Seaver clung to this theory for
another half hour, waiting impatiently for the news woman to come
back from a commercial and announce that the initial identification
had been wrong. His hope ended when the newswoman came back from a
commercial with, instead, footage of the victim’s parents
leaving the coroner’s office after identifying the body.
He wearily leafed through the
pile of tourist magazines the hotel maids had left on the coffee
table. They contained very little except ads for stores and
restaurants in the area, but finally he found one with three pages of
maps in it and spent a few minutes studying them.
Tomorrow morning, after he had
caught up on his sleep, he would drive up to Kalispell. It looked
like the only town up there that was big enough to hide a stranger
comfortably. He would check into a hotel there and spend some time
trying to pick up signs of Earl and Linda.
Jane
led Pete along the trail in the waning light. She kept them at a
double-time pace, along the long high cliff the map called the Garden
Wall and on to Haystack Butte. When she judged that they had traveled
two miles, she slowed to a walk. She waited for her wind to come back
and then listened while Hatcher’s deep, labored breathing
slowly became quiet. She said, “How do you feel?”
“Lousy.”
“Does your head ache?”
“Yes.”
“Dizzy?”
“Yes.”
“Green spots on your
hands?”
“Yes”
“Liar.”
“Yes.” He walked
along at her shoulder, taking deep breaths and blowing them out. She
listened to them attentively without speaking. There were no
whistles, no bubbly liquid sounds that would mean he was in trouble.
There were people who simply could not tolerate high altitudes.
Unless they were brought down, their lungs filled up with fluid until
they drowned. Starting Pete off with a two-mile jog probably had not
been the safest way to find out that he wasn’t one of them, but
she had needed to know before they had gone too far to turn back.
She had not lied to him about
needing to use the last precious hour or two of light efficiently, to
put distance between them and the road. It was already getting too
dark to run. A twisted ankle would make the next thirty miles a
nightmare.
As she walked, she subtly
increased the pace again. She tried to keep her steps regular enough
on the uneven, winding path to hold her speed. The end of the long
summer had come, so the trail was as beaten down by other boots as it
would ever be, and it had been laid out at about seven thousand feet,
along the ridges just below the treeline, where soil was thin and
poor and the constant winds stunted the fir trees.
After another mile they had
passed Haystack Butte, and in the dusky light she saw the change she
was looking for in the slopes to her left. There was a low, lush dark
carpet of bushes and evergreens – lodgepole pine, spruce, fir –
all young and thick. Among them loomed tall, ghostly gray trunks like
the masts of sunken ships.
“Look at that,” said
Pete. “I wonder why it looks like that.”
“A fire,” said Jane.
“In 1967 this patch burned.”
He craned his neck to look at
her with ironic amusement. “You from around here?”
She shook her head and smiled.
“Of course not. I spent half the day in the car looking at
maps. This is one of the places I picked out to get my bearings. If
we get lost up here we’re not going to enjoy the experience.”
“What do we look for
next?”
“After
another mile or two, we should be able to look up on our right and
see glaciers. First a little one. That’s Gem Glacier.
Then a really big one, called Grinnell Glacier.
Then Swift-current Glacier, all in a stretch of a couple of miles.”
“And after that?”
“If we get that far before
it’s too dark to travel, I’ll be very surprised.”
He walked along for a time, then
said, “I guess I should be delighted at the news that I don’t
have to keep trudging along all night. To tell you the truth, though,
the farther we get from that guy with the rifle, the better I feel.
And there’s even something about it getting dark that’s
comforting. I’ve been having a prickly feeling in the back of
my neck, like he’s back there looking down the barrel at me.”
Jane turned and looked up at him
with an enigmatic smile. “He wouldn’t be looking down the
barrel. Nobody puts a round through somebody’s temple from that
far out without a scope.”
“You’re a very
strange woman. You know that?”
“Of course I do.”
