She carried them upstairs to the master suite, showered and dressed. Then she walked the few yards down the hall to the room she had allowed herself to think of as the baby's room.
She opened the upper two dresser drawers and took out the stacks of neatly folded baby outfits, the receiving blankets, the soft, hooded towels and washcloths, the tiny socks. From another drawer she took out the mobile she had bought to hang over the crib, the pictures she had selected for the walls, the sets of crib bumpers. Then she added the stuffed animals that had been so perfect when she had seen them in the stores that she had prudently brought them home for fear she would never find them again when the time came. Everything she had been saving for the baby went into the first three plastic storage boxes, and then Jane put on the lids and sealed them with duct tape.
The last item she carefully lifted from a hook on the wall. It was a Ga-ose-ha, a cradleboard. Jane had never made up her mind whether she would actually use it. It was a beautiful object, about two feet long and a foot wide, with the footboard and the protective bent wood bow above the place for the baby's head both carved in a diamond pattern. The fabric that was supposed to lace the baby in was black with bright beaded vines studded with white, red, yellow, and blue flowers. She had no idea how old it was. Her grandmother had told her once that her mother had put her in it and hung her to rock in the wind while she tended her garden on the Tonawanda reservation.
Jane wrapped the Ga-ose-ha in white tissue paper, set it carefully in its own plastic box, then sealed the box. It belonged in a museum anyway, she thought. Probably that was where it would end up.
She stacked the four boxes, carried them to the door at the far end of the hall, and climbed the narrow stairs to the attic. She switched on the light and took the boxes around the covered rack of winter clothes on hangers, and between four trunks full of antique china that some ancestor of Carey's had not been able to sell in his long-vanished general store. She set her four plastic storage boxes on the old leather couch with horsehair stuffing that had been stored in the attic since Carey's grandfather died. She took a last look, then went back down the stairs.
Jane went to the kitchen, poured some coffee into a silver thermos cup, screwed the top on, picked up her purse from the counter, and went out the door. She got into her white Volvo, backed out of the garage, and drove toward Deganawida.
On the Youngmann Expressway it took only about fifteen minutes to get to the small town beside the river, and another five to reach the stretch of old, narrow houses where she had grown up. As usual, Jane parked her car in the garage and rolled down the garage door to keep from being noticed. She went to the kitchen door because it gave her a chance to walk around to the back of the house and check for broken windows or jimmied locks.
She went into the kitchen and stood still for a minute, listening to the sounds of the house and smelling its familiar smells. Then she opened four windows and descended the stairs to the basement to return her remaining sets of identification cards to their hiding place. She returned to the ground floor and did some dusting, then rolled the vacuum cleaner from the front closet and vacuumed the floor. It occurred to her that on one of her next trips here she would have to wash the windows. The exact day didn't matter. There was no rush.
She carried the vacuum cleaner up the stairs to the second-floor landing, and rolled it a few feet toward the far end of the hall before the telephone rang. It made her jump, but then she realized that Carey must have finished his rounds early and guessed where she must be. She stepped into her old room, hurried to the nightstand beside the bed, and lifted the receiver. "Hello?"
"Is this the number where I can reach Jane Whitefield?" It was a man's voice, and she had never heard it before.
"Who's calling?"
"My name is Michael Schneider." The man waited through a moment of Jane's silence, then seemed to panic. "Please, don't hang up. This is urgent. I really need to talk to her, and in an hour it might be too late for me. I know this is the number because I've carried it in my memory for a long time in case I ever needed it, and now I do."
Two more seconds passed while Jane took in a deep breath and then let it out. "This is Jane Whitefield."