Thomas Perry - Blood Money

It could be something wrong with the letters themselves, but they weren’t all alike. She had written most of them herself, and Henry had read all of them before they were sealed. Maybe one of the checks had told somebody something, but the only way she could think of to find out what it might be was to talk to Henry. And how would the families know so soon? It had to be something that an ordinary person could pick up at a glance. And a person like that—any outsider—would be unlikely to see anything but the envelope. She would just have to look at the envelopes again.

She began to flip through the stacks of letters, then set each one aside. Each had been stamped, each had a plausible return address bearing a zip code in sequence with the others near it, and each was addressed to some charity.

It was ten minutes before she found the letter with no return address. It was stuck among the letters to be mailed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At first, Jane considered letting it go, but she glanced at the address: Ann Shelford, FSP, Box 747, Starke, Florida 32081.

Jane put the rest of her stacks of letters into their suitcases. She calmly placed them in order to match her new itinerary, and zipped them up. She took the single letter, closed the tailgate, and got into the front seat. Then she opened the envelope.

The print style was the one Jane had stared at for a month, from the laser printer in Santa Fe. It had been slipped in with the letters Jane had picked up in Chicago, so that it wouldn’t have a Santa Fe postmark.

“Dear Mama,” it began. Jane felt a twinge of discomfort at what she was doing, and an enormous sadness. “Things are going pretty well for me now. I’m still living in the house out in the country with that friend I told you about.” Jane’s heart stopped for a second, then began to beat harder. She reminded herself that the “friend” must be Bernie. She could have told her mother about him as long as a year ago. Jane forced her eyes back to the letter.

“She and I have a lot in common, and we get along fine. We both like being outdoors, and traveling, and nice food. Now and then we drive into town and eat at a restaurant in a hotel called Eldorado. I’ve been trying to keep track of what I taste, and see if I can piece together the recipe. Maybe by the time I see you again, I’ll be able to cook something fancy for you. I don’t mean to make you jealous. She’s sort of like a big sister, not like a mother or anything.” Jane felt the sadness growing. Rita was a child, and she obviously had been lonely and scared, so she had created a fantasy complete with a Jane who was the way she wished Jane was. Jane’s guilt was getting worse, too. She wasn’t sure whether she had even told Rita yet, but she couldn’t think of a way that Rita could see her mother again for the next few years.

“I hope things are going okay for you. I know jail can’t be pleasant, but be patient, and maybe they’ll let you out early. I can’t come visit you like I used to, but I think about you and send you good thoughts. Well, I should get this into the envelope, because my friend is going out to mail some other things. I just wanted to write to you again right away, so I could tell you that things are better. I’m afraid my last letter might have made you feel worried.”

Jane whispered, “I don’t know, but it makes me feel worried.” She tried to collect her thoughts, but it was difficult because there were too many questions. She drove the Explorer out to the street and kept going until she saw a pay telephone attached to the front of a convenience store.

Jane dialed the telephone number of the house in Santa Fe, then pumped quarters into the slot until she had matched the toll. The telephone rang once, twice, three times, and her mind formed a picture of Bernie and Rita. They would be standing in the living room with the telephone between them. One of them would reach down to pick it up, and the other would say, “No. Don’t. Nobody knows we’re here.” “It could be Jane or Henry.” “If she was going to call, she would have told us.” “Maybe she didn’t know.” “It could be somebody making sure we’re in the house so they can come and kill us.”

The telephone rang fifteen times, but nobody picked it up. Jane closed her eyes and stood beside the building, thinking. They could be dead already, killed by people who had read Rita’s first letter. When the telephone had rung twenty times, she hung up. Jane heard a click, and her quarters came tumbling down into the cup at the bottom of the telephone.

As she walked back to the Explorer, she realized that the decision had been made. If there was an earlier letter, probably it had been among the ones she had mailed in California or Arizona, or maybe the first batch that Henry had mailed. There was no question that the families would have someone in the Florida State Prison reading Ann Shelford’s mail. Just one detail in the letter she had read—the name of the Eldorado Hotel—would be enough. There was no way to know what Rita had put in the earlier letter. If they were alive, she had to pull them out.

27

Jane drove the last miles to Santa Fe. She felt the weight of the travel and the time and the work. Whatever else happened, she told herself, the bulk of the money must be going where she had wanted it to. She had driven halfway across the country with the radio tuned to news stations, and she had heard nothing that could be interpreted as the death of Henry Ziegler. There had also been nothing to indicate that Bernie and Rita had been found. Maybe Rita’s earlier letter had not revealed anything. Maybe the postmark on it had been enough to lead the hunters in the wrong direction. She couldn’t count on those things, and it was unlikely that talking to Rita would reassure her.

She was confident that the Explorer still had not been identified. She could use the anonymity of the vehicle to check the town for signs. Santa Fe was small, and the places where people gathered on a summer evening weren’t far apart. She drove up and down the streets near the big hotels that surrounded the plaza, then parked and walked. There were lots of pedestrians on the streets, but most of them were grouped in ways that didn’t worry her. There were many couples—some with children and a few too old to be dangerous. The males who had no females attached to them were not the sort who raised the hairs on the back of her neck. The ones who were young, strong, and appeared to be searching seemed not to be looking for a resemblance, but a reception. Their eyes passed across her face with expressions that began as appraisal and then softened into something like hope, and finally subsided into disappointment when she deadened her own expression to look through them.

After her short walk she knew she should be reassured. If some hunting team had been close to finding the house, she probably would have noticed a few soldiers by now. Her walk through the public places in the city would have turned up at least two or three men who didn’t move much and stared at everyone who passed.

It still would not do to drive up to the house without being sure it was safe. If she approached it on foot after dark, she would have some chance of seeing an enemy before he saw her. She parked the Explorer on Canyon Road on a block lined with art galleries that had been closed for the night, then locked it and walked. Jane could see that it would be dark soon, but she had no fear that she would forget the way to Bernie’s house. She had made the trip on foot several times, and once she was a couple of miles from the city, the lights of the house would serve as a beacon.

As she crossed Apodaca Hill Road and moved into the brush and stunted trees on the far side, she felt better. If nothing had gone wrong, this would be no more than a pleasant evening stroll.