Thomas Perry - Runner

As she steered along the quiet street under the big trees and turned onto the boulevard in the direction of the Thruway entrance, she couldn't force her thoughts away from Carey. It had occurred to her that if Carey had not been persistent, she would never have married. By the time she was twenty-two she had lost nearly everyone she loved. Her father had died in a construction accident on a bridge in Washington when she was twelve, and her mother had died of cancer shortly after she graduated from college. Her grandparents were long gone. She had retained relationships with the relatives on the Tonawanda reservation and a few in other places. She spoke frequently with Jake Reinert, the elderly next-door neighbor in Deganawida who had been her father's closest friend. But because of the work she did, she had become more and more adept at being elusive and difficult to corner. She was on the road most of the year, came and went quietly, and didn't cultivate any relationships that required her to answer questions.

Jane had met Carey at a party years before when they were students at Cornell. He was from Amherst, which was close enough so they could occasionally share rides home on holidays. She had lost touch with him for years after graduation, when he was in medical school and surgical residency, and then one day he had simply turned up at her front door in Deganawida. She opened the door and there he was. He said, "Hi. I was just updating my address book." He had come back to live in Amherst, just as she had come back to Deganawida. He had set up a practice doing surgery at Buffalo General.

They became better friends than they'd ever been at college. She asked him to the movies, he took her to dinner. She did not recognize for the first year that he was courting her. He dated other women constantly, complained to her about them and asked for her advice. He was a tall, handsome, funny young surgeon in a city where such men were as rare as whirling dervishes, so he got no sympathy from Jane Whitefield.

Jane had never wanted to fall in love with Carey McKinnon. She had resolutely remained his friend without encouraging anything more, until the evening when everything changed. She had been away with a client for a month, and came home physically exhausted and emotionally drained. He was at her house waiting for her with roses. She was simply too tired to care about her determination to keep him at a distance. He offered to rub her back, and while he was doing it, the barrier between them dissolved. Afterward, he had been so concerned about her feelings that she'd had no choice but to admit she liked him more than before. A few months later he asked her to marry him, and she refused. She explained that she was perfectly willing to keep having sex with him, but she couldn't have the sort of relationship that restricted her movements or required her to answer questions.

For the next year he stayed near her and waited. Eventually, as he had probably known it would, a day came when her reluctance stopped making sense to her. It was pointless. After she had spent a year going out with him most nights when she was in town and then sleeping with him, he asked her for the hundredth time why she wouldn't marry him and she gave in.

Today was one of the reasons why she had been reluctant. She had not wanted to feel this way over and over, to experience this sense of loss, the knowledge that she might never see him again. She supposed she resented him a little, too, at the moment. Letting someone get so close to her had been an act of faith that she had known was a risk. Intimacy—letting someone see her weaknesses and doubts—shouldn't have been a license to use them in an argument. He should never have talked about the baby.

It had been five years since she had taken to the road like this to meet a runner. What she was beginning to wonder was whether she had spent those five years trying to make herself into a different woman so she would be a good wife to Carey, or if she had been using her marriage to him as a disguise to hide herself from her enemies. If it was the first, she was cheating herself, and if it was the second, she was cheating Carey.

Her route was the same one she had driven with Christine three months ago, but now the world she moved through was different. The northern latitudes had changed from summer to fall, so the air that rushed by outside the car was cooler, and the sun seemed always to shine at a lower angle so it was in her eyes most of the day and went down just at dinnertime. She drove as much as possible in the dark. At night a car was just a pair of bright lights in a rearview mirror. She was harder to see, and when she was seen it would be harder to tell that she was a woman driving alone.

Jane knew the best places to stop late at night as she made her way west. After midnight the interstate highways outside cities were largely the domain of long-haul truckers, and the roads inside cities were mostly occupied by young men who would be better off doing their drinking at home. Jane stayed with the trucks, and kept her speed just a few miles above the limit. She didn't want to take the chance of being pulled over by a cop and having him find two M92 Berettas and thousands of dollars in hundred-dollar bills. She made one stop to sleep at a motel outside Chicago, and then pushed on to Minneapolis, heading into the city after dawn with the sun at her back.

25

It was a clear, warm morning in Minneapolis. Jane waited until she judged that most of the people in Christine's apartment complex were up and off to work. She performed a drive around Christine's neighborhood, searching for signs of watchers. There were no men sitting in vehicles parked where they could watch Christine's apartment, no windows in nearby apartments with curtains hung too low so an eye or a lens could peer out above them. Jane drove through a second time and looked in all directions, not trying to detect anything specific, just looking at everything and being open to the possibility that she would see something unusual. There were more cars parked in the complex than there had been in June, because the students had returned from summer break.

She found a parking space on the street, half-opened the tailgate of her SUV, then changed her mind and closed it again. She would leave the suitcase in the back until she had spoken with Christine. She walked to the front door of Christine's building, carrying only her purse. She pushed the buzzer for number 4, Christine's apartment, and waited, then pushed it again. It was nearly nine, and she had assumed Christine would be awake. Maybe she had gone out already.

Jane walked to the driveway that led to the garage beneath the building. There was an iron gate across the entrance. Beyond it she could see there were sixteen spaces, two for each apartment. Seven had cars in them. She looked for the small gray Volkswagen Passat she had bought for Christine, but didn't see it.

Jane took out her new phone and pressed Christine's telephone number. The phone gave its ringing signal a few times and Christine's voice came on. "This is Linda Welles. Please leave a message at the tone." The cheerful, girlish voice didn't reassure Jane. She heard the tone and said, "It's me. I said I'd be back, and here I am. Here's my number." She recited it and closed the phone.

Jane went back to her car, drove up the street, and stopped at a hotel she had seen on the way into town. She checked in and went to her room. She showered, changed her clothes, went down to the hotel restaurant, and had breakfast. Then she called Linda Welles's number again, and heard the same message.

She went out to her car and drove back to the apartment complex. She walked to the front door again and buzzed Christine's apartment several times, but there was still no answer. She saw a small car coming up the main road of the complex. Its turn signal began to blink as the car approached Christine's building. Jane pivoted and went back down the steps as the car stopped in the driveway. The woman in the car looked young, only a couple of years older than Christine, with wavy red hair. She appeared not to notice Jane as she pressed her remote control and the iron gate across the entrance swung upward. The woman drove in and turned to the right, and Jane cut across the flower bed and sidestepped into the garage just before the iron gate came down again.