Authors: Thomas Perry
Jane took the elevator to the garage and opened the tailgate of the Explorer. She unzipped the first suitcase. She picked out a pile of letters with a rubber band around them. The return addresses were all in Ohio, and the zip codes were in sequence. No, she thought. If it were that kind of mistake—a
letter put into a mailbox in the wrong state—it might not be noticed even by the charities, let alone come to the attention of criminals.
It could be something wrong with the letters themselves, but they weren’t all alike. She had written most of them herself, and Henry had read all of them before they were sealed. Maybe one of the checks had told somebody something, but the only way she could think of to find out what it might be was to talk to Henry. And how would the families know so soon? It had to be something that an ordinary person could pick up at a glance. And a person like that—any outsider—would be unlikely to see anything but the envelope. She would just have to look at the envelopes again.
She began to flip through the stacks of letters, then set each one aside. Each had been stamped, each had a plausible return address bearing a zip code in sequence with the others near it, and each was addressed to some charity.
It was ten minutes before she found the letter with no return address. It was stuck among the letters to be mailed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At first, Jane considered letting it go, but she glanced at the address: Ann Shelford, FSP, Box 747, Starke, Florida 32081.
Jane put the rest of her stacks of letters into their suitcases. She calmly placed them in order to match her new itinerary, and zipped them up. She took the single letter, closed the tailgate, and got into the front seat. Then she opened the envelope.
The print style was the one Jane had stared at for a month, from the laser printer in Santa Fe. It had been slipped in with the letters Jane had picked up in Chicago, so that it wouldn’t have a Santa Fe postmark.
“Dear Mama,” it began. Jane felt a twinge of discomfort at what she was doing, and an enormous sadness. “Things are going pretty well for me now. I’m still living in the house out in the country with that friend I told you about.” Jane’s heart stopped for a second, then began to beat harder. She reminded herself that the “friend” must be Bernie. She could have told
her mother about him as long as a year ago. Jane forced her eyes back to the letter.
“She and I have a lot in common, and we get along fine. We both like being outdoors, and traveling, and nice food. Now and then we drive into town and eat at a restaurant in a hotel called Eldorado. I’ve been trying to keep track of what I taste, and see if I can piece together the recipe. Maybe by the time I see you again, I’ll be able to cook something fancy for you. I don’t mean to make you jealous. She’s sort of like a big sister, not like a mother or anything.” Jane felt the sadness growing. Rita was a child, and she obviously had been lonely and scared, so she had created a fantasy complete with a Jane who was the way she wished Jane was. Jane’s guilt was getting worse, too. She wasn’t sure whether she had even told Rita yet, but she couldn’t think of a way that Rita could see her mother again for the next few years.
“I hope things are going okay for you. I know jail can’t be pleasant, but be patient, and maybe they’ll let you out early. I can’t come visit you like I used to, but I think about you and send you good thoughts. Well, I should get this into the envelope, because my friend is going out to mail some other things. I just wanted to write to you again right away, so I could tell you that things are better. I’m afraid my last letter might have made you feel worried.”
Jane whispered, “I don’t know, but it makes me feel worried.” She tried to collect her thoughts, but it was difficult because there were too many questions. She drove the Explorer out to the street and kept going until she saw a pay telephone attached to the front of a convenience store.
Jane dialed the telephone number of the house in Santa Fe, then pumped quarters into the slot until she had matched the toll. The telephone rang once, twice, three times, and her mind formed a picture of Bernie and Rita. They would be standing in the living room with the telephone between them. One of them would reach down to pick it up, and the other would say, “No. Don’t. Nobody knows we’re here.” “It could be Jane or Henry.” “If she was going to call, she would have
told us.” “Maybe she didn’t know.” “It could be somebody making sure we’re in the house so they can come and kill us.”
The telephone rang fifteen times, but nobody picked it up. Jane closed her eyes and stood beside the building, thinking. They could be dead already, killed by people who had read Rita’s first letter. When the telephone had rung twenty times, she hung up. Jane heard a click, and her quarters came tumbling down into the cup at the bottom of the telephone.
