Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

"I brought your mail," said Jake. He set a pile of letters on the table.

"Thanks. Arthritis acting up?"

"It's just the winters," said Jake.

"Cold nights getting to you?"

"Yeah, too damned many of them."

He watched her bustling around getting cups, plates, and silverware. Nothing escaped his notice. She was wearing heavier makeup than usual, and her right eye was half closed and the high cheekbone on that side seemed tight - not puffy, exactly, but swollen. She still moved quickly and gracefully, but she didn't pick up things in groups: she lifted each one and set it down before she picked up the next. He judged it was probably a sprained wrist.

Jake had known Jane Whitefield for all of her thirty-two years, had known her mother for a few years before that, and her father all his life. He had come into this same kitchen as a child and watched her grandmother lay out corn bread, berries, and honey for him on this same table. Seneca women obeyed some ancient law that said that anybody who came in at any time of the day or night got fed.

He had not merely known Jane Whitefield, he had been around to see her coming, but it had been only two years ago that he had accidentally discovered what little Janie had grown up to do with herself. From the look of her, it had gotten harder lately. He said, "Rough trip this time?" He had suspected he would feel like an idiot if he said it this way, and he did; a woman who made her living by taking fugitives away from their troubles and into hiding probably didn't have any kind of trips but rough ones. He had said it that way because it acknowledged that he knew the nature of her business and implied that he wasn't shocked by it anymore. He considered this a necessary piece of hypocrisy.

To Jake's surprise Jane didn't take the chance he had given her to shrug it off or make a joke out of it. "Yeah," she said. "It was awful." She set a plate of corn bread in front of him and started to eat her own, but then set the fork back down. "I always thought the way it would end was that one day I would get sick of people and decide they weren't worth the trouble anymore. That probably won't be how it happens. I lost two of them, Jake."

"Lost them?" he said. "You mean you can't find them?"

"No." She spoke clearly but with the quiet voice that made him know what she was going to say, because people spoke in low voices about the dead. "I got them killed."

"How?"

"I don't know, exactly. I mean, I know what happened, but not how. We - the three of us - were taking a little boy to California. There was an ambush. I didn't read it in time because it wasn't a dark alley or a lonely road. It was a courthouse. The other two had to stop and buy me time to get the boy inside where he would be safe."

"I'm sorry," Jake said. That was what people said when somebody died. A man his age ought to have thought of something better than that by now, but if he had, he never remembered it when he needed it.

"Somebody outsmarted me. He knew what bait to use, and somehow he must have figured out a way to be sure that this lawyer - the one who died - knew it was there. But the trap he set wasn't for a lawyer. It was for someone like me."

"How do you know that?"

"He knew that I would find a way to get the boy into the courthouse before it opened in the morning, or at least study the building so I knew the entrances and exits and who was supposed to be where. So at the last minute he had them transfer the case to a different court."

Jake ate some of the corn bread and honey, and thought about what she had said. "Who is he, a cop?"

She said, "He was tracking the boy all over the country for years. If you run into a crooked cop, you can almost always avoid him by driving past the city line. There's hardly ever a good enough reason to follow you beyond it. On one side of the line he's just about invulnerable. On the other, he has no legal power and the local police wonder what he's up to. No," she said. "I think he's something else."

Jake stopped pretending not to stare at her face. "How did you get hurt?"

When she lifted her hands out of her lap and picked up her coffee cup he saw her knuckles and fingers. "At the courthouse," she said.

Jake ate his corn bread, drank his coffee, and considered. What she had wrong with her looked like one shot to the side of her face, but there was a lot of damage to her hands and wrists and probably elbows from somebody's teeth and facial bones. It was possible somebody was dead that she hadn't mentioned. "Should I be listening for sirens?"

"No. There was a judge who made sure I got out before it got to that stage." She noticed his puzzled look. "There are people like that. I don't know if I ever told you about that part of it. People who have no reason to take risks will do it. He knew he could get into trouble - probably get disbarred or something - but he did it anyway."

Jake answered, "People one at a time are a lot more appetizing than you would think if you look at them all at once." He shrugged. "So you came home."

She shook her head. "I was trying, but something else happened on the way home. There was a woman I ran into. She heard somebody talking about me in jail in California. She needed my help to get out of trouble. I started to do it. Then I realized I couldn't. I gave her some identification and some advice and left."

"Was she in danger when you left?"

"No."

"Then that's a good place to stop," he said.

She looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup. He couldn't see her mouth, just the deep strange blue of her eyes against her olive skin. To Jake it was like looking at both of Jane's parents at once. The skin and the long black hair that wreathed her face were all Seneca. But there was her mother too, the liquid blue eyes that had originated somewhere far from here in northern Europe. He tried to talk to the eyes because he had some superstitious feeling that he had something in common with them, some hope of talking to somebody behind them who shared at least one or two assumptions. But even before he began, he knew that it was nonsense. It was like thinking she was her mother because she was wearing her mother's dress. "I don't want to start giving you advice," he lied. "I never have, in spite of the fact that if everybody listened to me they'd all be a hell of a lot less erratic, since I seldom contradict myself. But I know something about how time works. No matter what you do with yourself, the day comes when it ends. You die or go into something else. If you spent your time catching fish, no matter how long you stuck at it, on the day you quit there would still be some fish out there somewhere. Not only can you not go back out and get them, but you shouldn't try."

Jane stood up and changed into the young woman next door again. She picked up the plates carefully, one at a time, and put them in the sink. She stood tall and straight, with her long black hair naturally parting to hang down her back, and began to clean her kitchen.

Jake stood up too and signified that he understood that their meeting was over. "Well, thanks for the snack, but I've got a lot to do in the yard before supper. It gets dark so damned early now, I barely have time to wake up before the streetlights go on."

Jane turned to him and gave him a small kiss on the cheek. "Thanks, Jake."

"I'll be home if you need anything," he said as he walked to the door. "I don't imagine much of what's in your refrigerator bears looking at by now." He stopped and glared suspiciously at the keypad on the wall by the door. "Can I open this without going deaf?"

"Yes," she said. "It's turned off."

He walked outside. "Don't forget to turn it on again."

Jane closed the door and stood beside it to listen to his footsteps going down the wooden steps and scraping on the sidewalk before she moved away. She walked back into the kitchen, washed the dishes, wiped the counters, and turned off the lights. She had cleaned the oven and emptied the shelves of the refrigerator before she had left to pick up Timmy and Mona in Chicago, so she could think of no justification for doing anything more in here. She walked out into the living room. She had given the whole house a nervous cleaning before she had left, and it had been closed tight with the furnace thermostat set to 50 degrees just to keep the pipes from freezing if the winds coming out of Canada turned fierce early, so there wasn't even any dust.