Jane Whitefield

  A Mysterious Profile

  Thomas Perry

  Jane Whitefield

  “Jane who?”

  This blow came from behind Jake and hit his back, the sudden, hard swing of an object that was mostly shaft with a heavier piece of metal at the end. It felt hot, painful.

  “Jane Whitefield, you sorry old sack of bones,” Doyle said. He held the fireplace poker up where Jake could see it, and handed it to the smaller of his two companions, the one they called Skip. “That was just a tap, a little pat on the back from the devil. If you want to tell me where she is, you miss a lot of pain.” He smiled. “Skip, go put it in the fireplace and heat it for me so it’s ready when I want it.”

  Jake Reinert kept himself from speaking, because he was out of breath from the punches and the blow with the poker.

  “How old are you, Jake?”

  “Old. So I’m not especially concerned that I might have missed something I wanted out of life. How about you, boy? Already done everything you want to do?”

  Skip swung the poker with both hands, so it bounced off Jake’s rib cage.

  Doyle said, “Better start thinking about what you can tell us that will make us forgive you for wasting our time. Put him with the others so he’ll have a chance to think.”

  Skip and Charlie dragged Jake out of the room, down the short, bare hallway and stopped in front of a closed door. Charlie took out a key and unlocked the door, dragged him to the center of a room furnished like an office, and dropped him on the rug in the center. Jake lay still until the two men were gone, and then turned a little to protect his rib while he lifted himself. The two women got up from their corner and knelt by him.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The older one, a woman he judged must have been eye-catching twenty years ago, said, “I’m Molly Seiler. They found me at my house in Florida three days ago. They put me in that SUV outside and drove me here.” She was short but athletic, had strawberry blond hair, light skin with freckles, and pale green eyes.

  The other, just a girl no older than about eighteen or nineteen, said, “I’m Rachel. They’ve had me for most of this week. I kind of lost track of time, but it was at least four days”

  “How did they get you?” asked Molly.

  “My father, David Holcomb, was somebody Jane Whitefield had helped a long time ago. This year he died in West Virginia. I went down there for the funeral, and so did the rest of the family. Afterward, when the authorities were doing the death certificate, somehow they got his real name. Somebody in the family figured it didn’t matter now that he’s dead, I guess. But it did matter. These people found out. First they came and asked me what I knew about how my father managed to disappear years ago. When I said I didn’t know anything, they left, but stuff started to go wrong in my life. My car was stolen, but then it was returned, as though somebody had just borrowed it. A friend died suddenly. Finally I got charged with embezzling from my job. I took off before they could lock me up.”

  “You came looking for Jane?”

  “Yes. And they followed me, I think.”

  Outside, the wind had been growing stronger as the cold front came in across Lake Ontario. Now and then, from some clapboard high on the house came a sound, the faint creak of the boards shouldering up against the wind. It had begun to snow, the first barrage of tiny hard particles freezing as they fell. They made a ticking sound against the windows on the north side of the house. Rachel said, “Did you hear that?”

  “It’s just the wind. We’re somewhere east of Deganawida, south of the lake. That northwest wind’s got nothing in its way to slow it down all the way across Canada.”

  “I was hoping—”

  “I know,” said Jake. “But it isn’t.”

  Molly said, “If it were what we wish, then it’s the last thing we should say out loud.” She stroked the girl’s hair, and patted her on the shoulder, then turned to Jake. “How did they get you?”

  “I’m Jane’s next-door neighbor.”

  “You’re not one of her runners?”

  “No. I’ve lived beside the Whitefield house since I was born. And that’s before Jane’s father was born. I was born a few months before he was.”

  “If you haven’t run from anything, then why take you prisoner?”

  Jake gave a sad smile. “Don’t you know?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody will pay to know where I am. It’s for you—the two of you. They want you to talk, but they also seem to want to leave both of you alive and not disfigured. Since you haven’t told them what they want to know, they want you to watch what they do to me until you can’t stand it anymore.”

  “Oh, God,” said Rachel. A look of horror settled on her face until she covered it with her hands.

  Jake said, “Don’t let them get her. No matter what they do, no matter how it looks or sounds, don’t tell them anything. If they get their hands on her they’ll do worse to her. They think they can make her tell where she’s hidden people, what their new names are.”

  Rachel got up and put her ear against the door, then came back and said quietly, “It sounds like they went away.”

  Molly got up and went to the window. “Their cars are both still out there in the driveway.”

  Jake said, “They’re not going to go away. They think if they take their time on us, they’ll work up to their big payday. Jane made a lot of people disappear. Some of them are worth big money to the people looking for them. If those guys can bring a few of them back to whoever is after them, they’ll be rich.”

  Molly sat by Jake and hugged her knees. “She told me this, you know. When I first came to her she said, ‘I’ve been a guide for a while. I’ve taken a lot of runners away from their troubles and made them into new people. By now there are a lot of hunters who would love to get me in a place apart and ask me questions.’ She warned me. ‘The most dangerous thing you ever did might have been coming to see me.’”

  Jake said, “If they’d got her, she wouldn’t have told.”

