A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(42)

He studied her for a moment. “Are you sure you didn’t hear something bad from Ellen that you’re not telling me?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then this is about the guy who’s framing me. He’s probably the one who did the shooting, and there’s a record of him buying the right kind of rifle, so he decided that saying he sold it to me would get him off.”

“All very good thinking, except that he didn’t do the shooting. He will have an absolutely ironclad alibi, which is why he could put himself forward like that. I think he’s doing a favor for whoever really did it, and so are the men who went to jail to kill you. Is any of this normal? No.”

“But you’re starting to sound as though I’m going to have to stay away from home for a really long time.”

“I’m not sure,” said Jane. “Maybe you won’t have to. I’m teaching you how to stay free for a short time, but the principles are the same, if you have to keep it up.”

Jane handed him the next bag. “Now that I’m sure about your sizes, I bought you more clothes. I’m aiming for the look I told you about before—upscale and professional. You have to be able to walk in a crowd on the street and never be one of the first men a cop looks at. Clothes can help accomplish that. From now on, you don’t wear sneakers unless you’re jogging. No knit caps unless you’re in the woods or it’s snowing. No sweatshirts unless they have the name of some university. You get the idea?”

“Sure.” He looked into the bag and pulled out some of the clothes. “Pretty nice. Maybe I should start dressing like this anyway.”

“That should be enough to think about for now,” she said. “If things ever got really awful and we had to give you a permanent new identity, there would be a lot more to learn. We can do a little more later. Right now, I’m tired. I think I’ll go take an afternoon nap.”

“Thanks, Jane,” he said. “I haven’t spent any time with you for at least twenty years, but you’ve turned out to be about the best friend I have.”

“I’m trying to be,” she said. She went across the room to avoid his stare, but still felt that he hadn’t looked away. She said, “See you later,” went into her bedroom, and closed the door.

They didn’t start again until after dinner that night and the kitchen was clean. Jane said, “Time for the next lesson.” They went to sit on the living room couch.

“What’s this lesson about?”

She said, “When professionals are searching for a fugitive, one of the most effective ways they do it is to keep his family and friends under surveillance—if necessary, for long periods of time. They check the mail before it’s delivered, record and trace their phone calls, and watch their houses. Sometimes there are private detective types searching, and they’ll do the illegal stuff—install hidden microphones, hack into their e-mail, and so on. The minute a runner contacts a relative or a friend, he’s given up his location. So the best advice is to let those relationships go.”

“Let them go? You mean give up your family?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “If you go back to the past, the ones waiting for you there are the chasers.”

“What kind of choice is that?”

“Not a very good one,” she said. “The only things it’s an improvement on are going to jail and dying.”

“How can anybody give up his family?”

“It’s all part of one process. You learn to forget every-thing about the past, and concentrate on inventing a future for yourself. Changing identities is an interesting opportunity for some people, like being reborn a new person. Once you’ve lived to about our age, the idea of making some different choices has its attractions. Did you always want to be something different—an artist, a musician, a teacher? Once your old life is obliterated or becomes too dangerous to live, you’ve got to be somebody, so why not that?”

“I suppose,” he said. “If you can’t be who you are, you have to be somebody else. I’m not in that position.”

“No,” said Jane. “But play along. It’s an exercise.”

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “If I had to give up my regular life, I suppose I’d like to try being an architect. I’ve been doing construction for years, and I’ve got some ideas I’d like to try out.”

“Usually I would recommend a profession that’s not even remotely related to your last one, but for the moment, architecture is fine,” she said. “First thing we’d have to do is get you into architecture school. School is a good choice. The people who look for fugitives don’t usually have a good ready-made way of searching campuses for people living under new names. School also takes time, so your trail gets cold.”

“How would I get into architecture school?”

“Fraud and chicanery,” she said. “Also some forgery. I’m experienced at getting people into places where they wouldn’t normally belong, and I have good relationships with some people who can produce just about anything on paper. But you really would have to get through the school yourself and learn how to be an architect. You can’t fake that.”

“Of course,” he said. “I would want to be a real architect.”