Harry had told her the first time he mentioned Lenore Sanders, five years ago, that Jerry had a rival. Jane had never considered what that meant, and she was not the only one. Everyone who had heard the story of the massacre at the poker game had known immediately that whoever had paid for Jerry’s murder had to be another criminal. He was a criminal by definition: A man who hired killers to kill his enemy was a killer. It had not occurred to any of the others that the motive could be anything except taking over Jerry’s territory, because that was what criminals did. But Bobby Cotton was a criminal who lived in St. Louis. He had no practical way of taking Jerry Cappadocia’s holdings in Chicago, so he never tried and never revealed himself. All he had wanted was the girl.
Jane had been given all of the information she had needed, but it had lain in a jumble in the back of her mind until the dream. She should have wondered why St. Louis kept coming up. When Martin wanted to fool her, he had told her he was a cop from St. Louis. Why had he chosen St. Louis? It was because he knew the city and knew a lot of details about the cop who had arrested him there. But why had he been arrested in St. Louis in the first place? He had been there on business, killing somebody there. She should have known instantly that it was unlikely that anybody in St. Louis had been enough of an annoyance to Martin’s usual customers in Chicago to make them send him down there. Martin may very well have been working for Cotton that time; he had at least come to Cotton’s attention.
Harry had told Jane so much about the girl that she should have wondered what had happened to her. It was ironic that nobody had spent any time thinking about the girl in five years—probably since she showed up at the funeral wearing a black dress she had bought at Dennaway’s. Most murders weren’t about money. They were about love. Whenever the cops found a body, the first thing they did was go out to look for the wife or the husband or the lover. She opened her eyes, looked up at the sky, and held the story in her mind to determine whether it felt like the truth. Yes, she had put the issue to rest. She was satisfied that she knew what had happened five years ago. As Harry had warned her, it did her no good at all.
She looked out at the surface of the lake before she stood up. At first she thought she was just looking to be sure that Harry had only been a dream, but then she sensed that she had wanted to ask him something. It was something she had thought of after he was gone. There was something she had figured out after what Harry had said. She opened the map and looked at it, and it was as though her mind had been wandering across it as she slept. She looked at the string of lakes and was sure. She folded the map and set to work. When she loaded her possessions and paddled up the next stream to Big Rock Lake, she knew he wouldn’t be there. She knew that he wouldn’t paddle on up the next stream to Bottle Lake, either. It was too small.
Martin had told her what he was going to do, if she just had the sense to read it. He had made a big deal out of lifting the canoe and walking around the parking lot with it before he would buy it. He was going to portage. Nothing else made sense. He wasn’t going to take the easy way up the whole string of lakes. He was going to stop at Big Rock Lake, lift his canoe and all the provisions and gear he had bought, and walk through the woods with them to the next chain of lakes. He had put the roads far behind him, and now he was going to leave the water, too.
He was going to a place where there was no easy way, where his strength and his stamina would separate him from any likely challenger. He had passed here three days ahead of her—maybe four now—and he hadn’t needed to go cautiously. He was wearing out his pursuers, so that when he met them he would have had four days to rest, hide his camp, and survey every inch of the surrounding country. Anybody who came after him would arrive with a canoe on his back that he had carried for miles, and would probably be in a state of exhaustion—fly-bitten, scratched, and half dead.
She looked at her map as she paddled. He would go west from Big Rock Lake to Charley Pond, then down into Lake Lila or even Lake Nehasane, and there he would stop and wait. He had come so far already that it was highly unlikely that anyone at all would follow. It was May, and the weather from now on would be tolerable, if not balmy. He had enough food to last for a long time, maybe into the summer if he was any good with the fishing gear he had bought in Lake Placid.
Jane Whitefield had spent ten years of her life hiding people. If a chaser was coming, usually he came hard and fast. If you could disappear without leaving any trail and stay hidden for two or three months, the chance of ever being found dropped close to zero. James Michael Martin had nothing to worry about from the police. They didn’t know he had killed Harry, and weren’t looking. He had little to fear from the friends of Jerry Cappadocia, who wouldn’t have any way to know that he would come to the mountains. The only possibility he had to fear was that Jane Whitefield would overcome her self-deception and be able to track him this far.
She spent an hour looking for his trail up from Big Rock Lake. She never found it. She tried to match his premeditation. It was mid-afternoon. If she could make the portage today and camp at the head of the chain, she could start the day fresh and maybe even find him before he expected her to arrive. She considered hiding the canoe in the woods and taking only the rifle and pack, but another look at the map made her reject the idea. The next chain of lakes was longer than the last, and the woods here were old and thick. She would lose time, and time meant exhausting her provisions and her strength.
The portage was about ten miles on the map, but there was no telling how long it would be on a winding trail. She took an approximate compass heading, packed her gear tightly, lifted the prow of her canoe, walked under it until she could lift it, and set off up the bank of Big Rock Lake to the west.
The canoe was light, and she had decided to travel with only the gear that she could carry strapped to her back. But the weight of it all together was seventy or eighty pounds. She walked westward for an hour, then set all of it down and lay on the forest floor, staring up at the dappling of the sunlight far above on the translucent leaves. At the end of fifteen minutes she slowly raised her body, set the burden on her shoulders again, and strained to lift the canoe. By the end of the second hour, she was staggering under the weight, her arms aching and her breaths labored and hoarse. She kept from looking at her watch while she rested, not wanting the rest to end.
Martin had been right. A person couldn’t come four days into the forest without carrying four days’ food, some fresh water, a canoe, and enough clothing to stave off hypothermia; and if she did, she had to carry it all on this portage. Some thug from Chicago would probably be lost by now, and begin to think about himself, not Martin.
Her footsteps converged with the deer run at four in the afternoon. It was narrow and went through glades and up hills, but it was clear. The hoofprints were usually obscured by the leaves, but the weeds were trampled down, and so it was easy to follow. She stopped now and then to glance at her compass, but it was difficult to tell on the winding trail whether most of the straight stretches tended to the west or the south. Finally, she put the compass into her pocket and trusted the deer. They would know how to get to water.
She had been on the deer run for a long time when she saw the second track. The deer path went down a little hill and crossed a small muddy patch, where their hoofs sunk two inches into it and a trickle of a stream ran. But among the marks of delicate cloven hoofs was the wide, deep imprint of the ripple-soled boot. He had found the deer run, too. Maybe he had known about it from the time when he was a teenager, and remembered.