Poison Flower (19 page)

"She's my sister. I should be with you."

"She and I have met, remember" Jane said. "This is the best way."

Iris said, "But what's the point in splitting up"

"Anybody who knows where Sarah is will be waiting near her, trying to get Jim. When I was in Los Angeles, one of the men who held me there told me they knew about her and that she'd be the next one if I didn't tell where Jim was. She'll be a priority for the police, too. They always expect fugitives to turn to a relative, and most of them do. The reason we've been tearing across the country is to get to her before anyone can figure out where she is."

"But we could all do that together."

"If you stay here with Jim, he doesn't have to go out and be seen. You don't fit the description of the woman who helped him escape, so you make him safer. There's only one person looking for you, and he's in a hospital or a prison cell for now."

"But you're still hurt."

"I'm not planning to do anything strenuous."

"But-"

"Don't bother," Jane said. "This is something I'll do better alone."

Jane called from a pay phone on the way to reserve a room, then drove them to the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Buffalo as though she were a friend who had picked them up at the airport. She paused at the entrance and watched them go inside with their suitcases. As Jane had instructed her to, Iris went to the desk with a credit card of Jane's to register while Shelby disappeared into a men's room in a corner of the lobby. Jane had seen enough. She drove off.

The drive to Ithaca was exactly as she remembered it from the years when she was a student at Cornell. There was a very long stretch of the New York State Thruway, and then the exit at Waterloo, and the long drive beside Cayuga Lake to the southern tip. She stopped in a gas station in Tompkins County near Ithaca to fill the tank, then went into the ladies' room to change the bandage on her leg again. For the whole trip she had been careful to keep the dressing fresh and clean, and she had used her left foot on the pedal when she drove, so her injured right leg was improving rapidly. Jane found her way to Dryden Road just after seven in the evening.

This was farm country, but most of the property this close to the university was no longer planted, and the only domesticated animals seemed to be dogs and a few horses. She had to read the house numbers stenciled on the sides of galvanized-steel rural mailboxes at the side of the road, but the long gravel driveways led to suburban houses, a lot of them probably owned by professors at Cornell or Ithaca College.

When Jane found the address she was looking for, she got only a second or two to glance down the driveway at the house. She saw a flash of lighted windows, and that was all. She drove on for a few hundred yards before she found a place to pull over. She looked in every direction, then saw that the nearest farmhouse was old, and apparently whoever owned the land didn't live there. She backed her car into the orchard and parked it.

Jane sat in the car for a few minutes and watched the traffic while she thought. There was something that bothered her about what she had seen at the house where Sarah was staying. At the end of the driveway was the house, and beside it a two-car garage. That looked fine. The garage door was shut, and there was no telling whether Sarah's car was there or not. But there had been a lot of lights on in the house, and no blinds or curtains shut. There was something inviting about all the lights, but it didn't feel like a house where someone was trying to wait quietly. Maybe Sarah was one of those people who felt safe only if every bulb in a house was blazing, but she had not struck Jane that way.

Jane reached under the seat and picked up the pistol she had brought with her across the country. She released the magazine and made sure the fourteen rounds she remembered were still there. She clicked the magazine back in, pulled the slide to cycle the first round in, and flicked on the safety. But the gun didn't make her feel better. Something was wrong.

Jane opened the glove compartment. She found the plastic pack of razor blades she had used to scrape off the dealer's stickers on the windows. The blades were the old-fashioned kind with one sharp edge and one thick and blunt, used mostly for linoleum cutters and paint scrapers. From the drugstore bag on the floor she picked up the roll of adhesive tape she had used whenever she changed the bandage on her thigh. She took off her shoes and socks, taped one razor blade to the top of each foot, and replaced the socks and shoes.

The house was about a quarter mile back up the road, so she began to walk. The right leg was still weak, but the pain had subsided over the past few days. She kept to the shoulder of the road, but when a car came along she diverted her path into the orchards and bushes where the headlights would miss her and she wouldn't be seen in the dark. She walked back to the mailbox, but she went more slowly up the outside of the driveway, where the view was complicated by trees, then slipped across to the side of the house.

