A String of Beads Page 6

  “I take it the police decided to waste their time.”

  “They did. They made it misdemeanor assault. I pleaded self-defense, and they set a hearing. It was supposed to be May third. I got a public defender and lined up a dozen witnesses. Then, on April twenty-fifth, the cops came to my place again. They said this Nick Bauermeister had gotten murdered, and they liked me as the suspect.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “He was shot with something on the order of a thirty-aught-six rifle from a moderate distance—maybe a hundred yards. He lived in the country with a girlfriend, and they shot him through a lighted window at night. This was not great, because in the western half of the state there are probably six people who couldn’t have made that shot, and I don’t know any of them. But because I’d been in the army and gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, I made a great sniper suspect. Prosecutors love it when you’ve served your country.”

  “So they just assumed you killed him because of that fight?”

  “Well, you know how we are.”

  “Who? Veterans?”

  “Indians.”

  “Wily,” she said. “Skulking around in the woods, tracking and hunting people.”

  “Yep.”

  “In other words, they didn’t have any real suspects?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Do you have an alibi for the night of the murder?”

  “I was at my mother’s house until nine, and then went home and got to bed around ten. I had to be at work on a construction job at six the next morning.”

  “You had witnesses to the fight in the bar, and I assume the police didn’t have a murder weapon or anybody to place you at the crime scene.”

  “Right. No evidence.”

  “So why did you take off?”

  “Because evidence was starting to appear.”

  “What kind?”

  “Somebody who said he sold me a thirty-aught-six rifle for cash at a garage sale. Not just sold some guy a rifle. Sold one to me, picked my picture out of a stack of pictures, and remembered my name.”

  “Interesting. Did you know him?”

  “Never seen him; never heard his name before. I’ll bet I haven’t gone to a garage sale since my mother took me at the age of fifteen. Right about then I used to outgrow my clothes in a couple of hours, so she bought some of them secondhand.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Slawicky,” said Jimmy. “Walter Slawicky.”

  “That’s progress. We know the name of the man who is trying to frame you. Or one of them, if there are more.”

  “Not enough progress.”

  “It wasn’t a good idea to take off.”

  “Wasn’t it?” he said.

  “They’re looking hard for you, Jimmy.”

  “How hard?”

  “They’re watching your mother’s house. As soon as I drove up and sat down on the porch, two state policemen drove up, probably to see if the car that had just arrived had brought you home. And there’s a state cop who’s a regular tracker a few miles behind me. I looked in his wallet to be sure that’s what he was. His name is Isaac Lloyd, and he’s a sergeant.”

  “They sent one state trooper after me? One?”

  Jane shook her head. “There’s no such thing as one state trooper. He’s just the guy out running point. If he finds a gum wrapper that you leave somewhere, he’ll call it in and there will be a hundred of them, five dogs, and a chopper.”

  “Good thing I don’t leave trash around.”

  “Your feet leave big footprints, and you have to buy food, and people see you from a distance, even if you don’t see them.”

  “So what am I supposed to do about that, Janie?”

  “Since you’re smart enough to ask, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do for you.”

  “What?”

  “Remember the helicopters that used to come to get you out of tight spots in Afghanistan?”

  “Very well.”

  “That’s me. That’s what I’m doing here. I’ve come to help you get back home before they catch you. Having a woman with you might help you look a lot less like a fugitive, and it might even make the state police a little hesitant if they see us.”

  “Why would you do this for me?”

  She looked at him as though she hadn’t thought about having to tell him. She hesitated, then said, “This isn’t just me that you see here. The clan mothers—all eight of them—came to my house one morning and told me to go find you. This is our people coming to take you out of trouble.”

  “The clan mothers sent you? I can hardly believe it.”

  “Believe it.” She took the single strand of shell beads out of her pocket and dangled it before his face. “They knew we were close when we were kids, so they asked me to do it. Here’s their ote-ko-a.”

  He took the wampum string into his hand, looked closely at it, and then handed it back. “So it’s official. You’re working for them.”

  “You know who they are,” she said. “What it means is, if I get put down, there will be somebody else—maybe another rescuer, maybe an avenger. But it doesn’t end with me.”

  For the first time Jimmy seemed serious, almost chastened. “I really don’t think going back is such a good idea, or I would have stayed there.”

  “Your chances are much better if you turn yourself in. I told you there’s already a state policeman out here trying to track us.”

  “You know what?” Jimmy said. “I think I see him.”

  “Who? The cop?” asked Jane.

  “Is he tall, thin like a heron, with khaki pants and a blue jacket?”

  Jane was up in a second, kneeling to see where Jimmy was pointing. “Get off the platform, but stay low,” she whispered. “We’ve got to move.”

