Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
A year after getting shot on a job that took a dangerous turn, Jane Whitefield has settled into the quiet life of a suburban housewife - or so she thinks. One morning, returning from a long run, she's met by an unusual sight: the female leaders of the eight Seneca clans waiting in her driveway. Jane's childhood friend from the reservation is wanted by the police for murder, and the clan mothers believe she is the only one who can find him. So Jane sets out to retrace a journey she took with Jimmy when they were fourteen years old, and soon discovers that the police aren't the only ones after her childhood friend. As the chase intensifies, the number of people caught up in the deadly plot grows, and Jane is the only one who can protect those in danger...
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 613
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
‘Another excellently engineered thriller from Thomas Perry featuring Jane Whitefield. . . . Soul-searching and car chases too. What more could we ask from an escape artist like Perry?’
—New York Times Book Review
‘Many scenes have an almost Twilight Zone atmosphere of sudden recognition. The landscape is filled with references to tribal history, and Perry also delivers fascinating information on how to hide and change identity. . . . First-rate suspense’
Booklist (starred review)
‘The 8th book in the Jane Whitefield series does not disappoint’
Deadly Pleasures
‘Perry’s thriller swings into action as soon as Jane is on the trail. A breathless pace sets the tone with numerous close calls as the expert, clever heroine tries to solve the crime before Jimmy gets caught. Enthusiastically recommended for series fans and for readers who appreciate strong female protagonists’
Library Journal
‘Jane Whitefield is unique in the annals of detective fiction. She is a throwback to a tribal world, still loyal to the beliefs of the Seneca Indians and still adhering to the call of a lost era. Thomas Perry has once again resurrected a remarkable character who seems imbued with a strange immortality and an unusual morality, and he is to be congratulated. . . . Mr. Perry always has a twisting and turning plot, yet what is most intriguing about his Whitefield series is the intense detail that accompanies its developments’
Washington Times
‘An outstanding Whitefield adventure’
Booklist
‘Thomas Perry’s smooth, unpretentious and action-packed page-turners just keep coming . . . In an era where the outsized comic book ethos of superheroes, magic, and vengeance seemingly has sway over the entire culture, it is a relief to enjoy one of Perry’s comparatively restrained adventures for smart adults . . . One of the best Jane books so far’
Life Sentence
‘Whitefield is an indelible figure – whip-smart, resourceful, brave and big-hearted’
Seattle Times
Also by Thomas Perry
The Butcher’s Boy
Metzger’s Dog
Big Fish
Island
Sleeping Dogs
Vanishing Act
Dance for the Dead
Shadow Woman
The Face-Changers
Blood Money
Death Benefits
Pursuit
Dead Aim
Nightlife
Silence
Fidelity
Runner
Strip
The Informant
Poison Flower
The Boyfriend
Forty Thieves
The Old Man
The Bomb Maker
The Burglar
A Small Town
Eddie’s Boy
The Left-Handed Twin
Murder Book
First published in the United States of America in 2015 by The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove AtlanticThis paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2023 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic
Copyright © Thomas Perry, 2015
The moral right of Thomas Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 029 6
E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 030 2
Printed in Great Britain
Grove Press UK
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ
www.groveatlantic.com
To Jo, as always,with thanks to Otto Penzler and to Paul Williams
Nick Bauermeister sat in the stained, threadbare armchair in the front room. Chelsea’s mother had dragged the chair out to the curb because it wasn’t brand-new, but he had taken it home because it was much better than any other place he had to sit, and he couldn’t do much better than free. He aimed the remote control at the television set, and saw that Chelsea had left it on the channel where they always showed girls buying wedding dresses.
For a girl who hardly ever wanted anything to do with a guy anymore, she sure was interested in stuff about weddings and honeymoons or some woman getting to pick one from a bunch of bachelors. He had to click the channel button several times to get to the basketball game. He adjusted the sound, but kept his thumb on the little Mute button.
Nick was mostly pretending to watch the game. What he was really watching was Chelsea. Usually he liked watching Chelsea because she was the perfect embodiment of what a girl was supposed to look like. Even now, as she walked around in the kitchen picking up plates from the table and taking them to the sink, he couldn’t help thinking about how incredible she was. She seemed unaware of the way she looked—couldn’t see the way her shorts neatly hugged her thin waist and, in the back, defined her ass nearly as well as if she were naked. Her blouse had worked another button open since they’d finished dinner and she’d begun scrubbing dishes. The femaleness of her body was a force of nature too strong for her clothes.
But tonight he wasn’t watching her in a friendly way. He was just watching. Nick was pretty sure that Chelsea had been cheating on him. He had no idea who the guy was, because anybody would sleep with her if she wanted him to. That information might not be available until he caught her at it.
He had noticed that she had begun sitting far away from him in the evenings lately, rapidly texting back and forth with somebody. “Who’s that?” he had asked. She would answer, “My mom.” Her mother was a woman who would never have had the patience to sit around sending texts. She liked to talk, and when she called she always used the chance to tell everybody what she thought of everything they were doing or weren’t doing. You couldn’t do that with a text message. And sometimes Chelsea would just pull a name out of the air. The last two times he’d asked her she had said she was texting Carrie or Chloe. Both of them worked as waitresses in the evening, and probably would have been fired for standing around texting their friends.
The only times he’d actually seen her talking on the phone lately was when he walked in unexpectedly and she was lying on the couch talking on her cell phone, laughing and playing with her long, blond hair. As soon as she saw him her voice would go flat. “Got to go,” and she’d stand up, put her phone in her pants pocket, and get moving. She’d do something to distract him, to force him to think about something besides her phone call. She’d offer him a beer, go to the kitchen to get it, and come back already talking about something that was wrong with the car or the sink. Two days ago he had gone into her computer and noticed that she had erased about a month of e-mails.
