Thomas Perry - Poison Flower

On the twelfth day she went to visit the Jo-Ge-Oh, the little people. They were very small, but they looked very much like the Senecas. They had been around for longer than the Senecas, but they had such a peculiar relationship with time that it was difficult to make assertions about it. They preferred to live in places where Seneca villages had been, either because those were simply the best sites in New York state-always near water and close to ground that was fertile and tillable-or because being close to full-size human beings scared off the animals that tended to trouble and annoy anyone their size. Raccoons, possums, skunks, and squirrels were particularly bothersome. For that reason the little people prized fingernail and toenail clippings, which they scattered around their settlements to give off a scent of big people. They were also extremely fond of the sort of tobacco that the Senecas favored, grown in western New York and Ontario, and mixed with a few shavings of sumac.

Jane had often visited them near the site of a large village that had once been along the Genesee River in Rochester. She usually approached the spot from Maplewood Avenue and climbed down the rocky sides of the chasm to the pebbly shore. But today, Jane didn't relish a climb, so she selected another place closer to home. She drove to the Niagara River, and then along River Road to the South Grand Island Bridge. She went over the east river and across the nine-mile-long island to a spot near the northern tip, then drove south along the river road. When she reached the right spot she parked and got out of the car, then walked along the eastern shore of the island to the site of an old, long-vanished hotel called Riverhaven. It was directly across the river from the old ferry landing in the city of Deganawida, and boats had landed here before the bridges were built at either end of the island. But the human occupation was much older than that.

This was a place that had been full of activity since long before the Senecas took the land by conquering the Wenros and Eries in the early seventeenth century. It was the site of one of the very few deposits of flint in the western part of the state, and it had been visited by Native people since the end of the last ice age. Jane walked the shore for a while, and then spoke. "Jo-Ge-Oh!" she called softly. "It's me, Jane Whitefield. I'm Nundawaono, and I've been away. I didn't want to leave again without visiting you."

The Jo-Ge-Oh were known for taking in people who were in terrible trouble and hiding them from their enemies. They would conduct such people to their settlements and let them stay until they were safe. Often the person would think he had been with them for a week or a month, and then come back to the full-size world and discover that many years had passed. His enemies would be long dead and forgotten. Jane had admired the Jo-Ge-Oh and felt close to them since she was a little girl.

"Jo-Ge-Oh! Little people! I've brought you some presents." She opened a foil package that the clerk in the store at the Tuscarora reservation had sold her. "Here's some tobacco. I hope it's good and strong." She made small piles of it on the rocks along the shore. "Here are some clippings from my fingers and toes. I hope it keeps the pests away." She took out a plastic sandwich bag and scattered the clippings around her.

She spoke to the little people in the Seneca language. "I came to thank you for helping me get home alive and be with my husband." Her speech was in keeping with Seneca practice, which was to thank supernatural beings for whatever they had given, but not to ask for anything. In English she said, "Thanks, little guys." After a few minutes of listening to the silence and watching the flow of the beautiful blue river, she turned and went back to her car. Tomorrow would be the thirteenth day.

That evening Jane had dinner ready early, and made sure she and Carey were in bed at shortly after ten. They began by making love slowly and gently, and then lay still for a time, holding hands. Then Carey moved again and loomed above her, kissing her hard, and she realized that she didn't have to tell him because he had already seen something-the overnight bag she'd packed, maybe-or just sensed the return of the melancholy she always had before she had to leave him. They began again, turning to each other wildly and passionately, as though it would be the last time in their lives and they were saying good-bye to everything that they loved and wanted.

Jane awoke at five a.m. as she had awoken many times, lying with her head on Carey's chest, feeling the rise and fall of his strong respiration, her long black hair spread over him like a blanket. She raised her head slightly and looked at him. His eyes were open, and he was looking at her.

"Good." She put her hands on the sides of his face, and gave him a long, gentle kiss. "One more chance to get that baby started. I'll be gone when you get home tonight."

15.

An hour after Carey left for the hospital, Jane locked the door of the big old stone house in Amherst, walked to the driveway, and got into her cab. She took it to Deganawida, walked to her house, opened the garage, and started the used Honda she had bought.

She stopped at a large sporting goods outlet in Niagara Falls and bought a Remington 1200 shotgun and twenty-five double-ought shells. When the man asked her what she wanted that kind for, she said, "Home defense." She bought a gun cleaning kit and a box of rubber gloves; a large, razor-sharp folding knife; a short-handled spade; and a hatchet. She stopped at an electronics store and bought four pay-as-you-go untraceable cell phones with cash.

In another few hours of driving east she was past Syracuse and making the turn onto Interstate 81, heading north to Watertown. From there Route 3 took her east on a winding road into the Adirondacks, and she drove the rest of the day to reach Lake Placid, where she checked into a hotel and slept.

It was mid-afternoon the next day, after she had read the rental listings in the papers and had spent hours combing the area around Lake Placid, when she found the house she wanted. Jane walked the property, climbed on the woodpile outside and looked in the windows, and then walked in the woods nearby. She found the trails: one a game trail that went only as far as a tiny clearing with weeds that had been flattened by deer as a resting place; and the other a man trail, bare of vegetation, that led two hundred feet or so to a small, dark Adirondack lake.

She liked the fact that the building had two stories. The upper story would give her a chance to see what was coming toward her from a greater distance. Because she had driven into the Adirondacks to a place that got cold in the winter, it hadn't been hard to find houses of brick and stone built to hold up to the weather. They would also stop a bullet. This one she judged to date from the 1930s. It had a sloped cellar door that led down steps to a second, vertical door to a basement. The windows were all old-fashioned thick glass, all two-light, opening inward like little doors, secure on the inside and equipped with shutters. She could see through rooms to the inner sides of some of them, and they all had iron fittings so in the winter they could be barred with two-by-fours. The snow in the Adirondacks had been known to pile up to twenty feet, and the windows had been built to hold up against the weight and the winds. The roof had a steep peak to prevent snow and ice from building up and getting heavy.

She took another look around, and then drove up the dirt road to the county highway, and then into Lake Placid to find the landlord. The owner turned out to be a young blond woman whose main business was a store that sold things summer visitors wore-high-end sunglasses; hiking boots; hats for keeping the sun out of the eyes; helmets and bright synthetic shirts and spandex shorts for those who rode the bikes hanging from the rack overhead.