  Jimmy slid off the platform, held on to the edge for a moment, and then dropped to the ground. Jane watched for the trooper. He was trotting along the crest of the hill beyond the creek that separated him from the rock shelter. He was about five hundred yards away, but moving back and forth on a trail to make his way down to level ground. Jane lowered herself off the platform, hung for a second, and then dropped.

  Jane and Jimmy slung their packs over their shoulders and began to make their way deeper into the woods. “Do you think he saw us?” Jimmy asked.

  “It almost doesn’t matter,” Jane said. “He’s a cop, and he’s obviously done this kind of thing before, and he seems to know this part of the world. He doesn’t need to see you to know where you must be. I’ve been traveling hard for five days. He must have tracked me for a while, then realized where I must be headed, and called for a ride to be here first. Come on, we’ve got to speed things up.”

  Jane moved ahead on the trail and worked herself up to a trot, and then to a half-speed run, watching the spaces between the trees for protruding roots or stones that could trip her. She could hear Jimmy behind her by about ten feet, giving her the chance to plot a course, stop to look, or change directions without crashing into her or stepping on her heels. Jane chose surfaces that wouldn’t leave a readable track—stone surfaces, openings in the middle of groves where the leaves had piled up. After a few minutes she found the bed of a small stream that flowed from an unseen spring near the top of the ridge, and led him down by the water so they could run along the pebbly bank, giving them a bit of invisibility.

  She could hear Jimmy’s heavier steps as he ran, and she listened to his breathing. He had been a good athlete when they were young. He had probably stopped playing games at some point—they were both in their midthirties now—but he had obviously stayed active. He was more muscular, but other than that, not much heavier than he’d been in high school. His breathing was even and unlabored so far. If t
hey could both keep up the pace for a while, and avoid twisting an ankle, they might make it through the day. That cop back there was a worry, but he thought he was chasing a killer, so he would be second-guessing himself, looking harder and longer at each thicket, each rise in the ground ahead, to be sure it wasn’t an ambush, or at least a hiding place. That would slow him down.

  Jane’s biggest worry was that there was no such thing as one cop. If this one had seen them on the rock, if she had led him to Jimmy, then he didn’t need to catch up with them. All he had to do was use his cell phone to call more cops and send them to block the way ahead. As soon as she’d thought about it, she caught herself listening for the throbbing sound of a helicopter’s rotors in the distance.

  In time the stream bed became steeper and the banks disappeared. The trickle of water was running over bare rock. She altered her course to keep from having to travel in the open, bringing them instead among the pines that dominated the heights near the crest of the ridge. The ground under the pines was thick with needles, and it soothed her feet. She turned to check on Jimmy, and found he was still the same ten feet back, still not ready to collapse after the quick climb. His T-shirt had a dark streak where sweat had soaked the shoulders and neck, then run down to his belly, but he didn’t seem to be in distress. When Jane stopped, she squatted in the shade under the pines, and he did too. They both looked back down the high hillside in the direction they’d come from, trying to see if they were being followed.

  If the cop was on his way up, the full green foliage of the trees was shielding him from their view. Jane was sure that if he had called for reinforcements she or Jimmy would be able to see them or hear them. There were no roads nearby for police cars to travel, and nothing was in the air but a couple of red-tailed hawks circling on thermals very high up and calling to each other now and then. She said, “I don’t see him, or anybody else. Do you?”

  Jimmy slowly shook his head. “No. But if I was tracking somebody, I’d try to be sure they didn’t see me, too.”

  “So would I,” she said. “We’d better keep going.”

  Jane got up and headed for the top of the ridge, and heard Jimmy follow. When they had almost reached the crest, she moved along just below it, trying to keep from being visible to the man following them. She looked ahead, trying to find a notch or a grove of trees that was thick enough to hide them all the way to the top, so they could slip over to the downslope on the other side without being silhouetted against the bright sky.

  After a short time she came to a spot where the pine trees seemed to spill down from the crest to the beginning of the deciduous forest. She entered the pines and led Jimmy to the crest and over to the far side. Immediately she saw the reason the vegetation grew so thickly to the top. A spring had formed a pool up there, and water seeped downward on both sides of the ridge. On the new side, she could see that the water had formed the beginning of a stream, and that farther down, the width and depth of the stream grew. The stream provided another clear path downward without fighting underbrush. As each section of the stream bed became wider and deeper, she and Jimmy could trot along it without being seen.

  The climb they had just completed had put strain on the muscles along the backs of Jane’s legs, and now going downward put stress on the muscles in the front. The bullet wound in her thigh was old now—it had happened over a year ago—and she had come to think of herself as fully recovered, but as she descended, she felt a twinge, a sudden weakness in her right thigh that startled her and made her wonder for an instant whether her leg would give way under her. From time to time she felt the twinge again, but the leg held.

  “We seem to be heading south,” Jimmy said. “That’s not toward home.”

  “We don’t have much choice. The direction we’ve been taking is just away.”

  “Then what? Circle back at night?”

