Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

Mary Perkins had come upon Ellery Robinson sitting in the sunshine in the yard, a headband around her forehead and the sleeves of her prison shirt rolled up to make it fit her child-sized frame. Mary Perkins smiled, but Ellery Robinson said only, "What do you want?"

"I heard you know who that woman is that came in yesterday. Tall, black hair, thin?"

"Yes."

"Is it true that she hides people?"

Ellery Robinson closed one eye and tilted her head up to look at Mary Perkins. "Why aren't you talking to her?"

"I thought I'd better rind out what I could first."

Ellery Robinson abruptly lost interest in Mary Perkins. She seemed determined to end the conversation, so everything came out quickly in a monotone. "I heard that if a person is in trouble - not the kind of trouble where the cops take them to court, but the kind where the cops find their head in a Dumpster - the person could do worse than see her."

Mary Perkins stared at Ellery Robinson, but her face revealed nothing. "You sure nobody made her up?"

Ellery Robinson nodded in the direction of the cell-block. "There she is."

"If you know her, why haven't you talked to her?"

For the first time Ellery Robinson's facial muscles moved a little, but it wasn't a smile. "I don't have that kind of trouble. If you do, go meet her yourself."

Mary Perkins looked uncomfortable. "This is all new to me. It's the first time I've been arrested."

"No, it isn't." It wasn't an accusation. There was no trace of reproof or irony. There was nothing behind it at all. Then she seemed to acknowledge that her words were what had made Mary Perkins take a step backward. "Lots of bad girls in here. You aren't the worst." She closed her eyes and moved to the side a little so she would be in the full sun again and Mary's shadow would be gone.

Now Mary stood in the shower in Michigan, feeling safe. She had begun to relax when she sensed something had changed again. She tensed and swung around to see the shape outside the shower curtain.

"Dry off," said Jane, "but leave your hair wet."

Mary turned off the water, snatched a towel off the rack, pulled it inside the curtain with her, and turned away to dry herself. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why leave my hair wet?"

Jane reached into the paper bag and pulled out a box with a picture of a fashion model on it. "We'll dry it after it's dyed."

"Dyed? What if I don't want it dyed?"

"Then don't dye it," said Jane. "You've got easy ways to stay lost, and hard ways. Changing the color of your hair is one of the easy ways."

Mary glared at the model on the box. Whatever color her hair had been when the picture was taken, an artist had painted it over a hedgehog brown. "That color?"

Jane set the box on the sink just under the mirror. "What's wrong with it?"

"I've just always been blond."

Jane's eyes lifted to glance at her in the mirror, and then Mary saw them move to the picture on the box. She said nothing, but Mary saw what she was comparing the color on the box to. She angrily snatched another towel off the rack, wrapped it around her and tucked it under her arm like a sarong. "I meant I've always felt blond. I've been blond for a long time."

Jane didn't turn to face her. "We've got less than two hours before checkout time. If you want to look different, the time to do it is before you rent an apartment, not later, after everybody has seen you already. I'll be out there. Think it over."

Mary sat on the edge of the tub and stared at the mirror. It was just high enough so that all she could see of herself was the glowing blond hair at the crown of her head. It was bright, shiny, almost metallic when it was wet like this. She walked to the door and called, "Okay, let's get it over with."

Jane came back in, slipped on rubber gloves, pulled a chair up next to the sink, and went to work on Mary's hair. The acrid smells and the mess on the counter were all familiar to Mary, but it had been years since she had endured them outside of a hairdresser's shop.

Jane worked in silence and with extreme care, glancing at her watch every few minutes. Then it was over, and she was brushing Mary's hair out.

Mary said, "You've done this quite a bit, haven't you?"

"Sure," Jane said. "If you do all of the easy things, the hard ones work better. Dyeing your hair, buying new clothes, using glasses to change the way your eyes look - those are easy. You can do all of them in a day, and none of them has any risk. If you think about what you're trying to accomplish, you can do it as well as I can."

"What am I trying to accomplish?"

Jane looked at her in the mirror impatiently. "You put in a lot of time trying to be Mary Perkins. You had it all worked out. Just do it in reverse. For the time being, you have nothing in common with Mary Perkins. She liked Las Vegas. You hate it; the lights give you a headache and everybody on the street looks like a zombie to you. Mary Perkins made businessmen think about her and remember her. Lose everything you did to accomplish that. Be the one who doesn't catch their eye. That's easy to do, and if you don't do at least that much, you're finished. Anybody who wants to find you can knock on doors and show your picture."

Mary Perkins studied her reflection. The effect wasn't as bad as she had expected. The woman who stared back at her wasn't dowdy or mousy. She was mildly, quietly attractive, and with a little makeup she could be made better than that. What she looked most like was a woman who had never existed; she looked like a grown-up version of Lily Smith. "All right," she said. "What do we change next?"

"That will have to do for now. Come on."

Checking out consisted of sitting in the car while Jane went into the motel office and set the key on the counter. When she returned, she started the car and said, "All right. Now we start getting into the hard parts. Do you have identification in any name besides Mary Perkins?"

"Lila Samuels," said Mary.

"Throw her away with Mary Perkins. You've been in county jail. Although you haven't exactly said so, you've been investigated, and probably arrested more than once. The authorities know your aliases, and so can anybody else who wants to."

Mary Perkins said, "I've got to be somebody."

"I've got some papers with me that you can use. Your name is Donna Kester. You're thirty-five."

Mary Perkins stared at her. "You have fake I.D. with you? But you were arrested too. They went through your purse."

Jane pulled the car out of the parking lot and drove up the street. "It wasn't in my purse." Jane had brought the papers for Mona and kept them taped under the dashboard of each car they had used while traveling across the country. After Dennis had wrecked the last car, she had gone to the lot where it had been towed and found the papers untouched. "You can be Donna Kester without worrying about anything for a while."

They looked at three different apartments before they found the right one. It was in a building in the middle of a large modern apartment complex on Huron Street that seemed to contain a high proportion of single people, but it was far enough from the University of Michigan campus to be vacant. The fact that Donna Kester had a credit card was enough to get her a lease that began in two days. The fact that she had no local employer only confirmed her story that she had just gotten to town.

That afternoon Jane checked them into another motel at the edge of Ann Arbor, past the place where Huron Street crossed Route 94 and became Liberty Road. Jane sat in the motel room on the twin bed across from Mary. It was dusk, and the cold wind was beginning to blow outside to announce that the short fall days were fading into winter nights here. The tree branches that scraped and rattled the gutters of the building were bare, and the wet pavement of the parking lot outside the window would be frosted by morning.