Everything had changed on the night when he had been in the fight with the big Indian in Akron. She had been quiet for a couple of days after that, and pretended to be busy all the time—busier than anyone could possibly be. Then, when she would come home, she would always be too tired. She didn’t show any signs of caring how bad he had been hurt in the fight, in spite of the fact that he had been unconscious and woke up with a broken nose and four cracked ribs.
The fight might have been his own fault, like she’d said, but losing so badly hadn’t been his fault. He’d been drunk, and the Indian wasn’t drunk at all. How was that a fair fight? Ever since then, Chelsea had been cold and distant, so cold that he was sure she was getting ready to leave him. But in order to do that, she would need two things—a place to live, and a new guy. Women were like frogs, jumping from one lily pad to another. Before Chelsea jumped, she would have to be sure the next lily pad was going to be there. She was nearly ready. He could feel it.
He kept his face turned toward the television set, but his eyes moved with her. Wherever she stepped, he watched. At some point there would be that peculiar twinkly sound her phone made when she got a text message, and he would be up in a second like a big cat, snatch it out of her hand, and read it. If he heard instead the buzz it made for a ring, he’d take it and say, “Who’s calling?” If the man hung up instead of answering, he’d find out his name from her. Once he’d caught her like that, she couldn’t deny it. If he had to, he’d beat the name out of her.
She walked across the front room without even glancing in his direction. He muted the TV so he could hear her. He heard her go down the hall, and then heard a door close quietly.
He turned the television up again to cover his movements, and stood to follow her down the hall. He would fling open the door and grab the phone. All he had to do was keep the sound of his steps quieter than the television set. He began to walk very slowly. One step seemed quiet enough, so he began the next.
The metal-jacketed 180 grain bullet that was already spinning through the night air at 2,800 feet per second smashed through the glass of the front window, pounded into the back of his skull, and burst out the front, taking with it bits of bone, blood, brain, and thirty-four years of accumulated jealousy, disappointment, and anger. Nick was dead before his knees released their tension and his body toppled to the floor.
Chelsea ran out of the hallway yelling, “Nick! What the heck are you—” before she saw his body and the window pane behind him. She cut off her mother’s phone call, dropped to her belly, and dialed 911.
Jane McKinnon jogged along the shoulder of the road toward home. Every morning after her husband, Carey, went off to the hospital to prep for surgery at six, she did tai chi and then went out to run. Sometimes she drove from the big old stone house in Amherst to the Niagara River near the house where she’d grown up, and then ran the three miles along the river to the South Grand Island Bridge and back. That was the run she had always made as a teenager—three miles each way with the wide blue-gray river beside her flowing steadily northward toward the Falls. Sometimes she would drive over the bridge to Grand Island and run along West River Road, looking across the west branch of the river at Navy Island and Canada. Sometimes she ran on one of the college campuses, or in Delaware Park in Buffalo.
Today she ran along the roads near the house she shared with her husband. The house had been here for a long time, the original structure a building made of fieldstones mortared over logs a foot and a half thick around 1760. Carey’s ancestors had done some farming and some trading with her Seneca ancestors who made up most of the population at the time. For the past few generations the McKinnons had been doctors.
When she was a child there had still been thousands of acres of farmland along here, mostly lying fallow and waiting for the developers. Now the developers had been at work for many years, and she ran past deep green golf courses and huge, low houses set far back from the highway and surrounded by enough remnants of old forests to provide shaded yards in the summer and windbreaks against the storms that blew off the Great Lakes in the winter.
Jane seldom ran the same route two days in a row. She never permitted a pattern to develop or ran in a predictable place on a predictable day. Random changes were one of the habits she had nurtured since she was in college. Before she had been Jane McKinnon she had been Jane Whitefield. Now, like other suburban housewives, she bought groceries at supermarkets, but unlike them, she had a list of fourteen markets, and she shopped in them randomly, often at odd hours.
Life was usually quiet for Jane McKinnon, much of it taken up by various kinds of volunteer work—benefits and fund-raising for the hospital, teaching two classes a week in the Seneca language for junior high and high school children at the Tonawanda Reservation during the winter, and helping to elect political candidates in the fall. Jane avoided being chairwoman of any public events, never had her name on stationery, and never identified herself on phone calls for causes except as “Jane.”
Jane still kept bug out kits in the McKinnon house in Amherst and in the house where she had grown up. Each one consisted of a packet with ten thousand dollars in cash and a collection of valid identification cards, credit cards, and licenses. The pictures on the cards were hers and Carey’s, but the names were not. Over the years she had learned to grow identities, using a set of forged papers to obtain real ones, buying things with the credit cards and paying the bills so other companies would offer more credit. As soon as she had a few valid forms of identification for herself and Carey under new names, she had obtained passports in those names. Each kit also included a 9 mm pistol and two extra loaded magazines.
Jane had persuaded Carey to accept her precautions as a part of their lives. He was tall, strong, and athletic, and had no enemies of his own, so it had taken a few new experiences for him to understand that he needed to take the steps she asked of him. The most powerful had happened only a year ago. Jane had gone to Los Angeles and sneaked an innocent man serving a murder sentence out of a courthouse. Jane’s runner had driven off as she’d planned, but she had been captured by his enemies, shot, beaten, and tortured for several days before she had escaped. Now Carey drove to work at the hospital on one of five different routes she had plotted for him, each with a cutoff where he could circle back and come out in the opposite direction if he was followed. But more important, she had taught him to look. He was aware of the people, the cars, the changes around him, and that was the one precaution that mattered most.
