Dance for the Dead (38 page)

Jane could see Farrell through
the front window of the store filling a shopping cart. The moment was
going by, and when it was gone there would not be another. She got
out of her car and walked toward the station wagon. She could see his
overnight bag on the seat, the crumpled receipt from the motel on the
dashboard. She moved out of sight behind the truck parked beside the
station wagon and watched the window of the store until she saw him
move around the shelves at the end of the aisle. Then she walked to
the front of his car, pretended to drop her keys, and knelt down to
pick them up. While she was kneeling she slipped her hand under the
front bumper and stabbed the lower radiator hose with her
pocketknife, stood up, and walked on to the corner of the building
where she could see the checkout aisles.

She watched while the clerk ran
Farrell’s groceries along the conveyor belt and past the cash
register, then put them into bags. The first had quart-sized bottles
on the top. The second had round bulges of fruits and vegetables,
double-bagged in smaller sacks inside. The third had cartons of
orange juice, milk in a plastic jug, and a box of cereal. She turned
and made her way back to the truck parked by Farrell’s car.

She waited while he slipped his
key into the driver’s door lock and electronically released the
rest of the locks so he could load his groceries, then put the three
bags in the cargo bay. He finished, then turned to push his cart back
to the collection rack, twenty paces away.

Jane moved along the right side
of the car to the back seat door, slipped the rubber band off her
ponytail, doubled it, opened the door, slipped the rubber band over
the catch in the door lock, then eased it shut again. Then she moved
back around the truck out of sight and made her way back to her own
car.

Farrell drove out of the lot and
turned east across the flat farm country toward Mendota. Jane glanced
at her watch, walked into the store, and bought a can of cola and a
box of plastic straws. Then she got into her car, waited three
minutes, and drove out after him. She could picture what was
happening. When the station wagon’s engine started, the water
pump began to circulate the coolant, taking the water from the leaky
bottom radiator hose, while some of it drained from the hole. As soon
as the engine reached its optimum temperature, the thermostat would
open. He would go a few miles before his temperature gauge went wild,
because the expansion tank would empty, keeping the engine cool until
that coolant too drained out the hose onto the road.

She drove down the dark road
until she saw the car pulled over on the right shoulder. She turned
off the road, killed her lights, and watched. There was no sign of
him. Far ahead along the road a truck pulled over to the side and she
could see him caught in its lights for a moment, waving it down. He
climbed into the truck and it drove toward her. She turned on her
lights, pulled back onto the road, and passed it, but as soon as it
was out of sight she turned around and drove back to Farrell’s
car.

She opened the backseat door,
took the rubber hair band off the latch, and pulled up the button on
the driver’s side to unlock the tailgate. She had thought it
through carefully on her drive, so she had no decisions to make. She
put a tiny slit in the plastic milk jug, stuck a plastic straw into
her perfume bottle of water hemlock and mayapple, put her finger over
the end, inserted the straw into the milk bottle, and let it drain
into the milk. Then she moved the gummed price tag to cover the slit.

She did the same to the cartons
of orange juice. The flat packages of meat were an experiment because
she had no idea what cooking would do to the chemical composition of
the clear liquid, but the holes in the cellophane wrappings were easy
to hide, so she used them. She was confident about the bottle of
scotch because the alcohol would hide any taste. She found the cap
could be opened and reclosed by peeling the blue tax stamp off with
her knife instead of tearing it, then pasting it down with a little
spit. She was certain that even if a bit of the food was intended to
reward Mary for talking, the scotch was for the men. Alcohol made
people too reckless to be afraid and too stupid to remember, and it
dulled pain. She left the vegetables alone because they would be
washed and boiled, but she made a tiny incision in each of the apples
and pushed the straw far enough into the depression at the bottom to
reach the almost-hollow core, so the poison would come out as juice
and the white of the apple would not be discolored by contact with
the air.

