Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"Hello, Janie," he said. "Can I help you haul your bags in?"

"No, thank you," she said with a smile. "It doesn’t take two." She swung out Mrs. Eckerly’s suitcase. A day ago Jack Killigan would have been surprised to see her pluck it off the car seat and set it down. She had told Rhonda Eckerly to put it on the bathroom scale to be sure it weighed no more than ten pounds before she left her house in Indiana. A fifty-pound suitcase was a burden; a ten-pound suitcase was a weapon.

Jake stepped inside his front door, then came back and walked around the privet hedge. She saw he was holding something in his hand besides the rag. "Here’s your mail," he said.

In the winter, if Jane didn’t get up in time to shovel her snow, she would wake up and see Jake give his bright red snowblower a pull and happily run it up her driveway and sidewalks before he did his own. She was always loudly grateful, not because she needed an old man to move the snow, but because the circumstances of the universe had given her the gift of a neighbor who would want to do it, and given Jake the pleasure of being able to do such things in his old age.

She glanced at the little pile of envelopes, her eyebrows raised. "Did I get anything interesting?"

He shook his head. "You know I just look for the magazines, but it looks like old Barney got to them first this time." Jake was the chief perpetuator of the myth that magazines in Deganawida arrived later than they did in other towns because Barney Schwick, the mail-man, read them before he delivered them. "Oh, I forgot," he said. "There was a fellow here to see you yesterday. Tall, fit, dark hair, dark eyes."

"An Indian?" She felt a slight alarm, although she couldn’t imagine why it felt like bad news.

"Well now, I couldn’t say," said Jake.

Yesterday was too soon for anybody Eckerly might have sent after her. She had taken a taxi to Burbank to fly back to New York City under the name Helen Freeman. She had used Lila Warren to fly to Rochester, then rented the car under her own name. "Did he say anything?"

"Not to me," said Reinert. "I didn’t talk to him."

"Well, thanks," she said. "I’m tired. I just spent the morning staring at the white line on the Thruway." She walked up the steps and unlocked her door, then rushed to punch in the code on her alarm system before the bell went off. People in Deganawida didn’t believe in alarm systems, but they respected personal eccentricity. They didn’t mind their own business, exactly, but they pretended to, and that was just as good. An unmarried woman who lived alone like Jane Whitefield was expected to be fearful, and could do what she wanted to preserve the calm that was the only defensible reason for living in Deganawida.

She walked into the living room and sniffed the air. She had been gone for two days and the house had been sealed to keep out the wet, cold winds of spring. The air in the house should have been dead and stale, but it wasn’t. It was fresh and clean and alive.

Jane stayed where she was and listened. She had opened the front door to come in, so in a few seconds the first cool air would reach the thermostat in the hallway by the bedroom and the oil furnace in the basement would kick on. She glanced again at the keypad of her alarm system on the wall. The little red letters said RDY: ready.

She decided she must have left something open. No, if she had, the furnace would have been churning away down there, trying valiantly to heat up the whole outside world to sixty-eight. It must be a crack somewhere, a tiny one that she wouldn’t have noticed if she had been here.

It was an old house, and twenty or thirty layers of paint had a way of making things fit too snugly to let air in. She felt a little tightness on the sides of her face as a chill passed on its way to the back of her neck. What was she thinking of excuses for? Somebody had been in here.

She backed to the umbrella stand and picked up her black umbrella with the metal tip on the end. She was prepared to admit that there were people on the planet who were capable of fooling any alarm system, but hers was a pretty good one. Had the power been turned off? The digital clock on the kitchen counter would have flashed twelve o’clock if the power was off. But he would have seen that too, and reset it. She quietly moved to the television table in the comer and opened the cabinet to look at the VCR. That too was glowing steadily with the almost-correct time. By her watch it was 3:47, and the display said 3:45. It had always been two minutes off. This should have reassured her, she knew, because he might have been alert enough to reset it, but he wouldn’t do it wrong. But she only wondered how he had thought of it.

The rational thing to do right now was to step back out the front door and walk around the outside of the house to look for the broken window or the scarred doorjamb, and when she found it, she could wait for the police at Jake’s house. That was what she would have told someone else to do, so why wasn’t she doing it?

It was because he was still here. He was hiding in a closet or behind a door or in the basement, or maybe just beyond a doorway. She stepped around the comer of the dining room, keeping her back to the wall, but her mind kept sending her bulletins of alarm. He had to be waiting for some reason, and the only part of the establishment that hadn’t been laid out in plain sight for his leisurely inspection was the woman who lived here.

She stepped into the kitchen and saw the gun on the table. It was wide and black and squat and ugly, with crosshatched grips that looked too big for a human hand. The cylinder was open and she could see five fat bullets inside like hornets in a nest. She froze for a second. Why would he leave it there? He was a psychopath. As she stepped closer, she could see the little colt etched on the blue metal above the handgrips. It was either a Diamondback or a Trooper. It was not a good sign when they spontaneously chose standard-issue cop equipment. It was a hint that their confusion had reached the who’s-who? stage. Maybe he was crazy enough to be the kind that took possession—ate all the food in the refrigerator, went to sleep upstairs on her bed, and forgot about the gun. That wasn’t something she felt like betting anything important on, and it set off another little alarm in her brain. If he wanted to put his mark on everything, there was one thing left that he would be waiting for. He wanted her to rush in, try to take the four steps to grasp it, and that would be when he jumped on her from behind.

If he had spent this much time looking around, he would have at least glanced into a closet and seen that she was tall or found a photograph of her. And if he was that sure he could instantly subdue a five-foot-ten woman without her making a sound, he was going to be big and strong. Maybe he had a kitchen knife and was ready to bring it across her throat while she was inhaling for the scream.

In order to do that, he had to be on the other side of the refrigerator. There was no other place. Okay, she thought. Time for a surprise. She took a deep breath and let it out to calm her nerves. When she moved, it was fast. She threw her shoulder into the side of the refrigerator and kept digging in with her feet. It rolled an inch on its casters, hit a crack in the tile, and tipped.

As it toppled, she swept the gun toward her across the table with the crook of the umbrella, snatched it up, flicked her wrist to snap the cylinder into place, ducked down, and aimed.

To her surprise, the refrigerator fell only as far as the counter and caught with a thump and a muffled sound of breaking glass. To her greater surprise, the man wasn’t crouching on the other side of it.

The voice came from the living room. "Do you have the gun?" He must have come down from upstairs.