As she walked back to the Explorer, she realized that the decision had been made. If there was an earlier letter, probably it had been among the ones she had mailed in California or Arizona, or maybe the first batch that Henry had mailed. There was no question that the families would have someone in the Florida State Prison reading Ann Shelford’s mail. Just one detail in the letter she had read—the name of the Eldorado Hotel—would be enough. There was no way to know what Rita had put in the earlier letter. If they were alive, she had to pull them out.
J
ane drove the last miles to Santa Fe. She felt the weight of the travel and the time and the work. Whatever else happened, she told herself, the bulk of the money must be going where she had wanted it to. She had driven halfway across the country with the radio tuned to news stations, and she had heard nothing that could be interpreted as the death of Henry Ziegler. There had also been nothing to indicate that Bernie and Rita had been found. Maybe Rita’s earlier letter had not revealed anything. Maybe the postmark on it had been enough to lead the hunters in the wrong direction. She couldn’t count
on those things, and it was unlikely that talking to Rita would reassure her.
She was confident that the Explorer still had not been identified. She could use the anonymity of the vehicle to check the town for signs. Santa Fe was small, and the places where people gathered on a summer evening weren’t far apart. She drove up and down the streets near the big hotels that surrounded the plaza, then parked and walked. There were lots of pedestrians on the streets, but most of them were grouped in ways that didn’t worry her. There were many couples—some with children and a few too old to be dangerous. The males who had no females attached to them were not the sort who raised the hairs on the back of her neck. The ones who were young, strong, and appeared to be searching seemed not to be looking for a resemblance, but a reception. Their eyes passed across her face with expressions that began as appraisal and then softened into something like hope, and finally subsided into disappointment when she deadened her own expression to look through them.
After her short walk she knew she should be reassured. If some hunting team had been close to finding the house, she probably would have noticed a few soldiers by now. Her walk through the public places in the city would have turned up at least two or three men who didn’t move much and stared at everyone who passed.
It still would not do to drive up to the house without being sure it was safe. If she approached it on foot after dark, she would have some chance of seeing an enemy before he saw her. She parked the Explorer on Canyon Road on a block lined with art galleries that had been closed for the night, then locked it and walked. Jane could see that it would be dark soon, but she had no fear that she would forget the way to Bernie’s house. She had made the trip on foot several times, and once she was a couple of miles from the city, the lights of the house would serve as a beacon.
As she crossed Apodaca Hill Road and moved into the brush and stunted trees on the far side, she felt better. If
nothing had gone wrong, this would be no more than a pleasant evening stroll.
She strode quietly with her eyes ahead and her ears tuned to the sounds around her. Jane had never been uncomfortable walking in wild country alone. The dry terrain of New Mexico was still alien to her, but it had an unearthly beauty in the early evening, when the last remnants of sun-glow kept the sage and piñon visible and let her feel confident about where she placed her feet. As the minutes went by, the deepening of the shadows made her feel even better. She had learned a long time ago that—barring falls and getting lost—a human being’s worst chance of harm on this continent was from other human beings.
As she walked, she picked out shapes and configurations of rocks and spiky plants that she remembered. Somewhere in her memory she carried a map of this area, and she began to navigate by it. She knew she would have to turn and walk a few paces to the left soon, because there was a dry arroyo coming up and that was the most gradual way down. She did it, then came up the other side. She knew there was a big piñon tree at about the eleven o’clock position from where she stood, and she walked to find it. The longer she walked, the clearer it all seemed.
She could see the house now, alone in the middle of the horizon. Everything looked reassuringly calm. The lights in the kitchen were on but the blinds closed, and there was a light on upstairs in the smaller bedroom. She wondered what they were doing. Probably they were having a late dinner or washing the dishes, and they had left a light on upstairs.
