"Hold it!" The shout was sharp and authoritative. Jane resisted the temptation to turn her head and look in the direction of the cop. She couldn't look away from Ketter while he was still so close to her.
A different cop's voice said, "Don't move. Hands up, and lie down on your belly."
Ketter looked at the three cops moving to surround him. He was outraged, but he had been arrested enough times to know that if he didn't make it very obvious he was complying, he was going to be in danger. "All right, all right, yes sir," he called out, holding his hands up in the air as the men rushed in on him, threw him down, dragged his arms behind him, and handcuffed his wrists.
The three cops kept him on the ground. "Wait, wait," he yelled. "Take a look at her identification. Make her show it to you."
Two of the cops were busy patting him down. One of them said, "Are you armed? Do you have anything on you that I need to know about?"
Ketter said, "I'm not moving. Somebody make her stay."
One of the two reached into Ketter's pocket and brought out a flat object about eight inches long. "Hey, look at this!" he called to his colleagues. "It's a ceramic knife."
The third cop, who seemed to be slightly older, said, "Sir, you're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to have an attorney present during questioning..."
There were more police officers around them now, and two of them lifted Ketter to his feet and backed him to the wall while the warning continued. "If you can't afford an attorney..."
One of the first three cops stood close to Jane. "Do you know this man, miss?"
"No. I don't. He must be crazy."
She could hear the cops talking to Ketter a few feet away. "If she's got false identification, then who is she really? Can you tell me her name?"
"I don't know. If I knew that—" He stopped himself.
"You'd what?"
"I want a lawyer."
The officer with Jane said, "Can I see your ticket and a picture ID, please?"
She handed him her plane ticket stub for the flight from Chicago and her Rebecca Silverman license. He examined them and nodded wearily to his colleagues—genuine, of course. They immediately lost interest in her. He took out a notebook, copied Rebecca Silverman's name, address, and phone number from her license, then handed the license and ticket stub to her. "Miss Silverman, you're free to go. We'll handle this."
"You don't need me?"
"Not right now. Those are cameras." He pointed at the dark glass globes at intervals along the ceiling. "And he was carrying a weapon in an airport. That's more than enough to hold him. We'll call if we need anything."
Behind him, Jane could see the other cops escorting Ketter away. Beyond the shops, there was an unmarked steel door on the left wall, with a keypad. One of the cops punched the keys and they opened the door and pulled him inside. "Thank you so much," said Jane. "You were so quick. You probably saved my life."
The officer shrugged, and Jane hurried off down the concourse. Jane knew she still had a problem. Ketter had called someone, and she had no idea who it was or what they looked like. But Ketter would certainly have described her to them.
Jane kept going along the concourse, then came to another row of shops. The first was a newsstand, the next a place that sold nothing but baseball caps. The next store sold golf clothes and accessories. She bought a white sweater, a blue nylon windbreaker, a pair of khaki golf pants with a sharp crease in them, and a straw hat shaped like a man's panama hat. She moved on until she found the next ladies' room, changed her clothes, and stuffed the jeans and sweater she had been wearing into her shopping bag, and then spent a few minutes getting her long hair hidden under the hat. She looked as unlike herself as she could on short notice. From a distance, outside in the dim light, she hoped she might even look ambiguous enough to be mistaken for a man.
As she went toward the escalator that would take her down to street level, she put together the little she knew. Ketter had said he wanted to walk her out through the baggage claim, so he had probably told his people to wait there. Being there would be of no use without having a car waiting at the curb to take her away. Jane went down the escalator, turned to her left away from the baggage claim, and walked to the lobby, where there were ticket counters. She could see the traffic outside in the circular drive was moving from left to right across the windows, so she kept going to the left. If any watcher saw her, they couldn't back the car two hundred yards to push her into it. She went out the last door of the terminal and walked to the next one before she got on the shuttle for the rental car lots. She sat on the bench seat on the right side of the shuttle near the driver, so her back would be to the terminal. When the shuttle made its first stop, Jane stepped down and went into the rental agency without caring which one it was.
She rented a car and drove from Long Island to New Jersey, crossed into Pennsylvania and took the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Harrisburg before she turned north into New York State and made her way north toward Rochester. Along a rural road she spotted a thicket of sumac bushes, so she stopped, broke off a few twigs, and took them with her. Late in the morning she stopped at a tobacco store on a plaza on West Henrietta Road and went inside to look around. There were lots of cigars behind the glass wall along the back, a supply of the usual kinds of cigarettes and pipe tobaccos, and a glass case that held lighters, pipes, cigar cutters, and cigarette cases, but Jane knew what she was looking for. She went to the rack where packs of exotic cigarettes were sold, and picked out two packs. The brand name was Seneca. The cigarettes were made by Grand River Enterprises, a company based on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, of tobacco that was grown, cut, and hung to dry in sheds on the Cattaraugus Reservation in New York. She brought the cigarettes to the cash register, and the tall, bald man who owned the store took her money and put the cigarettes into a small brown bag. She wondered if he remembered her from other times, but she preserved their impersonal relationship by not asking.
In the drugstore across the small plaza she bought a set of fingernail clippers and a newspaper. When she returned to her rental car she spread the front section of the newspaper on her lap, trimmed her fingernails, and poured the clippings along the crease in the paper into her bag with the cigarettes. Then she drove on up Henrietta.
It was nearly noon when Jane drove into the middle of the city and turned off onto a quiet, narrow street called Maplewood Avenue. At this time of day the sun was high enough so the spreading canopies of the tall trees on both sides threw the pavement into shadow. She left the rental car at the curb and walked down the street past the two rows of big old houses, all of them three stories, with steep peaked roofs. They were all edged right up to the sidewalk, built in the days when lawns were not of much interest. In those days people liked to have a carriage pull right up to the front of the house so a lady would not get mud on her thin shoes or the hem of her dress.
The houses had been built big to hold lots of children and a few servants, but as the world changed, many of them had been partitioned into apartment buildings, with extra kitchens and bathrooms where the original builders never intended them to be.
Jane walked to the end of the street to the long, narrow, quiet park that began at the white Romanesque Christian Science church and ran beside the street for a few hundred feet. Along the far edge of the park was a steel railing to keep people from falling off the cliff into the Genesee River below. The Genesee River was like an artery that ran down the center of Nundawaonoga, and if she stopped walking she could hear it running just beyond the edge of the park, past the railing.