Vanishing Act (18 page)

She was stung. "No chance," she said. Was there? Could he possibly think that she had some ulterior motive for everything she had done? "No."

"I see," said Jake. "So he knew you really well."

"Yes, we had an affair," she said, "since that’s the bush you’re beating around. But I’m being logical. He ran into trouble, but he knows the reason he got out was because I risked my life for him. He was carrying a lot of money, and some people would get suspicious of anybody who knew it. But I didn’t even let him spend any of it. I put up all the expenses. And he came to me; I didn’t look for him."

"What do you want to do?"

"How can I know?"

Jake walked along, looking around him instead of at her. "There are only a couple of really strong possibilities. One is, they found him and killed him before he got here." She caught him watching her for a reaction. "In that case, there wouldn’t be much to do, would there? They’d be long gone."

"I hope your other possibility beats that one."

"You said he used to be a policeman?"

"Yes," she said. "Eight years."

"Is it possible that he hasn’t quite gotten over it? Bear with me now. Suppose he stopped and picked up a paper and read about this fellow getting killed, just like you did. This Harry was some kind of friend, right? Or at least somebody who had done him a favor ..."

"Jake!" she gasped. She stopped and gave him a quick hug. "You did it. That’s right. It’s true. I talked to him for hours, endlessly. I was trying to tell him that he couldn’t afford to act like a cop anymore, figuring things out and then going off to do something about it. Even while I was saying it, I could see there was something in the back of his eyes, some door back there that closed. He was protecting something. And now I know. He didn’t have any other way to see things."

"So he just might have gone on south to Santa Barbara."

"Might have? I’m telling you, I’m sure that’s exactly what he would do. He’s thinking like a cop. He never stopped thinking that way, because he didn’t know how. He read, or heard on the radio, that Harry was murdered in Santa Barbara. He owed his life to Harry, and the people who killed Harry are also after him. He’s down at the scene of the crime trying to figure out who they are."

"Unless something happened on the way here."

"But that’s what’s been bothering me all along. The four men killed Lewis Feng and deciphered his list. Then what did they do? They went right away to Santa Barbara and killed Harry. That’s not a guess. We know they did because Harry’s dead. Meanwhile, John was driving from Vancouver to Medford. How could they find him unless they were actually following him? They couldn’t and they weren’t following him."

"How do we know that?"

"Because John left right after I did. First they had to break in at Lew Feng’s, kill him, and find his list. Harry was obviously the priority because they got him. Even if they found both names and addresses right away and split up, two to get Harry and two to get John, he would have at the very least an hour’s head start—fifty miles. He would be in one of thousands of little cars driving the five hundred miles down the coast, so they couldn’t have gotten him on the road."

"Some other way? It must be a nine- or ten-hour drive. A motel?"

"It’s the same problem. They would have to stop at every hotel or motel for five hundred miles and look for a car they’d never seen before. They never could have found him. They could have murdered Harry in Santa Barbara and still have flown here in time to surprise John, but they didn’t. John hasn’t been here, but neither has anyone else."

"How do you know that?"

"The lady across the hall has a baby, so she’s here during working hours and would have heard them. She heard me walking up the hall—one woman, not four two-hundred-pound men. Everybody else in the complex is here at night. When those men tried to sneak into my house, they had to break a window to do it, didn’t they?"

"Yeah," he said. "I guess they did."

"Well, they didn’t break any windows here or jimmy a door or anything else."

"No, they didn’t." He waited and watched her.

She avoided his eyes and craned her neck to look up and down the street. "Did you happen to see a pay phone on your rambles? This doesn’t look like a street where cabs cruise for passengers."

20

As the plane turned to come in over the Santa Barbara airport, Jane looked down and tried to imagine Harry living here. She had been here once before, when she had left a client in Los Angeles and wanted to spend a few days out of sight. It was a beautiful, quiet place, but there was something about it that had never seemed quite right to her
_—
like a graveyard with flowers that grew in too lush and luxuriant not to be a sign of a haunting.

