"You haven't told me what I want to know," she said.
"What's that"
"I guess it's, `Do you love me'"
"This is a lousy time to ask that question. I'm damned furious at you for putting yourself in the position to have this happen to you. But that doesn't change the situation between us-either the bad parts or the good. I love you." He paused, as though he dreaded what was coming next. "Anything I'm not seeing Is this the extent of it"
"Yes."
He took a deep breath, irritated that he had to be more specific. "Were you sexually assaulted"
"No. Maybe they would have, but they were very interested in finding Jim Shelby, and everything they did was intended to make me say where he was. Then I got away."
"I guess you didn't tell them where he was."
"No, he's still alive and relatively well." She frowned. "You still didn't really give me my answer."
"About what"
She put her hands on his shoulders. "Look at me. Do you think I'm ugly now"
"No. You're beautiful. I'm just upset at what you put yourself through. And I'm really angry. You don't have the right to marry somebody and then, whenever a stranger knocks on your door, run off and act like some kind of amateur police force. You told me that crap was over years ago."
"Yes, I did," she said. "I thought it was. But then one day somebody comes to your door and says, `My brother, who is innocent, is about to be murdered in prison.' You have only two choices. All you can be is the person who decided to keep him alive, or the person who decided not to. For the rest of your life, that's who you'll be. I decided I would be the one who did."
"No matter what it cost." He looked at her from head to toe. "Well, as I said, you're lucky this time. What you were apparently most worried about didn't happen. Your body is still beautiful and healthy, and with time, you'll be about the same as before."
"Thanks, Doc," she said. Then she waited for a few seconds, looked down at herself and then at him. "Are you even just a little bit turned on"
He nodded, but grudgingly.
She unhooked her bra, shrugged it off, slipped her panties down and stepped out of them. "Then I'd hate to have all this nakedness and hard liquor go to waste."
He frowned. "I'm sorry, Jane. I don't think this is a good time." He walked to the door, then turned. "Let's get a night's sleep, and then talk in the morning." He walked down the hall.
After a few more seconds she heard him go down the staircase. There were the familiar sounds of Carey checking the locks on the doors and setting the alarm. She showered, brushed her teeth, and got into bed with the light on. She waited an hour for him to come back upstairs, but when she heard his tread coming back up, he went to one of the other bedrooms. She turned off the light and went to sleep.
Later, when the night was at its darkest and the birds in the trees outside the old stone house had not yet begun the predawn chirping, she was aware of him. He was standing in the doorway, silent and motionless. She said, "If you're staring at me, you must have eyes like a cat."
"I'm looking. Can't see you, though. You had sort of an intriguing idea before."
"I thought you said it wasn't the right time."
"It wasn't."
"And now it is"
"If the offer is still open."
"Always," she said.
14.
Jane had been at home for ten days. She spent her evenings and nights with Carey at home in the big old stone McKinnon house in Amherst, New York. To her it was a bit like a honeymoon, a vacation from reality that had turned into a lazy enjoyment of the man she had married. This was not what she had intended in coming home, but she had felt that way the minute she had been in the kitchen with him the first night.
She knew the strength of her reaction to him and this taste of life was partly caused by the fact that she had never expected to be here again. After a few days with Wylie, Maloney, and Gorman, she had relinquished any thought of seeing Carey again. She had become like the old-time warriors, the Grandfathers. All she had hoped for was a chance to fight her enemies at the end-to snatch one of the tools of torture or an unguarded weapon and stab or slash until they overpowered and killed her. After she had become used to that idea and then escaped, even feeling the warmth of sunlight on her face had become a complex and delicious sensation. She had resigned herself to death, and now to be home again with her tall, strong husband was enough to make her feel as though she must be dreaming.
The days, from the time when Carey left at six in the morning for the hospital until late afternoon, she spent trying to speed her recovery. Carey had begun rubbing Neosporin on her burns and scrapes as soon as she had come home. There had been no need by then for any antiseptic effect, but the stuff seemed to help prevent scars. She did her series of tai chi positions, and she could feel herself stretching farther and becoming more flexible. After that she left the house and went for long walks, lengthening her stride a bit each day and raising the rhythm of her steps to go faster. She lifted light weights to strengthen her upper body, but most of the time she concentrated on her right leg. When she was not exercising it she was resting. She took special care to eat well and get lots of protein and take vitamins, and to get plenty of sleep.
On the eleventh morning when Carey left, she took a bus to Rochester, New York, and bought a used car at a big car dealership. It was a gray four-year-old Honda with low mileage. She bought it under the name Emily Westerveldt, an identity she had built with many others, but had seldom used. When she got her car back to Amherst, she had it washed and waxed at the car wash on Niagara Falls Boulevard, and then drove it to her regular mechanic. She asked if he could check it over for a friend of hers. He glanced at it and said, "I'll take a look at it."
"Thanks," she said. She knew he would take care of it, even if it meant he had to drive across the county for parts.
"Pick it up after four."
When she picked it up, she filled it with gas and then stopped to buy the things she carried when she was on the road-a case of bottled water, bags of nuts, trail mix, dried fruit. Then she drove the car to her old house in Deganawida, put it in the garage, and went inside to make other preparations.
This was the house that her grandfather and his friends had built, the house where her father had been born, and where Jane had lived until she'd gone off to college, then returned to after graduation, and stayed in through the death of her mother. She had lived here until she had married Carey. She had kept it since then, partly because she couldn't sell it to some unsuspecting stranger who might wake up in the middle of the night to hear an unfortunate runner knocking on the door for help-or to hear someone worse coming in a window.
There were still things hidden in the house. For a few years she had stopped thinking of them as the tools of her profession, and had begun to think of them as precautions, like the fire extinguishers in the kitchen and the upstairs hallway in Amherst. She went down the cellar stairs gingerly, trying not to put too much weight on her wounded thigh. She walked to the far end, near her father's old workbench, took the stepladder, and carried it back to the area beside the old coal-burning furnace that had been left here when the oil furnace was installed when she was a child.
She climbed to one of the old, round heating ducts, disconnected two sections, and reached inside. There was a box that contained four pistols, all of them loaded, and boxes of extra ammunition. There was a metal cash box full of money. There was another in the back. When she opened it she found, carefully wrapped in plastic, pieces of identification. Some were for a woman who looked like Jane, and some for a man who looked like Carey, but who had names that weren't McKinnon. There were birth certificates, passports, driver's licenses, and credit cards.