Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

Then, as the sun rose higher into the tops of the trees, her tears stopped coming. She stood up, looked around her, and knew what she was going to do. She walked back to the enemy’s camp and collected the tools she would need, then followed the path to the little stream of water that she had drunk from in the night. She rolled an old, rotten log down the bank into the stream to divert it from its course and then began to dig in the bed. The first few inches were small pebbles and gravel, and below them was mud. She packed the stones and mud against the log to make it into a dam. After an hour of digging, she was hip deep, and hit rock.

She couldn’t bear to touch his hands, so she brought up his sleeping bag, rolled him over onto it with her foot, and dragged him down to the streambed. When she had covered the body and pushed the three feet of mud and stones over him, she pushed the log away and let the stream return to its course, first washing over the grave in a little flood and then in a muddy, cloudy stream. In a few minutes the water was clear again, as though it had never been disturbed since the mountains first rose up from the earth. Then she walked back up the trail she had made for him, cut down the rest of the monofilament fishing line and the three hooks that hadn’t caught his flesh, untied the bent sapling, and filled in the hole she had dug.

She walked back to the camp, ate his food, and drank water beside the beautiful black lake. Then she tossed the paddle, the car keys, and four days’ worth of dried food into his canoe and pushed it to the edge of the lake to wait for her.

She found matches in his pack and collected all of the firewood he had gathered and built a big fire on a flat stone shelf above the water. She burned first his clothes, the wallet she had bought him with the identification that said he was John Young, then the rest of his packaged food, the tent, and the sleeping bag. She unloaded the rifle he had carried into the woods and pumped the shotgun he had used as a booby-trap to verify that it was empty, and placed them on the fire to burn off the wooden stocks and forepieces, then added the fishing pole to burn the cork handle and line and melt the fiberglass. Everything he had brought into the forest she took apart or cut into pieces and put into the fire.

When all of his possessions had burned, she brought more wood, built the fire bigger, and watched it burn to embers. She threw her bow, her arrows, and her war club into the fire too and watched them flare up and burn, then lay down to sleep on the bare ground twenty feet away.

When she woke up she saw that it was the middle of the afternoon. She walked to the edge of the lake and looked down into the water. She could see the reflection of her face, still streaked with green and black, and the black crow’s feathers in her hair. She dived into the icy water, plunging into silence and darkness, then gave a kick and an armstroke and shot up through the surface. She scrubbed herself and let the feathers float away, then climbed out and dried off in the warm sun on the rocks.

She walked to her fire and found that it had cooled. She scraped the embers off into the water with the canoe paddle, then collected the bits of metal and fire-altered plastic and put them into her quiver. As she made her last walk around the campsite to look for anything she had missed, she remembered the money. Whatever else James Michael Martin had done, he would not have been able to bring himself to leave the money. She searched the area again, then remembered that he would have hidden it before he had moved his camp, probably in the first hour after he had arrived at the lake.

She walked to his old campsite and searched in the places that fit his mind. It was not tied to a rope and put in a watertight container weighted with rocks to hang under the surface of the lake. It was not high in any of the trees close enough for him to keep an eye on it. Then she noticed that his old campfire looked different from the one in his new camp.

He had built the new one in a pit. The charred wood and ashes of this one were on a level spot near the place where his tent had been. She pushed the charcoal debris aside and dug down an inch, where she found a thick bundle sealed in a moisture-proof plastic bag. Inside the bag was the pack she had given him the night they had run to Olcott, and inside the pack was the money. The remains of a fire had been moved here and placed on top of the buried money. If something happened to him, the ones who had come for him would probably spend some time looking for the money. When they didn’t find it, they would camp and build a fire. The place they would probably choose was the site of his old fire: just add some new wood and set a match to it. After an hour or so, the money would be gone. She reached into the pack, picked up one of the green stacks, and read the white band the bank had put around it. The print said, "ten thousand dollars." There were thirty-five identical stacks of hundreds. He had been confident enough to hide all of it in one place.

Jane carried the bag of money to his canoe, pushed off, and began to paddle out of the wilderness. As she moved the canoe back up the chain of lakes, she stopped every hour or two, put down her paddle, and dropped something into the deepest places: the rifle barrel and action into Lake Lila, the shotgun barrel into Round Lake, the melted fishing pole and loose eyelets into Little Tupper, each fragment miles from the last one.

At the portage she had to drag the canoe for part of the way, because it was too heavy for her to carry. When she felt tired, she rested. It took her almost four days to emerge from the forest onto big Tupper Lake.

She had no way to get rid of the canoe, so she paddled to the Bronco, dug up the battery cables, took the plastic bottles of gasoline off the exhaust manifold and poured them into the tank, loaded the canoe onto the roof, and drove out of the mountains. She reached Lake George after dark and left the canoe at the edge of the water there.

She used the cash from John Young’s wallet to buy gas in Glens Falls, clothes in Saratoga Springs, and a gigantic meal of pancakes and eggs on the outskirts of Albany. The coffee tasted so good that she bought a sixteen-ounce cup of it to drink in the car.

A few hours later, she carefully wiped the Bronco clean inside and out while she washed it at a coin-operated car wash in Yonkers. Then she left it parked on the street with the keys in the ignition in Queens near La Guardia. It wasn’t a neighborhood where she could be certain the Bronco would be stolen and disappear forever into the world of chop shops, but it might, and if the police noticed it before the thieves, it wouldn’t matter. It led only to a person who had never existed. If the police started making a list of other people who might have left it there, they would begin with ones who had taken flights out of La Guardia. She walked to the waiting area outside the terminal, took a cab from La Guardia to Kennedy, and bought a ticket for the next plane to Rochester.

It was after three in the morning when she parked the rental car on the quiet street and walked across the thick grass to the railing. She looked down into the deep chasm at the place where the longhouses had once stood, all running east to west beside the winding stream of the Genesee. She listened, and this time the city was so quiet that she could hear the water down there, running into the rocks and curving around at the far bank to head north to Lake Ontario.

In the old days the people would have been asleep in the longhouses. Probably, on a cool night like this one she would have been able to smell a little smoke coming up from the coals of the fires. Up here in the cornfields the ground would be bare. Very soon it would be time for Ayentwata, the planting festival, so the women would have begun to turn the ground with digging sticks to prepare it for seeding.