3

Jane drove along Lake Erie into the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, then on across the Ohio line. It was dark now, and she had watched the mirrors for three hours. There had been no car that had stayed in their wake more than a few minutes, no indication that they could have been followed. Rita had slouched in the front seat reading the newspaper Jane had given her at the hotel for a time, then fallen asleep. Every time Jane had glanced up at the mirror, she could see Bernie’s sharp, pale eyes staring ahead at the road. She said, “Bernie?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“Do you know where you want me to drop you off?” Jane saw Rita stir and sit up. The voices had awakened her.

He said, “Someplace sort of on the small side. Not Cleveland or Cincinnati. How about Mansfield?”

“How do I get there?”

“How is he supposed to know?” said Rita. “The paper said he hasn’t been out of the house in, like, twenty years.”

“He knows,” said Jane.

Bernie said, “Stay on 90 until just before Cleveland, and then take 271 south. Stay on it, and it’ll change to 71. Keep going until you’re right outside Mansfield, then switch to 30. It’ll take us right into town.”

Jane looked at Rita. “I found road maps in their trash at the hotel. That was what made me sure who it was.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I know how people running from trouble behave. A road map isn’t big, it isn’t heavy, and it isn’t incriminating. So who would throw one away?”

Rita was silent, so Jane answered her own question. “A person who can look at it once and still have it later, in his memory. Bernie Lupus.”

Rita sucked in a breath and turned to Bernie. “But you left them in the room. What if—”

The old man said, “Don’t worry, kid. If the guys who are chasing you were as good as she is, we’d be riding in their car, not hers. Even if they played way over their heads and found the maps, what would they do with them? They’d spend two weeks looking for fingerprints on them that aren’t there.”

Rita seemed skeptical, but she was silent. Jane drove the dark highway, thinking. She couldn’t get the sight of Danny’s face out of her mind. He had been moving along the hallway in a quick, stiff-legged gait, his face only slightly touched by worry, like a man in an airport hurrying to catch a plane. When he had seen the man step out of the doorway, there had been no question he had recognized him. He had made no attempt to avert his eyes and walk past, just stopped and died.

She glanced at the old man in the back seat again. That was what he was thinking about too. He stared into space, probably remembering some good qualities in the man that Jane would never know.

She thought backward from that moment and remembered the bath. She had been running the water for her bath, heard the doorbell, turned off the water. It seemed to her now that at that moment, the floor beneath her feet had simply given way and dropped her here. She thought about Carey. What must Carey be thinking? He would be sick with worry. She had to find a way to call him. “Bernie?”

“Yeah?”

“Is there a good place to make a stop up ahead?”

He considered for a moment. “There are some little towns. And there’s a rest stop on 271 just after the exit for Richfield, if you can hold out that long.”

Jane glanced at her watch and drove on in silence, keeping the car moving. At this hour, the rest of the traffic was moving fast, the pace set by the long-distance truckers who planned to drive all night, pushing the speed limit a little while they could.

When she reached the rest stop, she drifted past the small buildings that housed the rest rooms and the telephones before she began to search for a parking space. Near the entrance, everyone who pulled in would be glancing at all the spaces, and they would see her car. She wanted them to go past her car after the building, when they would be staring ahead at the ramp onto the highway, matching their acceleration to the speed of the traffic, and not noticing cars in the lot.

Jane glanced at Rita. The girl had fallen asleep again, and now she sat up and looked around her, dry-mouthed and blinking. “We’re at a rest stop,” said Jane. “The bathrooms are in that building, if you need one.”

The girl got out without speaking and walked toward the building. Jane looked at Bernie. He said, “I suppose that’s not such a bad idea.”

Jane waited until both of them had started out, then locked the car and followed. She stopped at a telephone beside the first building, dug a handful of change out of her purse, and dialed the number of the house in Amherst.

His voice was tight and worried. “Hello?”

“Hi,” said Jane. “It’s me. I love you.” It wasn’t the first time that she had noticed that “I love you” was what you said when the rest of what you were going to say was bad.

“I love you too,” said Carey. “What happened?”

Jane said, “It’s hard to describe. I was getting ready for dinner, and this young girl came by. She had come from … a long distance to find me.”