  “I know,” said Molly. “She promised me that she never would. I said, ‘How can you be so sure? What if they torture you?’ She said, “I’ve told a lot of people I would die before I betrayed their trust. To be without the means to do it would make it a lie.’ She showed me the bottle she carries in her purse. It’s beautiful, cut glass with a gold cap. It looks like perfume but it’s not. It’s a distillation of the essence of Water Hemlock.”

  Jake nodded. “It’s the traditional Seneca way of killing yourself. The plant grows in swampy places all over the state.”

  “Wait,” said Rachel. “Did you hear it that time? It sounded like somebody moving along the roof of the house.”

  “If it was her, you wouldn’t hear anything,” Jake said. “She moves in the dark like a ghost. Like the thought of a ghost.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Rachel. “If she’s so good, where is she?”

  “I wasn’t saying she was supernatural. Her father, Henry, was my best friend from the time we were boys. Henry could do things other people couldn’t, because his father taught him to. And he taught her, while he still could.”

  “While he still could?”

  “He died when she was about eleven. He was one of a crew of high steel workers, the men who put up tall buildings and bridges and things. There were three Mohawks and Henry and another Seneca. They were working on a bridge in the state of Washington, and an I-beam came loose from its cable while Henry was on it. They have a special ceremony—what the hell, it’s a funeral—that takes about three days. It’s called a Condolence Council. The one for Henry at the Tonawanda Reservation drew hundreds of Senecas from all over—Cattaraugus, Allegany, the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. And there were whites like me, of course. Lots of us.”

  “She could be dead too by now,” said Rachel. “We’re sitting here hoping she’s going to notice we’re gone and figure out we’ve been found. Maybe the reason we’re here is they found her first.”

  Molly shook her head. “They found me because I made a mistake.”

  “What was it?”

  “I went back. When Jane brought me to Florida ten years ago, she stayed two months and taught me how to be a new person. That person is Molly Seiler. I’ve had a nice life because she taught me to keep the odds against being found on my side. Silently say good-bye to your family and friends. Don’t call, don’t write, don’t email. Above all, never go back. The person who used to live there—the person you were—is dead. There’s nothing there for you.”

  Rachel said, “You mean you were safe for ten years, and then you moved back to the town that you’d run away from?”

  “No, I’m not naïve enough to think I could go live there again. I just wanted to see it—to go back for a quiet look around and then disappear again. I was careful. I flew up to Philadelphia and rented a car there, so it would have Pennsylvania plates, not Florida. I drove to Paxinos and explored a bit. Within ten minutes I knew Jane was right. After my mother died, my aunt had sold the house where I grew up. The families I knew and the businesses I remembered were either gone or so altered that it didn’t matter. I checked into a hotel ten miles from town and stayed another day. I should have driven away as fast as I could.”

  “You mean to say there were people like these men waiting for you after ten years?”

  “ Not the professional hunters, but my former husband still was. There were also people who, in the old days, took my husband’s side in the break-up. To them I was an enemy. I liked to think that they just didn’t know my husband’s real nature—that he married me because I had a small inheritance from my grandfather. He would demand money from me for things he wanted, and if I didn’t agree, he would make out the check himself and then force me to sign it. No matter what he did to me, he was careful not to break my right hand.” She shut her eyes for a second as though trying to get rid of some image she still saw, then opened them. “The one who spotted me in town was a woman who had been a high school friend of mine. She called my ex-husband, and he called these men. I drove to Philadelphia and flew back to Florida. It took them only a week to find me through the car rental and the hotel. I suppose after they find out what they want about Jane, they’ll sell me back to him. He’ll finish me off.”

  Rachel said, “I think I’m the way they found Jane Whitefield’s house.” She put her hands over her face, and cried.

  “Don’t think about it,” said Molly. “How you got caught doesn’t matter.”

  “It does. It does,” Rachel said. “Don’t you see? I’m the reason Jake is here. I must have led them to her house. If it weren’t for that, they wouldn’t know who her next-door neighbor was. Jake, I’m so very sorry. They must have got me in trouble to make me run to her for help. I never saw anyone following me.”

  “Molly’s right. It doesn’t matter how we got here.” Jake got up with difficulty, listened at the door for a few seconds, then came back. “They’re not talking. It’s late and I saw some beer and liquor on the counter in the kitchen. They may have dozed off.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Have you checked the windows?”

  “First thing,” said Molly. “They’re all nailed shut.”

  Jake said, “Search this room—the desk, the cabinets. See if you can find some tape.”

  The women began opening drawers, moving the contents around. Molly said, “I found some duct tape.”

  “Perfect. Let’s have it.”

  She handed it to him and he laid a series of strips across the glass, and then more up and down in a grid. Then he went to the corner and took Rachel’s army blanket, folded it, and put it up against the window. After a few seconds there was a “pop” sound, but no tinkling, and no glass fell. He pushed the taped glass outside onto the snow. “There. It’s clear. Rachel, slide out, but stay on the blanket so you don’t get cut.”