As Jane ran, she could still feel the effects of the damage the bullet had done to her right thigh a year ago, and she listened to the rhythm of her steps to be sure she was not favoring that side or developing a limp. She also kept her eyes moving all the time. She watched cars coming and going, studied each person she could see in a window, noted anything that looked different in any yard. Today almost everything was exactly as it had been last time she had passed. The few things that were different she memorized for the next time.
She was coming up the final stretch of road before the old stone house, building up speed because she was coming to the end, when she saw two unfamiliar cars parked in front of it.
Jane reduced her speed while she studied the cars. They were both relatively new full-size cars. The front one was a Lincoln, and the second something like it, perhaps a Cadillac. They were both plain even under scrutiny, without any of the aftermarket equipment like floodlights or antennas that plain-wrap police vehicles usually had.
She maintained her speed, ran on toward her house, and saw that both cars had people in them. There were two women in the front and two in the back of each car—eight in all. The ones she could see were elderly and a bit overweight. She didn’t want to stare any harder. They were probably in the neighborhood for some charity meeting or other. One woman looked a bit like Ellen Dickerson.
All at once she realized who had come, and it made her knees feel weak. This was a visit from the eight clan mothers. They were important dignitaries in the Seneca culture. In the old times they had been simply the oldest, wisest, and most trusted women of each clan. When the Senecas in New York State had been divided into several reservations, Jane’s band, the Tonawanda band, had overwhelmingly retained the old religion and codified the old form of government, including the clan mothers.
But the clan mothers were stronger and older than law. Since the day in prehistory when the Senecas had first appeared on the great hill at the foot of Canandaigua Lake, the women of each clan—Snipe, Hawk, Heron, Deer, Wolf, Beaver, Bear, and Turtle—owned a longhouse, and all of them together owned the village and the land where they raised the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash—and brought up the children. Because the women knew each child best, the clan mothers had always chosen the chiefs, and could remove them if they were disappointed.
And now, here they were, the eight clan mothers, not much different from the eight who had signed the letter to President John Tyler in 1841 to inform him that every Seneca chief had refused to sign the despicable and fraudulent 1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek, and so the Senecas refused to be forced off the Tonawanda Reservation. The eight were also not so different from the women a thousand years before that, who had decided whether a captive should be adopted to take the place of a dead Seneca, or be killed to avenge him.
Even though she’d been running for miles, Jane felt her heart actually speeding up as she walked to the driver’s side of the nearest car. She smiled. “Hello, Dorothy. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Mae. Hi, Emma. What are you all doing here in Amherst?”
Dorothy Stone said, “We came to see you, Jane. I hope you don’t mind. We called ahead early this morning, but you were out already. We took a chance. Are you free, or should we come back tomorrow?”
“Come on in,” said Jane. “Don’t sit out here in a car.”
The car doors all opened, and Jane hurried to the next car and said, “Hi, Natalie. Hi Daisy. Hi Susan. Hi Alma. Come on in. I’m so sorry I didn’t know you were coming.”
She trotted ahead to the front door, her mind already scrambling from place to place in her mental image of the house, picking things up, straightening others, or in desperation, hiding them. Another part of her mind was in the kitchen opening the refrigerator and searching for appropriate food and drink. It was a tradition that Seneca wives keep food ready for unexpected visitors. In the old times people from any of the Haudenosaunee nations might arrive unexpectedly after a journey along the great trail that ran from the Hudson River to the Niagara. If she had lived then she might have served soup made with corn, beans, squash, and a little deer or bear in it for flavor. Jane swung the front door open and rushed into the kitchen.
Jane pulled some berries from the freezer. She defrosted strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries in the microwave and found some angel’s food cake to pour them over. She started a pot of coffee, made lemonade and put the pitcher and glasses on a tray, then piled everything on the biggest tray she had and carried it out so she could serve it as soon as the ladies had settled into seats near the big stone fireplace in the living room.
As Jane poured lemonade and brought in a tray of cookies, she surreptitiously looked around the living room. These eight formidable women looked like any gaggle of matronly ladies in spring dresses with flowered patterns, middle-aged and older, who might have come out for a game of bridge or a club meeting. But the clan mothers held great power. They were a governmental council that had been functioning the same way in the same region for many centuries longer than the British Parliament. In the old times they’d called for war by reminding the chiefs that there was a Seneca who had been killed but not yet avenged. When they didn’t want war they would say that the women weren’t inclined to make the moccasins for warriors to wear as they made their way to the distant countries of enemies.
As Jane occupied herself serving the cake and berries she felt the muscles in her shoulders relax a little. The women were all very cordial to Jane. “You have such a beautiful house.” “I love the flowers you’ve got in that bed along the side. My grandmother had tulips like that when I was a little girl.”
Jane accepted their compliments, and felt an almost childish sense of validation, but she could not ignore the unusual nature of this visit. This wasn’t just Jane’s own clan mother stopping by for a chat. This wasn’t even a delegation made up of her moitie—Wolf, Bear, Beaver, and Turtle. It was the mothers of all eight clans assembled here together—something that couldn’t be meaningless, any more than the arrival of all nine Supreme Court justices could.
She held Ellen Dickerson in the corner of her eye. She was a tall, straight woman about fifty-five or sixty years old, with deep brown skin and long, gray hair gathered into a loose ponytail that hung down her back. She sat on the edge of her chair with her back perfectly straight, and yet managed to look comfortable. Jane knew that it would be Ellen Dickerson who spoke first because she was clan mother of the Wolf clan, Jane’s own clan.
