Dance for the Dead (5 page)

She spent fifteen minutes
driving around the neighborhood to look for signs that anyone else
had found the house. She saw no parked cars with heads in them, no
nearby houses with too many blinds drawn, and no male pedestrians
between twenty and fifty. She came back out on Colorado Boulevard
satisfied and drove up two streets before she found the place where
she wanted to park her car She had to climb over the fence at the
back of the yard and crouch in the little cinderblock enclosure where
the pool motor droned away and stare in the back window until she saw
Timmy. She watched him eat his dinner in the kitchen with two other
children, and then begin to climb the carpeted stairway to the second
floor. Upstairs, a light went on for a few minutes and then went out.
The other children weren’t much older than Timmy was but they
were still downstairs. She supposed he was still living on Chicago
time, where it was two hours later.

The sun was low when Jane
decided how she would do it. She walked quietly to the back of the
house. In a moment she was up the fig tree and on the roof of the
garage. She walked across it to a second-floor window of the house,
tied a length of the jewelry wire into a loop, inserted it between
the window and the sill, and slowly twirled it until she had it
around the latch. She gave a sharp tug to open the latch, quietly
slid the window up, and slipped into the upstairs hallway.

When she opened the bedroom door
Timmy was lying on his side looking at her, his coffee-with-cream
eyes reflecting a glint of the light coming from the hallway, his
child-blond hair already in unruly tufts from burrowing into the
pillow. Somebody had bought him a new pair of pajamas with pictures
of fighter planes in a dogfight all over them, and had at least
looked at him closely enough to be sure they fit his long legs. He
held the teddy bear on the sheet beside him. “Jane?” he
said.

“Hello, Timmy,” she
whispered. “Can’t sleep?”

“I’m tired, but it’s
still light, and I keep thinking about them. Mona and Dennis.”

“I thought you might want
to go to their funeral.”

“I did want to, but they
said I couldn’t.”

“So we’ll have our
own.”

The shadows of the trees at the
edge of the vast cemetery were already merging into the dusk, but the
sky to the west had a reddish glow. Jane had sent two big displays of
white roses in case she and Timmy arrived after dark, but the flowers
weren’t necessary. It was still light enough to find the two
fresh graves on the hillside.

The bodies of Dennis and Mona
would be shipped to London and Washington for burial, but Jane had
searched the funeral notices in the newspaper and found a pair of
brothers who had been killed in a car accident and had been buried
today. As they walked up the hill Timmy said, “What are we
going to do?”

Jane shrugged. “We can
only do what we know. The kind of funeral I know best is the kind my
family did for my father, my mother, and my grandparents.”

They stopped at the head of the
graves. Jane said, “One thing we always did was to have close
friends or relatives say something to them.”

“How?”

“Just talk to them.”

Timmy looked down at the two
mounds of dirt for a moment, then said, “I don’t know
what to say.”

“Then I’ll go
first,” Jane said. “Dennis and Mona? We’re here to
say goodbye to you, and to tell you that there are people who know
and understand who you were and what you did. We saw it. You spent
your lives protecting and caring for people who needed help: little
children, and people who were going to court and didn’t have
anybody to speak for them. You died fighting enemies you knew were
bigger and stronger, trying to give us time. We’re here because
we want you to see that we’re okay. You won.” She nudged
Timmy. “Ready to say something?”

Timmy said, “Mona, I’ll…
I’ll miss you. It’s lonely here. I didn’t know you
weren’t coming back. I would have said something…”
His voice trailed off.

“What would you have
said?” asked Jane.

“I… guess…
‘I love you.’”

“That’s good.”

“And I would have thanked
her. But I can’t now. It’s too late.”

“You just did,” said
Jane. “Those are the two things that had to be said.”

Jane knelt on the grass and used
her hands to dig a hole in the soft mound of earth over the first
grave. Then she reached into her purse.

“What are you doing now?”

