Thomas Perry: Dance for the Dead

Even at this time of year, Southern California seemed to her to be parched and inhospitable. The broad lawns in public places like this were still a little yellow and sparse from the eight-month-long summer, with its hundred-degree stretches. Back home people would be telling each other stories about years they remembered when the snow didn't stop until May, and wondering if this would be another one. When her lemonade was finished she walked back across the campus to the row of eucalyptus trees. Before she turned the corner of the science building she heard a squawk, and then some fluttering, and she thought about the difference between birds and human beings. No matter how many times it had been done, each new generation of birds flew into the trap as though it had never before happened on earth. Maybe they weren't so different.

She approached the traps, but they didn't look the way she had expected. One of them was just as she had left it, and the other one had two big blue scrub jays in it together. When she moved closer she could see that one was a male and the other female, slightly smaller with more brown on top and less blue. As she stepped to the cage, the questions began. "Jree?" asked the male. "Jree?" The female scolded, "Check check check!"

They weren't like the birds at home, but they were quick and greedy for survival, so territorial and aggressive that they had probably crowded in together without hesitation. It was too late in the year for them to be feeding hatchlings, and having one of each seemed right. They were already mated.

She poured in some more seed to give them something to think about, lifted the cage, put it in the back seat of the car, and covered it with a silk blouse from her suitcase.

Jane drove to the county office building and wiped her face clean of the thick makeup she had been using to hide the bruises, then walked to the Department of Children's Services. The people in the office were busy in a way that showed they had given up hope of ever doing all they were supposed to do but were keeping on in the belief that if they worked hard enough they would accomplish some part of it. There were two empty desks for each one that had a person behind it, so they moved from one to another picking up telephones and slipping files in and out of the piles like workers tending machines in a factory. She waited for a minute, then saw a woman hang up her telephone and pause to make a note in a file.

Jane stepped forward. "Excuse me," she said. "I need to leave something for Nina Coffey."

The woman's eyes rolled up over the rim of her glasses and settled on Jane; her head, which was still bent over the papers on the desk, never moved. Jane could tell that her bruises had identified her as an abused mother. "How can I help you?"

"It's this teddy bear," said Jane. "Timmy Phillips left it in my car."

The woman showed no recognition of the name. She snatched a gummed sticker out of the top drawer and put her pen to it. "Spell it," she said.

"P-H-I-L-L-I-P-S. I'd appreciate it if you got it to her, because it's important to Timmy." Jane handed the woman the small, worn brown teddy bear.

The woman turned her sharp gaze through the glasses at the bear. "I can see that," she said. "Don't worry. I'll give it to her."

"Thanks," said Jane warmly.

The telephone rang and the woman held up one finger to signal that Jane was to wait while she answered it, but Jane turned away. She heard the woman call, "Mrs. Phillips?" but she was out the door.

Jane waited down the street from the parking garage. She had seen the row where the employees' parking spaces were, and now she parked at the curb where she could watch them.

It was not long before she saw the woman she had been waiting for. Nina Coffey was in her forties and very slight with red hair that was fading into a gray that muted it. Jane saw that she had the habit of holding her keys in one fist when she came out of the elevator, so she suspected that this was a woman whose profession had given her a clear-eyed view of the planet she was living on. In her other hand she held a hard-sided briefcase and a teddy bear.

Jane waited for her to start her car, drive to the exit, and move off down the street before she pulled her own car out from among the others along the block. She followed Nina Coffey at a distance, and strung two other cars between them so she wouldn't get too accustomed to the sight of Jane's. Coffey turned expertly a couple of times, popped around a corner and then up onto a freeway ramp, and Jane was glad she had put the other cars between them so that she had time to follow in the unfamiliar city.

She pushed into the traffic and over to the same lane that Coffey chose and stayed there, letting a couple of other cars slip in between them again. Coffey turned off the freeway in a hilly area that the signs said was in Pasadena, and Jane had to move closer. There seemed to be stoplights at every intersection, and Nina Coffey was an aggressive driver who had a knack for timing them. After the third one, Jane had to stop while Coffey diminished into the distance. She turned right, then left, then sped up five blocks of residential streets that had no lights, turned left, then right again to come out three blocks behind her.

Finally Nina Coffey came to a street where she had to wait to make a left turn, and Jane caught up with her again. When Coffey stopped in front of a modest two-story house with a brick facade, Jane kept going. As she passed, she studied the car that blocked the driveway and knew it was the right house. The car was a full-sized Chevrolet painted a blue as monotonous as a police uniform.

The authorities had done exactly as Jane had hoped they would. They were protecting Timmy from everybody, without distinction - the people who wanted him declared dead, the reporters, people who were sure to search the family tree to suddenly discover they were relatives - and without comment. They had put Timmy in the home of a cop while the mess around him was sorted out.

She spent fifteen minutes driving around the neighborhood to look for signs that anyone else had found the house. She saw no parked cars with heads in them, no nearby houses with too many blinds drawn, and no male pedestrians between twenty and fifty. She came back out on Colorado Boulevard satisfied and drove up two streets before she found the place where she wanted to park her car She had to climb over the fence at the back of the yard and crouch in the little cinderblock enclosure where the pool motor droned away and stare in the back window until she saw Timmy. She watched him eat his dinner in the kitchen with two other children, and then begin to climb the carpeted stairway to the second floor. Upstairs, a light went on for a few minutes and then went out. The other children weren't much older than Timmy was but they were still downstairs. She supposed he was still living on Chicago time, where it was two hours later.

The sun was low when Jane decided how she would do it. She walked quietly to the back of the house. In a moment she was up the fig tree and on the roof of the garage. She walked across it to a second-floor window of the house, tied a length of the jewelry wire into a loop, inserted it between the window and the sill, and slowly twirled it until she had it around the latch. She gave a sharp tug to open the latch, quietly slid the window up, and slipped into the upstairs hallway.

When she opened the bedroom door Timmy was lying on his side looking at her, his coffee-with-cream eyes reflecting a glint of the light coming from the hallway, his child-blond hair already in unruly tufts from burrowing into the pillow. Somebody had bought him a new pair of pajamas with pictures of fighter planes in a dogfight all over them, and had at least looked at him closely enough to be sure they fit his long legs. He held the teddy bear on the sheet beside him. "Jane?" he said.