A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(71)

Crane’s clothes were more extravagant, but he seemed to buy them on websites. In the three days Jane watched the house, she saw the UPS truck deliver four packages and leave them on his porch. She opened all of them, found they contained clothes he had ordered online, rewrapped them, and left them on the porch.

Each day a woman about fifty years old drove up at ten and went inside to clean the house, do laundry, and sometimes drive out to perform some light grocery shopping. She spent about half her time washing the huge windows, doing a couple each day until she had done them all, then starting the next ones, in a continuous rotation. Each day she raked the small Japanese garden in the courtyard. She was always gone before Crane came home at four. Jane timed her and chose the moment when she was busy with the windows on the back wall of the house to open her car door and read the registration in her glove compartment. The car’s owners were Wilfred and Verna Machak.

Jane visited the inside of the house on the second and third mornings at eight after Crane had driven off. On those mornings Chelsea Schnell left with him, having stayed the night. Jane found little in the house that surprised her. She confirmed that the two had slept together by the state of the bed in the master bedroom, the only one that had been touched. She could see that they had been drinking, at least moderately, from the champagne flutes left in the bedroom one morning and cognac snifters the next. She noticed that although Chelsea Schnell had now slept in the house at least three times in a short period, she had not left any of her belongings anywhere in the house. It was possible that she was very well organized, or that she was being careful not to scare Crane off. It was also possible that Chelsea wasn’t yet sure she really wanted Crane, and was trying to avoid having to gather toothbrushes and panties when she left for the last time.

On the fourth evening at sunset Jane drove to the reservation to visit Mattie Sanders, Jimmy’s mother. Jane parked at the old cemetery by the council house and walked. It was a windless evening and Jane could hear the chirps of sparrows and the warbling of robins competing with the crickets as she walked. She was aware of the sounds her feet made as she went, and found herself treading carefully along the shoulder of the road to avoid frightening the animals into silence. She turned off the road onto a trail through the woods to the smaller road that led to Mattie’s house, but stopped to watch the road through the trees and to study every building, every parked car. She was searching for the presence of strangers—anyone who might be watching the Sanders house or the approaches to it.

All the way to Mattie’s house she watched and studied, and when she arrived she had still seen nothing. It was almost as disturbing as it would have been to see something. It would have been reassuring to see signs that the state police were watching Mattie, but if they had been, they weren’t tonight. Someone must have been monitoring Mattie’s telephone, or the false cops would have had no way to find her and Jimmy in Cleveland. As Jane walked, the birds went to their nests and night fell.

When Jane stepped onto the front porch and knocked, Mattie opened the front door a few inches. “Janie,” she said. “Come on in.”

Jane entered and Mattie closed the door and then hugged her. “I’m so pleased to see you’re back,” she said.

Mattie was being scrupulously patient, but Jane knew she must be going mad with worry. “He’s fine,” she whispered in Mattie’s ear. Then she added, “Let’s go out for a walk.”

Mattie nodded and led her to the back door through the small, neat kitchen. She looked out for a few seconds, stepped out, locked the door, and headed into the woods. They moved along in silence for a few minutes, hearing only the crickets raising the volume now that it was fully dark. Jane remembered this path from her childhood, but it was the first time she’d been in this section of woods since the fall when she’d left for college. She stopped for a few seconds and listened, but heard no change in the frequency of the crickets. She said softly, “Jimmy is well and safe. I left him with new clothes, plenty of cash, and a reliable used car in a nice small town a long way from here. He knows what he has to do to stay hidden while I look into things here.”

Mattie eyed her. “Ellen Dickerson told me you said he was okay a couple of days ago, but I didn’t know how much confidence to put in that. Things could have changed.”

“He would call me if they did.”

“You’re not going to say exactly where he is?”

Jane said, “I want you to be able to take a lie detector test and say you don’t know. And the time may come when somebody asks you under oath.”

Mattie smiled sadly, and her beautiful brown skin seemed to tighten. “And if I get tempted to go see my son, I can’t lead anybody to him.”

Jane frowned. “I’m sorry. But there are easy ways for anybody to track your car, or use the GPS on your cell phone, or half a dozen other things to track you. I can’t even be sure I know all the ways, so I can’t warn you about them.”

“I found a little gadget stuck to the bottom of my gas tank with a magnet two days ago.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I left it there,” said Mattie. “If I threw it away, I figure they’ll do something else next time that I don’t know about. And I don’t care if they track me to the market. If I want to sneak off, I’ll get rid of it then.”

“That’s right,” said Jane. “Maybe we should wait a few days until the battery gets weak and watch your car to see who comes to replace it. To tell you the truth, one of the reasons I came by was to see who was watching you these days.”