Vanishing Act jw-1 Read online

  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?

  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 certain
ly 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.

  The creature that had always struck her as especially horrible was the Naked Bear, because it had come too close to revealing overtly the secret of the stories. The secret was that the stories weren’t true, but they weren’t exactly imaginary, either. This was a bear, a creature whose nature was to kill people, but it wasn’t just a bear. It was hairless, made to look like a human being, and it talked: "Ongwe ias"—I am the one who eats you.

  The surface of the big lake was almost invisible. She paddled on, going faster now because the slight sweat she had raised by paddling helped to keep her cool and her arms felt limber and strong after an hour of the rhythmic sameness. Her strokes had lengthened and become sure. It had been a couple of years since she had been in a canoe, but now everything had come back, because even when the mind forgot, the synapses in the brain that controlled physical movement had been altered to hold the pattern forever.

  The moon came up an hour later, but she still could not see the end of the lake. The paddling had already become unconscious, and she spent the time making herself firmer and stronger. Her grandfather’s stories were cautionary tales: The lone hunter the woods devoured had made some mistake out here. A turned ankle or a case of dysentery or even a failure to see signs on a trail thirty miles from a road might as well be a bullet through the head. The thought made her afraid, but it was the right kind of fear, so she nurtured and studied it. The fear made her alert and cautious, aware
of every sound. She felt the irises of her eyes opening wider, letting in more of the light from the moon that the black water reflected up at her. The people in the stories never survived by strength, only by cleverness. A human being was a small, fragile animal with skin that could be punctured and bones that broke. The only way to stay alive was to think clearly.

  She stayed a couple of hundred feet from shore, where the tiny, almost imperceptible swish of the paddle would be difficult to hear and the shape of the canoe would be hard to separate from the shimmer of the surface of the lake. She studied every foot of the shoreline as she went, watching ahead for a faint glow, sniffing the air for the smell of smoke.

  It was after midnight when she reached the southern tip of big Tupper Lake. The end was just a sense that the darkness had thickened in front of her. She paddled toward the shore through the standing reeds in the shallows that scraped quietly against the hull of her canoe, and passed along the shore until she found the inlet. It had been marked on the maps, but in the dark it was only a sensation that sounds were coming from farther back, not muffled, but open and alive. She had planned to camp here and wait for first light, but now that she had made it, she did not want to stop.

  The river was slow and the banks thick with low trees and bushes. He had a three-day start on her. She tried to feel his presence ahead, but it seemed wrong. He wouldn’t paddle this far, down to the tip of the big lake, and then stop a mile up the river. He would go on, farther from policemen, electric lights, and roads.

  If she guessed wrong and he had stopped along the little river, then it would be better to come on him in the dark, when he might be asleep, than to swing around a bend in bright sunlight and find him waiting. She paddled on up the little river into the dark forest. The river was swollen with water from the melted snows above, but she could make slow headway by paddling hard and not letting the canoe glide. She threw herself into the work, watching the trees along the banks for signs and the water ahead for obstacles.