14
Jane spent the morning preparing to leave home. She packed the clothes that she would need in a small suitcase and included her empty backpack inside, two more packets of identification and credit cards, and more cash. She walked to the nearest grocery store, which was only about a half mile down the road, bought food for Carey, and walked back. She left a bottle of eighteen-year-old Macallan single malt scotch on the kitchen table with a crystal glass to hold down her note to him. All it said was: “There are still fourteen more rooms in this house.” That would give him something to think about.
She said quietly to the empty house in Seneca, “Thank you for visiting me in my dream, grandmother. I’ll name you Keha kah je: sta e.” It was literally my black eyes.
Jane went outside, locked the door, and walked down the road to the bus stop to catch the bus to the station at Sheridan Drive and Getzville Road. She caught the rural service bus to Lockport, took another to Batavia, but got off at the Pembroke exit of the thruway. She took out her copy of the service order Ray Snow had given her when she’d left her car with him. She dialed the number she found on it and heard, “Snow’s auto.”
“Hi, Ray. This is Jane Whitefield.”
“Hey, Janie. Are you coming back for your car?”
“Well, I’m making my way there. I’ve gotten as far as the Pembroke rest stop on the thruway. I took a Greyhound.”
“Get yourself a cup of coffee. I’ll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“See you then.”
Twenty minutes later, she saw her white Volvo S60 coast along the exit ramp into the parking lot, and then glide up to the building. Jane tossed her suitcase on the backseat, sat down beside Ray, and fastened her seat belt. Ray smiled. “How was your hike?”
“Tiring. Thanks so much for picking me up, Ray.”
“No big deal. We do this all the time for our customers, and most of them don’t have such nice cars.” He drove toward the ramp back onto the thruway.
“I’m glad you like it. It’s about six years old.”
“Mechanics like a car that’s been cared for, and I like them better if they didn’t just come off the lot. I buy a few used ones now and then and fix them up for resale. If you ever want to get rid of this one, don’t trade it in. I’ll give you a better deal.”
Jane looked at him through the corner of her eye. “Do you happen to have any cars you’ve fixed up at the shop right now?”
“A couple.”
“I’m wondering if you have one I could rent for a while.”
“So you found Jimmy.”
“If you knew something like that, then sometime you might get asked about it under oath. You’d have to tell the truth. Fortunately I don’t know who you’re talking about. But what about the car?”
“Sure. I’ll rent you one.”
“I’ve got to be clear about this. I might not be able to return it in mint condition or right away. But I’ll pay for anything that happens to it.”
“Fine,” he said. He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then returned his eyes to the road ahead.
They drove up to Snow’s garage and he parked Jane’s car in a row of other cars of various makes and models. He walked over to a Ford Mustang that was red with black stripes running along the hood, roof, and trunk. “I put a five-liter Racing Crate Mustang Boss 302 V8 in there. It’s supposed to deliver four hundred forty-four horsepower, but I brought everything else up a notch too, so it should be faster than that.”
“I was thinking of something quieter, a little less vivid.”
“I’ve got that too,” Ray said. He stepped up to a small navy blue car and patted it on the trunk. “This VW Passat is a good, reliable car, and one you can hardly see if you’re standing beside it. I haven’t done anything but a tune-up, because it runs great and doesn’t have dents or scratches. That’s not the kind of car that interests me much.”
“That’s perfect. Dull is good.”
“Hold on a second.” He went into the shop and opened a drawer behind the back counter, then came back with the keys. He handed them to her.
“What about my Volvo? Can I pay now for the work you did?”
“No. It’ll be easier to handle everything at once when you come back. Besides, I heard something when we were driving on the thruway a few minutes ago—a little faint whine. It could just be a fan belt, or it could be a transmission problem. I’ll have to keep it to check it out. That VW is your free loaner until your car is ready.”
“Gee, Ray. You’re such a lousy liar I’ll trust you forever.”
“Thanks. By the way, the car came from Pennsylvania. The old license plate is still in the trunk, and it’s current. Maybe you’ll find a use for it. Say hi for me to, uh, any old friends you happen to meet.” He took Jane’s suitcase out of the backseat of the Volvo and put it in the backseat of the Volkswagen.
“I’ll do that.” Jane got in and backed the VW out of its space. She could already hear the smoothness of the engine. She drove down the road a few miles to the thruway, and then east to Rochester and stopped at the Hyatt Regency hotel on East Main Street adjacent to the Convention Center. The hotel was large, fairly new, and had been renovated within the past couple of years. She checked in and gave the desk clerk a credit card in the name of Janet Eisen.
