Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

She peeked in the back window and saw that the truck was empty. James Michael Martin had not left anything at all inside. The food was gone, the clothes, the tent. The canoe was gone, and he hadn’t even left the straps he had used to tie it to the roof. It was odd that he had used the name John Young to buy the car. He had money, and he must have had some kind of identification that she hadn’t provided that said James Michael Martin. But then it occurred to her that after eight years in jail he didn’t have a valid driver’s license.

Jane went back to her rented car, slid her canoe off the roof, loaded all her gear into it, and dragged it into the deepest brush at the other side of the trail, then came back the same way, carefully pushing the plants upright and tossing leaves over the keel marks.

She had to back up nearly a quarter mile to find a place where she could turn her car around. She did it clumsily deliberately, breaking a lot of brush. If anyone later came this far, they would believe this was where she had stopped and gone back.

When she reached the road, she drove all the way back to Saranac Lake to turn the car in at the Hertz lot. Now she was on foot and unencumbered. It took three hours for the bus to get her back to the town of Tupper Lake and three more hours to walk around the lake and back along the logging road to the place where she had found the Bronco. As soon as she had made it off the road and taken the first two turns, the woods closed around her and no sound of civilization reached her ears.

People who lived in this part of the country didn’t use the word Adirondacks much; they called it the North Woods. It was just as well. The surveyor who had put the word on his maps had thought it was the name of a vanished tribe. What it really was was an Iroquois word meaning "bark eaters," the name they called the Algonquin. It meant hunters who couldn’t kill enough to eat.

This hadn’t been anybody’s territory in the old days. Huron, Algonquin, and Montagnais had come across the St. Lawrence to hunt big game here, and the Abnaki and Mahican had come across the Hudson and Lake Champlain. Mixed bands of all of the Hodenosaunee, including her own people, had also come up along the chain of lakes at the spine of the mountains to hunt. The Hodenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, had never built their longhouses here. This country had been wilderness even to them, a place to hunt in parties of five or ten. They had built small temporary huts of bark and saplings, found the game, and then gone home to the south. Here the rocky peaks and high altitudes were too harsh for growing corn and beans and squash. Sometimes the snow in the winter was twenty feet deep.

Jane walked among the trees fifty feet from the path all the way into the forest, not so much to hide her trail as to foreclose the remote possibility of meeting Martin alone and unarmed. The trees here were all second growth, sprouted since the lumber had been cut away in the old days, and it had grown in thick. The trees that would ultimately grow tall and form a canopy were not yet old enough to shade the others and make them die out.

The sun was just beginning to move behind the tops of the mountains to the west when she found the Bronco again. She could see that she had been lucky to find it the first time. He had hidden it well, but he must have done it in the afternoon, when the sun would have fallen on the convex windshield and been dispersed and not on the flat tailgate window.

Jane stood and studied the Bronco. It still bothered her that he had bought it as John Young. The Department of Motor Vehicles had a record of the sale, so it was public information. She thought about Martin, not John Felker, because he had never been, or about John Young, because he had just been her version of the same person. Martin hadn’t come up here to stay. He had come back to the mountains to wait. He had killed Harry, and now Jerry Cappadocia’s father would be sending people out to look for him.

He had very little to worry about. He had killed Lew Feng, the person who had constructed John Young. He would be waiting for the news about Harry to come out and circulate to all of the people who might care and then to get stale. Jane supposed he had thought she would never figure out that he had killed Harry; she would assume that the four men had killed Lew Feng, gotten the list, and killed Harry. Now nobody had a way to find out about John Young because Lew Feng was dead.

She thought about the last night in Vancouver, and the truth settled on her slowly. She had thought he was upset because she had parted with him so abruptly. By the time he had known she was going, she was already on her way to the airport. But what he had really been upset about was that she had left him no safe way to kill her. She had slipped away. Now he was here waiting to see whether she had stayed fooled. If she had, there was no way for anyone to find him. But what if she hadn’t?

She looked at the Bronco closely. There was nothing visible. She went to the ground, slithered between the big wheels, and looked up at the undercarriage. There was nothing out of place that she could see. She slowly pulled herself toward the front of the car looking for wires, or maybe a pipe that didn’t look as though it belonged. When she saw the two plastic water bottles, she eased herself closer. There was duct tape around the tops. She touched one of them and brought the smell of gasoline away on her finger. The two bottles were tied against the exhaust manifold. She could have hot-wired the car and driven it a mile or two up the trail before the plastic melted and dumped a couple of gallons of gasoline all over the engine compartment.

If she had gotten out before the fire burned along the freshly greased underside and reached the gas tank, people in town would have seen the smoke and come to find her running away from John Young’s car. He had known that in order to find the car at all, she would need to ask a lot of people if they had seen John Young. When John Young didn’t come out of the woods after weeks, they might not be able to prove that she had killed him, but they would certainly suspect it.

Either way, she couldn’t win and he couldn’t lose. If the car burned, there would be nothing left of her or the two plastic one-gallon bottles. John Young would go back to being James Michael Martin. If it didn’t burn, then it would mean he could be John Young forever, because she hadn’t come for him. She might not have been able to imagine that John Felker could have killed Harry, or she might have gone to Medford and found that he had never made it there, and believe for the rest of her life that the four men had caught him. She rolled out from under the vehicle and sat beside it. She could feel the malevolence exuding from it now. A person would have to feel a vast distance between himself and anyone he planned to burn to death.

She wasn’t looking at the work of someone who was scared, a panicky person trying desperately to throw barriers between himself and retribution. He had gone over entirely. No, that was wrong; before she had even met him he had been enlisted on the other side. He had come to her for one reason only, pretending to be an innocent victim so that he could find a man who thought he was a friend and cut his throat. She stared at the big black vehicle to let it burn the last of her feelings for John Felker away. As the sun disappeared over the top of the mountains, the Bronco seemed to grow like a shadow.

Jane rolled back under it. She had only a half hour of light left after sunset and a lot to do. She opened the hood of the Bronco by reaching up from underneath to pull the cable to release the latch. She left the two bottles undisturbed. Instead, she unhooked the two battery cables and buried them at the foot of a bush ten paces away.