A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(18)

In time the stream bed became steeper and the banks disappeared. The trickle of water was running over bare rock. She altered her course to keep from having to travel in the open, bringing them instead among the pines that dominated the heights near the crest of the ridge. The ground under the pines was thick with needles, and it soothed her feet. She turned to check on Jimmy, and found he was still the same ten feet back, still not ready to collapse after the quick climb. His T-shirt had a dark streak where sweat had soaked the shoulders and neck, then run down to his belly, but he didn’t seem to be in distress. When Jane stopped, she squatted in the shade under the pines, and he did too. They both looked back down the high hillside in the direction they’d come from, trying to see if they were being followed.

If the cop was on his way up, the full green foliage of the trees was shielding him from their view. Jane was sure that if he had called for reinforcements she or Jimmy would be able to see them or hear them. There were no roads nearby for police cars to travel, and nothing was in the air but a couple of red-tailed hawks circling on thermals very high up and calling to each other now and then. She said, “I don’t see him, or anybody else. Do you?”

Jimmy slowly shook his head. “No. But if I was tracking somebody, I’d try to be sure they didn’t see me, too.”

“So would I,” she said. “We’d better keep going.”

Jane got up and headed for the top of the ridge, and heard Jimmy follow. When they had almost reached the crest, she moved along just below it, trying to keep from being visible to the man following them. She looked ahead, trying to find a notch or a grove of trees that was thick enough to hide them all the way to the top, so they could slip over to the downslope on the other side without being silhouetted against the bright sky.

After a short time she came to a spot where the pine trees seemed to spill down from the crest to the beginning of the deciduous forest. She entered the pines and led Jimmy to the crest and over to the far side. Immediately she saw the reason the vegetation grew so thickly to the top. A spring had formed a pool up there, and water seeped downward on both sides of the ridge. On the new side, she could see that the water had formed the beginning of a stream, and that farther down, the width and depth of the stream grew. The stream provided another clear path downward without fighting underbrush. As each section of the stream bed became wider and deeper, she and Jimmy could trot along it without being seen.

The climb they had just completed had put strain on the muscles along the backs of Jane’s legs, and now going downward put stress on the muscles in the front. The bullet wound in her thigh was old now—it had happened over a year ago—and she had come to think of herself as fully recovered, but as she descended, she felt a twinge, a sudden weakness in her right thigh that startled her and made her wonder for an instant whether her leg would give way under her. From time to time she felt the twinge again, but the leg held.

“We seem to be heading south,” Jimmy said. “That’s not toward home.”

“We don’t have much choice. The direction we’ve been taking is just away.”

“Then what? Circle back at night?”

“Maybe. Somehow we’ve got to lose this cop and get you back up to the reservation.”

“So I can surrender to a different cop.”

“Yes. That’s what it amounts to, but running makes you seem guilty. And being a fugitive in a murder case is highly risky. Any cops you meet will almost certainly draw their sidearms, and sometimes a nervous cop will misinterpret any movement as hostile. When we’re home we’ll get you a great defense lawyer, and get some private detectives going on investigating your case. While we’re out here running through the woods nobody’s doing anything to clear you.”

Jimmy said, “Clearing me sounds like it costs a lot of money.”

“Enough will be available,” Jane said.

“The clan mothers set aside money for this kind of thing?”

Jane didn’t bother to correct his impression.

They moved along the stream bed, careful not to step on the mossy rocks right near the water because they were slippery. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have thought that you’d do something like this.”

“Then why did you leave me a message in the ladies’ room by the expressway?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess being there again brought that trip back to me, and I had been feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t really expect you to find it.”

“Just because I don’t live on the reservation I’m not suddenly a stranger. I never lived there anyway, except in the summer when my father was working far away.”

“That’s part of it,” he said. “And the other part is that you can be Indian or not whenever you want.”

“That’s not how it works. I don’t get to pick, and never did. My mother had eyes so blue they looked like the sky reflected in ice water, and skin like cream. She’s the one who chose, and she wanted to be Seneca because she loved my father. After the Wolf clan women adopted her, she was never anything else. And I’ve never been anything else.”

“You have blue eyes just like hers.”

She laughed. “Don’t sound like that. I didn’t steal them.”

“I meant you can pick.”