1
There were still moments when the old life seemed to be on the
verge of returning—there would be something out of place
near the vanishing point of her sight or in the periphery. A bit
of the past seemed to materialize for an instant, just long enough
to catch Jane’s eye and cause her to remember it, then recede
again to become indistinguishable from the soft, familiar landscape.
Sometimes it would be no more than a sound—a spring-loaded
metallic click-scrape noise that turned out to be a door bolt
slipping into its receptacle, but could have been the slide of
a pistol cycling to snap the first round into the chamber.
Usually it would be a man who made her uneasy. A few times it
had been men in crowds who had resembled other men from other
times. Once it was only a stranger in a deserted mall parking
structure who happened to be walking in the wrong place for too
many steps—a bit behind Jane and to her right, where she
would be most vulnerable to attack. The old habits of mind emerged
again in a reflex. As she prepared her body to make the sudden
dodge, her ears listened to his footsteps to detect a change in
his position. Her eyes scanned the area around her to record its
features—the shapes of parked cars she could put between
them, small pools of bright light on the pavement to avoid, the
railing she could roll over to drop to the next level down without
running for the stairs. Then, as each of the others had done,
this man changed his course, unaware that he had startled her,
and walked off in another direction. Usually it had been men.
Today, it was just a young girl. From a distance, the girl looked
about fourteen: the thin, stringy blond hair that kept getting
in her eyes; the narrow hips and bony chest; the clothes she wore
that were a little too tight and too short, but made Jane wonder
about her mother rather than about her. The girl first appeared
on the Seneca reservation, and that was the first sign. She was
too blond to be somebody’s cousin from Cattaraugus or Allegany,
and too young to work for the government, and Jane couldn’t
see any obvious explanation of how she had gotten there.
It was twelve miles from the Tonawanda reservation to the house
in Amherst where Jane and Carey lived. Since Jane had begun to
construct her new life she had spent more and more time on the
reservation. First, she had visited friends and relatives, then
let the friends talk her into going with them to meetings about
tribal issues. At one of them she had volunteered to work in an
after-school program to teach the old language to kids who had
not learned it. All of them knew some words and phrases, and a
few could make sentences, so the classes were easy and pleasant.
Jane had held her walks three times a week for over a year on
the day when she first noticed the girl. Jane had waited on the
high wooden front porch of Billy and Violet Peterson’s house
under the tall hemlock and watched for the school buses. When
enough of the children had gathered, Jane had gone inside with
them and talked. The simple, inevitable logic of languages was
appealing and satisfying to her students: “ah-ga-weh”
is mine, “ho-weh” is his, “go-weh” is hers,
“ung-gwa-weh” is ours, “swa-weh” is yours,
“ho-nau-weh” is theirs.
But a language carried implications and assumptions that had to
be explained. There was a history even in its lapses and absences.
A modern Seneca conversation was filled with borrowed words for
the things that filled the children’s houses—computers,
television sets, microwave ovens.
Jane found herself taking the group out to walk the roads and
fields and woods of the reservation to talk about the world. Whatever
scurried across the path ahead of them or hung in the sky above
or shaded them with its branches she could talk about without
words from new languages.
Most of the time, if Jane saw a teenaged girl watching, she would
wait until the girl’s curiosity led her close enough, then
invite her to join the walk. This girl appeared at the edge of
a distant stand of sycamores, then disappeared. Jane saw her five
times that day, but the girl never came closer. Jane couldn’t
help knowing at each moment the route the girl must be taking,
and where she would appear next. That was part of what Jane had
spent years training her mind to do. When she had seen the girl
twice, she could follow the rest of her progress with as little
conscious effort as a hunter needed to track the trajectory of
a pheasant.
Jane asked her little band of linguists who the girl was, but
each of them waited patiently for someone else to answer. Jane
said, “If she comes to join us, I want everybody to make
her feel welcome.”
But she didn’t. The last time was when Jane got into her
car at the Petersons’ house. Jane considered driving a quarter
mile, then quietly making her way back through the woods on foot
to come up beside her for a talk. Jane lowered her head and pretended
to search for something in her purse while she kept her eye on
the rearview mirror. The girl was coming out of hiding to talk
to a couple of Jane’s students. Now that she could see her
clearly, Jane began to feel a vague sense of discomfort.
There was a haggard, feral look around the eyes, and a set to
the thin lips. It was a small-featured, precocious look that reminded
Jane of the undercover policewomen they sent into high schools
to impersonate students. Jane started her car and slowly pulled
out onto the highway. If the girl was just a girl—maybe a
friend of one of the kids on the reservation—then probably
she would overcome her shyness by Monday. If she wasn’t,
then Jane had accomplished what she had needed to: she had memorized
the face.
Almost certainly, this was just another time when Jane’s
old reflexes had been triggered by something innocuous. She glanced
at her watch. She would have just enough time to make a few calls
for the hospital fund drive and then get ready for dinner.
Jane finished setting the dining room table, then walked back
into the kitchen to wash the crystal wine glasses by hand. She
had noticed that there were water spots on them. If Carey had
been here, she would have said it was because the last time they
had been put away, she and Carey had both been suffering from
the ill effects of having used them the night before. They only
had wine with dinner on special occasions, and special occasions
always ended the same way in this house. The wine glasses would
end up somewhere in the bedroom, and the dishes would be left
for morning.