She smiled. “It’s something I’ve cultivated over
the years. But I’ll bet you want to keep going even more than
you did a minute ago, don’t you?”
He seemed to be consulting an
inner voice as he walked. “You’re right. It worked. I
feel bad enough to walk for hours.”
“Bad isn’t exactly
the feeling I was looking for, but that’s the price. As long as
you never let your brain stop working, thinking about what’s
behind you, you’ll be very hard to kill.”
“So the prickly feeling in
the back of the neck doesn’t go away.”
“That’s right. I
have it right now.”
Pete half-turned his head to
look as he walked. There was nothing behind them but the empty trail
as far as the last bend. “You think they’re back there?”
“If I did, I’d be
running for my life,” she said. “I think they’re
good. They’ll find out the car was left in that lot in about
three days, when it’s towed out of the park. By then the only
road here will be closed to visitors, the nearby car crossings into
Canada will be closed too, and the long detours that go up there
don’t go to where we’ll be. What I think they’ll do
next is give up.”
The sky was darkening quickly
now, and she saw the glow of his teeth that had to be a smile.
“Really?”
“They’ve been
following you for about a hundred days. They’ve committed two
murders they won’t get paid for. They’ve exhausted the
computer searches, because from here on we aren’t going to use
credit cards or even names, if we can help it. That means the hunting
is going to get much harder. Following you into a foreign country
adds a level of extra risk. I think for a professional, the point of
diminishing returns has come. They’re in it for the money, and
if this goes on much longer, the money’s not good enough. They
could have made more of it more easily doing bitter divorce cases and
premature life-insurance payouts.”
“Won’t Pleasure,
Inc. hire somebody else?”
“There are several
possibilities. One is that these killers will tell Pleasure, Inc.
where they lost you. Pleasure, Inc. will decide that if you’re
in Canada, then you’re not planning on talking to American
police. A second possibility is that the people who are after us now
will keep Pleasure, Inc. on the hook – tell them to be patient,
they’re on your trail – but not waste any time actually
hunting. Once a month they’ll use the computer to see if your
aliases turned up again.”
“So I should feel good,
right? I’m not being stupid.”
“No. Because in a week or
so they’ll probably be off stalking somebody else, and if
they’re replaced, the new ones will be starting at zero. This
morning you were talking about a different feeling you had –
that you were glad to be alive. It’s not gone, is it?”
“No.”
“The quiver in the back of
your neck doesn’t go away, but the good feeling doesn’t
either. Now that you’ve had it, every day is going to feel as
though you won it in a world championship.”
He laughed. “It already
does.”
“You’ll notice other
things later.”
“What things?”
“Good things. The kind of
ambition that’s stupid, the kind that makes you want a fancy
car and a big house and flashy clothes, goes away.”
“Why?”
“Because having them makes
you feel as though people are looking at you, and that’s
uncomfortable. Being average, normal, makes you feel comfortable, and
it isn’t very different unless you read labels very closely.
That was always true, of course, but now you’ll be able to feel
it, because you know that being a regular guy is a million miles from
being dead.”
The trail led them up between
thickets of berry bushes, across meadows of wildflowers now dry and
well past blooming. As the light died for the night, Jane could see
the higher peaks on her right, but the blue-white glacial ice was
lost in the black silhouettes of the mountains. They walked on,
sticking to the center of the path in the dark. Jane took her
flashlight out of her pack and let it play on the ground in front of
her. Finally, as the trail led them up into a stand of stunted pine
trees, she stopped, knelt on the ground, and studied the map.
“Are we lost yet?”
asked Pete. She felt his shoulder beside hers as he knelt down to
look at the little circle of light.
She put her finger on the map.
“We’re here.” It was a spot where twisting dotted
lines seemed to radiate in all directions, like the strands of an
unraveling rope. “The trail on the left goes back to the road,
then up Flattop Creek. The one on the right goes through Swiftcurrent
Pass and connects with this whole network of trails up here. This one
in the middle is the one we want.” She aimed her flashlight up
the path, and in the glow around it, Pete caught a glimpse of a
wooden sign.
