A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(52)

“I’d like you to get a storage unit for me. Make that two, but not next to each other. Put them in names like Smith and Brown. Not the same name. And make sure that I have the only keys to the locks.”

“Of course, Mr. Malconi. I’ll do that today.”

“Good,” said Malconi. “When you bring me the keys, maybe I’ll know more about your problem.” He hung up.

Salamone stood for a moment looking at his cell phone’s display to be sure the call had ended, and he hadn’t just lost the signal for a moment. He didn’t want the old man listening to his conversations for the rest of the day.

He shook his head. It was always risky to call Mr. Malconi. And expensive. Every time the old man talked to anybody about anything, he exacted some kind of payment, like a tax. If Mr. Malconi knew you had the owner of a prosthetics factory on the hook, he would want a free leg or something. Salamone thought about the two storage bays. He could only hope the old man didn’t do anything strange with them. Salamone didn’t want to have a bunch of drugs in them, or a cache of explosives. Malconi’s business dealings could include anything.

JANE AND JIMMY HAD BEEN driving eastward all day through the rural countryside of Upstate New York on Route 20. They passed through small towns where traffic signals impeded their progress, and they ate in small diners. Between towns they stopped at roadside stands and bought fruit and snacks. They avoided taverns, because they all had television sets mounted in the corners and above the bar, where people intending to watch some game might instead see a mug shot of the man being sought for the murder of Nick Bauermeister. Their progress was slow, but a car following them on Route 20 would be easy to spot.

Once when Jimmy was taking his turn to drive, he said, “I’m getting a little tired of small-town America. Can we switch to the thruway for a couple of hours?”

“It’s better to stay off any road with tolls,” Jane said.

“Are we out of money?”

“No. It’s not the tolls that bother me. It’s the booths. They all have cameras mounted on them, and the police have been using them more and more often to see if a car with a license plate they’re looking for has gone through.”

“Do you think they know this car or its license number?”

Jane shrugged. “Can’t tell. The people who chased us out of Cleveland saw it. If all they need to do is get you into a jail, they might pass that information to the New York State police through some innocent-looking intermediary.”

“Slow back roads it is, then,” said Jimmy. “I’m always shocked by how far you think ahead.”

“It’s not clairvoyance. It’s avoiding situations that might increase the risks. If you don’t want to be found, you stay away from cameras, particularly ones operated by police agencies. You try to be sure as few people see your face as possible. None of these precautions is hard. They’re just inconvenient.”

“The hard things are more than inconvenient. It’s hard not to be able to go home, and not to be able to check up on my mother, to be sure she has what she needs. Half the time her car isn’t working right.”

“You’re luckier than most people in that way. Your mother is surrounded by people who care about her. There are probably four hundred people on the reservation who would love to drive her wherever she wants—one a day for a year and a month.”

“But none of them is me.”

“I think you’ll be back before long.”

He smiled. “Where are we going?”

“I’ll know when we get there. We’re just passing through New York State on the way, because as soon as you cross a state line, you’re no longer at the top of the list of fugitives. You’re somebody else’s problem.”

In the evening Jane rented a motel room near Saratoga Springs, and the next morning after breakfast they crossed into Vermont. In the afternoon they drove through miles of hills covered with thick, old-growth forests, and then crossed the Connecticut river into Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Jane drove north through Lebanon. There were restaurants, a couple of plazas full of huge discount stores, a few hotels, a sign for a hospital that was back from the road at the end of a driveway that wound out of sight among the trees. Next the road narrowed again and they passed rows of clapboard houses, most of them white, built with steep, smooth gray roofs designed to make the deep snows of the winter slide off them. And then they were in Hanover. As they drove past small stores selling clothing, food, furniture, and housewares, they reached the center of the small town and were surrounded by the lawns and the white spires and redbrick buildings of Dartmouth College.

“Dartmouth,” said Jimmy. “We’d better get out of here before somebody notices I don’t fit in.”

“We look perfect,” Jane said. “The place was started as a school for Indians. Thayendanegea’s sons were among their first graduates. It must have been in the seventeen seventies or so.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot you went to Cornell. You and Thayendanegea are Ivy Leaguers. Is this where they taught him to call himself Joseph Brant?”

“No,” said Jane. “After his father died, his mother married a Mohawk named Brant. She had the same clan name as I was given—Owandah. That’s why I was curious about her when I was a kid. What do you think of the town?”