Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Jane hurried up the steps to the second floor, then the third. Carey’s recovering patients were always on the third floor or the fourth. She stepped out of the stairwell and walked purposefully along the third-floor corridor. She turned the corner and stared down the next hallway at the nurses’ station to be sure Carey wasn’t there, reading charts or talking to someone. She went back the way she had come, then turned the other three corners, looking in each open door until she could see the nurses’ station from the other side. She caught a glimpse of Nancy Prelsky hurrying across the hallway and into a patient’s room. Jane waited a few seconds to be sure Nancy was occupied in there, then stepped across the hallway and into the other stairwell.

Jane repeated her tour on the fourth floor, but she saw no sign of Carey. There were three orderlies pushing head-high carts loaded with trays full of covered plates along the corridor, then stopping at each room to make a delivery. She looked at her watch: six twenty. Carey wouldn’t come in to examine anybody during dinner.

She waited until the orderlies had moved around the corner to the rooms on the other side of the nurses’ station, then stepped to a door. There was a chart with notes on it, and she recognized Carey’s scrawl. She hesitated, then decided. If the person in here was eating dinner alone, then he wasn’t too sick and he wasn’t asleep. She knocked and heard a muffled response. She took off her hat and opened the door just enough to stick her head in.

The man was in his thirties, and his leg had a cast on it that went from a metal stirrup at the ankle nearly to his hip. He had a fork in his right hand and a television remote control in his left. When he looked down from the television at her, he seemed pleased.

“Excuse me,” said Jane.

“Sure,” he said.

“I’m just checking to see if Dr. McKinnon has been in to see you yet.”

The man nodded and let his eyes be drawn back up toward the television screen above the bed. “Yeah. About … a half hour ago.”

“Thanks,” said Jane. But this time she did not smile. She was looking past the man on the bed. The windows on this side of the building looked out on the parking lot. Through his, she could see Carey’s empty parking space. She closed the door, slipped into the stairwell, and began to run down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairwell, she paused, put her cap on her head, then stepped out and stared at the floor as she hurried across the lobby and out the front door. She trotted to the van, climbed in, and started it. She spent five seconds checking the mirrors before she threw the van into gear and drove off.

It took twenty minutes to get to Amherst, and while she was driving the last glow of the sunset disappeared and late afternoon turned into evening. As she made the turn onto the street where she and Carey lived, she studied the parked cars, noted the houses that had lights on and the ones that didn’t, searching for anything that seemed wrong or out of place.

Jane parked a few doors away from the house and moved to the back of the van to look at it. Carey’s car was not visible in the driveway, and there were no lights turned on. Then she saw Carey’s BMW make the turn at the corner and come along the street. She moved back from the tinted window and watched it glide past her.

Jane forced her attention away from him. Her eyes devoured the sights of the neighborhood, scrutinizing them for the tiniest change. Had a shadow passed behind the set of blinds in the window across the street? Had a curtain moved? She pivoted to stare up the street, then down it to see if a new car had come around the corner after his. His arrival had not prompted any visible response.

The sky was black now—as dark as it would get tonight—and it was still early enough so that the normal activity in the neighborhood would keep her from standing out. It was time to move. She switched off the dome light in the van, slipped to the passenger side and out the door. She kept her body in the deep shadow of the van and studied the street again. When she was sure that there were no headlights approaching, she drifted quickly across the open pavement and up the driveway along the tall hedge that hid even her silhouette.

As she approached the rear corner of the house, she saw a square carpet of light suddenly splash onto the grass in the back yard. He had turned on the kitchen light. She would step in the back entrance, let him see her, but cover his mouth before he could say her name. She would tug him outside, out of the house before she spoke, in case that woman had planted a microphone like the ones she had found in the house in California.

Jane turned the corner of the house and looked at the big maple tree in the back yard. The glow of the red and yellow leaves above her made her stop and step back into the shadows along the house. She looked up. The light had come on in the bedroom.

Carey had come in the front door, walked through the living room, the dining room, and into the kitchen. He had not had time to climb the stairs and turn on the light in the bedroom. Jane quickly moved to the kitchen door, unlocked it, and stepped inside. The room was empty.

She hurried to the dining room, but he had already passed. She heard his footsteps above her on the upstairs landing. She ran across the living room to the stairway and climbed, taking the steps three at a time. As she reached the top, she saw him—the long legs, the familiar shape of his back, the unruly light-brown hair that stood up from his head, glowing in the light from the bedroom doorway.

Jane quickly moved along the second-floor hall as he stepped into the room. She heard him say, “What’s going on?” It was too late to prepare, too late to think. She slipped into the room and stepped in front of him.

The woman’s pretty face contorted into a mask of fright as she snatched the bedsheet to cover herself. Her green eyes shot to Carey’s. “Who is she?”

Jane’s mind fought to sort out what she saw: blond hair, size eight, the right age. But this wasn’t the way she had expected to find her—in bed, with her clothes in a pile on the chair. This had to be some kind of deception, and Jane sensed instinctively that she had to make the woman believe it was succeeding. Maybe she would not think she had to kill them if she thought they were fooled. Jane could only play the role that the woman had invented for her, and pretend to be the wronged wife. Jane said, “I’m just the woman who lives here—his wife.” After a pause she added, “You seem to have us mixed up.”

But Carey was gulping and staring, his face longer and emptier than she had ever seen it. “Jane. I just got here myself. I didn’t—”

Jane kept her eyes on the woman, but she patted Carey’s arm. “Stop,” she said. “I know you didn’t arrange this.”

“I’m glad.”

“You might come home late for dinner, but you wouldn’t have been late for this.” She struggled to figure out what was going on. The woman had been in here with the lights off until Carey had come in the house. The woman had come into the house to do something or other, and Carey had interrupted her.

Jane’s heart beat faster. If the woman had been interrupted—surprised—then pretending she had come to seduce Carey would be a good tactic. All she had to do to be convincing was take off her clothes. But she had seen Jane now, and she wasn’t doing anything. Jane stared at her. It was just possible that she wasn’t armed, and that she was afraid Jane might be.

Maybe she just couldn’t reach the gun. Jane kept her eyes on the woman and walked to the chair by the wall where the woman had left her clothes. There were suede leather pants, a silk blouse, underwear, a black leather purse. Jane reached down and tossed the clothes onto the bed where the woman could reach them. She squeezed the purse and tested its weight, then tossed it on the bed too. She felt her muscles go slack with relief. She had been right. The woman had not brought a gun. Jane could still get Carey out alive.