  “Maybe. Somehow we’ve got to lose this cop and get you back up to the reservation.”

  “So I can surrender to a different cop.”

  “Yes. That’s what it amounts to, but running makes you seem guilty. And being a fugitive in a murder case is highly risky. Any cops you meet will almost certainly draw their sidearms, and sometimes a nervous cop will misinterpret any movement as hostile. When we’re home we’ll get you a great defense lawyer, and get some private detectives going on investigating your case. While we’re out here running through the woods nobody’s doing anything to clear you.”

  Jimmy said, “Clearing me sounds like it costs a lot of money.”

  “Enough will be available,” Jane said.

  “The clan mothers set aside money for this kind of thing?”

  Jane didn’t bother to correct his impression.

  They moved along the stream bed, careful not to step on the mossy rocks right near the water because they were slippery. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have thought that you’d do something like this.”

  “Then why did you leave me a message in the ladies’ room by the expressway?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess being there again brought that trip back to me, and I had been feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t really expect you to find it.”

  “Just because I don’t live on the reservation I’m not suddenly a stranger. I never lived there anyway, except in the summer when my father was working far away.”

  “That’s part of it,” he said. “And the other part is that you can be Indian or not whenever you want.”

  “That’s not how it works. I don’t get to pick, and never did. My mother had eyes so blue they looked like the sky reflected in ice water, and skin like cream. She’s the one who chose, and she wanted to be Seneca because she loved my father. After the Wolf clan women adopted her, she was never anything else. And I’ve never been anything else.”

  “You have blue eyes just like hers.”

  She laughed. “Don’t sound like that. I didn’t steal them.”

  “I meant you can pick.”

  “If I wanted to, I could pass as something besides Seneca, and so could you—at least outside New York, where everyone’s used to seeing Haudenosaunee people. Having black hair and a dark complexion opens up a lot of possible ethnic identities. But I don’t forget who I am. And when the clan mothers say I’m the one to do something, I know who they are too.”

  “Janie, you’re not still a true believer in the old religion, are you?”

  “What I believe in these days is pretty much dominated by what I learned in science classes. But I sometimes like remembering that I’m not just one person. I’m part of a group of people like me. And I’ve never heard anything to make me think the old people were stupid.”

  “I get you,” he said.

  They kept trotting along the stream bed for a time, and then they both heard a faint hoot of a train’s horn, then another. They moved on, making their way downhill. As the stream bed flattened and no longer kept them hidden, Jane altered her course a little. The train horn sounded again, this time a long wail, then another hoot.

  “There must be a town down there,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re blowing their horn for a crossing—two short, one long, one short. They’re warning the vehicles that might not see them coming.”

  They ran on for a few minutes and then saw, stretched across the bottom of the valley below, the train tracks. The double line of steel rails was coming out of a small town to their right. Jane stopped running and walked through a stand of trees, keeping herself in the foliage.

  She followed the tracks with her eyes, moving her gaze from the spot where they emerged from the cluster of buildings at the edge of a grid of streets, stretched across a level field that looked like wheat, and then reached the hillside where they began to wind and go upward. She pointed. “Right over there�
��where the tracks turn and climb—I’ll bet a train would have to slow down to practically a walk.”

  “Are you planning to jump a train?”

  “I’m considering it,” she said, and watched Jimmy for a reaction. He said nothing.

  She said, “Thank you for not mentioning Skip Walker.” Skip was a harsh nickname for a boy they had both known when they were young. At some point in early childhood he had decided to hop a train. He had run along beside it, then either tripped or been unable to hang on to a handhold after he’d made his leap. The train wheel had rolled over his leg and amputated it. “Skip” was a reference to the way he walked on his prosthetic leg, with a limp and a little hop. He had been one of those boys that everyone’s mother cited to scare them out of taking risks.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Skip was seven or eight when he did that. We ought to be able to keep from being hurt that bad.”

  Jane was still tracing the tracks with her eyes, walking along the hillside to see where the tracks went after the first turn. “It looks to me as though the tracks go mostly north,” she said. “If we jumped the train, our trip home might be a whole lot quicker.”

  Jimmy said, “Let’s head for that place right over there, where it takes another turn and climbs at the same time. If they have people watching at the front and the back, they won’t see us if we pop out in the middle and climb aboard.”

  They trotted along the hillside, staying among the trees but heading for the spot where the tracks turned and disappeared into thick woods. It took them a few minutes to run from their hill to the one where the tracks were. When they arrived they could look down above the tracks to see a place where the rails bisected the town. On one side they could see four church steeples, a row of long, flat-topped buildings that were probably stores and offices, and farther out, dozens of small houses with pitched gray roofs. On the other side of the tracks were a number of old brick buildings with rows of dirty, barely translucent windows, smokestacks, and railroad sidings. Beyond them there were metal Quonset huts that were either warehouses or garages.