A String of Beads Read online

  Jane noticed a mechanical, trained quality to his movements, like a soldier on an obstacle course. He ran to the road and crossed without pausing to look, timing the cars without effort and stepping out of the way of one into the slipstream of the next and on to the grass stripe in the middle. “Cop,” Jane thought. He ran the way cops did when they wanted to reach a car that had stalled in the left lane.

  Jane stepped back inside the restroom, closed the door, and climbed on one of the toilets to look out the window. She heard the men’s room door open and close, so she knew he had made the stop. She waited a few minutes, and then heard it again. Through the window she watched him stride across the parking lot. He was in a hurry and she knew he was in that moment of heightened alertness when he was rushing to catch up with her, hoping that she had not just turned off on another path or stopped to sleep for an hour so he would run on ahead and lose her.

  The man gradually worked his way up from a long stride to a jog. She could see he was a habitual runner, a man who was comfortable going long distances on foot. As she slipped out the door and started after him, his strength and steadiness worried her.

  The man crossed the narrow road that ran parallel to the expressway. The road still had a string of decrepit businesses left behind when the highway had bypassed them. She sensed that he was about to look behind him to see if he had overrun her position, so she altered her course and ducked into a small convenience store and bought some bottles of water, apples, nuts, and protein bars. Then she came out and looked southeast to southwest to spot the tallest hill along the path. That was where he would ultimately have to go to spot her. As Jane moved south she sped up, testing herself against the man.

  It was already late in the day and he would be getting around to admitting that he had lost her and would have to climb to higher ground. He would be reduced to looking down from the top of the high hill and see if he could spot her on one of the trails beneath the trees. That was the most effective thing he had left to do. Ten or fifteen thousand years ago, when the ice age glaciers still covered the land a few miles north of here, Paleo-Indians used to live on the heights and watch for the migrating herds of caribou they hunted and for approaching enemies.

  Jane couldn’t yet allow herself to be sure what this man was. He looked like a policeman, but he still could be almost anything—the real killer of the man Jimmy had fought in the bar, a private detective hired by the victim’s family, or a friend of the victim. Or he could be a long-distance hiker who had simply come along behind her on the trail, but had nothing to do with her or Jimmy.

  She checked the level of the sun, estimated that it would be down in an hour, and decided to head up the east side of the highest hill, where it would be dark soonest, and prepare to start out before sunup.

  She climbed the hill quickly, stopping only a few seconds at a time on the thickly forested slope to listen for his footsteps, or for an abrupt silencing of the birdsongs that would warn her of another interloper in the woods. The way up was steep, but it would take her to the top faster, and test her legs and her wind. In the year since she had been shot in the right thigh, she had gone harder and longer and steeper every time she felt uncertain about her strength. She had to make up for the months when she had barely been able to stand.

  As Jane was approaching the summit she began to smell the pungent, perfumed scent of a pine fire. The fire was small, probably a few sappy pine twigs as kindling to start a piece of hardwood that would give off less smoke and more heat.

  She moved off the path into the wooded terrain. She followed the smell and after another two hundred yards she found him. He had set up camp in a small copse a bit higher than the surrounding ground, and hidden from view by trees and brush. Jane dropped down and crawled closer to watch him. He was camped on the east side of the hill, just as she had planned to. He had unrolled a mat to pad his sleeping spot. He had a plastic tarp with brass grommets that he’d hung as a lean-to, and then spread a lightweight sleeping bag on the mat.

  His simple preparations made Jane wary. He was not some fat, soft cop who spent his weeks in a patrol car and then went out on weekends to drink beer and pretend to fish. He poured water in a small pot, added some dry soup from a packet, and set it above his tiny fire to warm.

  Jane considered leaving immediately, but staying might give her a chance to gain an advantage that she might not get again, so she waited. She watched the man make his dinner, and she watched him eat. He was a slow, thoughtful eater who looked at the trees and listened to the calls of birds and the chattering of squirrels in the limbs above. He was alert but at ease in the woods, and had soon finished his dinner, wiped the pot clean, and put it away. He stood up carrying a folding entrenching tool from his pack and a roll of toilet paper, and disappeared into the woods.

  Jane waited a minute until she heard the entrenching tool digging into the ground fifty yards off. She kept the sound in her ears as she moved into his camp, quickly examining everything. She found a box of 9 mm pistol ammunition in his backpack, but he must have taken the pistol with him. Next she found a little black leather wallet. There was a badge that said NEW YORK STATE POLICE, and an identification card that said he was Isaac Lloyd, Technical Sergeant, Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He was based in Rochester.

  When the state police had seen Jane visit Jimmy’s mother, this one must have decided to follow her. Jane thought about taking the bullets, badge, and ID, but dismissed the idea. She didn’t want to taunt this man, and alarming him would be the fastest way to turn one cop into fifty cops.

  She heard the crunch of footsteps on leaves, ducked down, and moved off into the woods. When she descended again to the level of the long trail south it was already getting dark. Deep, gloomy shadows painted the east sides of the wooded hills. Jane plotted the route she would have to take to stay out of Isaac Lloyd’s sight. She thought about the name as she began to move south. Isaac was almost certainly “Ike.” Yes, he was definitely an Ike.