It was a single-story house with a high, pitched roof and narrow clapboards painted the dried-blood color of a barn. She looked in the first window and saw the dining room. There had been an attempt to furnish the neat little house with authentic early-nineteenth-century furniture. The dining table and chairs were bird's-eye maple, and in the part of the living room she could see were a couple of red cherrywood tables and short cabinets. There were built-in bookcases along the far wall.

For all the lights, Jane could hear no sounds inside, and saw no people. Before she went to the front door and knocked, she wanted to reassure herself that Sarah Shelby was here, and alone.

Jane walked farther between the driveway and the side of the house, and around to the kitchen window in the back. She had to go up the first step of the back porch to see in the window. There was a counter, and in the sink she could see pots and pans that Sarah must have used to prepare her dinner. She pulled herself up a little farther and peered in at the kitchen table. There were four dirty plates, four glasses, and four sets of silverware. Everything was pushed aside or piled, as though dinner was over and four people had eaten. It was too many. Who could Sarah Shelby know in Ithaca, New York.

Jane walked to the garage and looked in the side window. There were two cars inside. One would be Sarah Shelby's. Jane had an awful suspicion about whom the other might belong to. She tried to assure herself that if someone were trying to ambush Shelby when he came to meet his sister, he wouldn't leave his car in the garage. But she couldn't prove that to herself.

Jane moved to the front of the house and crouched among the shrubs. She was careful not to touch the clapboards and not to make a sound that could be heard inside. Slowly, carefully, she raised her eye to the corner of the front window.

Sarah came through the living room, but right behind her was Maloney, the man who had shot Jane in Los Angeles. Sarah was carrying some beer bottles that someone had left in the living room, and Maloney was carrying something, too. As Sarah went through the dining room into the kitchen, Jane could see she was hobbling, as though her ankles were tied with a short rope to keep her from running.

Jane moved with her along the outside of the house, then saw her in the kitchen starting to wash the dishes in the sink. Then Jane saw Maloney step in. This time Jane could see that what he was carrying was a short-barreled pump shotgun. The sight of it made Jane sick. She knew what he would do with it if he met resistance. If Sarah tried to run, or if someone tried to drag her away, Maloney could hardly miss. There wouldn't be much chance of her surviving.

Jane couldn't see a simple way to get Sarah out of the house without getting her killed. If Jane got the right angle, she could probably shoot Maloney in the head and kill him before he killed Sarah. But then Sarah would still be in the kitchen when Gorman and Wylie raced in, guns drawn.

Jane walked carefully along the side of the house, moving from window to window to determine exactly where Gorman and Wylie were. She had to make whatever move she was going to make before Sarah finished with the chores. When she was done, they would almost certainly make her more difficult to rescue-maybe with the shotgun and maybe by tying or chaining her to something immovable, with someone close enough to kill her.

At least they didn't seem to have harmed her yet. She looked all right. Jane thought carefully as she searched for Wylie and Gorman. If she could find them in one place close together, she might be able to take them both out. She could fire without warning, take the first one through the head, and then immediately fire several rounds at the other, who would be a moving target by then. If she got the second one, she could move around the corner of the house to the kitchen window, and maybe shoot Maloney from behind as he stepped to the other room to see what had happened. Sarah had seemed smart when she had visited Jane. She could only hope that Sarah was also alert enough to know that when shooting started she should duck and run from a man with a shotgun. But Jane knew it was a terrible plan. It depended on so many unlikely breaks. She craned her neck to see if anyone was in the living room to her left.

"Hold it." The voice was Wylie's terrible Texas drawl.

