Thomas Perry: Blood Money

Jane walked the first floor of the house, glancing at each door and each window, then went upstairs. The house always seemed tiny after she’d spent a night in the McKinnon house. Jane stopped at the answering machine in her bedroom. The red glowing display said zero. Until she had looked at it, she had dreaded the possibility that there would be another call.

She went to the vanity. She picked up the large perfume bottle on the end, unscrewed the little gold cap, and sniffed. It was still fresh enough. The juice of water hemlock and may-apple would still kill quickly. She set the bottle on the vanity with the others, and left the room.

She went downstairs, through the kitchen to the cellar. Down here was the only place where the real age of the house was visible. The cellar had been dug with a shovel and built of blocks of stone, and the beams were just logs that had been cut near here. A few of the square-headed, hand-forged nails that held the floorboards could be seen here, pounded into the beams near the wall so somebody long ago could hang something there.

Jane walked to the far end of the cellar, where the coal bin had once stood, and moved the stepladder under one of the old round heating ducts that led along the ceiling to a point where it had once curved upward to a big floor register. The coal furnace had been replaced long before Jane was born.

She pulled apart two sections of the duct and reached inside for the metal box she kept there. She placed it on the top of the ladder and looked inside. There was the supply of identities she had grown for runners but never used—credit cards, birth certificates, licenses.

Jane began to unload her purse. She put all of the false identities she had brought from Chicago into the box. Then she put the few thousand dollars she had not spent inside. She dug deeper into the purse and found the tissue paper Bernie had put there. She opened it once more, looked at the collection of sparkling stones, and hesitated. Mrs. Carey McKinnon could probably afford to have a few of those diamonds set, and even get away with wearing them. But Mrs. McKinnon couldn’t afford to forget that she was still Jane Whitefield. And Jane Whitefield lived in a world where the only practical use for diamonds was to transport a great deal of flight money in a small space. Jane folded the paper and put it into the bottom of the box, under the money, where she kept a special set of identities that nobody else knew existed. These were particularly good ones, grown in pairs and carefully renewed and tended so that all of the licenses, passports, and credit cards were kept current. The pictures on them were hers and Carey’s.

Jane pushed the metal box into the dark duct, closed the two sides, and moved the ladder across the cellar to its space beside her father’s old workbench. She climbed the stairs. Before she turned off the light, she took a last look at the heating duct to reassure herself that the two sections had come together tightly to keep her hiding place secure and invisible.