5
Jane felt trepidation as she came from the brush on the side of the Southern Tier Expressway. She stood perfectly still for a full minute as she studied the cars in the lanes close to her. She looked in each direction and reassured herself that all the threats were simple and visible. She walked onto the parking lot. Nothing had changed in this place since she’d been here twenty years ago. She kept looking ahead for signs of Jimmy. She had guessed that when he decided to escape, he would think of the path they had taken the summer when they were fourteen. Maybe she’d been wrong.
She looked at the small building at the end of the parking lot as she approached, and her stomach tightened. She hadn’t imagined she would ever return to this rest stop. She walked directly to the ladies’ room door on the small, lonely building. She pushed the door so it opened against its spring, and then closed as she came in. She looked around her. The initials scratched in the mirror over the sinks were gone. Probably someone had gone all the way and broken the mirror at some point, so it had been replaced. Today there was graffiti on the walls. Had there been twenty years ago? No. If Jimmy came here and saw the writing, he might have left a message to her here. When she had the thought she realized that was what she had been searching for—not Jimmy himself, but a message only for her, to tell her where he was hiding. Jimmy wasn’t somebody you could just track down and find at the end of a trail. He had to invite her, allow her to find him.
Jane stepped to the spot away from the door where she and Jimmy had sat that night and tried to get their sleeping bags to dry. There were the same three sinks on the right, the three stalls beyond them, and the same hand dryer on the opposite wall. She took out a hairpin like the one she hadn’t used twenty years ago and walked toward the switch plate for the lights. She stopped. Last time, when they were fourteen, Jimmy had stopped her. Keeping the lights off hadn’t kept that horrible man from finding them, but the darkness had probably saved her from being raped. This time she used the pin to turn on the lights, then stepped to the wall and began to read.
She knew his message wouldn’t be any of the big, bold marker lines. His would be one of the small pencil messages that a person had to look for. “They’re cute when they’re little, but don’t bring one home,” some woman had written. “They grow up stupid.” She kept reading the small handwriting on the wall. “Kylie, Mona, and Zoe were here, but wish they were somewhere else.” Somebody had replied, “We wish you’d never come back.” There it was. “J. If you’re here to help me out, I’m heading for the oldest place. J.”
Jane knew what Jimmy meant by the oldest place. When they had come this way twenty years ago they had been on a summer camping trip. But they had also been trying to go back in time. They had wanted to feel the way they would have felt if they’d been an Onondawaga boy and girl long ago. For them the easiest way to do that was to turn away from everything that had happened since the 1600s, and that meant entering the forest. In the second-growth woods between the Tonawanda Reservation and the southwestern part of Pennsylvania, they felt like ong-we-on-weh, “the real people.” They were on parts of the land that had not been damaged much. They were where the past still was.
Jane found the pencil in her backpack, took it out, put her face close to the wall, and erased Jimmy’s message. She checked it from several angles to be sure it couldn’t be read or brought back, then wrote in the same tiny space, “J., I’m going to the oldest place to find you. If I miss you come see me. J.,” put the pencil away, turned off the lights, and went into the cleanest stall to use the toilet, then headed to the door, pushed it open, and looked in both directions. It was at that moment that she realized she wasn’t alone.
She saw the man on the north side of the divided expressway. He was tall and thin, with blond hair, a reddish face, and big hands. She watched him emerge from the trees beyond the expressway. He began to trot toward the highway. He ran at about half speed and looked comfortable loping along, even though he was in the high weeds and uneven ground of the margin. As he neared the chain link fence, he sped up slightly, ran up the fence high enough to get his toes into some links at midpoint and his hands at the top at a vertical post, and hoisted himself up and over. As his feet hit the ground, his knees bent to absorb the shock. He popped up and resumed his trot.
Jane noticed a mechanical, trained quality to his movements, like a soldier on an obstacle course. He ran to the road and crossed without pausing to look, timing the cars without effort and stepping out of the way of one into the slipstream of the next and on to the grass stripe in the middle. “Cop,” Jane thought. He ran the way cops did when they wanted to reach a car that had stalled in the left lane.
Jane stepped back inside the restroom, closed the door, and climbed on one of the toilets to look out the window. She heard the men’s room door open and close, so she knew he had made the stop. She waited a few minutes, and then heard it again. Through the window she watched him stride across the parking lot. He was in a hurry and she knew he was in that moment of heightened alertness when he was rushing to catch up with her, hoping that she had not just turned off on another path or stopped to sleep for an hour so he would run on ahead and lose her.
The man gradually worked his way up from a long stride to a jog. She could see he was a habitual runner, a man who was comfortable going long distances on foot. As she slipped out the door and started after him, his strength and steadiness worried her.
