A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(15)

Jane thought about what she wished she had said to Carey, how she should frame her sentences when she talked to him again. At last she fell asleep in a cornfield, and slept uninterruptedly until afternoon when the heat of the sun woke her. She got up, rolled up her sleeping bag, shouldered her pack, and began to walk.

She kept moving south. Each night she wished she could call Carey, but as cell phones had become nearly universal, it had gotten harder and harder to find a pay phone. But one night she came to a diner in a small village along the road. She ate, and then found a pay phone on the wall outside the diner by the parking lot. Carey didn’t answer, so she left a message. “Hi, honey. I’m still on the trip, but I’m not anywhere I can call very often. I don’t have my cell phone anymore, so don’t try that.” She paused for a second. “I’m afraid I’ve got nothing to say but I love you, so here it comes. I love you.” She hung up.

She kept moving south, mostly at night. Sometimes her road ran through small towns, where it was transformed into a main street, and ran past churches and schools. At times she would go up on a sidewalk and jog along beside the display windows of stores, and then the road left the town behind and became rural again.

She wished she had gotten to talk to Carey on the phone, and not just leave him a message. The anger she felt at his lack of understanding had faded, and now when she thought about him she simply missed him.

Late on the fifth night of hard travel Jane reached the Meadowcroft Rockshelter. Since she and Jimmy had been here long ago the state of Pennsylvania or some institution had built a sturdy-looking wooden shelter to put a roof over the ancient outcropping of rock. There were platforms and steps to the shelter now. She stopped in the woods a hundred yards from the wooden structure, staying far enough away so that the security cameras in or on the building wouldn’t pick up more than a slight thickening of the darkness at the edge of the woods for a moment, and then nothing. She continued into the woods above the building, went another hundred yards to a suitable thicket made of sprouts and saplings of a vanished maple tree, and spread her sleeping bag in the center of it.

She woke a few hours later already aware that she wasn’t alone. She carefully rolled out of her sleeping bag and squatted to be ready to spring if she needed to. Jimmy? No, he wouldn’t sneak up on her. But it could be a Pennsylvania park ranger looking around to be sure she wasn’t somebody dangerous. She waited a few minutes in motionless silence, and then saw the source of the movement. It was five deer, two bucks and three does, moving along outside the edge of the woods where the foraging was best. In a few more minutes they faded back into the forest, up some narrow trail that she had not seen.

Jane packed up and walked toward the creek, but then realized that she hadn’t been intended to go that way. She was supposed to think the way she and Jimmy had thought when they were fourteen.

She took the path that had been marked and cleared above the creek, and then climbed a bit to the broad opening of the wooden structure over the rock shelter. There sat Jimmy Sanders in the mouth of it, smiling like a jovial stone god in a forest shrine. He wore a gray-green T-shirt that showed his bulging biceps and a pair of cargo pants with a zippered leg that could change the pants to shorts. His legs hung off the platform at the cavernous entrance to the shelter, kicking happily. On his head was an olive drab watch cap of the sort that Jane had brought to keep warm when she camped at night, but she could see enough above his hairline to see his hair was cut very short. His shoes were brown hiking boots made of netting and rubber like high-top sneakers. His skin was like Jane’s, but it had been darkened by the sun to look like Jane’s father’s—like a worn copper penny. His face was still handsome and a little boyish with the same amusement showing in his black eyes.

“Hey, Janie,” Jimmy said, his cheerful smile growing. He looked down at her from the platform and then stared up at the sky and took in a deep breath of morning air. Then he looked down at her again. “I knew that if anybody would come and find me it would be you.” He closed his eyes to the sunshine and then opened one eye. “I had hoped for your sake that you’d look about that way at our present age.”

“You look pretty chipper yourself, Jimmy.”

“I wasn’t talking about chipper.”

“I know you weren’t,” she said. “I’m married. Happily.”

“I’d heard that. Good for you. It takes character. Another sign that you grew up just the way I thought. He’s a doctor, right?”

“Yes, and a good man. How about you? Get married yet?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll bet you stopped off at my mom’s before you came, and she would have said so if I had.”

“Probably,” said Jane. “But we didn’t get to talk much this time.”

“I would have been a better husband in the old times I think. I’d go off up the trail with my friends to fight whoever we were fighting that month and the little woman would stay in her clan’s longhouse and raise crops and babies with her friends. When I came back we’d make her section of the longhouse a happy place for a while, and then I’d go off again.”

“Very romantic. But I’ll hold on to some hope that you find a regular modern girl and live a dull life.” She climbed the steps to the platform where he sat. She sat down beside him and let her legs dangle from the edge of the platform.