“So you dropped everything and took off without telling me.” His voice wasn’t angry. It was disappointed, as though a grim expectation about her had merely been confirmed. He had simply left off the word “again.”

“I’m sorry. She had left some things in a hotel room, and I could tell that she hadn’t made a serious attempt to keep people from finding out she was there—didn’t know it was necessary, didn’t even know how. I was trying to pick up her belongings and get out before anybody else showed up. I couldn’t hang around waiting for you, or even send people around the hospital to hunt you down.” She hesitated for a moment, then realized that she owed him the next admission. “I didn’t even know what to say to you if I did.”

“That brings us to my next question,” he said. “Where is ‘out’? Where are you?”

She thought for a moment. If anyone was listening to this conversation, they would already know where it had come from. “I’m in Ohio right now, but I’m just at a rest stop, and I’ll be on the road again in a minute. I know this makes you angry and it hurts your feelings. I know I promised never to do this again. I swear I’m not doing this because I missed the old days, or that it’s fun. I don’t, and it isn’t. I felt that I couldn’t say no.”

“I figured that out,” he interrupted. “This call isn’t exactly a surprise, you know. I’ve had a couple of hours to think about where you must have gone, and about what I should feel about it, what I should say. What it comes down to is this. When I said ‘I love you’ it wasn’t just automatic, like ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine, and how are you?’ It’s the truth. The decision is made. It’s too late to talk you out of it, so all I can do now is figure out how to make this easier for you. I would like you back in one piece, and very soon.”

Jane could feel tears beginning behind her eyes. “Every time I think I have you figured out, you always amaze me.”

“I don’t think I want to get into an amazement contest with you. Now, what can I do? Do you need me to send money, or—”

“No,” she said. “Nothing. I don’t need anything. I just called to tell you that I’m all right, and to say I’m sorry I had to do this. I probably won’t be home for at least a couple of weeks, and I may not be able to call.”

“A couple of weeks?”

“That’s a guess,” said Jane. “Her situation is a little vague, so I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to have to do to get her out of it. It could be longer.”

“You mean you did this without even knowing what her trouble is?” he asked.

Jane sighed. “I know who is looking for her. The rest doesn’t really matter, because I know about him. I can’t just let him have her.”

“Who is he?”

“I can’t talk about it anymore,” she lied. “I’m in a public place, and I’ve got to get going in a second.”

“You aren’t saying it because it’s a name people know, isn’t it?” he said. He was too quick, too perceptive.

She took the phone from her ear, wanting to hang it up, but sure that he would know it had been intentional. “Yes,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.

“If it’s somebody like that, how can you possibly expect to—”

“I have to try.”

“My God.” Carey’s voice was strained, incredulous. “It doesn’t matter to you who wins, does it?”

“Of course it does,” she said. “But it matters more that somebody try.”

He was silent for a few seconds. She heard him draw in a deep breath and blow it out slowly. “I don’t understand. Or maybe I do, and I just don’t agree. I can’t pretend that I do. Arguing about it isn’t going to do any good, is it?”

“No,” said Jane. “It isn’t.”

“I love you, and I’ll be in the usual places waiting to hear from you. You already know that if I can do anything to help you, I will.”

“Thanks, Carey,” she said. “I promise that the second I can come home, I will. I love you. Got to go.” She hung up.

As she walked to the ladies’ room she felt guilty and sorry and, most of all, unsettled. What she had been doing from a year before they had met in college until the day they had married had always been hard to talk about. She had considered agreeing to marry him to be a promise to stop being a guide. But she had been away twice since then.

The first time it had been Pete Hatcher—a man she had hidden before she had made the promise. One night she had learned he’d been spotted, and was running again. She had considered him unfinished business, and she had gone off to make him disappear for good.

In the year after that, she and Carey had both gotten attached to the idea that making people disappear was just something she used to do when she was young and single. When they talked about the past, it was the shared past—things that had happened to both of them—or the distant past inhabited by parents, aunts, and uncles. But Richard Dahlman had changed that.

Dahlman was a doctor, the older surgeon who had taken Carey on as a novice and taught him. Jane had never met him until the night when he had turned up at Carey’s hospital with a policeman’s bullet in his shoulder. Jane had plucked Dahlman out of the hospital and kept him invisible while she had tried to sort out how a respected surgeon had gotten into that kind of trouble. She had done it because Carey had asked her to.