When the perfume bottle was
empty Jane closed the tailgate, went to the driver’s side,
pushed down the button to relock all the doors, and then drove her
own car a mile down the road to wait for Mary Perkins’s
interrogator to return with a new hose for his radiator.

It
had been nearly forty-eight hours since Mary had walked across five
lanes of the Ventura Freeway and gotten into the car. She did not
know this because time had already become one more thing that had to
do with other people. Sometimes so much happened in a very short
time. If one of the men hit her, the bright sharp suddenness seemed
to explode into pain and wonder, then bleed on into the next several
hours, slowly tapering down into something she knew but didn’t
feel.

At first she had been most
afraid of permanence. There was some instinct that told her it didn’t
matter if they gave her a sensation that made her scream, not because
having it happen so many times had made her used to it but because it
left something. It was like dividing her in half. Each time they did
it, half of her was gone. Then they would divide the half, and she
would be smaller, but no matter how many times they hurt her, some
tiny fraction of her would be left. Even if all that was left at the
end was the size of a germ, someday it might grow back. But if they
blinded her or crippled her, her eyes or legs would not grow back.
She had a deep animal urge to keep her body intact.

But even this feeling was faded
now. She had gone from fear to despair. She could not force herself
to imagine a future. The past was all lies, arrogance, and deception,
and she could not think about her life as separate events now. Even
Mary Perkins was more filth she had made up and smeared on herself.
She was Lily Smith, and she was sorry.

Sometime after the little window
high on the wall in the bathroom turned dark again, a man she had
never seen before walked in carrying a briefcase. He was older and
had gray, bristly hair. He wore a gray suit with a coat that seemed a
little too tight in the shoulders, and a pair of shoes that looked as
though he polished them a lot. She thought of him as Policeman. He
brought with him a straight-backed chair that appeared to be part of
a dining room set and sat down on it.

He watched her with eyes that
looked serious and alert, but there didn’t seem to be anything
else behind them. He had no predatory gleam, no cold contempt. He was
simply waiting. She wanted to please him, to deal with this new
person and win him over to her side.

She began slowly and logically
because she had failed so miserably with Barraclough, and this one
seemed even more touchy, more likely to dismiss her and go away. “I
would like to rind a way to make this end.” She tried to sound
ingratiating, but her voice came out toneless and monotonous.

He pursed his lips and nodded,
as though he were giving her permission to go on. “I know.”

She ventured a little further.
“Nobody has asked me any questions.”

He shrugged. “There’s
no hurry.”

This was like a weight tied to
her. “Why?”

He said, “We destroyed the
tapes you made of the meeting on the freeway – ”

“I didn’t do that,”
she interrupted.

He raised an eyebrow as a
warning. She winced, forcing herself to keep silent. That was how she
had earned Barraclough’s contempt, and if she did it to this
one, her last chance would be gone. They both knew she was an
accessory to the crime, so she accepted it.

He said, “Your girlfriend
Jane wrote you off. She turned up yesterday at the L.A. airport.
Operatives followed her to Chicago.” He opened his briefcase
and lifted out a big plastic food-storage bag with a seal on the top
like the ones they used for evidence. Inside was a long shock of
shiny black hair. He placed it back in the briefcase. “It seems
to me that there’s nobody else who even knows that you’re
missing. You’ve been traveling under false names for some
time.”

She had not realized until now
that she had been living on the assumption that Jane was alive. If
she was gone, then Policeman was right. Enduring a day or a year made
no difference because nobody in the world knew she was gone. There
was no possibility that she could ever leave this room. She repeated,
“Is there any way that I can end this?”

Policeman looked at her
judiciously. “It all depends on you.”

A tiny hope began to return. It
was from a different source this time, and it seemed more genuine
than imagining that Jane could convince the authorities to break down
the door to save her. Now that Jane was gone, she could see how
foolish she had been to think of it at all. She said, “What do
I do?”

He said, “Let’s
talk.”