The man crossed the narrow road that ran parallel to the expressway. The road still had a string of decrepit businesses left behind when the highway had bypassed them. She sensed that he was about to look behind him to see if he had overrun her position, so she altered her course and ducked into a small convenience store and bought some bottles of water, apples, nuts, and protein bars. Then she came out and looked southeast to southwest to spot the tallest hill along the path. That was where he would ultimately have to go to spot her. As Jane moved south she sped up, testing herself against the man.
It was already late in the day and he would be getting around to admitting that he had lost her and would have to climb to higher ground. He would be reduced to looking down from the top of the high hill and see if he could spot her on one of the trails beneath the trees. That was the most effective thing he had left to do. Ten or fifteen thousand years ago, when the ice age glaciers still covered the land a few miles north of here, Paleo-Indians used to live on the heights and watch for the migrating herds of caribou they hunted and for approaching enemies.
Jane couldn’t yet allow herself to be sure what this man was. He looked like a policeman, but he still could be almost anything—the real killer of the man Jimmy had fought in the bar, a private detective hired by the victim’s family, or a friend of the victim. Or he could be a long-distance hiker who had simply come along behind her on the trail, but had nothing to do with her or Jimmy.
She checked the level of the sun, estimated that it would be down in an hour, and decided to head up the east side of the highest hill, where it would be dark soonest, and prepare to start out before sunup.
She climbed the hill quickly, stopping only a few seconds at a time on the thickly forested slope to listen for his footsteps, or for an abrupt silencing of the birdsongs that would warn her of another interloper in the woods. The way up was steep, but it would take her to the top faster, and test her legs and her wind. In the year since she had been shot in the right thigh, she had gone harder and longer and steeper every time she felt uncertain about her strength. She had to make up for the months when she had barely been able to stand.
As Jane was approaching the summit she began to smell the pungent, perfumed scent of a pine fire. The fire was small, probably a few sappy pine twigs as kindling to start a piece of hardwood that would give off less smoke and more heat.
She moved off the path into the wooded terrain. She followed the smell and after another two hundred yards she found him. He had set up camp in a small copse a bit higher than the surrounding ground, and hidden from view by trees and brush. Jane dropped down and crawled closer to watch him. He was camped on the east side of the hill, just as she had planned to. He had unrolled a mat to pad his sleeping spot. He had a plastic tarp with brass grommets that he’d hung as a lean-to, and then spread a lightweight sleeping bag on the mat.
His simple preparations made Jane wary. He was not some fat, soft cop who spent his weeks in a patrol car and then went out on weekends to drink beer and pretend to fish. He poured water in a small pot, added some dry soup from a packet, and set it above his tiny fire to warm.
Jane considered leaving immediately, but staying might give her a chance to gain an advantage that she might not get again, so she waited. She watched the man make his dinner, and she watched him eat. He was a slow, thoughtful eater who looked at the trees and listened to the calls of birds and the chattering of squirrels in the limbs above. He was alert but at ease in the woods, and had soon finished his dinner, wiped the pot clean, and put it away. He stood up carrying a folding entrenching tool from his pack and a roll of toilet paper, and disappeared into the woods.
Jane waited a minute until she heard the entrenching tool digging into the ground fifty yards off. She kept the sound in her ears as she moved into his camp, quickly examining everything. She found a box of 9 mm pistol ammunition in his backpack, but he must have taken the pistol with him. Next she found a little black leather wallet. There was a badge that said NEW YORK STATE POLICE, and an identification card that said he was Isaac Lloyd, Technical Sergeant, Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He was based in Rochester.
When the state police had seen Jane visit Jimmy’s mother, this one must have decided to follow her. Jane thought about taking the bullets, badge, and ID, but dismissed the idea. She didn’t want to taunt this man, and alarming him would be the fastest way to turn one cop into fifty cops.
She heard the crunch of footsteps on leaves, ducked down, and moved off into the woods. When she descended again to the level of the long trail south it was already getting dark. Deep, gloomy shadows painted the east sides of the wooded hills. Jane plotted the route she would have to take to stay out of Isaac Lloyd’s sight. She thought about the name as she began to move south. Isaac was almost certainly “Ike.” Yes, he was definitely an Ike.
She reached a trail on the far side of the next hill with the sun sinking quickly, and then followed it to a north-south road. She moved along the sparsely traveled road at a strong pace for a time, and periodically stopped to verify she was still alone. She stayed on the shoulder of the road, and then began to trot. Jane let her eyes get used to the darkness and then picked up speed. She was glad she had checked his identity. She didn’t want harm to come to him, but she also didn’t want to answer the questions he might ask if he caught up with her.
At the first public trash can she took apart her cell phone and threw the battery in. At each spot where she could dispose of another part of the phone, she did. She didn’t think the police had followed her this far using her cell phone’s GPS, but she was certain they could if they knew her number, and they could get that if they knew her name. She was running for Jimmy’s life, and if they were going to overtake her, they would have to work harder than that.