Jane had built Janet Eisen over a period of six years, beginning with a birth certificate that had been inserted into the records of the county clerk’s office in Chicago. She had gotten an Illinois driver’s license, a diploma from a long-defunct local parochial high school, St. Luc’s. In time Janet Eisen had submitted her resume to a few online employment agencies. The resume listed a BA degree from North Ohio Business and Technical School, an entity that had gone bankrupt in the 1990s, but had a ghostly afterlife due to the efforts of a man who sold artfully concocted academic transcripts. Janet Eisen had also applied for everything she could get without much risk or effort—library cards, gym memberships, magazine subscriptions, frequent flyer -programs—so within a year or two she had been firmly established in an online existence. Jane had even inserted a few articles about her in online publications so anyone checking her name on Google would find her. Jane had hired her to work in McShaller, Inc., the consulting business Jane had incorporated fifteen years ago. Jane used the business to run credit checks and buy information, but it also allowed the fictitious Janet Eisen to give imaginary people jobs, employment histories, and glowing recommendations.
Jane didn’t have a clear idea of who might be searching for Jimmy—or for her—or what resources they might use. Today she was making sure that if someone searched, she would be in a spot that was far down the list of likely hiding places. This hotel was big and full of business people just like Janet Eisen who were in Rochester for conferences, business meetings, and sales visits to local companies. As soon as Jane had checked in at the hotel she walked down Main to the convention center and registered for the convention that was starting that day. It was a convention for the medical information storage and transcription industry, and would last a week. She paid a two-hundred-dollar fee, accepted a folder full of information about meetings and presentations, and a map of booths in the Convention Center. While she waited, her name badge was printed and inserted in a plastic case that hung from a lanyard. She put it around her neck so she looked like everyone else, then walked back to the hotel with a few of the women from the convention.
She went to the hotel business center and signed on to a computer using the account of McShaller Systems, her consulting corporation. She read the Buffalo News, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Livingston County News. She scanned every article about Jimmy Sanders or Nick Bauermeister. They all had the same things to say about the case: Bauermeister had died of a single rifle shot fired through the front window of the house he shared with his girlfriend, Chelsea Schnell, age twenty-three. Police had interviewed neighbors, friends, employers, co-workers, and then begun seeking Jimmy Sanders for an interview because he’d had a fight with Bauermeister and been charged with assault. They had left messages, but had not connected with him yet when a man came forward claiming to have sold a .30-06 rifle and a box of ammunition to Jimmy at a garage sale a couple of weeks before the murder.
Jane wrote down the name of the girlfriend and then looked up the address. She wrote down the name of the supposed gun seller, Walter Slawicky. The Livingston County paper, which was published in Geneseo, had seen fit to include a few details that the big-city papers had left out, including Nick Bauermeister’s employer, a storage company called Box Farm Personal Storage on Telephone Road near Avon. On the computer Jane ranged further in space and time, searching for the names of Bauermeister, his girlfriend, his employer, and the gun seller in any context, asking the engine to search the past five years up to the present day. Whenever she found anything she printed the page.
When Jane had exhausted her search, she tried to assess what she had. The most interesting person to look at first would be the man she knew was lying to connect Jimmy with the crime. She found Walter Slawicky’s address online. He lived on Iroquois Road in Caledonia. She looked at views of the house from street level and from above, then signed out.
Jane went back upstairs to her room, plugged her cell phone in to charge, set the alarm on it, and lay on the bed. She was asleep in a few minutes, still tired from the late night with Carey. At ten the alarm went off. She got up, dressed in a pair of black jeans, black running shoes, and a black pullover sweater. She took out a black baseball cap, but didn’t put it on yet. She wore a light gray hooded sweatshirt to counteract the unrelieved black, then took the stairs to the garage and got into her Passat.
The drive from Rochester down Interstate 390 to Caledonia was easy and fast at night. Her car was small, dark, and nondescript, so she felt confident leaving it parked along the street in Caledonia where there were a few restaurants still open. The line of other cars at the curb would camouflage hers, and she expected to be gone before the bars closed. She took off her hoodie, put on her baseball cap, and got out to walk.
Slawicky’s house was on the opposite side of the street, but Jane approached it by staying along the side where the shadows were deepest and hurrying past any building that cast light on the sidewalks. When she found the address she could see that the house had lights on. Someone must be at home. She crossed the street.
As she approached the house she looked carefully in all directions to be sure there wasn’t anyone on the street and nobody standing at windows to notice her. She slipped into the yard, then moved along the tall, untrimmed hedge at the border of the property, letting it hide her silhouette.
The house was an old one, probably from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, with a sagging covered porch and tall, narrow windows that looked cloudy as though they hadn’t been washed recently, and wispy whitish curtains behind them.
When Jane was as far back in the side yard as the first window, she glided silently to the side of the house and looked in. The window showed her a small dining room with an old table that had a number of rings in its finish from years of wet glasses, and a vase in the center with dusty silk roses in it—a faded red and a white that was now yellowish. A still-folded newspaper and pieces of junk mail were strewn around on the surface. She saw no signs of a recent female presence, and no female belongings. She was fairly sure no man would buy fake roses for his house. This looked like a house Slawicky had inherited from elderly rela-tives and never cleaned.
