Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

She reached the Bank of Illinois before four o'clock and was behind the counter in a quiet cubicle opening her safe-deposit box within five minutes. Months ago she had come to Chicago to pay the bill for the Furnace corporation's post office box, shop for clothes, and store Catherine Snowdon's papers. She took them out and studied them. Catherine Snowdon had a birth certificate, a driver's license, a Social Security card, a Visa card, and an ATM card from the Bank of America in case she needed cash. Jane examined the other papers in the box.

That left only Wendy Lewis, Karen Gottlieb, and Anne Bronstein. She examined their papers to reassure herself that she had not let any of the expiration dates go by. Then she put them back under the savings passbook and the nine-millimeter Beretta pistol, closed the box, and rang for the lady who would go with her to return it to its slot in the vault.

A guide needed more insurance policies than any of her clients, but she could spare Catherine Snowdon for Mary Perkins. She would hide the Catherine Snowdon papers with ten thousand dollars in cash somewhere within walking distance of Mary's apartment in case she had to bail out.

Jane caught a cab from the Dirksen Building on West Adams and flew back to Detroit to do some shopping. At a Toys "R" Us she found a toy called Musical Moves. If the child stepped in the right places on a brightly colored mat, he could play a tune electronically. Jane would redirect the wire so that instead the pressure on the mat would send current to a small lightbulb. Two would be better - one mounted inside the apartment and one somewhere outside - maybe in the mailbox, if it could be done without alarming the letter carrier. If the bulb was lit, Mary Perkins would know that somebody was in her apartment waiting for her.

At a hardware store she bought the tools, wires, electrical tape, and a rope ladder designed for getting out a second-floor window in an emergency. She decided these purchases would be enough for the present. Mary had a lot to get used to in a short time, and she would be less likely to make mistakes in a crisis if she wasn't distracted by complexity.

Jane stopped at a pay telephone and dialed her own number. She heard the telephone ring four times and then heard her own voice. "Hello. Please leave a message at - " Jane quickly punched in her two-digit code, then heard the machine rewind. It seemed to be taking a long time. Then there were a couple of clicks and Carey McKinnon's voice.

"Jane? It's Carey. I know you're probably calling in for messages, and this is the only way I have to reach you. I'm sorry I had to go back to the hospital the other night. Give me a call when you can - at home or the hospital or my office. If I'm in surgery or something, leave me a number where I can reach you." The machine's computer voice said, "Tuesday, ten-fifteen a.m."

Carey's voice came on again. "Hi, Jane. Just me again. It's been a few days and you still haven't called me. Am I imagining that you said you would? I'm in my usual haunts."

"Saturday," said the machine, "two thirty-six p.m."

The next one said, "I'm beginning to think you're mad at me or something. If you are, please call me up and yell at me. Two weeks is a long time to sit around wondering."

"Friday, six fifty-two p.m."

Jane hung up the telephone and then dialed Carey's number. When his machine came on, she said, "Hi, Carey. It's me. I'm sorry I couldn't get back to you. This job has turned out to be just awful. I'm trying to help a woman make her business profitable, and her business is promoting products all over the country. I've been in more airports than... a couple more than my suitcase has, anyway. I always seem to be strapped into an airplane seat when you're home, and then we have to sit down and run figures for the next meeting the minute we're in a hotel, and get to the meeting by breakfast time. Enough whining. I'm not mad at you. I'll call you when I'm home." She caught herself before she said "I love you" because he had never said it to her, but then she felt foolish for being petty. She changed it into "I miss you," then hung up. She tested the sound of it in her mind and decided it was true, as far as it went. She did miss him.

There had been two or three friends in college who had known that she had a knack for hiding people, but Carey McKinnon had not been one of them. Each year thereafter it would have been harder to tell him, but that was not why she had avoided it. She had been saving him for herself. She needed to keep home a safe place where she could talk to people who cared about her and forget that the next day she might have to take a fugitive out of the world. But she had planted a lie that had grown thick enough to choke her. Now that he had asked her to marry him, she could barely stand to talk to his answering machine.

As she stepped off the curb, she realized that the only solution she had thought of was to perpetuate the lie - tell him the profession she was quitting was the consulting business - and not admit to him that she was not the person he thought he knew. She would only be doing what she had taught dozens of other people to do - pick the life you want and lie fifty times a day to get it - so she felt ashamed that the prospect seemed so empty and hopeless to her.

Then she recognized that she was thinking about it as though she had decided to marry Carey. She had not decided. The time to decide about marriage was when you had reason to assume you would be alive on your wedding day.

Jane took a bus back to Ann Arbor and got off at the university. She did not begin the walk down Huron Street back to the apartment until after midnight. She had taken a longer time than necessary to give Mary Perkins a day alone. The more time Mary had to think, the better she would be.

As Jane walked up Huron in the cold, still air, listening to her feet crunching the snow, she began to hear another sound, far off behind her. It started low and quickly moved up an octave a second until she recognized it as a siren. She walked along, listening to it grow louder and closer, until she heard it pass her on a parallel street. A minute later, she heard another set of sirens coming toward her from somewhere ahead and to her right.

She watched the intersections ahead and saw the blinking lights of a fire engine swing around a corner and head out Huron Street. After another block she began to smell the smoke in the air. It was a thin, hanging haze like the smoke from somebody's fireplace in the windless night. She began to walk faster, and at the next corner she turned down a side street. It was a two-alarm fire so far, and there was no point in walking into the middle of a lot of firemen and policemen after midnight carrying shopping bags. At the first corner she turned right along the street behind Huron and hurried on.

When she was still two blocks from the big old house where Mary lived, she could see the sky suddenly begin to glow. She dropped her bags and broke into a run. It must be the house. As she ran up the quiet residential street, she began to see other people coming out of apartments and houses and walking toward the fire.

When Jane turned back onto Huron, she could see the trucks lined up in front of Mary's house. The coats of the firemen were glowing, their wet helmets reflecting the flames that were now coming out of the lower windows and licking up the wooden clapboards toward the upper floor.

Jane forced herself to slow her pace to a fast walk, looking carefully at every human shape illuminated by the fire. She tried to recognize one that might be Mary, already almost certain that she would not see her. The fire didn't make sense unless they had made a mistake and killed her. They had set a fire not because it would fool a coroner - Farrell, the training officer, would have taught them that much - but because fire got rid of fingerprints and fibers, and because water and firemen's boots obliterated footprints.