As Jane rinsed the two glasses and reached for the towel, she
saw in her memory her mother making the same motion in the small
house in Deganawida. Her mother had probably been the happiest
woman Jane had ever met. She had also been a fraud. She had decided
at the age of twenty—or twenty-two, as Jane had corrected
her after her death—who she wanted most in the world to be,
and then spent the rest of her life impersonating that woman.
It had been a very sophisticated, wise thing to do, and what had
prompted her to do it had been the same five or six years that
had given her the sophistication. Jane had grown up knowing little
about her mother that was true. Her mother had been an expert
at cheerful evasion, and when Jane would ask insistent questions,
she was capable of lying with tenacity and consistency. What was
true was that Jane’s mother had somehow turned up in New
York at the age of sixteen alone. The next five or six years were
what she never spoke about. Jane had learned a little after she
had grown up. Her mother had spent those years in the company
of men who had money to share because they took it, and who, without
thinking of it, offered her a certain safety because they inspired
fear. At the end of the time, in a display of the preternatural
cunning that people who live on the margins develop as a substitute
for everything else, she had re-invented herself.
She had met Henry Whitefield, a worker in structural steel who
traveled the country with a crew of men—three Mohawks and
a couple of Onondagas from Grand River, and two other Senecas.
Now that Jane was a grown woman, she knew that their chance meeting
had been contrived. Her father, Henry Whitefield, had been too
perfect a counter to the men her mother had decided to desert.
He was tall, with skin like a copper penny and eyes like obsidian.
He was scrupulously honest—even blunt—but most of all,
he was manifestly not a man who could be dissuaded by any conceivable
threat of harm. Men who walked on steel girders twenty-five floors
above the street in uncertain winds were unlikely to be intimidated
by anything they met on the ground. The fact that he traveled
in the company of a whole crew of similar men would have reassured
her too: she would have misinterpreted it at first, because it
looked like the way her old companions behaved. But she had been
a woman with acute instincts, and she had probably sensed that
the misinterpretation was not entirely wrong: if he were in danger,
the others would circle around him.
They were both long dead now, but they were not absent. They had
taken up residence behind Jane’s eyelids. Jane’s mother
had re-invented herself as Mrs. Henry Whitefield and lived the
next eleven years in blissful imposture. She was the sort of wife
who always looked as though she had just changed her clothes and
fixed her makeup. She was the sort of mother who had time for
everything and overdid the birthdays and indulgences. And she
had tended Jane as though she were training her to rule a small
kingdom.
Before Jane was born, her mother became conservative in dress
and manner like other children’s mothers, but it didn’t
disguise either the reasons why she had gotten into her troubles
or why she had survived them. Henry Whitefield’s best friend,
Jake Reinert, who still lived next door to the old house in Deganawida,
had once said to Jane that her mother had been “the single
best-looking female human being not only to live in Deganawida,”
but, he had insisted, “the best-looking ever to pass through
it by a nonflying conveyance.” Then he had added wistfully,
“It’s a shame you didn’t get more of her . . .
disposition.”
During the horrible summer, six years after her father was killed,
when her mother was dying of cancer, there had been a frantic
period of talk. Her mother would palm her medicine and fight the
pain so she could talk to her for hours at a time. She had been
doing something she admitted was laughable—trying to tell
her daughter everything she would need to know from the age of
nineteen to the age of forty.
Their conversations were full of things almost said: “After
I met Henry I was never unhappy another day of my life.”
For years afterward, Jane wondered at the foolishness of it, but
she sensed that she had heard only part of it. Her mother had
not told Jane that happiness was not something she had waited
for, but something she had decided. Jane had carried the things
her mother had said and done as though they were statements in
another language, then slowly, one by one, she had realized that
she understood them. In a way, she knew, she was emulating her
mother. She had spent the early part of her adult life doing something
that was dangerous—always illegal, and on the occasions when
she made a wrong turn or a wrong guess, punctuated with bright
flashes of violence. She had been a guide. People whose lives
were in danger had found their way to her—first a young man
she knew, and after that, a woman who simply knew someone she
knew, and, later, strangers. She had moved them to other places,
given them other names, and taught them how to live other lives.
Then one day, she had agreed to become Mrs. McKinnon, and begun
to make Jane Whitefield the last of the fugitives to disappear.
Since then she had devoted herself, just as her mother had, to
being the woman she wanted to be. For the past two years, she
had refused to allow herself to fall asleep at night without being
able to say to herself, “This was a good day. I’m glad
I didn’t waste it.” She was not ashamed of her premeditation.
When Carey got home, she was going to demonstrate that her mother’s
wisdom had not been lost on her. Carey didn’t have to go
to the hospital tomorrow until evening rounds, and she had decided
she was going to keep him up for most of the night. She went upstairs
and began to fill the tub for her bath.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpted from Blood Money by Thomas Perry Copyright 2002 by Thomas
Perry. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division
of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from
the publisher.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
