A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(13)

Jane knew what Jimmy meant by the oldest place. When they had come this way twenty years ago they had been on a summer camping trip. But they had also been trying to go back in time. They had wanted to feel the way they would have felt if they’d been an Onondawaga boy and girl long ago. For them the easiest way to do that was to turn away from everything that had happened since the 1600s, and that meant entering the forest. In the second-growth woods between the Tonawanda Reservation and the southwestern part of Pennsylvania, they felt like ong-we-on-weh, “the real people.” They were on parts of the land that had not been damaged much. They were where the past still was.

Jane found the pencil in her backpack, took it out, put her face close to the wall, and erased Jimmy’s message. She checked it from several angles to be sure it couldn’t be read or brought back, then wrote in the same tiny space, “J., I’m going to the oldest place to find you. If I miss you come see me. J.,” put the pencil away, turned off the lights, and went into the cleanest stall to use the toilet, then headed to the door, pushed it open, and looked in both directions. It was at that moment that she realized she wasn’t alone.

She saw the man on the north side of the divided expressway. He was tall and thin, with blond hair, a reddish face, and big hands. She watched him emerge from the trees beyond the expressway. He began to trot toward the highway. He ran at about half speed and looked comfortable loping along, even though he was in the high weeds and uneven ground of the margin. As he neared the chain link fence, he sped up slightly, ran up the fence high enough to get his toes into some links at midpoint and his hands at the top at a vertical post, and hoisted himself up and over. As his feet hit the ground, his knees bent to absorb the shock. He popped up and resumed his trot.

Jane noticed a mechanical, trained quality to his movements, like a soldier on an obstacle course. He ran to the road and crossed without pausing to look, timing the cars without effort and stepping out of the way of one into the slipstream of the next and on to the grass stripe in the middle. “Cop,” Jane thought. He ran the way cops did when they wanted to reach a car that had stalled in the left lane.

Jane stepped back inside the restroom, closed the door, and climbed on one of the toilets to look out the window. She heard the men’s room door open and close, so she knew he had made the stop. She waited a few minutes, and then heard it again. Through the window she watched him stride across the parking lot. He was in a hurry and she knew he was in that moment of heightened alertness when he was rushing to catch up with her, hoping that she had not just turned off on another path or stopped to sleep for an hour so he would run on ahead and lose her.

The man gradually worked his way up from a long stride to a jog. She could see he was a habitual runner, a man who was comfortable going long distances on foot. As she slipped out the door and started after him, his strength and steadiness worried her.

The man crossed the narrow road that ran parallel to the expressway. The road still had a string of decrepit businesses left behind when the highway had bypassed them. She sensed that he was about to look behind him to see if he had overrun her position, so she altered her course and ducked into a small convenience store and bought some bottles of water, apples, nuts, and protein bars. Then she came out and looked southeast to southwest to spot the tallest hill along the path. That was where he would ultimately have to go to spot her. As Jane moved south she sped up, testing herself against the man.

It was already late in the day and he would be getting around to admitting that he had lost her and would have to climb to higher ground. He would be reduced to looking down from the top of the high hill and see if he could spot her on one of the trails beneath the trees. That was the most effective thing he had left to do. Ten or fifteen thousand years ago, when the ice age glaciers still covered the land a few miles north of here, Paleo-Indians used to live on the heights and watch for the migrating herds of caribou they hunted and for approaching enemies.

Jane couldn’t yet allow herself to be sure what this man was. He looked like a policeman, but he still could be almost anything—the real killer of the man Jimmy had fought in the bar, a private detective hired by the victim’s family, or a friend of the victim. Or he could be a long-distance hiker who had simply come along behind her on the trail, but had nothing to do with her or Jimmy.

She checked the level of the sun, estimated that it would be down in an hour, and decided to head up the east side of the highest hill, where it would be dark soonest, and prepare to start out before sunup.

She climbed the hill quickly, stopping only a few seconds at a time on the thickly forested slope to listen for his footsteps, or for an abrupt silencing of the birdsongs that would warn her of another interloper in the woods. The way up was steep, but it would take her to the top faster, and test her legs and her wind. In the year since she had been shot in the right thigh, she had gone harder and longer and steeper every time she felt uncertain about her strength. She had to make up for the months when she had barely been able to stand.

As Jane was approaching the summit she began to smell the pungent, perfumed scent of a pine fire. The fire was small, probably a few sappy pine twigs as kindling to start a piece of hardwood that would give off less smoke and more heat.

She moved off the path into the wooded terrain. She followed the smell and after another two hundred yards she found him. He had set up camp in a small copse a bit higher than the surrounding ground, and hidden from view by trees and brush. Jane dropped down and crawled closer to watch him. He was camped on the east side of the hill, just as she had planned to. He had unrolled a mat to pad his sleeping spot. He had a plastic tarp with brass grommets that he’d hung as a lean-to, and then spread a lightweight sleeping bag on the mat.