Jane’s father, Henry, had been a Snipe. Her mother had been a young woman he brought home from New York City who had milk-white skin and eyes so blue they looked like pieces of the sky. In order to marry Henry Whitefield she should have been a Seneca and come from a clan of the opposite moitie from the Snipes. The women of the Wolf clan had insisted on adopting her, just as they had taken in captive women, runaways, or refugees hundreds of years earlier. In Seneca life, children were members of their mother’s clan, so a couple of years later when Jane was born, she was a Wolf.
They all talked for a while about topics of polite conversation—the early thaw this year, the beautiful spring they’d been having. Daisy Hewitt said, “I’ve been trying to figure out when to plant my corn. The sycamore leaves aren’t the size of a squirrel’s ear yet, but it’s like midsummer.”
“I’ve got a nursery catalog that divides the country into zones,” said Mae. “This year I’ll just go by the zone south of ours.”
Then the random conversation faded, and they all looked at Jane. Ellen Dickerson said, “Jane, do you remember Jimmy Sanders?”
“Sure,” she said. “He and I used to play together when we were kids. During the summer, when my father was away working, my mother and I would go out to the reservation to live.”
“That’s right,” said Alma Rivers, of the Snipe clan. “I used to see the two of you running around in the woods. You were pretty cute together.”
Ellen frowned. “He’s in some real trouble right now.”
“He is? Jimmy? Is he sick?”
“No. The police are looking for him.”
“What for?”
“He got in a fight in a bar in Akron about two months ago. He won, so he got charged with assault I think it was. But before his trial, the man he’d fought with died.” She frowned again. “He was shot. Jimmy hasn’t been seen since.”
Jane said, “That’s horrible. I can hardly imagine Jimmy in a bar, let alone hurting somebody in a fight. And he’d certainly never shoot anybody. His mother must be going insane with worry.”
“She is.”
Jane looked closely at Ellen, who was sitting across the coffee table from her. Ellen’s eyes were unmoving, holding her there. Jane said, “I haven’t seen him in twenty years, when he was at my father’s Condolence Council. No, it had to be my mother’s funeral, when I was in college. Still a long time.”
“We want you to find him and bring him back.”
Jane’s eyes never moved from Ellen’s. “What makes you think I can do something like that?”
“We know it’s something you can do. I’ll leave it at that.”
“You know that about me?”
“We’ve never had a good enough reason to speak. Sometimes when a person has a secret, just whispering it to yourself can risk her life.”
“All this time, you’ve been watching me?”
“We watch and we listen. Years go by, and the sights and sounds add up,” said Ellen. “Don’t you think we wanted to see how you turned out? Your mother was an important member of the Wolf clan. She gave me the dress I wore to my senior prom, and helped me cut it down to fit. She drove me to Bennett High School in Buffalo so I could take the SATs and get into college.” Ellen paused. “Then she took me to lunch at the restaurant in AM and A’s. She was so beautiful. I can still see her.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not making her sound different because she wasn’t born Seneca.”
“Some people are born where they belong, and some have to find their way there,” said Alma Rivers. “There’s no difference after that.”
Ellen said, “Jimmy needs to be found and persuaded to turn himself in before the police find him. They think he’s a murderer, someone who killed a man with a rifle. They’ll be afraid of him, and if he resists, they’ll kill him too.”
“I knew him, and he was a close friend when we were kids,” said Jane. “But that doesn’t give me—”
“We think the one most likely to find him is you.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Who, then?” asked Ellen. The eight women stared at her, waiting.
Jane kept her head up, her eyes meeting Ellen’s, but there was no answer.
Ellen stood up. “All right, then.” In her hand was a single string of shell beads. Each shell was tubular, about a quarter inch long and an eighth of an inch thick, some white and some purple, made from the round shell of the quahog, a coastal clam.
Jane’s eyes widened. The Seneca term was ote-ko-a. The rest of the world called it wampum, its name in the Algonquin languages. Ellen placed the string in Jane’s hand. Jane stared at it—two white, two purple, two white, two purple, the encoded pattern signifying the Seneca people as a nation. Ote-ko-a was often mistaken by the outsiders as a form of money, but ote-ko-a had nothing to do with monetary exchange. It was a sacred commemoration, often of a treaty or important agreement. Giving a person a single string of ote-ko-a was also the traditional way for the clan mothers to appoint him to an office or give him an important task. “Come see us soon.”
“I really don’t know where Jimmy is.” She fingered the single string of shell beads, feeling its weight—like a chain.
“Of course not,” said Alma Rivers. “I’ll let his mother know to expect you. You were always a great favorite of hers.”
Dorothy, Daisy, Alma, and the others all stood up too. One by one, they thanked Jane for her hospitality and hugged her. They were all softness and warmth, and together they gave off the smells of a whole garden of flowers, some mild and subtle and others spicy or boisterous. Senecas were tall people. Most of the older generation of women were shorter than Jane, but when the eight clan mothers hugged her they seemed to grow and become huge, like the heroes of myths, who only revealed their true size at special times.
In minutes they were gone, driving off in the two cars to the east toward the reservation. Jane stood alone in her living room looking down at the single strand of ote-ko-a she held in her hand. She tried to set it on the mantel, but that seemed wrong, almost a sacrilege. She put it into her pocket, where she couldn’t help feeling the weight of it as she went about collecting the cups and dishes.
WHEN CAREY CAME HOME AT eight, Jane was already preparing. He came in the front door, and she called, “I’m in here.”
He came into the kitchen dressed in the white shirt and tie he changed into after his morning surgeries and wore until he’d made his hospital rounds. He kissed her and said, “Something smells good. Is that dinner?”