Jane walked more slowly and carefully. If someone was watching the house, she didn’t want to trip over him in the dark. She bent low and tried to tell whether anyone else had passed this way recently, but in this light every indentation in the dirt could be a footprint, or could be nothing.
Then, ahead of her, she saw something, a strange, unexpected shape that she didn’t remember. It was about two feet high and bushy, but it was too long and unvarying to be natural. She changed her course to move closer. She was only
a few feet away when she made out the structure. There were posts—four of them—sticking up, and strung between them was a net. She walked around to the far side of it. The net had plants stuck in it, and a couple of large rocks along the bottom. She walked around it again. The ground on the side away from the house was smooth and flat, with a plastic tarp spread over it. She knelt down and ran her fingertips along the bare surface behind it. There were footprints on this side. They were long and deep, as though a big man, or maybe two, had stood here. It wasn’t just kids building a fort.
It was a blind. Somebody had built a blind. But what would they be hunting from blinds here, in midsummer? She stepped onto the plastic tarp, knelt down behind the blind, and looked. There was a clear, unobstructed view of the house and of the trail she was about to take to the kitchen door. She judged the distance. It must be about two hundred yards. There was a wing along the left side of the blind, so she moved to that side and looked over it. This side of the blind had been put here to command a view of the first curve of the road. A car heading from Bernie’s house toward town would come around the curve, then drive straight toward the blind for—what?—ten seconds, before the next curve began and the car went past.
Jane felt an urge to run for the house, but she held it in abeyance. She moved to the front of the blind and touched one of the plants that were stuck into the netting. It was beginning to feel spongy and dehydrated, so it had probably baked in the sun. She followed the stem to the cut, and felt a sticky, wet residue, so it had been cut within a day or two. She decided they must have built this blind after dark last night, when Bernie and Rita could not have seen them doing it. She stared at the blind. They must have planned to come back tonight after dark to occupy it. The sun had already been down a half hour. She let her eyes go unfocused and looked around her for other disturbances in the landscape. A hundred feet to her right she saw a group of big rocks she remembered from her other visits, but it looked different tonight.
She moved closer and saw that a couple of feet behind the
rocks was a darker shadow that kept fooling her eyes. Was there a tarp there too? She reached the spot and looked down. It wasn’t a tarp. It was a hole … a foxhole? She dropped to her knees and stared into it, then saw a vague line in the shadows. She reached down for it and touched a smooth wooden handle. She grasped it and lifted it, and found that it was much longer than she had expected, at least four feet. It was a shovel. This wasn’t a foxhole. Nobody could stand in a six-foot hole and still see over those rocks. She looked at the shovel. The spade end seemed to have an odd glow in the darkness.
She held it closer. It was covered with a bright white powder-fine dust. She used it to probe the hole, and heard a sound of paper rustling. She pushed the shovel lower to bring the paper object closer to the surface, where she could see it. The object was a big empty bag. She saw the word “Lime.” She dropped the shovel and stepped back to measure the hole with her eyes. It was a grave.
Jane turned toward the house and broke into a run, dashing straight for the kitchen. When she reached the steps, she leapt up to the landing and pounded on the door.
She stepped back, so that when the porchlight came on she would be right in the middle of it, where Rita could see her, but the light didn’t come on. Instead, the door opened and Bernie said, “Sorry, honey. This is the doorman’s night out, and I didn’t hear your car.”
Jane stepped inside and pushed past him. “I left it in town. Where’s Rita?”
Bernie opened the broom cupboard to put his shotgun away. “Upstairs. She said she was going to read. She’s got the radio on, so I guess her eyes and ears are on separate circuits.” He frowned. “Is something wrong?”
Jane hurried through the dining room past the computers, across the living room, checking that the windows were covered, then up the stairs. “Rita!” she called.
“Yeah?” The voice came from the back bedroom.
Jane stepped inside. Rita was lying on the bed with her bare
feet propped up on a pillow with bits of tissue jammed between her toes while the nail polish dried. There was a magazine opened facedown on the other pillow. She sat up quickly. “What’s going on?”