  She reached a trail on the far side of the next hill with the sun sinking quickly, and then followed it to a north-south road. She moved along the sparsely traveled road at a strong pace for a time, and periodically stopped to verify she was still alone. She stayed on the shoulder of the road, and then began to trot. Jane let her eyes get used to the darkness and then picked up speed. She was glad she had checked his identity. She didn’t want harm to come to him, but she also didn’t want to answer the questions he might ask if he caught up with her.

  At the first public trash can she took apart her cell phone and threw the battery in. At each spot where she could dispose of another part of the phone, she did. She didn’t think the police had followed her this far using her cell phone’s GPS, but she was certain they could if they knew her number, and they could get that if they knew her name. She was running for Jimmy’s life, and if they were going to overtake her, they would have to work harder than that.

  6

  Jane traveled for several hours that night. Once she had divested herself of her cell phone, she began to change her course. Until the rest stop she had followed the exact route that she and Jimmy had followed at fourteen. It had led them to the Juniata River in eastern Pennsylvania, because that was the place where archaeological finds had placed the Iroquoian speakers before most of them had migrated north to the land that became New York State. That had been an old place. But it had not been the oldest place. The one they’d called the oldest place, one of the oldest sites in North America, was the Meadowcroft Rockshelter near Avella, Pennsylvania, southwest of Pittsburgh. Carbon dating on baskets and animal remains in the shelter showed that people had been there sixteen thousand years ago.

  The Meadowcroft shelter was an overhang in the side of a sandstone cliff where small groups of Paleo-Indians had stayed for short periods of time, probably following the caribou herds at first. But others in later millennia stopped to wait out a
storm, rest from a journey, hunt for meat in the surrounding woods, or fish in Cross Creek. Many groups had stopped at Meadowcroft, including Senecas, who regularly traveled though the upper Ohio valley until at least the 1780s.

  To reach the shelter Jane headed south. All night long as she alternately ran and walked, she thought about her husband, Carey. They had known each other since sophomore year at college. She had not been a guide in those days, had never taken a person away from his troubles—never even thought of it until she was a junior and a friend needed that kind of help. But years later when Carey had reappeared in her life and they’d fallen in love, she had told him all about her past before she’d agreed to marry him. In fact, at first she had told him to explain why she wouldn’t marry him, but he had kept after her until she had agreed. When they married, she stopped taking on runners and their troubles, and concentrated on being a good wife, a doctor’s wife. But people still came sometimes. Runners she had made to disappear and who were living new lives met other people in the same kinds of trouble, and sent them to Jane. Usually she had resisted and found other ways to help, but now and again she’d made exceptions and gone on the road again. This was one of the exceptions. She had discussed the reasons with Carey, and she had thought about them over and over while she’d been traveling on foot down deserted Pennsylvania roads. Now Carey was angry, and disappointed, and acted as though he’d been betrayed.

  She reached into the pocket of her jeans and took out the ote-ko-a, running her thumb along the strand, feeling each of the polished shell beads in the dark. Two white, two purple, two white, two purple, and on down to the end. The string of shell beads was one of the things Carey couldn’t possibly understand. The string of beads was an appointment to act as the agent of her people. It was a license, an assignment, a contract, a physical symbol of an agreement. It was all of these and none of them, but having it gave her a responsibility she couldn’t duck or amend. She put it back in the pocket where she had been carrying it since she’d started her journey. A small part of her brain reminded her that she had never shown it to Carey, never tried to explain to him what it meant. The ote-ko-a was a burden, but at the same time, it was a proof of her acceptance by the women, people whose opinions mattered. The time had come when the tribe needed the specialized kind of help that she could give. How could she have refused?

  Jane thought about what she wished she had said to Carey, how she should frame her sentences when she talked to him again. At last she fell asleep in a cornfield, and slept uninterruptedly until afternoon when the heat of the sun woke her. She got up, rolled up her sleeping bag, shouldered her pack, and began to walk.

  She kept moving south. Each night she wished she could call Carey, but as cell phones had become nearly universal, it had gotten harder and harder to find a pay phone. But one night she came to a diner in a small village along the road. She ate, and then found a pay phone on the wall outside the diner by the parking lot. Carey didn’t answer, so she left a message. “Hi, honey. I’m still on the trip, but I’m not anywhere I can call very often. I don’t have my cell phone anymore, so don’t try that.” She paused for a second. “I’m afraid I’ve got nothing to say but I love you, so here it comes. I love you.” She hung up.

  She kept moving south, mostly at night. Sometimes her road ran through small towns, where it was transformed into a main street, and ran past churches and schools. At times she would go up on a sidewalk and jog along beside the display windows of stores, and then the road left the town behind and became rural again.

  She wished she had gotten to talk to Carey on the phone, and not just leave him a message. The anger she felt at his lack of understanding had faded, and now when she thought about him she simply missed him.