“All right.”

“Tell me what happened the
day you left the Los Angeles County Jail.”

“I took a bus to the
airport. Then I saw Jane.”

“What color was the bus?”
He asked her questions without appearing to listen to the content of
the answers, just watching to see if she was lying.

“What name did you use in
Ann Arbor?”

“Donna Kester. Jane picked
it. She had cards and things in that name.”

“Where did you go when you
left there?”

“Let’s see. Ohio. We
hitched a ride with a student to Columbus, then Cleveland. The Copa
Motel.”

“Did you pay cash?”

“No. Credit cards. She had
lots of credit cards, all in different names.”

“What name did she use at
the Copa?”

“I’m not sure. I
think it was Catherine Snowdon.” She told him the addresses of
the hotels and motels, the agencies where they had rented cars, the
routes they had driven – everything that came out of her
memory. She wanted to please him. He seemed to be rooting for her,
hoping she would pass. He wrote nothing down, but he seemed to be
listening for mistakes. Each time a detail struck his ear as wrong,
he would interrupt.

“How did you get into a
women’s dormitory at night? They’re locked.” It
would always be something irrelevant, but it would be like a slap
because it made her remember something else to prove she was giving
him everything.

Finally, when the questions
didn’t bring any new answers, he stood up and took a step
toward the door.

“Wait,” she said.
“Don’t go. I’ve done everything, given you
everything. What do you expect me to do?”

Policeman opened his briefcase
again, pulled out a blank piece of paper, took a black felt-tipped
pen out of his shirt pocket, closed the briefcase, and set the pen
and paper on the chair. Then he walked to the shower, unlocked the
handcuff from her wrist, turned, and walked out the door. She heard
him locking it behind him.

She could not believe her good
fortune. She stepped unsteadily to the chair. She started by printing
the names as neatly as she could: Bahamas Commonwealth Bank; Union
Bank of Switzerland; Banco de America Central of the Cayman Islands;
International Credit Bank of Switzerland. The names themselves
brought back the numbers, clear and fresh and clean in her mind,
because numbers always were.

When she was finished, she left
the pen and the paper on the seat of the chair and went back to her
shower stall. After a long time. Policeman came through the door,
picked up the chair and the piece of paper, and walked out the door.

It took them a few hours to do
whatever they had needed to do to verify that the accounts existed.
Then Policeman came in with Barraclough. This time Barraclough
carried the papers. They were bank-transfer authorizations. Across
the top was the name of one of her banks and the account number.
Across the bottom of each one was the account where all of the money
was going: Credit Suisse 08950569237. Her hatred clutched the numbers
to her and clung to them as though they were the eyeballs of the men
in the house.

When she was finished signing
the papers they took them and walked out of the room without speaking
to her. She had a strange sense of relief now. Her body felt light,
as though she could dance or just rise up into the air. She held the
numbers in her head and played with them like colored billiard balls
that clicked when she moved them. Oh, eight ninety-five, oh, five
sixty-nine, two thirty-seven. No fours or ones. First letters,
O-E-N-F-O-F-S-N-T-T-S. 08950569237.

Jane sat in the dark and studied
the gravel drive beside the house. There were the white station
wagon, a white van, and a dark gray Dodge that looked like the same
model as the red one they had used to bring Timmy to the freeway
meeting. The small white house looked as though it had once been a
real farmhouse where a family had lived and worked the broad flat
fields around it, probably back in the thirties.

Jane knew she was going to have
to do everything as quickly as she could. In an hour or two the sun
would be up and one of them would look out a window. She had left the
car a mile away by the side of the road, so there was no chance of
using it as a blind.

She moved a little closer to the
house, slowly and quietly, watching for signs that they had wired the
grounds somehow. She had seen a beige box on the back side of the
gate that she guessed was a motion sensor, and she had given the long
gravel drive a wide berth because of it. She had come in across the
empty field and seen nothing electronic since then.