Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

Jane said, "This is a good place to be. There are about thirty-five thousand students here, just about all of them strangers. Figure five thousand faculty, all from other places. Most of them are married, so they're really ten thousand, and another five thousand staff. Most of those people just returned here for fall semester. You're one of fifty thousand people who just got to town in a community with a year-round population that can't be much over a hundred thousand."

"Are you trying to sell me a condo?" asked Mary.

"No," said Jane. "I'm trying to teach you something. If you're going to be a fugitive you'd better get good at it. I've heard a couple of versions of who isn't chasing you, but not who is. It doesn't matter. This isn't the sort of place where they'll look first. That's the best you can do in choosing a place to be invisible. There are always about five likely places to look for anybody. If you're stupid, you'll be in one. Once you move beyond those, every place is about as likely as any other, so the odds of finding you drop dramatically."

"Where would you look? You said five places."

"J haven't studied Mary Perkins as thoroughly as they have. You've been to Las Vegas and liked it. You'd be too smart to go back, and Reno's too close, so I might try looking in Atlantic City. You said you had worked in Texas and California, so people know you. But that leaves lots of cities in between that would appeal to Mary Perkins: I'd try Scottsdale, Sedona, Santa Fe. You like to be around money and sunshine." As she watched Mary, she could see that the list was making her frightened. "The fifth place is somewhere in the South."

Mary Perkins looked like a woman who had paid to have her palm read and heard that she had no life line. "Where?"

"You have just a trace of a southern accent. Since I know you've been arrested, I'd check the arrest record to find the city where you were born. That's always the fifth place."

Mary looked at Jane with an expression that was meant to be intrigued puzzlement, but the surface never set properly; her face only formed itself into pie-faced hurt. "Why is that?"

Jane's eyes were tired and sad. "I don't know. Some people will tell you it's because they know the territory better than a stranger could, but they say that even if every inch of the place was bulldozed and rebuilt the day they left. Some of them say it's because they can get help from friends and relatives, but half the time they don't ask for it when they're there. They go there even if everybody they ever knew is dead and buried."

"You're telling me what you don't believe. What do you believe makes them go back?"

"I'm telling you I don't think the people who do it know why. Maybe it's just some feeling that people have because we're animals too. You go to ground where you once felt most safe, and that's wherever your mother was." She watched Mary Perkins for a moment. "It's a lousy instinct, and it will get you killed."

"So what now?"

"This is a place where nobody is searching for you. You look a little different, and if you work at it you can change more. You have identification as Donna Kester that should hold up. The credit cards are real. You'll get the bills. The driver's license is from New York, but it's good too. Somebody actually took the road test. You can get a new one here with the old one and the birth certificate. That's real too." A man Jane knew had found a job in a small-town courthouse and added forty or fifty birth records that hadn't been there before. He sold about one name a year, so the odds were good that nobody would catch one and start looking into the rest.

Mary Perkins looked increasingly alarmed. "How long do we have to stay here?"

"It's up to you. If you want my advice, I'll give it to you. Spend your time around the university, where there are crowds of strangers of every description and all the thugs wear helmets and shoulder pads. Buy yourself a long, warm coat with a high collar and wear a hat and scarf."

"You're telling me you're cutting me loose, aren't you?" said Mary Perkins with growing anxiety. "I thought you were going to protect me and get me settled."

Jane framed her words carefully, making an effort to keep the frustration out of her voice. "You came to me in trouble, with two men on your back. I got you out of that trouble because you asked me to and I didn't think you could do it yourself. Now you're reasonably safe if you want to be. That's as far as I go with you."

"It's because you think I can't pay, right? Well, I can. I've got money with me, and I can get more when it's safe to travel. Enough to make it worth your time, anyway."

"Keep it," said Jane. She picked up her purse and the keys to the car. "The more you have, the longer it will be before you do something foolish." She walked to the door, stopped, and added, "Take care."

"I have a right to know why."

"No, you don't," said Jane. She stepped outside, closed the door, and walked across the cold lot to the car. She started it and drove around the block and past the motel twice. When she was certain that nobody was watching the motel and nobody had followed the car, she continued straight to Route 94 and headed east toward the junction with 23 to Ohio.

7

When Jane reached Toledo she swung east across the vast flat lake country toward home, In the morning when she passed into the southwestern tip of New York, she felt as though she had left enemy territory. Three hours later, she drove the rented car to the Rochester airport and turned it in at the lot to make it look as though the driver had continued east on a plane. Then she took a commuter flight seventy miles west to the Buffalo airport, where she had left her own car.

She drove up the Youngmann Expressway to Delaware Avenue and turned north into the city of Deganawida in the late afternoon. The sun had already moved to a position in the west where its feeble glow did little to blunt the bite of the wind off the Niagara River. She drove onto Main Street near the old cemetery that had filled up before the Spanish-American War, took the shortcut along the railroad tracks and down Erie to Ogden Street, then turned again to her block. The house was one of a hundred or more narrow two-story wooden buildings placed beside the street that ran the length of the city from one creek to the next one, two miles away.

Jane pulled the car into the driveway and her eyes instantly took in the state of the neighborhood. She had been looking at these same sights since she had first stood upright and been able to see over the hedges to survey the world while she was playing. The houses in this block had been built before the turn of the century for the people who worked in the factories and shipyards that were no longer here, and the trees were tall and thick, their roots pushing the blocks of the sidewalks up into rakish tilts that had made roller skating dangerous. Her front yard looked lush and green and needed cutting, the blades thick and wet from the rain she had missed while she was away. The clapboards of the narrow two-story house always had looked soft and organic to her because the dozens of layers of paint spread on by generations of Whitefields had made the corners rounded. She saw the curtain on Jake Reinert's corner window twitch aside and she knew he had heard the car's engine in the driveway next door.

She walked to her front door, unlocked it, and slipped inside to punch the code on her alarm keypad before the alarm could go off. She left her front door open so Jake would know that she was willing to talk. She walked into the kitchen, poured coffee into the filter of the coffee-maker, opened the freezer and unwrapped a frozen square of corn bread and a package of blueberries, and started to defrost them in the microwave oven.

Jane heard Jake on the porch, his footsteps heavy and a little stiff. "Come on in," she called, then went back to the cupboard for honey. The microwave bell chimed, and she had the corn bread, berries, and honey on the kitchen table before Jake was comfortably seated. She heard him strain a little to ease himself down with his arms.