Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

"What?" whispered Mary.

"I didn't see you throw it away. Where is it?"

Mary said, "I don't know. I guess I..." She reached into her pocket. "Here it is." It was in a wad.

Jane took it, stepped far back from the door and away from the light, came back to the doorjamb, and stuffed it into the hole where the latch would go when the door shut. Then she beckoned to Mary and they both went across the dormitory lawn to sit on a curb and wait.

In fifteen minutes the girl's dryers stopped and she folded her clothes, kicked the doorstop up, and closed the door slowly and quietly. It was almost three in the morning and she didn't need a couple of hundred neighbors waking up angry.

Jane waited a few minutes longer before she opened the door, pulled the adhesive tape out of the doorjamb, dug the dimes out of the hole, and pulled Mary inside. She shut the door, and they made their way up the back stairs to the second floor, away from the public areas to the long corridors lined with students' rooms. Jane walked quietly through the halls of the dormitory, looking at the doors of all of the rooms. At each corner she stopped and listened for other footsteps, but she heard none. Finally she stopped at a door where there was a folded note taped at eye level. She pulled it off carefully and read it.

Cindy - Your mother called like eight times!!! I told her you were in the library. Call her as soon as you get back from Columbus.

Lauren

Jane slipped the Catherine Snowdon credit card between the doorknob and the jamb until she found the plunger, then bowed it a little to push the plunger aside and open the door. Before she closed it behind Mary she put the note back. Cindy was going to need time to prepare a comforting story for her mother.

Jane felt for the single bed by the wall, pulled the thick blanket off it and draped it over the rod behind the curtains so that no light would escape, then turned the switch on. She went to the closet and studied the clothes for a moment, then started taking things out. "She's about your height, but she wears her tops big." She tossed a sweater on the bed. "Put it on." She took off her own blouse and slipped another sweater over her head. Then she glanced at Marys rubber boots. "Those aren't going to help us either. Try some of hers."

Within a few minutes they were both dressed in Cindy's clothes. There was one short fall coat and one University of Michigan jacket. It was reversible, so Jane pulled it inside out and put it on. There were places where she could still pass as a college girl, but a college was not one of them. She counted a thousand dollars out of her purse and set it on the desk. "Sorry, Cindy," she wrote on Cindy's pad. "I needed clothes." She turned to Mary. "You look good, considering. Let's go."

Jane led Mary out through the laundry room, then found the Student Union by walking toward the center of the campus. The Ride Board was something she remembered from her college days, and she found it in a big hallway off the entrance. There were index cards posted in long lines on a cork bulletin board. She ignored the "Ride Wanted" cards and looked closely at the "Going to..." cards. Most of them offered rides for Thursday night or Friday, so they were obsolete already. She selected one that said, "Going to Ohio State. Leaving for Columbus Saturday 5:00 a.m. Return after game. Share driving and gas. Doug," and gave a phone number. She glanced at her watch. It was four a.m. now. If Doug wasn't an idiot he was at least awake. She walked to the pay phone across the hall and dialed the number.

At five o'clock the car pulled up in front of the Student Union. Doug was big and smiled easily. He was the sort of boy who would shortly flesh out and play a lot of golf. His two passengers were a surprise to him. While he was driving from his room to the campus he had planned to say he was glad that they had turned up at the last minute because he loved company. He also liked making a road trip without having to pay all of the expenses himself, but better than either, he liked women. He liked looking at them and hearing their voices and smelling the scents that hung in the air around them. When he saw the two women walking down the steps of the Student Union he thought that this was turning out to be a very fortunate day. But when they got into the car and the light came on he realized that they were old. They weren't old like somebody's mother, but they were still too old to be any more interested in Doug than his female professors were.

Near the ramp for the 23 Expressway at Geddes Avenue, Doug started to signal for a turn into the all-night gas station, but the dark one said, "Can we stop for gas later? There's nobody on the road now and we can make good time. Later on we'll be dying to stop."

Doug could live with that. The gauge said they had half a tank, so it didn't really matter. But for a second it seemed to him that she had some other reason for not wanting to stop until she was out of Ann Arbor. It was as though her husband was cruising around looking for her or something. They didn't stop until Toledo, and then the dark one insisted on paying for the gas and driving the next hundred miles.

It turned out that the one in the back was a graduate student in the business school. She had worked for ten years and then decided to go back. She was asleep most of the time. The dark one was a lot more talkative. She was a friend of the graduate student, and had talked her into going down for the game. Maybe she wasn't really that talkative, because afterward he couldn't remember learning anything else about her in the four-hour drive. Maybe she had just prompted Doug to talk and smiled a lot.

When they were on the outskirts of Columbus, the dark one announced that they still had to go scrounge tickets to the game, because she had talked Alene into coming at the last minute on a whim. She had him drop them off on the Ohio State campus so they could check the bulletin boards for offers of unused tickets.

Doug hated to relinquish the fantasy he had been developing for four hours, revising and refining it at each turn in the long road. He had envisioned himself ending up in a hotel in Columbus with the two older women, celebrating Michigan's victory on a king-sized bed. But he had not been able to invent any plausible set of circumstances that might lead to the fulfillment of this fantasy, nor could he imagine how one went about proposing such a thing. He left them with a regret that hung about him until later in the day, when he met a girl named Michele who called herself Micki with an i. She had seen him on the Ohio State campus with the two older women and convinced herself that there was a melancholy sophistication about him. He did not think about the two older women again until Sunday night, when he was driving back to Michigan with Micki. It had occurred to him that they might not have been able to get tickets to the game, but he would not have guessed that instead they had bought airline tickets from Columbus to Boston under assumed names and disappeared during the stopover in Cleveland.

21

Mary lay on her bed in the motel room and listened to the airplanes passing overhead. She had already unconsciously perceived their rhythm. They would growl along for four minutes somewhere far beyond the eastern end of the building, then roar overhead and into nothingness. There would be a pause of forty-five seconds before she heard the next one growling and muttering at the starting line.

Mary was tired of waiting for the question. She turned her head to look at Jane. "It was the medical records," she said.

Jane was sitting at the round table under the hideous hanging lamp sorting small items she had taken from her purse. There was a lot of cash, and cards that seemed to have been taped to the lining in rows. "What medical records?" She didn't look up.