“Well, the Old People
believed that after somebody died, he had to make a long trip to a
place where he would be happy all the time. They figured it took a
long time to get there, so they tried to give him presents that would
make the trip easier. Weapons, food, that kind of thing.”

She held up a new Mont Blanc
fountain pen and said, “This is like the one Dennis carried in
his briefcase, but the police have that. We’ll let it stand for
the weapon.” She pulled out a credit card and put it beside the
pen. “This is the way people travel now.”

At the other grave she dug a
second hole and placed a credit card and four granola bars in the
bottom.

“What’s that?”
asked Timmy.

“Mona wasn’t the
sort of person who thought much of weapons. She loved to feed people,
so she would like this better.” Jane stood and brushed the dirt
off her hands. “Now cover them up.”

As Timmy worked to pack the dirt
over the little holes, Jane went to the car and brought back the
birdcage.

“What’s in there?”

She took the blouse off the cage
and the scrub jays glared around them suspiciously, the white streaks
above their shining black eyes looking like raised eyebrows.

“Birds!” said Timmy.

“The Old People did this,
so maybe it works.” She spoke to the birds. “Mr. and Mrs.
Bird, we have the souls here of two very brave and noble people. They
had a lot of reasons why they must have wanted to run away from
danger, because they loved each other very much, just like you do.
But they did the hard thing instead. I want you to carry them up to
Hawenneyugeh. Will you do it?”

The birds jumped back and forth
on the perches calling
“Check-check-check,”
uneasy
about the low level of the sun.

Jane said, “Mona, it’s
time to go. Have a short trip. You did your work well. You were a
wonderful woman.” She grasped the female scrub jay gently,
holding her on her back and stroking her breast feathers as she stood
over the grave, then tossed her into the sky. She fluttered about and
then flew fifty feet to light on a limb of a magnolia tree.

Jane reached into the cage again
and caught the male. “Dennis,” she said, “you were
a great fighter. Now I wish you peace. Mona is waiting.”

The scrub jay flew up and joined
the female on the branch of the magnolia. They looked down at Jane
and Timmy for a few seconds as though they wanted to be sure there
was no plan afoot to molest them further, then flew off to the west
toward either the setting sun or the college campus.

“Goodbye,” said
Timmy. He waved as the birds flew, and kept waving long after they
were invisible.

“Ready to go now?”

“I guess so.”

They walked back to the car in
silence, got inside, and coasted down the hill and out of the
cemetery.

“Do you think they heard
us?” asked Timmy.

“There’s no way to
know,” said Jane. “The Old People will tell you that they
do. What I think is that it doesn’t really matter. Funerals
aren’t for the dead.”

“They’re not?”

“They’re for us, the
ones who have to go on.”

“You did all this for me,
didn’t you?”

“For you and for me.”
She drove on for a few seconds, then admitted, “But mostly for
you. For somebody your age you’ve seen a lot of heartache. Some
of it you don’t remember already, but you’ll remember
this. I wanted to be sure you remember it right.”

“What should I remember?”

“That you got to live when
there were still heroes. Real heroes that feel scared and bleed, and
that’s the part that gets left out of the books. That’s a
privilege. Nobody has to read you a story. You saw it.”

“I wish they hadn’t
done it,” said Timmy.

“Me too.”

Timmy started to cry. At first
it was just a welling of tears, but Jane knew the rest of the tears
that he had been too exhausted to cry were behind them. She drove to
the freeway and kept going beyond Pasadena into bare and unfamiliar
hills. After half an hour Timmy stopped crying, and Jane drove until
he spoke again. “What’s going to happen? They’re
all gone.”

“You don’t have to
worry about that, because some very smart people are spending all
their time taking care of it. Judge Kramer said the court would study
your story, learn all they can about you, and appoint somebody to
take care of you.”

“Will it be you?”

“No,” she said. “It
will be a family. Somebody like the people you’re staying with
now. Are they nice?”

“Yes,” he said.

Jane let out a breath before she
realized she had been holding it. “Well, I’ve got to get
you back there so you can get some sleep.”