“So what’s the
problem?”
She frowned. “Never give
up a chance to deceive. This chance is a beauty. I’m just
trying to figure out how to use it.”
He said, “Switch the
sign?”
“They wouldn’t be
looking for one trail or another. They’d be looking for us,
probably our footprints. We’ve already put about seven miles of
them on the path, and if they were following, by now they wouldn’t
have much trouble recognizing them.”
Pete sat and waited while Jane
stared at the map, then stood up, opened his pack, and handed him his
flashlight. “This is probably a waste of time,” she said.
“But if they do follow us, it isn’t. You go down the left
path as far as you can until it gets so narrow you can’t step
off it. A quarter mile would be great, but at least a couple of
hundred yards. When you get to that point step off, and come back
parallel with the trail, never stepping back onto it. Meet me here.”
Jane walked down the trail to
the right alone. She stopped once to listen for Pete’s
footsteps, and when she heard them they sounded as though he was
doing what she had asked. One of the qualities that made Pete Hatcher
worth saving was that he never resisted. He wanted to live, so if she
was willing to help him, he would do what she asked. Simple.
As she walked, she imagined
herself taking Carey out of the world. Everything he said would be a
question too, but the questions he asked would come from a more
complicated intelligence, one that would be sifting and evaluating
and testing alternative logical paths. The problem with classically
intelligent people was that they seemed to be able to discern too
many alternatives to pick any of them during the brief periods when
what they did still mattered. She wondered what she had meant by
that, and was back to the night ten months ago when Carey had asked
her to marry him. She had said she would not marry him right then.
She would tell him about her last trip – about who she really
was – and then give him a year to think before he asked again.
He had not listened and then
said instantly, “I don’t care about any of this. Marry me
now.” He had listened judiciously and then let the waiting
period begin. When he had thought about it for a month, instead of
sticking to the terms and letting her spend the year cutting her
ties, he had realized that he didn’t want to wait – not
shouldn’t, but didn’t want to. He had been unfair. He had
focused his intellect on convincing her to marry him while she still
had no business marrying anyone.
Her mind abruptly collided with
something and jumped to another track. That story was fictitious.
Jane Whitefield walked through the world with her eyes wide open. She
could not pretend she had not known what might happen, or what she
would do if it did. She had always felt contempt for women who
accepted the theorem that if they were unhappy it could only be
because their husbands had not made them happy. This must be how it
started: constructing convoluted proofs that their mistakes were not
actually their mistakes but their husbands’ failure to prevent
them or cure them. Not me, she thought. I did this, because I wanted
his love more than I wanted to be careful. Now I’m going to get
through it and go home to my husband, who is impatient because he
adores me.
She watched the path narrowing,
the rock slope on her right rising into a wall, and the little margin
of weeds on her left thinning into a ledge that bordered a steep
chasm. She put the flashlight into her back pocket, leaned both hands
on the wall, placed her toes on the weeds, and began to sidestep back
the way she had come. She had inched along for fifty feet before she
was able to stand upright again. Then she carefully took a diagonal
course down a gentler slope and headed for the crossroads.
When she approached the rocky
knoll, she saw Pete Hatcher waiting patiently for her. She switched
on her flashlight so he would see her coming and not be startled.
“Been waiting long?”
“No,” he said. “Just
got here. I went as far as a streambed, where it started to get wet.
I came back through the woods.”
“Very good,” she
said. She sat beside him. “Now we change our socks.” He
watched her untying her boots for a second, then did as she said.
When they had their boots on again, she said, “Now put the old
socks on over your boots.”
“It’s a tight fit,”
he said as he tugged and stretched.
“It’s okay,”
said Jane. “Now stuff some of these dry weeds under the soles
of your boots, inside the sock, for padding. Don’t use leaves,
because they’ll squish and get juicy. No pine needles, because
they’re slippery.”