She looked at the Bronco closely. There was nothing visible. She went to the ground, slithered between the big wheels, and looked up at the undercarriage. There was nothing out of place that she could see. She slowly pulled herself toward the front of the car looking for wires, or maybe a pipe that didn’t look as though it belonged. When she saw the two plastic water bottles, she eased herself closer. There was duct tape around the tops. She touched one of them and brought the smell of gasoline away on her finger. The two bottles were tied against the exhaust manifold. She could have hot-wired the car and driven it a mile or two up the trail before the plastic melted and dumped a couple of gallons of gasoline all over the engine compartment.
If she had gotten out before the fire burned along the freshly greased underside and reached the gas tank, people in town would have seen the smoke and come to find her running away from John Young’s car. He had known that in order to find the car at all, she would need to ask a lot of people if they had seen John Young. When John Young didn’t come out of the woods after weeks, they might not be able to prove that she had killed him, but they would certainly suspect it.
Either way, she couldn’t win and he couldn’t lose. If the car burned, there would be nothing left of her or the two plastic one-gallon bottles. John Young would go back to being James Michael Martin. If it didn’t burn, then it would mean he could be John Young forever, because she hadn’t come for him. She might not have been able to imagine that John Felker could have killed Harry, or she might have gone to Medford and found that he had never made it there, and believe for the rest of her life that the four men had caught him. She rolled out from under the vehicle and sat beside it. She could feel the malevolence exuding from it now. A person would have to feel a vast distance between himself and anyone he planned to burn to death.
She wasn’t looking at the work of someone who was scared, a panicky person trying desperately to throw barriers between himself and retribution. He had gone over entirely. No, that was wrong; before she had even met him he had been enlisted on the other side. He had come to her for one reason only, pretending to be an innocent victim so that he could find a man who thought he was a friend and cut his throat. She stared at the big black vehicle to let it burn the last of her feelings for John Felker away. As the sun disappeared over the top of the mountains, the Bronco seemed to grow like a shadow.
Jane rolled back under it. She had only a half hour of light left after sunset and a lot to do. She opened the hood of the Bronco by reaching up from underneath to pull the cable to release the latch. She left the two bottles undisturbed. Instead, she unhooked the two battery cables and buried them at the foot of a bush ten paces away.
Then she found her canoe, dragged it to the edge of the water, and knelt beside it to check her equipment. She spent some time getting used to the rifle. The first one she had found that was suitable was a Winchester 70 XTR Standard 30-06 bolt action. It held five shots, and the receiver was tapped for scope mounts. It was heavy, seven and a half pounds without the Weaver K4 scope. The man at the store had told her that her husband would be very pleased.
She loaded the magazine and set the rifle on top of the nylon tarp in the hull in front of her seat and wrapped it once to keep it from catching drops from her paddle blade when she changed sides. Then she distributed the weight of the rest of her possessions as evenly as possible. She spent a few minutes staring out across big Tupper Lake to memorize the shape and took compass readings to help her find the outlet at the other end.
When the lake was obsidian-black and glassy, Jane pushed her little canoe into the shallows among the reeds, settled her weight into it, and began to paddle. She moved the canoe steadily along the quiet, calm water. She set the compass down on the hull in front of her and moved out from the shore to where she could see any flicker of light in the woods above it. The darkness was comforting now because she knew that somewhere deep in the forest, a man who had embraced the left-handed twin, the Evil-minded, was waiting for her.
25
Jane paddled steadily but quietly. She judged the distance from her starting point at Martin’s hidden vehicle to the southern tip of big Tupper Lake to be ten or twelve miles. She planned to take three hours to get there, so she would reach the head of the lake about the time the moon rose. As the afterglow of the sunset disappeared, the swallows that had been skimming the surface of the lake for mosquitoes returned to their nests and she was alone.
She glanced down at her compass now and then as she got used to the little canoe. Six strokes on one side, then six on the other seemed to hold the canoe’s course straight and to keep her arms from feeling the strain. The simplicity of the act of paddling and the quiet swish of the light craft gliding on the still water soothed her. She let her senses explore the world around her. Route 30 ran along the far side of the lake, so once in a while she would see a tiny glow of light from a cabin or a fishing camp across the water. The west side, where she paddled, was dark.
The chill of the evening had begun to settle on the mountains, a still, frosty mist that made the air that entered her lungs burn a little. After she made the bend in the lake and passed the distant lights of the little town of Moody, she saw nothing to mark the far shore. At this time of year there probably weren’t many tourists, and the locals were locked in their houses recovering from the skiers, so the highway was already deserted.
She knew that he had come down this side of the lake, and she could visualize his passing if she allowed herself to reconstruct it. He had the kind of concentrated premeditation that seemed possible only to those who had given themselves over entirely to scheming. If he had parked the Bronco in the afternoon, he too probably had made this stretch of the journey at night. He was entering the last part of his trail that went near the places where even a sprinkling of people lived, where any roads had ever been.
She could hear the night whisper of the trees now that she had moved away from the roads. He had been born here. The North Woods could never represent safety to anyone who had been born here. He wasn’t running to safety. He was running because he knew he could go farther and deeper into a dangerous place than the ones who were chasing him. It was like a taunt, not meant to discourage pursuers but to lead them farther and farther out until they were in a place where he was stronger than they were. It was a place where shots could be fired without falling on a human ear, where any number of people could die without their bodies ever being found.
Her grandfather had told her old Nundawaono stories. Sometimes the people they happened to had names, but usually they were just the Hunter or the Woman, and they always seemed to end up alone in the forest, as she was now, and the forest was alive with frightening beings. There were flying heads with long streaming hair that sailed through the air, always searching the ground for something to feed their voracious craving for flesh. She couldn’t help feeling the hair on the back of her neck start to stand as she thought about the way she must look from above right now, alone in the middle of the empty lake, but she refused to turn her head and look over her shoulder.
Then there were the stone giants. When she looked to either side, she could almost see them stepping forward to free themselves from the camouflage of the bare rocky peaks of the dark mountains that surrounded her now, coming down to hunt her, their skin made of rock so she could not shoot them, and with such enormous strides that she could not outrun them. They were all supposed to have been killed off at Onondaga, a hundred miles south of here, except one, who still roamed the woods. That was the way the stories went: There was always one left, and it was the one her imagination could construct out of the shapes in the rocks above her right now.