“I’m sorry, Carey. When I came home from my run, the clan mothers were here waiting for me. I had to start hauling things out of the freezer so I wouldn’t seem to be a terrible wife. As it was, I looked like a madwoman, all sweaty with my hair all over the place. Dinner is one of the things I pulled out but forgot about, so it started to thaw. It’s some stew.”
“I remember that stew. I liked it.”
“You’re such a liar.” She poked his stomach with her finger. “But I made you a pie as an apology. It was the best I could do, up to my armpits in clan mothers.”
“Clan mothers? Not just Ellen Dickerson?”
“All of them.”
“Is that normal?”
“No.” She slipped by him, plucked pieces of silverware out of the drawer, then two plates, and went into the dining room. She returned and got two water glasses and two wineglasses.
“So what was it about?”
“What?”
“The visit. All eight clan mothers coming to see you, all in a bunch.”
“That’s another story. I’ll get to it. Meanwhile, I’d rather hear about your day.”
“As surgeries go, they were all good, with no sad stories waiting to be acted out afterward when the anesthesia wore off. Everybody will be alive on Christmas if they look both ways before crossing the street for the next few months.”
“Great,” she said. She slipped past him again carrying two plates of salad, then came back and brought the bowl of stew. “Open a bottle of wine.”
They came to the table, Carey poured the red wine, and Jane ladled the stew into bowls. They each sat down and took a sip of wine. Carey said, “So stop evading. What did they want?”
“You know that when I was a kid, my mother and I used to move out to the reservation every summer. My grandparents had left my father a little house there, and the idea was that I wouldn’t lose my connection with the tribe, and I’d be better at the language, and I’d have the fun of running around loose in the woods with the other kids. My father was always gone in the summer, off in some other state building a bridge or a skyscraper or something. On the reservation my mother always had a lot of other women to hang out with.”
“You were lucky. Other kids just got to go to camp and pretend to be Indians.”
“I liked it, and I suppose it gave my father peace of mind to know that she and I were safe surrounded by a few hundred friends and relatives. I got to spend summers running around in the woods and hearing people speak Seneca. But I found out today that the clan mothers were watching me then, and never stopped. They knew things I didn’t think they knew.”
“Such as?”
“Yes. That. They knew what I was doing for all the years from college until I married you.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I made a careless mistake one time, or somebody I helped told them. For all I know, one of them found out in a dream.”
“Have they told anybody else?”
“No. They don’t tell people things. They just know, and maybe they never use what they know. Or maybe years later they use it when they have to make a decision or solve a problem.”
“You sound as though you’re afraid of them.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I am, a little. They’re eight ladies, most of them old, and a little chubby, but they have power—the regular political kind, but something else, too. When you and I are here in the house together, with the lights on, I believe in quantum mechanics and the big bang and relativity, and everything else is crap. But there’s the power of history. When your ancestors built this house, they had to get the permission, or at least benign acquiescence, of eight clan mothers, who could just as easily have had them disemboweled and roasted. But I feel something else in those women. And there’s a ready-made explanation that’s been waiting in the back of my mind since before I was born, if I let myself pay attention to it. They’re drenched in orenda, the power of good in the world that fights against otgont, all the darkness and evil.”
Carey said, “Sounds like a lot of responsibility.”
“Thanks for not laughing at me until I leave the room. What they said was that a little boy they saw me playing with on the reservation twenty-five or thirty years ago has grown up, and he’s in trouble. He got into a fight, and a short time later the man he fought was murdered. He took off and hasn’t turned up.”
“What are you supposed to do about that?”
“They asked me to find him and bring him back.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Find him and bring him back.”
Carey stopped eating and sat back in his chair. His eyes were staring, and he took several deep breaths. “Really?”
“I know.”
His face was tense with dismay and growing anger. “It’s hardly a year since you came in the kitchen door barely able to walk. The burns on your back have hardly had time to heal even now. Tell me—when you go out running, don’t you ever feel a twinge on your right side and remember what caused it?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I know this sounds to you as though I’m out of my mind. But I’m not going off with some stranger who’s got people chasing him down to kill him. They want me to find an old friend and tell him that coming back is for his own good.”
“I can’t believe that you’d even consider getting involved in something like this. We have police. We have courts. In spite of everything, most of the time they do their jobs and get things right. It almost never makes sense to run away from them. This is just madness. For a long time you told me this part of your life was over.”
“I’m sorry, Carey. I know this is difficult for you to understand. I don’t want to go. I especially don’t want to spend any time away from you. But this time I have to.”
He stared at her for a moment. “If you honestly believe that’s true, then I guess I have to accept your judgment. I can have my people postpone my appointments and go with you.”
She shook her head. “They’re not just appointments. They’re surgeries. People could die if you don’t help them. And what I have to do might be possible if I do it alone. It won’t be if anyone goes with me. That’s why the clan mothers came to me.”
“You know that if you shelter him from the police, even for a day, you can be arrested and charged with a crime.”
“I know.”
He sat unmoving. He looked as though he was about to give in to the anger, but she could tell he was fighting it to keep his composure. “I think you’re making a mistake. That’s for the record. But I can see you’re going to do it anyway.”
“I’ll try to make it as quick and painless as I can.”
“I hope you succeed.” Dinner was over. He got up, tossed his napkin on the table, and walked to the staircase.
When Jane finished clearing the table, loading the dishwasher, and cleaning the counters, she went upstairs. Carey had gone to bed.
Jane drove away from the McKinnon house early the next morning. The traffic on the New York State Thruway going eastward away from Buffalo was light, even though the incoming traffic was heavy.
