A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(74)
“Goodness.”
“The best, of course, would be if the men who were after you would decide to sit in the parking lot and wait for you to come back, while the police did the same thing. They could hardly help bumping heads, and I know which heads I’d bet on.”
“You’re really good at this, aren’t you?”
“I hope so,” said Jane. She’d said too much. She prepared herself for the next few questions, dreading the prospect of lying to Mattie Sanders.
“Would you mind if I drove for a while?” Mattie said. “This much inactivity begins to get to me after a while. It makes me anxious. You could even get some sleep.”
“A good offer,” said Jane. “I’ll take it. Just stay on Route 20. It goes all the way to Kenmore Square in Boston.”
“We’re not going there, are we?”
“No. If you see Interstate Ninety-One north, take it. That should be in three hundred miles or so, and I’d better be up long before then.”
Jane pulled off the highway onto the shoulder and they traded places. She lay back in the passenger seat while Mattie adjusted the seat and mirrors, then pulled out onto the road. Jane pretended to be asleep for a few minutes while she watched the speedometer and the road with one eye. When she was satisfied that Mattie was still a competent driver, real sleep overtook her.
She woke when it was still dark, but she could tell that it would be morning before long. The window beside her felt cold, and there was a fog that had gathered in the bottoms of the valleys and put rainbow auras around the streetlamps they passed. There were already a few delivery trucks out unloading supplies of various sorts, and lights in a few house windows. She stretched, rubbed her eyes, and said, “How are you doing, Mattie?”
“Fine. It’s been a nice, easy trip with so little traffic.”
“I’m feeling rested. I’m ready to take over when you feel like it.”
“I’d like to stop for breakfast somewhere.”
They stopped at a diner in the next town. There were a surprising number of customers, most of them men who wore jeans or work uniforms, and sat at the counter. Jane and Mattie sat in a booth and ordered fried eggs, hash browns, and toast, but ate mostly in silence because they didn’t want to attract attention. After about twenty minutes a pair of police officers came in, a man and woman who were both about thirty years old and were hard to see as anything but a couple. Jane and Mattie finished their food, paid in cash, and went back to their car. This time Jane took the wheel.
They crossed the Hudson into Massachusetts in the morning sunshine and drove north up Interstate 91 into New Hampshire, and then switched to Interstate 89 at Manchester. The rolling mountains of New Hampshire made Jane think of huge sleeping prehistoric creatures, their big rounded bodies covered over the centuries of sleep with windblown leaves, then humus, then trees. The fog had burned off while Jane and Mattie were still in New York State, and now the sky was a fresh, robin’s egg blue with small puffs of white cloud in rows like the letters of an unknown language. Every ten minutes Jane and Mattie seemed to cross a bridge over a dark river that ran out of the forest. There were several with signs that said, BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE THE ROAD, a warning that this was a different sort of country in the winter, and soon there were signs in swampy places that said MOOSE CROSSING.
Every town had its eighteenth-century churches and cemeteries, and a few had outlying margins of malls and discount stores and fast-food outlets. But most of the route was forest, and from the road Jane could see deep into shady spaces between white pine, maple, white oak and hickory, beech and birch trees. They got off at exit 18, and drove into Hanover on Route 120 past the hospital, into the center of town, and found themselves on the Dartmouth campus. There was no clear separation between the town and the college, only the realization at some point that the buildings had gotten bigger and fancier. In the center was a vast expanse of grass leading to a long brick building with a white steeple.
When they reached the apartment house where Jimmy Sanders was staying Jane parked the car and knocked on the door. She saw no movement, only felt a vague impression that the curtain had been disturbed. The door opened and Jimmy was visible a few feet back from the open door, where he would not be seen from the street.
When Mattie stepped in, she and Jimmy stood in silence and hugged each other for a few seconds while Jane closed the door and slipped the bolt. Jimmy said, “What are you doing here, Mom?” Then he turned to Jane. “This can’t be safe.”
Mattie said, “Safer than home. A bunch of men came to get me.”
“Came to get you?”
“Bad men. Jane thinks they’ve gotten tired of waiting for you to come home, so they decided to grab me and see if they could get you to come back.”
Jimmy looked at Jane, his eyes troubled.
Jane said, “They were in three cars—one lookout car with two men to control the street, one SUV to block the driveway, and another SUV to take her away. Six men rushed the house with guns drawn. The only thing to do was get her out of there. I should have done it before. Your mother is the most obvious way to get to you.”
“I can’t believe this,” said Jimmy. “Two months ago I had no enemies, and my mother was as safe as anybody could be, surrounded by a couple hundred families, nearly all relatives—brothers and sisters, practically.”