  He held the folded blanket on the lower part of the opening.

  “I can’t do this. Why me first?”

  “You’re the youngest and you’ll certainly be the fastest. You’re our best hope. Run like hell until you can get to a house where they’ll call the police.”

  She sat on the blanket and slid out. For a few seconds they could hear her feet crunching the snow the snow outside, but then it was lost in the changing rush of the wind. Jake used more of the duct tape to secure the blanket over the opening.

  “What next?” asked Molly.

  “We keep talking, I guess,” Jake said. “If one of them is awake he’ll hear the murmur of voices in here, and feel reassured. We’ll give Rachel some time—a half hour or so, and then you and I can slip out and go in different directions. If they chase us, she’ll have an even better chance. He looked up at the clock on the wall. “It’s one twenty a.m. At two we go. Until then we talk.”

  “You said you were Jane’s father’s friend. You must have known her mother too.”

  “I knew her about as well as anybody in Deganawida did, but there were big blank spaces.”

  “What wasn’t blank?”

  “Jane’s an attractive enough female citizen, but you should have seen her mother. She was a prodigy of nature and of invention. She was probably the single best-looking human being who ever actually set foot in Deganawida, New York, and didn’t just fly over it in an airplane. That’s where the eyes come from.”

  “The eyes. Yes. Blue, like the color of a glacial lake. And with that long, obsidian-black hair.”

  “The hair was from Henry, of course. Jane’s mother was blond. What I know of her past, I got from Henry’s crew. Somebody said she was of Irish ancestry, and that somehow she found herself alone in New York City at the age of seventeen. What she did to feed herself and stay out of the weather I don’t know, and wouldn’t judge if I did. I know that when she and Henry first saw each other while his crew was in New York riveting and welding together the steel frame of a building, she was with a man who had a lot of cash money and a few convictions for things like extortion and aggravated assault. And he had friends who were like him or worse. But as it happened, Henry had friends too. I know there was a face-to-face meeting about the girl.”

  “What happened?”

  “I can tell you that nobody is going to win a contest of pure calm courage against five men who get up every day and walk on steel girders thirty floors above the sidewalk. She came home to Deganawida in the car with Henry’s crew. She and Henry got out at Henry’s house and the others drove on home. A week or so later the matrons of the Wolf clan arranged for her to be adopted. Henry was a Snipe, and Wolf is one of the clans that can marry a Snipe. But on the day she arrived, she already had made up her mind about who she was going to be. She invented a woman and worked as hard as she could at being her. For the rest of her life she was the ideal Seneca wife. She and Henry only had Jane. But Jane was raised as a Seneca. Not half-this and half-that. Jane and her mother both were as Seneca as Cornplanter or Red Jacket.”

  “You said ‘for the rest of her life.’”

  “She died of cancer just about the time Jane graduated from college.”

  “And then Jane started out on her own profession.”

  “Not in a premeditated way like that. She’s one of those people who are only understandable if you piece things together afterward. After college she came back to Deganawida, and moved into the house her grandfather built. It wasn’t that she sat down and invented being a guide. In college she had already done it once. There was a boy. He got into some trouble during summer break. She told me ten years later that it was a frame-up, but that might just be what he said and she chose to believe. I think there was a car accident. He was charged with manslaughter, but he claimed he wasn’t even driving. One day he got a call from his parents that the judge had revoked his bail, and the police had come to their house for him, not knowing he’d gone back to school. Jane and some other friends had a grim going-away party for him that night while they waited for the police. Suddenly she realized that he didn’t have to go to jail. She’d had a summer job as a skip-tracer, and she knew how to keep him from getting found. She put him in her car that night. She never told me much more than that, but I know that nobody has seen him from that day to this. He was her first runner.”

  “How did she get her second?”

  “Well, that was the built-in problem with helping him. Everybody at the party knew how he’d gotten away. About a year after Jane graduated, the second one showed up at her door. One of the others at the party had a friend who had reason to believe he was about to be murdered. After that it didn’t stop. People she had helped, or others who just knew about her would, at some point in their lives, know somebody else who needed that kind of help. And Jane would get a call or a visit.”

  “But she did invent it—being a guide.”

  “Not alone,” Jake said. “Let me begin this way. In the Seneca religion, the way the supernatural world communicates with people is their dreams. When a person has a dream, sometimes what happens is that a being will appear. It can look like a man or woman, a god, or an animal. That being is there to tell you something you need to know. He or she or it is called a guide. And what Jane does for people who are in danger is give them a new identity. The Senecas and the five other Iroquois nations were probably the world’s champion identity-changers. They were always at war, for at least the five or six hundred years they can trace back. They were incredibly brave and always attacking, so they lost enormous numbers of people. The way they made up their population was to take in captives, refugees from distant wars, the survivors of decimated tribes, and later, Europeans on the run. They would give the new person the identity of someone who had died. They would give him the name, the family, the possessions, and the responsibilities of the dead man. It took time, but eventually he would be treated the same as everybody else. There wouldn’t be much difference between somebody who was born Iroquois and somebody who was made Iroquois.”

 

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