But apparently then, or in the months after that, something had quietly changed. It seemed that when Carey had asked her to make one more person disappear, he had forfeited—no, knowingly spent—his right to demand that she never do it again. She had heard it in his voice tonight, and she didn’t like it.

While she was listening to the girl’s story this afternoon, she had acknowledged that Carey would not be pleased. Then she had told herself that Carey would understand why this, too, was an exception. But to Carey, this had been merely the first instance to occur after he had given up his right to an opinion. Marriages were more fragile and complicated than she had ever imagined. Trouble came in quiet, unexpected ways. Things had to be said over and over again, all existing agreements renewed and clarified.

When Jane returned to the car, the girl was half-turned in the front seat and the old man was leaning forward in the back, while they talked. As soon as the girl saw Jane coming, they stopped and both stared straight ahead. Jane wasn’t sure that she liked that, either. She got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and drove off onto the highway.

It took only a few minutes for the old man to speak. “You know, I think I’m going to need a car. Mansfield is big enough to have a couple of used-car lots. Suppose Rita comes in with me to buy one. I’m old, so nobody is shocked if I’m old-fashioned enough not to trust banks. I pay cash. Rita makes a big deal about what a crazy old coot I am—you know, like she’s embarrassed—and the salesman sells it to me. That way I don’t need a bank account with a name on it and all that.”

Jane muttered, “If you have a valid driver’s license, I assume it must be in your own name. Otherwise it might work.”

“What might work better?” asked Bernie. “How about if we rent an apartment, you buy a car under a false name, wait for the ownership and registration to come in the mail, and sign the pink slip over? Would that be better?”

“You know it would,” said Jane. “But I’m not staying in an apartment with you for a month while the state of Ohio gets around to mailing a lot of papers. I own this car—not in my real name, of course. We’ll go to Mansfield. I’ll sign the car over and Rita and I will be on our way.”

“Oof,” moaned Bernie.

Rita turned in her seat. “What’s wrong?”

“Uh … nothing,” said Bernie. “I guess I’m just tired.” To Jane he said, “Keep going.”

“I don’t have much choice,” she said. “There’s not much point in stopping unless we come to a hospital.”

“No,” said Bernie. “I don’t need a doctor, and if I did, the price of stopping would be a little steep. I’m just not used to the excitement, and I’ve been out a lot today. When we got to the hotel and Rita wasn’t there, I went to see the Falls. Pretty spectacular.” Jane expected him to be quiet, but he added, “The day I died we were in San Antonio, Texas. Before the credit report came telling us where to find Rita, I got to see the Alamo.”

It was clear to Jane that he wanted to continue talking, but she was not sure whether he was trying to ignore some pain or keep her occupied. “What did you think of it?”

“All my life I’ve been hearing about it,” he said. “But it’s not much to look at. A crappy place to die. Don’t you think so?”

“I’m not a believer in last stands,” she said. “I’m a believer in running.”

Bernie chuckled. “That comes with the high I.Q., I guess.” He was quiet for only a few seconds. “I wanted to go to all of those places.”

“You mean since you died?”

“No. I’ve wanted to see Disneyland, for instance. I’ve wanted to know what the fuss was about since they started building it in the fifties.”

“Danny was going to take you to all those places?”

“Others, too. He was a good kid. He was scared shitless for this trip, but I kept him at it. We just got to Niagara Falls this morning.”

When they reached the Mansfield city line, Bernie said, “Honey, I hate to be trouble, but I’d like it if you could stop at a motel around here. I got to rest.”

Jane was careful not to pick the first one. She wasn’t ready to trust Bernie the Elephant.

When the car came to a stop beside the third motel, Jane saw that Rita was sitting stiffly, pretending to stare straight ahead, but her eyes had sneaked to the corners of their sockets to see what Jane was going to do.

“Thanks, honey,” said Bernie. “Get three rooms. If they see you two go into one with an old man, they’re not going to respect you.”

Jane reached across Rita to open the glove compartment and take an envelope out.

Bernie said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m signing the pink slip to the car.” She put it back into the glove compartment and closed it. “This way, if my sanity returns in the middle of the night, Rita and I can get a cab without waking anybody up to say good-bye.” She got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked toward the motel office.