The Tonawanda Reservation was about three miles north of the Thruway, just northeast of Akron. After the Revolutionary War, George Washington had signed the treaty letting the Senecas retain roughly two hundred thousand acres of land in this single plot. During the next half century, a cabal of prominent New York businessmen formed a land company and stole legal ownership of the reservation with the help of federal Indian agents who were openly on their payroll. The Tonawanda Senecas, led by the clan mothers, could only repurchase eight thousand acres. What was left was mainly swampy lowlands and second-growth forest, but various parts had been farmed as long as the land had been occupied.
Jane drove through Akron to Bloomingdale Road, then to Hopkins Road. The houses she passed were all ones she had known since she was born. She knew the people who owned them, and knew the complicated network of kinship that connected one family with another throughout the reservation, and even some of the connections with people from other Haudenosaunee reservations in New York and Canada. Jane turned and drove up to the house on Sand Hill Road that belonged to the Sanders family. She stopped her white Volvo beside the road and studied the place for a few seconds. There had always, for Jane, been a profound feeling of calm in the silence of the reservation. The thruway and major highways were too many miles away to be heard. The roads on the reservation didn’t allow for much traffic, and didn’t lead anywhere that big trucks wanted to go. Today the only sounds were birdsongs and the wind in the tall trees.
The Sanders house was old, but it had a fresh coat of white paint on it, and Jane was glad to see the shingle roof was recent too. Jane got out and headed for the wooden steps to the porch. She had always loved the thick, ancient oak that dominated the yard and shaded the house, so she patted its trunk as she passed. She remembered how she and Jimmy had made up stories about it when they played together as children. They agreed that a great sachem had been buried on this spot thousands of years ago, and an acorn planted above his heart had sprouted into this tree. They decided that the buried sachem’s power inhabited the tree, and so the tree had always protected the family from harm.
The front door of the house opened while Jane was still climbing the steps, and Mattie Sanders came out. “Jane?” she said. “You’re looking wonderful.”
“So are you, Mattie. All I did was grow taller.”
Mattie Sanders hugged Jane tightly. She was about five feet nine inches tall, with long, thick hair that had been jet black when Jane had come here as a child. Now it was hanging down her back in a loose silver ponytail, the way Jane wore hers to do housework. “If you came to see Jimmy, I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”
“I heard about his troubles yesterday,” Jane said. “I came to see you.”
“Well, then, come on inside.” Mattie looked up and around her at the sky and the trees. “Or we could sit out here if you’d like.”
“Out here would be nice,” Jane said. “It’s such a spectacular day.”
“Yes,” said Mattie. “Of course, I see a day like this, and I hope that Jimmy’s somewhere getting the benefit of it. It could still get cold and wet even at this time of year.”
They went to a small round table on the porch under the roof, and Jane sat in one of the four chairs. She thought about how pleasant this spot was during a late spring or summer rain, and felt sorry for Jimmy.
Mattie went through the screen door into the small kitchen. She would feel compelled to observe the ancient customs, so Jane knew she would be back with food and drinks, just as Jigonsasee had, six or seven hundred years ago when Deganawida and Hiawatha—the historical one, not the Ojibway hero Longfellow later used in a poem and gave Hiawatha’s name—had stopped at her dwelling beside the trail. Jane sat alone and listened to the chickadees and finches calling to each other in the big old trees. Mattie returned with a plate of brownies and a pot of tea, and resumed the conversation. “So you heard about Jimmy’s problems.”
Jane took a brownie and nibbled it. “These are wonderful, just as I remembered them. Thank you.”
Mattie nodded.
Jane said, “I got a visit from some of my mother’s old friends, and somebody remembered that Jimmy and I were close friends when we were kids, and thought I’d want to know.”
Mattie looked at Jane’s face for a second, and in that second, Jane knew that she had already seen through what Jane said to what she hadn’t said.
Jane braved the look, like swimming against a current. “Since I heard, I’ve been worried. What happened?”
Mattie looked at the surface of the table for a second, then up. “Jimmy isn’t the boy that you knew, any more than you’re the little girl he knew. You both grew up. You’re like the woman I thought you would be. Maybe girls are more predictable. He fooled me. When boys are little you can’t imagine them getting into fights in bars. Or some of the other things they do either. Jimmy is a good person, a good son, but he’s all man.”
“Where is he?” asked Jane.
“I don’t know,” said Mattie. “He didn’t say he was leaving. After he was gone he didn’t call or write to say where he was going or when he’d get there.”
“Do you think he needs help?”
Mattie sighed. “Anyone who’s alone and running needs help, whether he knows it or not. I just don’t know where he went. And I assume the police are watching me to see if I get into a car and drive.”
Jane said, “I think I can find him.”
Mattie said, “You can only get in trouble, and that would be twice as bad.”
Jane said, “South?”
Mattie sat motionless for a second, then nodded. “Maybe like you two went south that time when you were teenagers.”
Jane said, “And how about you, Mattie? Are you getting along okay here?”
Mattie shrugged. “I always have. I have my Social Security, and a pension from the school system.” Jane remembered Mattie had worked as a janitor in the Akron schools at night. “I also work four mornings a week at Crazy Jake’s. It gives me a few bucks to save.” Crazy Jake sold tax-free cigarettes and gasoline just outside the reservation.
Jane said, “If Jimmy gets in touch, please tell him I’d like to help. I know some good lawyers.”
“We probably wouldn’t have what they charge.”