Through a wide opening beyond the dining room table she could see a darkened living room where the changing glow of a television set was visible on the ceiling. She moved into the deeper darkness away from the dining room window and toward the living room. She picked a window on the television’s side where she would not have its glare in her eyes. What she had to minimize now was motion. If Slawicky’s eye caught movement he would be unable to keep from turning to look. She slowly moved her face close to the side of the house and brought only her left eye near the corner of the window.
There he was in a chair in front of the television set. He was about forty-five to fifty years old, and his hair on top was retreating to the back of his skull. He was broad, and wore a light blue T-shirt that rose above his pants to reveal a round, hairy belly. There was a bottle of beer in his right hand and occasionally he lifted it to drink, but his eyes remained aimed at the television set, the pupils barely moving. When he drank, the pressure of the bottle to his mouth made his small round nose bob up and down.
The furnishings in the living room were consistent with everything Jane had seen so far. The couch was swaybacked and the arms had ladders of frayed fabric where people had leaned on them. The chair where Slawicky sat matched the couch, and both looked as though they had been bought by an earlier generation, and inherited with the house. The chair was aimed precisely at the television screen. Jane caught a reflection in the dark window across from the television set, and decided get a better look from another angle.
She moved around to the opposite window where she could see the television set. It was well over five feet wide, a plasma high-definition screen of the sort that she’d seen in stores for around four thousand dollars. In the two corners at that end of the room were pairs of detached speakers, two tall and two short. She had no idea of what those had cost, only that it was more than most people would have paid to hear every whisper of the inane commentary on televised games.
Jane moved along the driveway to the garage. The big door was closed, but she could see there was a man-size door on the side, so she tried the knob. It was locked, so she took out her pocketknife, inserted the blade into the space between door and jamb by the strike plate, pushed to depress the plunger, then pulled the door open. Inside she could see the sleek, rounded, gleaming shape of a Porsche. She stepped in and read the letters across the back: Carrera. She moved along the car, and noticed that there was a slight cloudy residue on the rear side window where the dealer’s sticker had been poorly scraped off. The car was new. It had to cost around eighty-five thousand.
Jane slipped out and relocked the door. As she stood there she saw a car slowing down and moving to the right slightly as it passed the driveway, as though the driver were planning to park. She moved around the garage to the back, and saw something else that didn’t belong, a lump under a tarp. She lifted it. This time it was a Jet Ski, bright and gleaming. She had no idea what those cost, since she detested them. She covered the Jet Ski again and moved along the side of the garage to watch the street.
She caught the shape of a man moving from the street into the far side of the yard where she had entered, and, as Jane had done, stepping along the high unruly hedge to keep his silhouette shaded by its dark opaque shape. Jane prepared to run. The man was on the side of the yard she had come from, and that put him between her and her car. If she went, she would have to go left for a distance, sneak across the road into one of the yards, and run along the backs of the houses and out to the street where her car was parked.
She pulled her black baseball cap down tight on her head with the brim low on her forehead to shield her eyes from moonlight and the faint light pollution from neon signs and distant streetlamps. She judged where the new man must be and stared to the side of that spot until she saw him move into it. He stood perfectly still for a minute or more, and then began to move again.
Jane stayed still. This man was trouble. He knew how to move in the dark without being easily detected. He took a few silent steps, then stopped and waited. He knew that if someone had heard him or sensed movement, then he must wait until the opponent’s mind had determined that there was nothing there—the impression must have been false or self-generated or unthreatening, because there had not been another to make into a pattern.
He stepped away from the hedge to the side of the house. As he did, the light from the dining room window illuminated him for a second. He was tall, thin, almost stork-like, with very short blond hair. Hello, Ike. It was the man who had been tracking her and Jimmy in Allegheny, Technical Sergeant Isaac Lloyd, State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He didn’t stop at the window for long, because in a moment Jane saw him appear at the rear corner of the house. She pulled back her head and crouched on the opposite side of the garage as he kept coming. She heard him open the smaller door of the garage and step inside.
Jane stood and moved quietly up the driveway, across the street into the yard of the house opposite Slawicky’s. She walked along behind it to the street, stayed low as she came around the trunk of her car and into the driver’s seat, slipped the key in, and started the engine.
As she drove along Iroquois Street away from Caledonia, she thought about her visit to Slawicky’s. Apparently what Sergeant Lloyd had been doing since he had lost the trail of Jimmy Sanders in the Alleghenies was looking more closely at the people who had some connection to the murder. Walter Slawicky, the man who had come forward to report that he’d sold Jimmy the murder weapon, seemed to have caught his attention. Sergeant Lloyd had just seen what she had—that the man who had implicated Jimmy Sanders in the murder seemed to have come into some money.