A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(10)

Jane said, “See across on the other side?”

“It’s a rest stop,” said Jimmy. “The building might be closed at night. I don’t see a lot of cars.”

“It won’t hurt to check,” Jane said.

As Jane remembered their conversation now, she’d had no sense of concern, no reluctance or foreboding. The rest stop was just an unoccupied place that might be dry inside.

They got a sense of the speed of the trucks, the average distance between them, and a measure of how far in front the beams of their headlights extended. They clambered over the chain link fence, moved closer, and waited for the right moment.

It came. They scooped up their packs, ran hard, and came across to the wooded center strip before the next truck’s headlights could reach them. They squatted in a thicket for a few minutes before they chose a time to run again, and this run was successful, too. They made it all the way to the opposite fence before the glare of the next set of headlights appeared.

They used the next period of darkness to climb the fence and trot into the long parking lot of the rest stop. Jane remembered that she felt hopeful for the first time in hours. Her sneakers were so wet they squished as she walked on the pavement. She said, “I only see two cars, and they’re way down there by the entrance. That building is probably bathrooms, and this one too.” She pointed to a low building like a cinderblock box with a roof.

As they approached she saw a small sign that said MEN and let Jimmy peer inside while she walked around the building to the door that said WOMEN. She held her breath as she reached out to the doorknob. It turned and she breathed again.

She slipped into the restroom and felt the rain stop pounding on her head and shoulders. Suddenly the water was reduced to a thrumming sound on the roof, and a noise as it trickled down off the eaves. The room was a single -concrete-and-cinderblock box with three toilets in small stalls, three sinks, and a big plastic trash barrel. The mirror above the sinks was scratched with initials. She couldn’t imagine why some woman would make use of a diamond that way.

Jane used the farthest stall and thought about the luxury of it after three days on the trail. She came out the door and sidestepped along under the eaves, where there was a curtain of water coming down. She stopped at the men’s room door and knocked. “Jimmy?”

“Coming.” She heard a flush.

She waited until he opened the door a few inches. “Come on in.”

She said, “No, it smells like pee. Let’s wait it out in the ladies’ room.” She remembered thinking that men and boys’ anatomies gave them the option of missing, but didn’t want to say anything that would start that kind of discussion.

“Okay,” he said. They sidestepped to the ladies’ side and entered.

There was a switch on the wall like the ones in hallways at school that kids weren’t supposed to be able to operate because only teachers had keys. But the girls Jane knew had discovered by second grade that a bobby pin was just as good as the principal’s light key. She had a couple of pins in her jeans pocket, so she took one out and stepped to the switch.

“We don’t want light,” said Jimmy. “It’ll attract attention.”

When they started out they’d both been convinced that they had a perfect right to be exploring a part of the Seneca homeland on foot. They also believed that if the state police came along they’d be arrested and their mothers forced to drive to a remote police barracks to bail them out. “Yeah, you’re right,” Jane said, and put away the pin. There was light coming through the small, high window from a streetlamp lighting the parking lot, so they could see well enough.

They sat down on the concrete floor together and listened to the rain. “It’s raining harder,” she said. “We’re lucky we found this place. We’d better plan to sleep here.”

Jimmy shrugged. “When we get home let’s not tell people we slept a night in a bathroom.”

Jane imitated the shrug. “In the old days the warriors would have loved a nice, dry girls’ bathroom to stay in.”

Jimmy laughed. “But one of them would have said, ‘Let’s not tell anybody.’”

They unrolled their sleeping bags and found that they were only soaked around the edges, where their covers had left an end exposed. Then they took out a few items to see if they had also stayed dry. Jane was already thinking about the awkwardness of changing clothes in the restroom, but she was pretty sure she was going to try. She had packed fairly well, with her clean clothes in a couple of plastic trash bags, and her snacks in another. The maps and other papers had been in a pocket on the side of her backpack, but even they seemed salvageable.

She opened the road map they had used the most because there were details besides roads, and held the paper under the hand dryer on the wall for a couple of minutes, until it was crinkly but dry. At the same time she surreptitiously moved her lower body under the dryer too, and found that the hot blast of air helped. She turned around to look at her friend. “Jimmy,” she said. “What’s that?”

In his left hand was the frame of a small gun-blued revolver, with the cylinder pulled out and to the side. He was wiping it carefully with a rag made from a torn-apart cotton undershirt. He had emptied the cylinder onto his sleeping bag, and Jane could see nine .22 long rifle rounds. “I’ve got to wipe it down so it doesn’t rust.”