“I’ll get him a deal.” Jane heard the sound of a car engine, and then the squeak of springs and shock absorbers as a police car bounced up the road toward them. The car stopped, a tall state trooper got out and reached for his Smokey Bear hat, put it on, and walked toward the porch. A second car, this one a black unmarked car, pulled up behind. The driver sat there staring frankly out the window at the women on the porch. Jane and Mattie sat motionless as the state trooper climbed the steps to the porch. “Good morning, Mrs. Sanders,” he said. He nodded to Jane and said, “Ma’am.” He turned to Mattie. “I came by because I was wondering if you had heard from Jimmy yet.”
“I haven’t,” said Mattie.
“Sorry about that,” said the trooper. “If he calls or writes, please let him know we’d like to talk to him. Thanks, ladies.” He got into his car and drove up the road.
Mattie said, “They drive by my house day and night, hoping they’ll see Jimmy. They must have seen your car and hoped it was him.”
“I suppose that’s to be expected,” Jane said. “I’m surprised they’re so obvious, though. I guess they thought they couldn’t fool you anyway.” She took another sip of her tea and finished her brownie. Then she stood and hugged Mattie. “It’s been great to see you again. I wish it hadn’t been at such a bad time.”
“Me too,” said Mattie.
“I’ll come and see you when things are better.” She bent to kiss Mattie’s cheek. Then she got into her car and drove. The reservation had only a few roads, and they all met. She went up Parker Road past Sundown Road to Council House Road.
She took Allegheny Road to Java, where it became Cattaraugus Road. She drove south to the mechanic’s shop that was owned by the Snows. She pulled close to the garage doorway, got out, and walked to the front of her car.
“Janie?”
Jane turned her head and saw a dark-skinned man about her age wearing blue work pants, steel-toed boots, and a gray work shirt with an embroidered patch above the pocket that said RAY. Jane stepped up and hugged him. “It’s great to see you, Ray. I was afraid you would be on vacation or something.”
“No, the guys who work for me get vacations. I’m always here, like the doorknob. Got a car problem?”
“I wondered if you could do the scheduled maintenance on my car—you know, oil, filter, lube, check and replace belts and hoses—and then keep it here safe for at least a week or so.”
“I’d be glad to. You staying around here?”
“I thought I’d go on a hike, like we used to when we were kids.”
Ray Snow’s brows knitted. “You trying to find Jimmy?”
Jane looked around to see if anyone else was in earshot. She smiled and said, “Not me. That’s the police’s job. I wouldn’t want to get involved.”
“Well, that’s good. A person would have to be stupid to do that.” He whispered, “Give him my regards.”
Jane pulled her backpack up over her shoulders, adjusted the waist strap, and began to walk. She had known from the visit of the clan mothers that it might come to this, but she had not been sure until she talked with Mattie. She had not been able to tell Jane where Jimmy was—had not known, specifically—so what she did was let Jane know that maybe the answer was already there, inside Jane’s memory.
Jane wasn’t in doubt about how to get there. When Jane and Jimmy were fourteen, they’d saved money all spring. They had spent a few days collecting road maps, hoarding clean socks and underwear from the laundry, and planning. On the third morning after school let out in June, they set off toward the south.
Today, as Jane walked out of town away from Ray Snow’s mechanic shop, she made a hundred-yard detour so she could walk in the footsteps of the fourteen-year-old Jane. She and Jimmy had begun their journey on the reservation and walked to the south. The first big moment for Jane was when they crossed Route 5. It was an old road, one that white people had made by paving the Wa-a-gwenneyu. Underneath the pavement was the trail that ran the length of the longhouse-shaped region that was Iroquois territory, from Mohawk country at the Hudson River to Seneca country at the Niagara River.
The reason for their trip was personal and complicated. They told other people they wanted to explore a bit of the region. But what they were looking for was themselves. Jane and Jimmy had lost their fathers when they were eleven and twelve. Later, after Jane had become an adult, she realized that this coincidence must have been what drew them together and launched them on their trip. Without their fathers they had lost part of their link to the past, to the long history that had produced them. Changes that had taken place before they were born left them as two lonely Senecas, survivors among countless millions of other people in a world that sometimes bore no resemblance to the one that had formed their culture. Jane had been especially lost without her father, because her mother was white and didn’t speak Seneca even as well as Jane did, and they lived in a city miles from the reservation. Jane and Jimmy had seen nothing in junior high school that made them want to be part of the wider world, learned no point of view that gave them an acceptable place or a purpose in it.
When they talked about this during their thirteenth summer, they had made a pact to go on a trip the following summer, when they would be fourteen. They would travel as the old people had, speak only Onondawaga, and visit places that had not been changed, deforested, tamed, or demolished. Maybe they would learn something about who they were. In their fourteenth summer, they went.
Jane and Jimmy had hiked only a few miles by the time they reached Route 5, but when they crossed the highway they became travelers, not kids going for a walk. They were going back to the indeterminate time before the arrival of white people, when the eastern woodlands still extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from James Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Whenever Jane and Jimmy stepped a hundred yards into the woods between the roads it could have been two hundred or ten thousand years ago.
A couple of miles farther on would be the New York State Thruway. Jane looked at her watch when she reached it, and remembered. It had been noon by the time Jane and Jimmy had arrived on this spot. The thruway was a serious barrier. There was a high chain link fence, then a weedy margin about two hundred feet wide, and then a two-lane strip of highway full of cars driving sixty or seventy miles an hour toward the west. Next came a central island of grass and trees, and then the two-lane strip going east, and another weedy margin before the next fence. Kids from the reservation knew that the thruway was a fearsome barrier that kept deer, foxes, and other animals captive on one side or the other. The thruway was a toll road, so it had few exits a pedestrian could use for crossing. Some were thirty miles apart.
