“It’s a gift for my mother,” Jordan said with a fake smile.
The register girl ran the credit card and asked, “Would you like a box to put it in?”
“Yes,” Jordan replied. She had been counting on this small detail, that stores in the mall didn’t box items up themselves any longer. Now they just put a folded cardboard box and the sweater in a paper bag adorned with the shop’s logo.
Jordan signed the receipt with a scrawl that imitated Karen’s name. She glanced at her watch. She needed to hurry.
At a paper goods store, she purchased a birthday card, some gaudy silver wrapping paper, and tape. Then she marched to a large chain store that specialized in sporting goods. Surrounded by Nike, Adidas, Under Armour T-shirts, sweat clothes, and manikins modeling the latest in running gear, Jordan went directly to the section marked Hunting and Fishing. A middle-aged salesman was lurking amidst camouflage clothing, fishing rods, lures, life jackets, and paddling helmets.
“Hi,” Jordan said briskly. “Can you help me?”
The salesman looked up from putting the price tags on bows and arrows, and Jordan could tell that he immediately dismissed her. Teenagers were usually over in the section with running shoes or looking for headphones for an iPod.
“My dad is a big hunter and fisher person,” Jordan said with a laugh. “I want to get him something for his birthday.”
“Well, what sort of gift?” the salesman asked.
“He really likes to bring fresh fish home for dinner,” she replied. “He has a boat that he takes out.”
Jordan’s father was an executive at a Wall Street investment firm. As far as she could tell, he had never spent a night outdoors, and he avoided leaving his office for anything more rustic than a two-martini business lunch at a French restaurant. She pointed at a display. “What about something like that? Do you think he’d use one of those?”
The salesman followed her eyes. “Well,” he said, “no fisherman who likes to bring his catch home would be caught without one. These are really good. Top of the line. A little pricey, but I bet he’d enjoy it.”
Jordan nodded. “That’s what I’ll get, then.”
The salesman took the eight-inch filleting knife down from the display. “These are Swedish and come with a lifetime sharpness guarantee.”
Jordan admired the narrow curved blade and black grip. Like a razor, she thought.
She did not have much time left before the junior faculty member would start collecting all the students for the ride back to the school, so she hurried to the second-floor ladies’ room, which she guessed would be more private than the larger toilets near the food stations. She burst in, and to her relief, she was alone.
She took the filleting knife out of its plastic packaging and removed the blade from its leather sheath. She took a single sheet of tissue and sliced it easily. Then she brandished the knife in the air, like a swordsman. That will do, she thought. Then she carefully slid it within the folds of the black turtleneck. This she placed in the box they had given her at the store. Working as quickly as she could, Jordan then took some of the brightly colored paper and ribbon and wrapped the package up, taping every crease shut. She took the birthday greetings card and wrote “Happy Birthday Mom! Hope it fits! Love Jordan” inside the card. She put this in an envelope and taped it all to the package.
The school did not allow students to own weapons of any type, but Jordan knew she needed one. She had no intention of sending the sweater to her mother, whose birthday was many months distant anyway. But no junior faculty member would ask her to unwrap such a package, and even if he did, he would just glance at the sweater inside and not feel within its folds for anything else.
Jordan wondered whether the Wolf was as good a smuggler as she was.
She tried to create the sensation of driving the filleting knife between his ribs into his heart. Drive it up under his chest bone, she thought. Be relentless. Get all your weight behind it and every bit of strength you can summon and don’t hesitate. Kill him before he kills you. The idea of surprising the Big Bad Wolf with a weapon as deadly as the filleting knife gave her a sense of safety, although the Wolf was always ill-prepared and at her mercy when she pictured the confrontation in her head. And the Wolf never had a gun or a knife or any other weapon of his own when she envisioned their face-to-face meeting.
Jordan couldn’t quite piece together how she’d gain the upper hand. She just knew she had to find a way.
One of the first things Sarah noticed about Safe Space was that some of the laws that people commonly took for granted were wildly ignored there. She liked this. She fully expected to ignore some other laws in the days to come.
For example, when she hunched over the laptop computer and started to construct a new identity out of the Cynthia Harrison information that Red One had provided, she thought she would have to keep what she was doing secret-only to find out that the staff at the women’s center were experts at creating an entirely new person out of electronic vapors.
It was not the first time, the center’s director told her, that the easiest course of action for an abused and beaten woman was to simply become someone different. The local police knew about this sideline at the center, and did nothing to stop it. There was an agreement that as long as a woman was trying to avoid becoming a victim, the cops would look the other way.
Hiding was the center’s primary purpose.
Protection was the second.
In short order, they had helped her get a copy of the dead woman’s birth certificate from the small town where Cynthia Harrison was born, which they subsequently managed to get illegally notarized, making it wonderfully and magically official. A new social security card was applied for and a replacement driver’s license was put in process through a dizzying bit of computer legerdemain. A bank account at a large national bank-nothing local that might be traced-was established with some cash that Karen had given her.
Sarah was disappearing. In her place a new Cynthia was taking shape.
When Karen dropped her off, Sarah had been welcomed with hugs and encouragement. Before she was shown to a small, functional, and sunlit room on the third floor of the old Victorian house, the director asked her some pointed questions about how dangerous her husband might be.
Sarah said nothing about Red One, Red Two, and Red Three. She made no mention of the Big Bad Wolf. She stuck to the outline of the story that Karen had invented: beaten and stalked. The director asked, “Are you armed?”
Her first instinct had been to lie about the gun in her bag. But she was lying about so many other things that this additional falsehood seemed distinctly wrong, and so she answered, “I stole a handgun.”
“Let me see it,” the director said.
Sarah had produced the weapon, handing it over butt-first. The director cracked the cylinder expertly and removed the bullets. She held these in her hand, caressing the burnished bronze of the shells before reloading the revolver, sighting once down the barrel, saying “Bang!” under her breath, and handing it back to Sarah.
“That’s quite a weapon, she said.
“I’ve never fired it,” Sarah responded.
“Well, we can do something about that,” the director continued. “But we’re always concerned about the children staying here with their mothers. Don’t want an accident. And the kids, the older ones-you know: eight, nine, ten-they might be tempted because they’re so scared of the men that might show up.”
Then she reached into her desk, removed a trigger lock, and gave this to Sarah. “The combination is seven-six-seven,” she told Sarah. “It’s easy to remember: It’s the numeric equivalent to SOS on a telephone.”