A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(67)

She passed without stopping. When she reached the outskirts of the town of Akron she found an empty carport in a large apartment complex, parked her car inside, and went to sleep.

At six the sun woke her, and she drove to the business section, where she found a diner that seemed to have the right number of customers. She took a booth near the back, sat where she could face the rear wall, and ate breakfast while she thought about what she had seen during the night. At seven she drove back past Chelsea Schnell’s small farmhouse. As Jane drove past she saw that the same lights were on in the windows, and nothing else had changed, so she drove another half mile and parked her car off the road. She walked back and stationed herself in a thicket of saplings beneath the tall maples at the rear of the field behind the house.

The car that brought Chelsea Schnell home at noon was a new Range Rover. As it turned off the highway onto the long gravel drive to the house, Jane studied what she could see of the driver. He was a man in his early forties. He drove up to the front porch and got out to let Chelsea out of the passenger side. She was wearing a fancy black dress and high heels that seemed wrong for this time of day. She took a set of keys from her purse and unlocked the door, and the man followed her in.

Jane moved in closer until she could read the license plate, then moved in close enough to take a picture with her phone. She put it away, and then moved to the side of the house, where she couldn’t be as easily seen from the street, and then to the back. As she ducked to cross under one of the rear windows, she heard voices. She stopped to keep from making noise or having one of them look out the window and see her. The voices stopped, and then she heard something else. There was a squeaky sound, slow at first, and then a bit louder. Could it be?

She moved her body close to the wall, slowly raised herself, put one eye to the corner of the window then away almost instantly, and ducked down. She had seen enough to know that it was time to go. Neither of the people inside the bedroom would be looking out the window very soon, because they were on the bed having sex.

Jane made her way to the back, where there were trees and bushes to hide her. She walked a course parallel to the road, and didn’t alter it until she came to her car. As she left, she looked at her watch. It was half past noon.

Jane drove to Interstate 390, took it north to the Rochester Inner Loop and got off on Main, then drove to her hotel and parked in the underground garage. She put the lanyard that held her badge for the medical records management convention around her neck, carried her folder under her arm, and took the elevator upstairs to the lobby, where there were dozens of other men and women with convention badges coming in or out of the hotel restaurants and the business center. She took a second elevator to her floor, went into her room, hung the PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door latch, closed the door, and bolted it.

It was strange to be in this room. All of this time she had been within seventy miles of her home and her husband, but she was in hiding. She couldn’t do the things she needed to and then go home and sleep in her own bed. She couldn’t risk leading someone back to the McKinnon house. Those things had all been clear from the beginning. But what bothered her at that moment was that she couldn’t be there because Carey would ask her questions, and she would have to lie to him, have to avoid letting him see her come and go, and argue with him about what she was doing. If she argued this time she couldn’t say that what she’d been doing was legal, or that it was safe, or that it was nearly over. It was none of those things.

She took off her clothes, showered, and then went to bed. She slept from two o’clock until nine in the evening, and got up still thinking about what she had learned during the night and morning. She wondered how Jimmy was doing, and whether he was still safely hidden. She knew she had to trust him, to assume that he had the sense to follow her instructions long enough for her to find out what was going on.

At ten she was dressed in a black shirt and black jeans and ready to go out in the dark again. She went down to the garage, retrieved her car, and drove to the Tonawanda Reservation. She pulled over to the side of the road near Ellen Dickerson’s house and walked along the shoulder. She listened to the sound of her feet crunching the first sycamore leaves to fall to the ground. It was still summer, but the sycamores always seemed to drop a few green leaves bigger than the spread of a big man’s hand about now, reminders that summer was not permanent, and someday winter would come back. Jane felt an increasing sense of reluctance and trepidation at dropping in like this at the home of the clan mother of the Wolf clan. What she was doing felt presumptuous.

She stepped up the four steps to the wooden porch and the front door opened. Ellen Dickerson was standing in the doorway wearing blue jeans and a loose shirt with the light behind her and her face in shadow. “Hello, Jane.” There was no surprise in her voice, no real emotion except patience.

Seeing her there already waiting made Jane pause for a second before she came forward the rest of the way. Maybe it had been a coincidence. Maybe Ellen had seen the light from Jane’s car and wondered who had come, or heard her walking on the crisp dry leaves. Maybe she had heard her feet on the porch and already been near the door. “Hello, Ellen,” she said. “I’m sorry to come without calling.”

“We’ve been waiting.” She came out onto the porch and closed her front door behind her, leaving them both in shadow. She stood by the railing and stared up the road into the darkness beyond Jane’s car, then in the other direction. When she was satisfied, she said, “Come in. We’ll talk.”