Jane and Jimmy had stopped to eat their sandwiches and study the traffic on the thruway. Their maps said they’d have to go east as far as Le Roy to reach the next exit, or chance a quick run across the pavement. They had begun their journey already knowing which it would be, but they took their time sitting side by side in a bushy area outside the first chain link fence and watching the cars go by, the nearer ones from left to right and the farther from right to left. Jane knew a car going sixty covered eighty-eight feet per second. If they could start right at the moment when a car passed, they could be across the pavement before the next arrived, but there was a problem of visibility. If a state police car came by at the wrong moment, they’d be picked up and suffer serious but nonspecific consequences far beyond the anger of their mothers. In the end they climbed the fence, crawled close to the pavement, pushing their backpacks ahead of them, and waited. They watched cars coming, evaluating each one, and finally saw a break in traffic that was inexplicable but welcome, and dashed across the two westbound lanes into the stand of trees in the center margin. They sat and laughed, not because there was anything funny, but because their fear had made them giddy. A state police car passed on the side they had just crossed, and it was twenty minutes before they dared to make the second crossing.
Grown-up Jane climbed the fence at a post, swung a leg over and set her toe in a link on the far side, lowered herself to the ground, then trotted across the field to the center strip and began to look to the right, barely pausing in the trees before she crossed the last two lanes. When she got to the second fence she dropped her backpack on the other side and stepped on the top of the fence to vault over. As she walked on, she thought about how easy it had been this time. Had she and Jimmy been smaller at fourteen? Probably Jimmy had, but he was fast, strong, and wiry, and could climb a tree like a squirrel. She guessed the fear of doing something they knew was illegal and dangerous must have weighed them down.
Jane faded into a stand of hardwood trees on the other side and kept walking south. She remembered the trip as fully as she could, bringing back details and finding others in the landscape as she went. She and Jimmy had stayed away from big north-south routes because they’d wanted to be in the woods and not on a road. In the old days, Senecas used to travel south on foot to the countries of the Cherokees and Catawbas to fight. They took canoes down the rivers and streams that ran south from Seneca country into Pennsylvania, and she had read in old sources after she’d grown up that they had also used a route along the crests of the Appalachian mountain ranges to strike as far south as Georgia. A number of times in the early 1700s the sudden appearances of Iroquois war parties in the high country had raised formal protests from the governors of the colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.
While Jimmy and Jane had walked, they spoke Onondawaga by advance agreement, forcing themselves to avoid blurting out something in English. But as the time passed, they spoke more comfortably, thinking less and less about it. Jane’s vocabulary was good, but a bit formal and archaic. Much of it had come from her grandfather and grandmother, who had taken over the job of teaching her after her father died when she was eleven. But Jimmy had always lived on the reservation, and his language was more flexible and functional, replete with borrowings from English.
Now, as Jane retraced the route over twenty years later, she thought about the two fourteen-year-olds and their relationship. They had been very close at six, closer still at eight or nine, but then they had reached that strange age around ten when Jimmy stopped playing with her. She had gone back to her parents’ house for school at the end of one summer, and when she came back to the reservation in the spring, Jimmy and his friends had refused to have anything to do with her. At first she searched her memory for the crime she must have committed, but came up with nothing. Eventually her mother had asked her why she was alone all the time, and heard Jane’s story with sympathy. She explained it as “the way boys are. A time comes when they go away from us for a while. They fight a lot. It’s the last time in their lives they can do it without killing each other, so it’s probably okay. They play rough sports, they have secrets, they compete. There seems to be an agreement that girls don’t exist. It lasts two or three years, and then around seventh or eighth grade, they admit girls to the world again. It’s as though they couldn’t see us for a while, and then they can again.”
Just as her mother had predicted, when Jane came back to the reservation in the summer of her thirteenth year, not only Jimmy but the other boys too were friendly again. Jane and Jimmy became close, but forever after there was a slight reserve between them. They had each discovered things during the break that made using the different pronouns “he” and “she” seem not nearly large enough to reflect the real differences between the sexes.
Jane knew she was coming to a bad place as she walked today. The first night she had camped, just as she and Jimmy had twenty years ago, under the stars in an old apple orchard at the back of a farm. The second was so warm and still that they lay in a field under the stars, and she did the same on her second night. But on the third night the weather had changed. When they had decided to take a summer hiking trip, they hadn’t thought hard enough about rain. She remembered one of them saying, “We should set aside extra time in case it rains,” and the other replying, “The old people didn’t hide under roofs when it rained. They just kept going. Skin is waterproof.” She was pretty sure the stupid one was the fourteen-year-old Jane Whitefield.
The rain began before first light on Jane and Jimmy’s third day and didn’t stop. They walked southward under a ceiling of gray clouds that produced a steady summer downpour as though the sky were draining onto the earth. The pair walked all day in soaked clothing. They were cold at the start, and kept telling each other the rain would end in the afternoon. In the afternoon the rain was heavier. They both agreed that rainstorms in Western New York blew through from somewhere on the Canadian plains across the lakes and eastward, and since they were walking south, the rain clouds shouldn’t stay with them this long. They should just pass over them to the east and be gone. But the rain went on all day, and as night fell, the rain picked up strength.
They trudged along the edge of an alfalfa field where a farmer’s ancestors had left a windbreak of chestnuts and maples that had long ago grown too tall to stop the wind. A more recent owner had planted a set of six-foot-tall evergreens as a hedge, so if they stayed beside it they didn’t feel the full force of the northwest wind. They were approaching the second major highway, the Southern Tier Expressway, just as the dim glow from the invisible sun gave out.