“Will I see you?”

“Probably not for a long
time.”

She drove back to Pasadena and
parked behind the street where the policeman and his family lived.
She climbed to the top of the fence, lifted Timmy and lowered him to
the lawn. She could see that the other two children were still
watching television downstairs. She led him to the tree, hoisted him
to her back, and climbed. When they walked to the open window, Timmy
was seized with a panic. “I don’t want you to leave.”

“I have to, Timmy,”
she said.

“But what am I going to
do? I mean after you’re gone.”

Jane hesitated, then accepted
the fact that she had to try. “Go to school. Make friends. Play
games. Try to grow up strong and decent and healthy. That’s
plenty to do for now.” She helped him in the window and sat on
his bed while he put on his pajamas.

“But what happens after
that? What will I be then?”

“I think that’s why
it takes so much time to grow up. You don’t really make a
decision; you just find out when the time comes.”

“What would you do?”

Jane shook her head and smiled
sadly. “I’m not a good one to ask.”

“Who is?”

Jane had an urge to tell him
everything she knew, because this would be the last time. No words
came into her mind that were of any use, but she had to push him in
the right direction. “Well, when I was in college I knew a boy
who was in a position sort of like yours. He didn’t know what
to do, but he knew that if he wasn’t careful, he would be lazy
and wasteful and selfish.”

“What did he decide?”

“He decided to become a
doctor. It was the hardest thing he could think of to be, so he knew
that would force him to study. And when he had done enough studying,
he would know how to do something worthwhile. At the time I thought
he was being very sensible. I still can’t find anything wrong
with the idea.”

“Is he a doctor now?”

“As it happens, he is, but
that isn’t the point. The real reward was that he got to be the
kind of person he wanted to be. It doesn’t matter whether he
ended up a doctor or something else. He had decided to try. That made
him special.”

There were noises. She heard the
first complaints from little voices downstairs. The children were
being sent to bed.

“I’ve got to go now
or I’ll get caught,” she said. She leaned down and kissed
his cheek. “Sleep well, Timmy. Remember that people have loved
you before and others will love you again, because you’re worth
it.”

As she slipped out the window
she heard a whisper. “Jane?”

“Yes?” She stopped
and leaned on the sill.

“Thanks for the bear. I
knew it was from you.”

“I thought you would.”

“Are you one of the
people? The ones who love me?”

“Of course I am.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Sure.”

She drifted across the garage
roof like a shadow, and seemed to Timmy to fly down the tree without
moving a leaf. He watched the back fence, but even in the light of
the moon he didn’t see her go over it. After listening for a
few minutes, he fell asleep.

Jane
returned the car to the airport rental lot and caught the shuttle bus
to the terminal. As she stepped off, she smiled perfunctorily at the
efficient skycap offering to check her luggage through to her
destination and shook her head. She didn’t have luggage and she
didn’t have a destination. She had made a stop at a Salvation
Army office on the way to the airport and disposed of the clothes
that had remained in her suitcase that weren’t torn or
bloodstained, and then had donated the suitcase too. She had known
that she would never wear any of the clothes again because they would
have reminded her of all that had happened.

She had spent her three days in
the county jail ruminating on failure, and her nights remembering the
faces of dead people. She should have been quick-witted enough to
save Mona and Dennis. There had to be some better way to stop a court
case. If nothing else had come to mind, she should have called in a
bomb threat to make the police evacuate the courthouse, then arrived
during the confusion and attached Timmy and Mona to a squad of
policemen. She had not thought clearly because she was so busy trying
to get Timmy to the building on time; she had not seen the ambush
because she was too busy dragging her clients into it.

In the nighttime, after a day of
reliving her failure in her mind, gripped by the shock over and over
again as each of her mistakes was repeated, old ghosts crept into her
cell. The one she knew best was Harry the gambler. She had hidden
him, then made the mistake of believing that the man who had been his
friend would not also be his killer. Harry had visited her so often
over the years that he had almost become part of her.