets up.
It’s the getting up that hurts you.”

“I can see how that might be,” said Jane.

“Well, sure. I’m just going home. All he has to do is lie there for less than ten
seconds while he thinks about why I might not have been his best choice. But he’s
not a thinking man. He’s the ‘back up in your face’ guy. So when he came for me again,
I knew I’d have to hit him a little harder and faster. I did. Maybe five times. Then
I went home.”

“And?”

“And the next day the police came to my house after work to say that they’d picked
this Nick guy up off the floor and taken him to the hospital last night. They were
considering charging me with assault.”

“And you said . . .”

“I said, ‘I hope you won’t waste your time doing that, because the bar was full of
regulars who saw him take a swing at me out of drunken belligerence. That’s probably
why nobody helped him up before you got there. They didn’t want to have to knock him
back down themselves.
’
”

“I take it the police decided to waste their time.”

“They did. They made it misdemeanor assault. I pleaded self-defense, and they set
a hearing. It was supposed to be May third. I got a public defender and lined up a
dozen witnesses. Then, on April twenty-fifth, the cops came to my place again. They
said this Nick Bauermeister had gotten murdered, and they liked me as the suspect.”

“How was he killed?”

“He was shot with something on the order of a thirty-aught-six rifle from a moderate
distance—maybe a hundred yards. He lived in the country with a girlfriend, and they
shot him through a lighted window at night. This was not great, because in the western
half of the state there are probably six people who couldn’t have made that shot,
and I don’t know any of them. But because I’d been in the army and gone to Iraq and
Afghanistan, I made a great sniper suspect. Prosecutors love it when you’ve served
your country.”

“So they just assumed you killed him because of that fight?”

“Well, you know how we are.”

“Who? Veterans?”

“Indians.”

“Wily,” she said. “Skulking around in the woods, tracking and hunting people.”

“Yep.”

“In other words, they didn’t have any real suspects?”

“Apparently not.”

“Do you have an alibi for the night of the murder?”

“I was at my mother’s house until nine, and then went home and got to bed around ten.
I had to be at work on a construction job at six the next morning.”

“You had witnesses to the fight in the bar, and I assume the police didn’t have a
murder weapon or anybody to place you at the crime scene.”

“Right. No evidence.”

“So why did you take off?”

“Because evidence was starting to appear.”

“What kind?”

“Somebody who said he sold me a thirty-aught-six rifle for cash at a garage sale.
Not just sold some guy a rifle. Sold one to me, picked my picture out of a stack of
pictures, and remembered my name.”

“Interesting. Did you know him?”

“Never seen him; never heard his name before. I’ll bet I haven’t gone to a garage
sale since my mother took me at the age of fifteen. Right about then I used to outgrow
my clothes in a couple of hours, so she bought some of them secondhand.”

“What is his name?”

“Slawicky,” said Jimmy. “Walter Slawicky.”

“That’s progress. We know the name of the man who is trying to frame you. Or one of
them, if there are more.”

“Not enough progress.”

“It wasn’t a good idea to take off.”

“Wasn’t it?” he said.

“They’re looking hard for you, Jimmy.”

“How hard?”

“They’re watching your mother’s house. As soon as I drove up and sat down on the porch,
two state policemen drove up, probably to see if the car that had just arrived had
brought you home. And there’s a state cop who’s a regular tracker a few miles behind
me. I looked in his wallet to be sure that’s what he was. His name is Isaac Lloyd,
and he’s a sergeant.”