  Late on the fifth night of hard travel Jane reached the Meadowcroft Rockshelter. Since she and Jimmy had been here long ago the state of Pennsylvania or some institution had built a sturdy-looking wooden shelter to put a roof over the ancient outcropping of rock. There were platforms and steps to the shelter now. She stopped in the woods a hundred yards from the wooden structure, staying far enough away so that the security cameras in or on the building wouldn’t pick up more than a slight thickening of the darkness at the edge of the woods for a moment, and then nothing. She continued into the woods above the building, went another hundred yards to a suitable thicket made of sprouts and saplings of a vanished maple tree, and spread her sleeping bag in the center of it.

  She woke a few hours later already aware that she wasn’t alone. She carefully rolled out of her sleeping bag and squatted to be ready to spring if she needed to. Jimmy? No, he wouldn’t sneak up on her. But it could be a Pennsylvania park ranger looking around to be sure she wasn’t somebody dangerous. She waited a few minutes in motionless silence, and then saw the source of the movement. It was five deer, two bucks and three does, moving along outside the edge of the woods where the foraging was best. In a few more minutes they faded back into the forest, up some narrow trail that she had not seen.

  Jane packed up and walked toward the creek, but then realized that she hadn’t been intended to go that way. She was supposed to think the way she and Jimmy had thought when they were fourteen.

  She took the path that had been marked and cleared above the creek, and then climbed a bit to the broad opening of the wooden structure over the rock shelter. There sat Jimmy Sanders in the mouth of it, smiling like a jovial stone god in a forest shrine. He wore a gray-green T-shirt that showed his bulging biceps and a pair of cargo pants with a zippered leg that could change the pants to shorts. His legs hung off the platform at the cavernous entrance to the shelter, kicking happily. On his head was an olive drab watch cap of the sort that Jane had brought to keep warm when she camped at night, but she could see enough above his hairline to see his hair was cut very short. His shoes were brown hiking boots made of netting and rubber like high-top sneakers. His skin was like Jane’s, but it had been darkened by the sun to look like Jane’s father’s—like a worn copper penny. His face was still handsome and a little boyish with the same amusement showing in his black eyes.

  “Hey, Janie,” Jimmy said, his cheerful smile growing. He looked down at her from the platform and then stared up at the sky and took in a deep breath of morning air. Then he looked down at her again. “I knew that if anybody would come and find me it would be you.” He closed his eyes to the sunshine and then opened one eye. “I had hoped for your sake that you’d look about that way at our present age.”

  “You look pretty chipper yourself, Jimmy.”

  “I wasn’t talking about chipper.”

  “I know you weren’t,” she said. “I’m married. Happily.”

  “I’d heard that. Good for you. It takes character. Another sign that you grew up just the way I thought. He’s a doctor, right?”

  “Yes, and a good man. How about you? Get married yet?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll bet you stopped off at my mom’s before you came, and she would have said so if I had.”

  “Probably,” said Jane. “But we didn’t get to talk much this time.”

  “I would have been a better husband in the old times I think. I’d go off up the trail with my friends to fight whoever we were fighting that month and the little woman would stay in her clan’s longhouse and raise crops and babies with her friends. When I came back we’d make her section of the longhouse a happy place for a while, and then I’d go off again.”

  “Very romantic. But I’ll hold on to some hope that you find a regular modern girl and live a dull life.” She climbed the steps to the platform where he sat. She sat down beside him and let her legs dangle from the edge of the platform.

  “Maybe I’ll give it a try if I live.”

  At last, she thought. “Tell me why the police are after you.”

  “It started, as a lot of stupid stories do, in a bar. I was there, and so was a guy
named Nick Bauermeister. I didn’t know his name at the time, but I noticed him. He was about thirty I’d say, maybe a little older. He was drunk and loud. It was around midnight and I was getting ready to go home, because I always figure if you haven’t met somebody who will change your life by midnight, she isn’t coming.”

  “Good policy,” said Jane.

  “I thought it was fairly practical,” he said. “I was heading for the door and this guy stepped in my way.”

  “Why?”

  “Stupid and drunk.”

  “How big was this guy?”

  “Slightly bigger than me.”

  “Bigger than you? Wow.”

  “Slightly. He looked like a bleary-eyed Viking. He took a poke at me and I sidestepped and dropped him. He was one of those hopeless guys who does that, and then gets up. It’s the getting up that hurts you.”

  “I can see how that might be,” said Jane.

  “Well, sure. I’m just going home. All he has to do is lie there for less than ten seconds while he thinks about why I might not have been his best choice. But he’s not a thinking man. He’s the ‘back up in your face’ guy. So when he came for me again, I knew I’d have to hit him a little harder and faster. I did. Maybe five times. Then I went home.”

  “And?”

  “And the next day the police came to my house after work to say that they’d picked this Nick guy up off the floor and taken him to the hospital last night. They were considering charging me with assault.”

  “And you said . . .”

  “I said, ‘I hope you won’t waste your time doing that, because the bar was full of regulars who saw him take a swing at me out of drunken belligerence. That’s probably why nobody helped him up before you got there. They didn’t want to have to knock him back down themselves.’”