Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"Hello," she said. "This is Jane Whitefield. I just got back from out of town and I understand I had a burglary?"

There was a short pause. "Are you reporting it, or did you already?"

"The police were here already."

There was another short delay, and the voice came back sounding cheerful, so he must have found what he was looking for. "Yes, ma’am."

"I just wanted to know if there was anything I had to do. I was gone when they were here."

"Well, no," he said. "If you find anything missing, you should come fill out a report. Your insurance company will need a copy of that."

"Nothing’s missing. They never got inside."

"Okay," he said. "I’ll just make a note."

"Good," she said. "Thank you."

"Oh, and one more thing." Where did they all learn to say that? "If you see any suspicious activity, be sure to call and we’ll check it out. Sometimes they come back."

"I sure will," she said, and hung up quickly. She sat cross-legged on the bed and considered. The fact that the four men had come here at all was an immense relief. It meant that they had completely lost the trail in Olcott, only a few miles from here. If they hadn’t even gotten inside the house, they hadn’t learned anything about her that would have helped. Whatever they learned from now on was useless. There was no logical way for them to piece together the trail from Olcott to John Young of 4350 Islington, Apartment B, Medford, Oregon.

She walked down the stairs and took his picture out of her purse. The best course of action would be to take it into the kitchen and burn it. Then it occurred to her that the picture didn’t lead anywhere, either. If they had been following him, they didn’t need a picture. And if they had seen him come put of this house, they already knew she knew him. She stopped in the dining room and looked at the boarded window. It was special glass put in by the alarm people, and in order to get to it, the men had ripped the special conductive screen over it.

Jane picked up the telephone in the living room and dialed the alarm company’s number. She had perfected the nervous-young -woman-who -lives-alone voice, so the man on the other end was eager to send a technician to replace the window in the morning.

Then she called Cliff.

"Janie, Janie," he said. "You do the weirdest things to my cars."

"Is it broken?"

"No."

"I didn’t paint it, did I?"

"No."

"I didn’t keep it too long."

"No, you just parked it out in the boonies."

"Cliff, I’ll make you a deal."

"You’ll wash and wax it, and I won’t charge the wear-and-tear fee and the pickup fee and the reshelving fee? Gee, I don’t know ..."

"No," she said. "You’ll forget your fees, and I’ll forget my refund."

There was a shocked silence. "Jane, you okay?"

"Why?"

"You don’t seem ... normal."

"You know a lot of normal people, Cliff? You have a lot of them come by to rent a car?"

"Well, no, but—"

"I’m just tired. I’ll try to screw you out of some money next time. Thanks for handling things."

"Sure, Janie."

The next morning when she went out to get her mail, the man from the alarm company pulled into the driveway. It took him twenty minutes to fix the window, and then Jane said, "Can you wire the vent in the peak under the roof for me too?" She said it with a sad look in her eyes, so he didn’t argue. "We’ll just put it on your next bill," he said, and hurried to get his ladder off the roof of his truck.

For the next three days, she went out only at night and in the early morning to run on the long grassy strip along the river. She was too agitated and impatient to read, so she cleaned her house, then invented chores that would make it cleaner, and kept moving all of her furniture into new relationships. When she had finally settled on an arrangement that placed all of the furniture along the walls so that her living room was a vast open space, she did stretching exercises and Tai Chi in the middle of it. In the evening of the fourth day, she acknowledged that it was time to go out and face Jake.

He had been spending all of his time watching. He had painted the whole side of his house that faced hers, planted geraniums, mowed his lawn, and dug out every nascent dandelion. Finally, in desperation, he had altered the habits of his long lifetime and taken to reading his newspapers and magazines in his yard.

Jane walked across her back yard and into his and sat down on the grass beside his lawn chair. After a minute he said, "Am I imagining it or are people getting dumber?"

"I don’t know."

"Hardly a day goes by when I don’t read about somebody doing himself some real harm when if he’d just called up and asked me, I could have told him what to do."

"Who is it this time?"

"Take your pick. Today it’s Washington, but there’s never a shortage of the mentally needy. I ought to hang out a shingle."

"You’ve done everything else."

"What?"

"You’ve painted that wall on my side maybe three times."

"It’s the weather side. Takes special care."

"Jake, I’ve decided we’d better talk some more before you fall off a ladder peering in my window and hurt yourself."

"Very thoughtful," he said.

She chose her words carefully. "Those four men weren’t looking for me. They were looking for a friend of mine. He was the guy you saw knocking on my door. I helped him to go away."

"I’m not supposed to ask questions, I take it?"

"I’m telling you the things you have a right to know," she said. "He’s safe because they can’t find him. We’re safe because they’ll know he’s not coming back here." She stood up and smiled. ’’The end."

He nodded, his lips pursed in thought. "Why did you change your mind about telling me?"

"A lot of reasons. One is that I don’t want you to decide one day to have a talk with your friend Chief Dormont; you can’t be expected to keep a secret unless you know it’s a secret. Another is that if he or someone like him comes to my door some night, I don’t want you to think I’m in danger and haul out the old twelve-gauge and blow his head off."

"You’ve done this before, haven’t you?"

She didn’t answer.

"You said ’someone like him.’ That’s it, isn’t it?" he said. "The secret isn’t him, it’s you."

"Telling would hurt me," she agreed. "It would hurt me a lot." She stared into his eyes for a moment, until she had seen whatever she was looking for, and then she released him. "I’ve got some shopping to do. You need anything?"

"No," he said. "No thanks." He watched her go. The long brown legs and the strong, erect back made her seem taller than she was, but not tall enough for this.

Jake set the newspaper on his lap and stared off at the big trees along Franklin Street. The little girl next door hadn’t grown up to do something as normal as having a little outlaw sex. She was—well, hell—she was Jigonsasee. How could she think he wouldn’t know? Did she expect him to live for sixty years in a town called Deganawida and never bother to find out why they had chosen a name nobody could even spell? They used to teach it to kids in the grammar schools, although God knew what the hell they were teaching them now.

Maybe she was crazy. White people went crazy and thought they were Jesus Christ or Napoleon, but those two would strike an Indian woman as having no more to do with her than a couple of Australian marsupials. Besides, whatever sex was really about, one of the things it did was determine the way people thought about themselves. He had never heard of an adult woman who identified with a man.

Jigonsasee would make sense to her, he thought. Sometime in the distant past, a woman lives in a bark lodge all by herself on the trail that runs east and west below Lake Ontario a few miles from here. She feeds the warriors who pass by on their way to murder each other. One day, off the lake comes a canoe with a lone Huron in it who has paddled all the way across from the Canadian side. He’s a fugitive, a man in exile from his tribe up there. He’s been skirting the land, looking for the smoke of somebody’s fire so he can bring them his message. The message doesn’t seem like much, since all it really amounts to is that peace is better than war. His name is Deganawida.