Twenty minutes later, John Young walked up to the Honda Accord. He put his suitcase into the trunk, hid all of the documents except his new driver’s license in the wheel well, and closed the trunk. Then he got into the car, drove it around the block, and parked it again. From here he couldn’t see the ocean, but he could see the fog coming in, the ocean’s presence beginning to obscure everything else. He sat perfectly still and prepared his mind for what he now had to do.
18
Jane stepped off the airplane at five in the morning. While she went about picking up her suitcase and finding a taxi, the sun used the time to rise high enough to irritate her eyes. She had slept the last couple of hours on the plane, but it had only made her feel hollow and light-headed. The Buffalo airport was small and simple, but the emptiness and lack of distractions gave her time to succumb to the feeling that she didn’t want to be in the flat landscape outside the windows. While she was still inside an airport, she was still in transit, in motion. She could turn back and choose a gate, and beyond it would be the world. But once outside the door, she was only in western New York again, back where she had started.
At other times when she had arrived here, the sensation had been relief that she was finally home. Even the grimy, wet pavement of Genesee Street used to feel friendly to her. Today she clenched her teeth until she was on the Thruway, and then the houses she could see beyond the fences were small, dirty, and depressing.
She had no trouble understanding it, because she had been trying to prepare herself for this morning from the second when she had walked out of the hotel in Vancouver. She shouldn’t be here. She should be with him. She reminded herself that she had invented all of the rules, and what they said was that a guide was not in the business of transporting people with all their attachments to other addresses—a guide took them out of the world. When she set the rabbit free, he had to be a new rabbit. He could only be that if he was alone.
When he arrived unencumbered and uncomforted, he would be forced to form new relationships, to dig deeper into the new ground and quickly become indis- tinguishable from the people around him. People who had never had anything happen to them always seemed hard and unchanging, but they weren’t. Human beings were vulnerable and malleable. Within a couple of years they picked up regional accents, walked differently, changed their preferences and habits without ever noticing it. They didn’t do it to fool the chasers; they did it because it was the only way to touch the people around them, and touching them left an imprint, made them like the people they saw every day. People needed not to be alone.
The cab took only fifteen minutes to reach Deganawida, and then Jane took over. "Turn left at the next light. Go straight for two lights. Turn right up here. It’s the third house from the corner, the one with the green door."
The cab had just made it out of her driveway and Jane was picking up her suitcase when Jake Reinert came outside. It was only six-thirty in the morning, but there he was, all dressed and walking stiffly outside with shower-wet hair combed straight back on his head. She was too tired for Jake. "Hi, Jake," she said, and hurried toward her door.
The old man danced down his steps and, with a haste she couldn’t remember seeing in years, stepped across both his lawn and hers, leaving deep, wet depressions in the saturated grass. "Hold up, Jane," he said. "Got to talk to you."
She set down her suitcase on the porch and got out her keys. "Sure," she said unenthusiastically. "Come on in."
She swung open the door and hurried to the keyboard on the wall to press in her code and turn off the alarm system. When she turned around, Jake was inside and shutting the door. "You had a burglary while you were gone."
"Oh?" she said. "Did they get caught?"
"Not exactly."
She had been expecting this, right up to the word no, and she assumed that she was going to have to face a big housecleaning because they would have vented a little of their rage on her belongings while they searched. It didn’t matter. She never kept records of her clients. Her clothes were the only expensive things in the house, and it would probably make her feel better to spend the next few days buying new ones. "Why not exactly?"
Jake seemed to be shuffling his thoughts into logical order. "Here’s how it happened. They broke your back window, here." He took a couple of steps toward it to show her the plywood nailed over the break. She could see the black fingerprint dust the police had used all over the glass, but he answered the question she hadn’t asked. ’’That set off the alarm at the police station. They heard it ringing inside, so they started to run. But I woke up, and turned on my porch light just as they were coming around between the two houses. You know how bright that is. It’s a two-fifty flood. Like daylight. It was so bright it startled them. They all turned to look right at it for a second, then covered their faces and ran to their car."
Jane was so exhausted that she felt giddy. She started to laugh. Jake’s floodlight was so powerful that on the few occasions when he had turned it on, she had been furious. "You really did get your money’s worth on that light, Jake."
"The hell I did. The damned hardware store sold Margaret the fixture years ago, and when I got a look at it and took it back, they wouldn’t accept it. The bulbs cost five dollars even in those days. You could use it to jack-light deer."
"Well, for once I’m glad you had it. They didn’t get inside at all?"
"No," he said. "Not with the light and all. And of course they knew an alarm must be connected to something, and how long could it take for the police to get here in a town this size?"
"How long?"
"Too long. Maybe four or five minutes. By then they were probably that many miles away."
"Well, if they didn’t get in, then nothing’s lost," she said, and lifted her suitcase to take it toward the bedroom.
Jake ignored the hint. "I saw them."
"Yes," she said noncommittally.
"Really saw them," he said. "Saw them so clearly it was like a flash picture. There were four of them, and not kids, either. Grown men. When I turned on the light, one of them started to pull out a gun. He couldn’t see me, because the switch is inside by the front door."
"Did you describe them to the police?"
"Sure, but they’re not from around here. The Deganawida police aren’t going to pick them up and put them in a lineup for me."
"I don’t think they could do a lineup for you, Jake. They have to put in extra people to fool you, and you know everybody," she said. "But if they were just passing through, at least they won’t break into somebody else’s house tomorrow."
"Jane ..."
"What?"
"You know the chief, Dave Dormont, he’s a good friend of mine. I pulled him out of Ellicott Crick one time when we were kids. The Rowland boys had tossed him in and I was ten years older, and ... Anyway, he’s a really good cop. Maybe it’s because he got picked on when he was little, so he doesn’t put up with the strong hurting the weak. He was an F.B.I, agent for years."
"I heard that," she said.
"That wasn’t just gossip. I was saying he might be able to help."
"Oh," she said. "I don’t think I need anything special. Look around. Unless they wanted some women’s clothes ..."
"They weren’t after your stuff," he said quietly. "And you know it."