She went to the telephone mounted on the wall and called Carey's office. After one ring the receptionist answered, "Dr. Mc-Kinnon's office."
"Hi, Julie. It's Jane. Is he in?"
"Hi, Jane. He just got off a call, and he's getting ready to go back to the hospital for rounds. I'm sure I can catch him, if you'll hold."
"Sure."
A few seconds later there was a click. "Jane? Are you home?"
"Yes. I just got home a minute ago."
"Was there any trouble?"
"No trouble," she said. "None at all."
12
Jane lay in the bed in the darkened room and listened to the regular, deep breaths that indicated her husband had fallen asleep. She looked beside her at his big, familiar shape. When Carey slept, his face acquired a lineless, peaceful emptiness that made him look like a teenager. She liked to see him, but the moon had moved so it was no longer shining in the bedroom window. She looked at the glowing display of the alarm clock on Carey's nightstand. It was two-thirty A.M. already. She felt happy, but she wasn't ready to sleep yet. She got out of bed, put on her bathrobe, and walked out of the bedroom. She walked along the hallway a few yards to the spare room that faced the front of the house. This was the room she had begun two years ago to prepare as a nursery. She stood at the edge of the curtains to look out the window without being seen.
She looked out at the long, open road, now lined by large houses that had been built in the past forty years since Amherst had gone from farm country to suburb. There was nobody out there, not even a car parked where she could see it. During the winter a car left on the road was liable to be hit by a snowplow, and even now that summer had come, people stuck to the habit of putting cars away in their garages. There was nobody out there. Her house, her husband, her identity were all safe.
Brent Ketter was on her mind. Even in the old days, she had known there was no question that if she kept being a guide, then one day she was going to walk down the wrong street in some distant city, or go into the wrong building. A face would be waiting for her, and it would acquire a sudden look of recognition, and then hatred. He would be someone she hadn't been thinking about, maybe hadn't thought about in years, but he would have no trouble remembering her. He would open fire before she could move. It had almost happened last night. If Ketter had seen her anywhere but in an airport, she would be dead.
She had taken many people out of terrible lives, and for each of them there was at least one person like this—a professional killer who had not collected, an abuser robbed of his victim, a rival who had been cheated out of his little victory. Each time Jane had gone out with a runner, she had made another chaser aware that she had beaten him. She had gotten through last night, but someday, one of them might be more alert, faster, luckier.
But she was home now. She had made a very brief, necessary return to the old life. Now Jane had returned to the life she had half-chosen and half-invented, the life with Carey. As she stared out the window at the familiar configuration of trees and rooftops arranged on the broad, flat country where she had always lived, everything looked the same as it had been before Christine. But nothing was the same as it had been. The world had a tension to it, an expectation like an indrawn breath.
Carey had told his colleagues that Jane had been referred to the ear clinic at UCLA for treatment of minor hearing damage she had sustained in the bombing. She supposed that Carey was a better judge than she was about what would satisfy the curiosity of other doctors. She also supposed the nature of the imaginary injury would help. The problem had to be something that a doctor would shrug off as dull, and that didn't require Jane to look or behave differently. Carey had been at work every day since the bombing, telling the necessary lies. It made her feel peculiar—sad, grateful, regretful, guilty—that she had forced her husband, the man she had admired since she'd met him in college, to become a liar.
But the lies were over, at least for now. She would be home with Carey for the summer. She had put the pursuers far behind, and she was almost sure she had left them no way of tracing Christine. At first Jane had maintained a small hope that at least one of the six would be arrested, but after a couple of weeks passed with no news of arrests, she had given that up. People who made a living doing armed kidnappings seldom used their original names. Earlier tonight Carey had said, "I'm really sorry they weren't caught."
Jane said, "That's okay. They're not important anymore."
"They're not?"
"No. I would have loved it if they were caught, or if something bad had happened to them to make them give up. But time will do the same thing. I'm not trying to get revenge on these people for the bombing, or bring justice for the ones who got hurt, or make sure someone gets punished. I don't really know how to accomplish any of those things. All I took on was a pregnant girl who came to me for help. I did what I could, and if she does what I taught her, she'll be safe."
"Was that what it was—the fact that she was pregnant?"
Jane studied him. "You mean is that why I helped her?"
"Well, yes. It wouldn't be so strange. For years now you've thought about having a baby. And one night, here's a young woman who's pregnant. After five years of staying out of sight, she's the one you decide to risk your life to help. I wondered if that had anything to do with your decision. Just now you said, 'All I took on was a pregnant girl—' "
"'...who came to me for help.' That's what I said."
"Right," said Carey. "But the pregnancy was the only quality you mentioned."
"I helped her because she's the first person to find her way to me needing my help. The pregnancy made it harder for her to run and harder for her to hide. It was only one of the reasons why she needed help."
Carey shrugged, and Jane could see he had noticed she was getting angry. "Fair enough," he said. "I didn't mean to accuse you of anything. I was just trying to understand you because I love you."
Jane closed her eyes for a few seconds, then said carefully, "You're right that what I want most right now is to have a baby. It bothers me a lot that it hasn't happened. We both know that. But what made me take Christine away wasn't a sudden wave of female hormones at the sight of a pregnant woman, or some kind of sentimental craziness brought on by infertility. What I did—putting her out of the way of the people who were after her—was the only thing I could do. I didn't look for her, or tell anyone I was available or anything. I'm not going back to making people disappear."
"Why not? You just did."
"Because I've changed. The world has changed. When I started I was twenty, and running was easy. Whether you get caught or not depends on who's searching for you. In the old days, it was always just creeps, or once in a while somebody who was willing to kill someone for money. Now the whole government is looking for people with false identities, even for people who have blanks in their histories. Everybody's financial information is passed from one computer to another all day and all night. This country is a harder place to move people around."
"So you're not going to do it again?"
"I can't say that, Carey. I can say it's not practical anymore. There used to be holes in the system, and I was keeping people alive by sneaking through them. Now there are fewer holes. But if Christine Monahan came to me tomorrow, I would have to try."