The area was heavily wooded; I had no idea where I was but I guessed that the plane had been heading more or less north. So I headed more or less south, trudging heavily, barefoot, through the marsh water, hoping there was nothing nastier down there than the odd tree root.
My exceptional luck held: within ten minutes I had reached a broad spine of dry land that seemed to run through the morass, and saw on that a path.
I stopped and opened my bag. The seal must have been as good as the manufacturer claimed, for the clothing inside was dry. I stripped off what I had been wearing and used my upper garments to dry myself, then put on a fresh shirt, jeans and trainers. I found a mirror, comb and usable makeup in my very soggy handbag. When I had made myself look half normal, and arranged my hair so that it covered the creature in my head, I set out to follow the path.
America never ceases to surprise me with its contrasts. Less than half an hour later, I stepped out of the wilderness, and into a quiet suburb of what I guessed was a dormitory town for the nearest city. The streets were as empty as the swamp had been, save for a few cars parked in driveways. I walked on, aimlessly, until a black and white taxi slowly turned a corner and pulled up outside a house thirty yards away. A middle-aged woman paid the driver, then climbed out. She had barely reached the stone path that led to her front door before I flagged the guy down.
‘Where to, lady?’ The cabbie looked disconcertingly like Big Pussy, the Sopranos character who went to sleep with the fishes, but I forced myself to look at him casually and reply, ‘Into town.’
‘A little more specific?’
I searched for an answer that would mask my ignorance of my surroundings, and came up with ‘Sorry, Wal-Mart.’ In the USA, those are everywhere.
That Wal-Mart turned out to be in the centre of a community that seemed to have no obvious industry; my dormitory conjecture had been correct. I paid the man. . happily, he was not gabby, and just as happily, the cash in my purse was still dry. . and looked around. Straight across the road, I saw a car lot, the New Jersey equivalent of the sort of place you might find in EastEnders. It was evening, going on for eight o’clock, but it was still open.
I checked my cash reserve. I had six hundred dollars in my purse, and ten thousand in a compartment in my case. . emergency money that I’d never thought I’d need. Around a third of that bought me an elderly but serviceable Chrysler Voyager, from a dealer who probably thought all his Christmas Days had come early. I gave my name as Mary Edison, and an address I also made up on the spot. He asked no questions. He even threw in a free map and a tank of gas.
I was fuelled by adrenaline: I found the nearest Interstate, and drove through the night without a break, apart from a couple of pit-stops, till early next morning, when I reached the city of Buffalo, and with it, the Canadian border. I ditched the car in a public car park, found the station and bought a ticket for the evening train to Toronto.
I had most of the day to wait; I bought a big floppy hat and a huge pair of sunglasses that covered most of my face, and spent it looking at the Niagara Falls, and thinking.
What was there to think about?
Are you kidding? Plenty.
First, had I done the right thing in committing what was probably a federal offence by leaving the scene of a fatal air accident? If I was certain that Oz had staged the crash, shouldn’t I have stayed right there and denounced him?
A quick glance at that morning’s Buffalo News was all it took to convince me that I’d done the right thing. As far as the media were concerned, Oz was a victim himself. Rescue teams were searching for his body as well as mine. I knew damn well that when he surfaced there would be a wave of public relief. I knew also that if he had sabotaged the plane. . and the media were already alluding to suspicious circumstances. . there was no way it would ever be traced to him. If I spoke out, I’d be a mad woman, a bitter and twisted ex-wife, with a track record of trying to harm him. Not a soul would believe me and I would still be in his sights.
No, much better to go along with playing dead for a while.
I was confident that I wouldn’t be traced to the car lot in that New Jersey town, the name of which I still don’t know, simply because nobody would be looking for me there. The riskiest part would be getting into Canada, but since the press seemed to be calling me ‘Mrs Blackstone’, and I was travelling on my Primavera Phillips passport, I reckoned I’d get through without leaving a trace.
The second big consideration was what to do next. My dad and my sister would be in agony, I knew. Was it right to allow that to continue? Much as I hated it, I told myself I had to, for a while at least, if I was to keep Oz off my trail. The word ‘stoic’ could have been coined for Dad, but Dawn was flaky. If she knew I was alive, she’d never keep it to herself. . and she, Miles and Oz were still close. Then there was Tom, but at that stage I couldn’t bring myself to think about him.
Finally, I asked myself the toughest question of all. What was I going to take from the experience?
I looked back over the time since I had met Oz, and thought of the person that I’d become, that he had helped to make me. It didn’t take me long to realise I was having trouble blaming him for trying to bump me off. In his shoes, I’d have been tempted to do the same thing. Whatever happened, as the Niagara’s white water thundered down I promised myself that I would emerge from the wreckage of my life as a better person, as the daughter David and Elanore Phillips had raised, not the woman she had been for the best part of a decade.
Crossing the border wasn’t a problem. The Canadian immigration people looked at my passport and thought, ‘Tourist,’ as they took my entry card and filed it with the rest, where no American FBI investigator was ever likely to look.
I spent the night in the smallest hotel I could find in Toronto, to lessen the chances of being spotted. Next morning I went back to Union Station and bought myself a transcontinental train ticket for Vancouver. It seemed like a good place to kick off my new life, for a couple of reasons. My time with Oz, and our divorce, had left me very well fixed financially, thank you, and most of my money was stashed there, invested through a private bank. And so were some other items, in a safe-deposit box, chief among them being my two extra passports.
In the brief period when I was married to Oz, I’d applied for a passport as his wife and had managed, by a discreet lie, to hold on to the one it was supposed to replace, the one I was still using. But I’d done more than that. I’d obtained another, as Janet More, the birth name of my predecessor, the first Mrs Osbert Blackstone. She was dead, and it was before the days of biometrics, so it was easy. Why did I do it? Because I was a devious, cunning bitch, always looking for an advantage, and thought that I might find it useful some day. That was how being with that guy made me think.
I checked into a hotel in Burrard Street, and holed up in Vancouver for a week, hanging around Granville Island and Stanley Park, breakfasting in Starbucks (I like Starbucks, okay?), dining in the Sandbar, Joe Fortes and Earl’s, and reading every newspaper I could find. When I was sure that my disappearance had lost its news value, I booked a flight to Las Vegas in Jan’s name, and rented an apartment through an Internet agency. Las Vegas, you ask? Trust me: it’s one of the best places in the world to hide. The population changes all the time as the casino hotels fill up and empty, fill up and empty, weekend in, weekend out. If you need to, you can be truly anonymous there.