She turned in her key and left before dawn, driving along the perimeter of Tupper Lake slowly, stopping now and then to scan the shore. She drove up seven old logging roads before the sun came up without finding one that went farther than a few hundred yards. She knew it would be one of the old roads. From the time the Adirondacks had been surveyed, in the 1830s, until the government had decided to protect what was left of them, in the 1890s, logging had gone on unimpeded. After that it had been controlled in most of the park, but the roads were still visible in lots of places, even some of the old narrow-gauge railroad spurs that had been built to get the logs out. James Michael Martin had been born here, and he might even have picked out the one he would use while he was still sitting in his cell in Illinois.
It was after ten when Jane saw the tire tracks on the old road above the lake. The road was now only a set of ruts that started in the marshy land along the lake and turned up into the forest immediately. Down in the flats, the tracks from his new tires were deep, with black mud mushroomed out of the lozenge-shaped depressions even after three days. As the trail swung up and away they faded, soon only an impression of a big weight that had crushed the growth of thistle and milk-weed and goldenrod that had healed the ancient ruts. As the trail went higher, the ground was hard, with rocks close to the surface and a network of roots where the big trees on both sides intertwined. There were places here and there where the thick plastering of last fall’s leaves had been rotted black by standing water or washed away by spring rains, and then she could see the tire treads again. There was still the chance that even this early in the year, when the deep drifts of snow had barely melted from the high peaks above the lake, this might only be innocent fishermen trying to get to the fish while they were still eager and hungry.
The treads were the right pattern, but there might be hundreds of exact duplicates on pickups and jeeps all over the mountains. She drove on, bouncing her rented car over exposed roots and dipping into trenches where rain rivulets had rushed across the path toward the lake below.
At eleven she saw the first glint of light. It was sharp and piercing, a flash as though a chunk of the sun had fallen into the brush to the right of the road. She stopped the car, took her rifle, and walked the rest of the way off the path, stalking quietly along the carpet of wet leaves on the forest floor. When she was still thirty feet away, she stood still and stared at it.
The big black Bronco had been pulled off the path through some bushes and into a thicket of low thorny trees that formed a bower over the roof. She moved her head and saw the flash again and, this time, identified it. The rear window wasn’t curved like the rear window of a car, but broad and flat, and it caught the sun like a mirror.
She cautiously moved sideways until she could be sure that the cab was empty and the door locks pushed down. She walked up and touched the hood. It was warm, but the warmth was uniform from the baking of the sun, not a hot spot in the center because the engine had been running.
She peeked in the back window and saw that the truck was empty. James Michael Martin had not left anything at all inside. The food was gone, the clothes, the tent. The canoe was gone, and he hadn’t even left the straps he had used to tie it to the roof. It was odd that he had used the name John Young to buy the car. He had money, and he must have had some kind of identification that she hadn’t provided that said James Michael Martin. But then it occurred to her that after eight years in jail he didn’t have a valid driver’s license.
Jane went back to her rented car, slid her canoe off the roof, loaded all her gear into it, and dragged it into the deepest brush at the other side of the trail, then came back the same way, carefully pushing the plants upright and tossing leaves over the keel marks.
She had to back up nearly a quarter mile to find a place where she could turn her car around. She did it clumsily deliberately, breaking a lot of brush. If anyone later came this far, they would believe this was where she had stopped and gone back.
When she reached the road, she drove all the way back to Saranac Lake to turn the car in at the Hertz lot. Now she was on foot and unencumbered. It took three hours for the bus to get her back to the town of Tupper Lake and three more hours to walk around the lake and back along the logging road to the place where she had found the Bronco. As soon as she had made it off the road and taken the first two turns, the woods closed around her and no sound of civilization reached her ears.
People who lived in this part of the country didn’t use the word Adirondacks much; they called it the North Woods. It was just as well. The surveyor who had put the word on his maps had thought it was the name of a vanished tribe. What it really was was an Iroquois word meaning "bark eaters," the name they called the Algonquin. It meant hunters who couldn’t kill enough to eat.
This hadn’t been anybody’s territory in the old days. Huron, Algonquin, and Montagnais had come across the St. Lawrence to hunt big game here, and the Abnaki and Mahican had come across the Hudson and Lake Champlain. Mixed bands of all of the Hodenosaunee, including her own people, had also come up along the chain of lakes at the spine of the mountains to hunt. The Hodenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, had never built their longhouses here. This country had been wilderness even to them, a place to hunt in parties of five or ten. They had built small temporary huts of bark and saplings, found the game, and then gone home to the south. Here the rocky peaks and high altitudes were too harsh for growing corn and beans and squash. Sometimes the snow in the winter was twenty feet deep.
Jane walked among the trees fifty feet from the path all the way into the forest, not so much to hide her trail as to foreclose the remote possibility of meeting Martin alone and unarmed. The trees here were all second growth, sprouted since the lumber had been cut away in the old days, and it had grown in thick. The trees that would ultimately grow tall and form a canopy were not yet old enough to shade the others and make them die out.
The sun was just beginning to move behind the tops of the mountains to the west when she found the Bronco again. She could see that she had been lucky to find it the first time. He had hidden it well, but he must have done it in the afternoon, when the sun would have fallen on the convex windshield and been dispersed and not on the flat tailgate window.
Jane stood and studied the Bronco. It still bothered her that he had bought it as John Young. The Department of Motor Vehicles had a record of the sale, so it was public information. She thought about Martin, not John Felker, because he had never been, or about John Young, because he had just been her version of the same person. Martin hadn’t come up here to stay. He had come back to the mountains to wait. He had killed Harry, and now Jerry Cappadocia’s father would be sending people out to look for him.
He had very little to worry about. He had killed Lew Feng, the person who had constructed John Young. He would be waiting for the news about Harry to come out and circulate to all of the people who might care and then to get stale. Jane supposed he had thought she would never figure out that he had killed Harry; she would assume that the four men had killed Lew Feng, gotten the list, and killed Harry. Now nobody had a way to find out about John Young because Lew Feng was dead.
She thought about the last night in Vancouver, and the truth settled on her slowly. She had thought he was upset because she had parted with him so abruptly. By the time he had known she was going, she was already on her way to the airport. But what he had really been upset about was that she had left him no safe way to kill her. She had slipped away. Now he was here waiting to see whether she had stayed fooled. If she had, there was no way for anyone to find him. But what if she hadn’t?