Jane turned her head slowly in the direction of the voice. She could see him at the corner of the house to her left. Only his right arm and gun hand and his right eye were visible. Jane was standing in front of a lighted window, her body not even turned far enough toward Wylie to see him clearly, let alone take her gun out of her pocket, aim, and fire at him. Her right leg was still weak from the wound in her thigh, and she couldn't hope to run fast enough to avoid getting shot.

Jane threw her body backward between the bushes, rolled and pushed her gun into the center of a thick, dense yew bush, then kept crawling back away from the house and the light.

Wylie fired once and hit a tree, exploding particles of bark above her. Then he fired low and to the side, missing her again and spattering dirt in the air. "Last chance. You've got no place to go."

Jane's heart beat harder with anticipation. That was exactly the impression she wanted him to have-that she was unarmed and helpless. She stood and raised both hands in the air.

"That's right," Wylie said. "Much better." In the corner of her eye she saw him come slowly around the house. His gun was still aimed at her, but his body was fully visible now. "Let's walk slowly to the front door."

Jane took two steps forward, and that brought her up to the low yew bush where she had hidden her gun. In a moment she would drop to her left knee, snatch her gun from the bush, turn, and fire. One more step.

"Not that way." It was a second voice, coming from the opposite direction. It was Maloney. "Over this way toward the light."

They had her in a cross fire. Maloney was aiming his gun at her with both hands, and he had a perfect view of her back, with nothing to shield her. Jane's heart dropped to her stomach. She had told herself she would never let herself be taken alive by these men again. The reason she had taken such a foolish risk was that she didn't want Sarah to be in their hands as she had been. Now they had not only Sarah, but her. She should have shot Gorman through the window as soon as she'd seen him, and taken her chances with the others. If she picked up the gun now, they would kill her in a second.

"Come on. What's it going to be"

Jane stepped past the yew bush toward the light, her hands in the air. She had just thrown her life away, and probably Sarah's, too.

The front door opened before she reached it, and Maloney came up behind her and put his hand in the center of her spine. He pushed her in. Jane saw Sarah across the room, standing with her back to the wall with Gorman, who held the shotgun on her.

Jane stared straight ahead so she could hold all three men in her peripheral vision and detect any sudden movement. She would get another chance, she told herself. She only had to be ready to take it. And her gun was still a secret. It was in the yew tree with its safety off and a round in the chamber so all she had to do was grasp it and pull the trigger.

The next few minutes were unbearable. It was worse because this time she knew all of it before it happened. Wylie and Maloney searched her together, roughly and with no restraint. Jane made sure to seem as weak and injured as possible, to be barely able to stand. When she thought it was over, Wyle knelt and lifted her pants legs to be sure she didn't have a boot knife. He ran a finger around the inner elastic of her socks to be sure there was nothing else, then stood. She knew that as soon as they had reassured themselves that she had no weapons, they would begin with, "Where's Shelby" They would go on from where they had left off in Los Angeles. She knew every painful sensation that was coming, every stifled wave of fear.

"Where is Shelby right now" Wylie asked. "I'm sure Sarah would like to hear about her brother."

"I don't know," Jane said. "I was supposed to meet him in Salt Lake City. Because of you, I got there late and he had already left. I thought this would be the first place he'd come." She braced for a punch.

Wylie grasped her shoulders so hard she winced from the pain, and looked into her eyes as though he were searching for the truth. Then, surprisingly, he shrugged and pushed her. She fell, as though she could barely stand.

"What" Jane said.

"You're probably right. He seems to be the sort of guy who will travel across the country and end up here at some point. I'm not surprised that you're faster at it than he is. He's not a pro like you."

While Maloney watched her, Wylie stepped into the kitchen and returned with a length of rope and a roll of duct tape. He tied her wrists in front of her with rope, then wrapped duct tape around the wrists and covered the knot so she couldn't untie it or slip out of it. Then he knelt and took a second length of rope and tied it around her ankles, so she could take a stride of only about a foot.

He stood and looked at her. "That ought to do it. With that bullet hole in you, I guess you won't get in too much trouble."