The air gave a "huff" sound and the fire came into being above the pile of human things like a little explosion that puffed against her hair. It was a big flame, at least ten feet tall at first, bright orange with an aura of blue around it. Jane watched it for a minute, until it had begun to calm down and settle into devouring what it had been given. Then she walked out of the firelight and went about two hundred feet to the edge of the lake.
She kept walking, and her boots sank into mud at first, making a sucking sound as she lifted them for the next step. The water was icy, but to her it felt clean and fierce and scouring. She kept going until the water reached her chest, and then bent her legs and ducked under. She came up gasping, feeling as though her skin were burning instead of cold. She took two more deep breaths and then went under again, scrubbing herself all over with her hands. She took off her boots and cleaned them of the lingering bits of mud, then walked up through the reeds to the shore. She put her boots back on and walked up toward the fire.
She was shivering when she got there, but she stood in the heat for a few minutes, feeling the fire evaporating the moisture almost instantly. Already there seemed to be nothing recognizable in the fire, only ashes and black residue. She walked to the house, and left her boots on the back porch to dry. She locked every door, barred every window, and went upstairs. She stepped into the shower and washed herself carefully and thoroughly, beginning with her hair and ending with her feet, then dressed in a clean sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers.
She reloaded her pistol and her shotgun. Then she went to a room that had not been touched, lay on the bed, and went to sleep.
Over the next few days she would search the van, remove its license plates and VIN tag, and abandon it deep in the woods. She would perform many hours of scrubbing in the house, fill holes in walls, and paint over them. She would do some more planting over the grave. But most of the time, she would rest and recover.
It was not until the fourth day, while she was indoors during a heavy rain organizing the information she had gleaned from the men's belongings and the contents of the van, that she admitted to herself what she was going to do next.
18.
Jane drove west on the Southern Tier Expressway over a hundred miles before she stopped at Oil Springs. This was a tiny bit of land that had been left as a Seneca reservation to preserve Seneca ownership of the spring. The water flowed into a pond and was clear and cold, but had a coating on top that was oil. In the old times, the Senecas used to collect it by dragging a blanket along the calm surface and then wring it out into containers. She had heard that the prophet Handsome Lake, who had lived not far from here in the 1790s, used to come to make medicine.
The spring was at the end of Cuba Lake on County Route 50. She parked her car, put some equipment in a bag, and began to walk west from the pond. It didn't take her long to get far enough inland on the swampy ground to begin spotting the flower she was looking for here and there. She looked for healthy plants over seven feet tall with complicated branchings that each ended in the flat white groups of tiny flowers that looked like circles of lace.
Harvesting was dangerous. She had retained a few pairs of surgical gloves from the housecleaning, and she put on a pair now. She used the long, razor-sharp blade of the K-Bar knife to dig up the muck around the bottoms of the plants so the roots would come up easily. She collected the roots of about fifty of the tall water plants.
She loaded the roots into one-gallon ziplock bags, then went to a spot in the shade where there were a few large flat limestone slabs. She set the bags on the flat stone surface and used the blunt side of her hatchet to pound the roots into a mash. She repeated the process with each of the bags. Finally, she stretched the leg of a pair of panty hose over a glass jar, put a pinhole in the first of the plastic bags, and squeezed the pale yellow juice from the pulverized roots out the hole and through the homemade filter into the jar.
Jane was always extremely cautious with water hemlock. Just handling the stems with bare hands could make a person lose consciousness, but the strongest poison was concentrated in the roots. It was a powerful nerve toxin, and eating a couple of bites of a single root would kill a person in minutes. She kept working with her bags of root mash, moving the panty hose occasionally to present a fresh filter. She filled four quart jars with the filtered root juice before she ran out. The juice she obtained was strong and clear, free of root particles. She capped the jars, reloaded her equipment into her backpack, walked to her car, and put everything in her trunk.
She drove on, bought a ten-foot coil of copper tubing and a camp stove in a hardware store in the next town, then stopped in the cooking section of a small department store and bought a teapot and a cooking thermometer. She drove another thirty miles and followed signs to a picnic area by a campsite. Cicutoxin, the poison in water hemlock, was a complex alcohol. Alcohol boiled at a lower temperature than water, so purifying and concentrating the juice was done by distilling it. She set the covered pot on the stove, attached the copper tubing to the spout, sealed the openings with duct tape, and let the tubing extend in a downward spiral into an empty jar. When the juice in the teapot boiled, the cicutoxin would vaporize at around seventy degrees Celsius, then condense in the long copper tube, and drip into the jar. The water wouldn't boil off until it reached one hundred degrees Celsius. She boiled the juice until about a quarter of the liquid remained, then refilled the pot and repeated the process. When she had finished, she had about a quart of highly concentrated poison. The clear liquid had lost almost all of its yellowish tinge.
She sealed everything she had contaminated in a big plastic bag, put that into a second plastic bag, stopped after dark at a Dumpster behind a large store, and put the bag in the Dumpster, a few feet down where no human being might touch it. The Dumpster would be lifted by the mechanical arms of the garbage truck and dumped in a landfill. All she had kept was one quart jar of concentrated poison. She wasn't sure that it was as strong as the best batch she had ever made, but she was sure it wouldn't take more than a tablespoon of it to kill a person.
In Erie, Pennsylvania, she turned in the rental car and went to a car lot and bought a used Camry for a down payment of five hundred dollars and a promise that Heather Gollensz would begin paying two hundred dollars a month after a three-month grace period. She drove on into Ohio. As she traveled, she fell back into the old discipline. She never let her gas tank go below half full, and the nearer she could keep it to full, the better. She traveled at night by preference, moving along the highway at a steady, unchanging speed with feigned patience.
She was so familiar with the east-west interstate highways that she noticed if a new sign for a restaurant or a hotel appeared where it hadn't been last trip. She had driven these night roads with exhausted, sleeping fugitives, staring at the mirrors every few seconds because any set of headlights that lingered in her wake too long might be death waiting for its best chance. She'd driven the same routes alone, pushing the road time and the speed, because an extra day of travel could mean a helpless victim would disappear forever. This time her eyes were usually fixed on the road ahead, and her mind was occupied with trying to move forward to the day when she would find Daniel Martel.
As Jane drove, she thought about Martel. He would be getting a bit anxious by now. He had sent out eight hired shooters to the place where he'd known Jane, and probably Shelby, would be, and the eight had simply vanished into silence. There were no news reports, no police investigations, no complaints of a disturbance. Jane was satisfied with that. She hoped the disappearance of his men kept Martel awake at night, and made him compulsively turn to look over his shoulder in daylight.