It was a place where lots of people had died for no reason at all. Father Junipero Serra stopped here in the 1780s and founded a mission for the Chumash Indians. The Chumash had lived along the coast and done a little fishing in the kelp beds and a lot of gathering in the tidal pools, and hunted in the hills that ran along the coast a couple of miles inland. It had been an easy, unchanging life, and they hadn’t prepared themselves for the arrival of the Europeans by generations of fighting as the Iroquois had. They were easily enslaved, and forced to build stone buildings and aqueducts and work in the fields for the priests. She had seen virtually all that was left of the Chumash years ago: a cave in the hills painted with mystical figures and a few intricate baskets behind glass in the little museum up the road from the mission. The coast of California was a sad place for Indians: Chumash, Gabrieleno, Cupeno, Tataviam, Luiseno, Costanoan, Miwok, Ipa, Salinan, Esselen—all either exterminated by 1900 or down to 1 percent of the 300,000 people the priests had counted when they took their first inventory of souls.

Jane had brought Harry to Lew Feng, walked out of the shop, and taken the next flight out of Vancouver. She had insisted that she never be told where Lew Feng sent him. She had not wanted to have that piece of information in her mind, waiting to come out as soon as somebody inflicted enough pain. But Santa Barbara should have been a shrewd place for Lew Feng to put Harry. If she had known, she would have agreed with it. There were lots of people in their fifties and sixties wandering around town doing nothing. They played golf, walked on the beaches, and sauntered around State Street looking in store windows. It was the sort of town where all you needed was the money to pay the rent and a dull, plausible story that would explain why you had chosen to pay it there. To the sort of people who were looking for Harry, Santa Barbara would have been invisible, just another cluster of exits on the freeway up the coast.

Jake noticed the change in Jane as they walked to the car-rental desk at the airport. Until now she had been held in a rigid immobility by the simple fact that airplanes traveled faster than girls did, but now she was eager, ready to move. She was very good at standing there, the young woman waiting for old grandpops to rent the car, but her eyes were always in motion, never settling on anything for more than a second or two.

As soon as he had the keys, she picked up her bag and set off. She took the keys out of his hand without speaking and got in on the driver’s side. She maneuvered the car along Sandspit Road to the freeway and took it through the town to the Salinas Street exit, then swung up the first street. "Why is it called Ocean View?" Jake asked. All he could see was tall apartment buildings and long, skinny palm trees.

"It’s California real estate language," she said. "If it’s called a view or vista of something, it means it’s not near it."

"But view means you can see it. I can’t see it."

"You could if you were eighty feet tall. They’re not responsible for your shortcomings. Ninety-two. That must be it up there. The big white building on the left."

"What do we do?"

"I go in, you stay inconspicuous and watch."

"What am I watching for? Your friend?"

"John isn’t likely to come in daylight. If you do see him, whatever you do, don’t let him get away. Talk to him. Ask directions or something. And remember, he’s got a lot to be scared of. Until he sees me, he’s as dangerous as the others."

She closed the door, slipped her shoulder into her purse strap, and walked across the street to the apartment buildings. Jake couldn’t see anybody to watch, so he watched the buildings. He had considered coming to a place like this to wait out his last few years. It was pretty, a lot of palm trees and stucco buildings you couldn’t see the ocean from, but it was just the front door of a nursing home, really, and those weren’t much different anywhere. At least in Deganawida there was a chance that somebody might visit.

Jane came back smiling and sat in the driver’s seat. "We’re in luck. I rented the apartment next door to Harry’s. We move in before dark."

"It just happened to be vacant?"

"There was a murder. People always move out in droves. But next door is better than I had hoped."

Jake wondered how a person came to know things like that, but she seemed to know a lot of them. She started the car and drove back down the street, turned right, then left, and went down a long, straight residential street with houses that looked like cottages.

"Where are we going?"

Jane seemed to be pulled back reluctantly from whatever she had been thinking. "There are homicide detectives in there right now. They never work nights except the first one, when the body’s on the ground and they still have some hope of catching somebody. The fact that they’re still in there after a couple of days is great news."

"It is?"

"It means they still have it sealed, and John probably hasn’t come in yet."

"Are you sure that’s what he’ll do?"

"No," she said. "I’m guessing. But he’ll feel the way I do, which is that we killed Harry. He and I did. He might not find anything by looking at the apartment, but he has nothing else to look at. And if he’s thinking like a cop, then seeing what the other cops looked at might tell him a lot."

"So where are we going now?"

"You’re going to drop me off downtown. Then you’re going to pick up a few essentials."

"Such as?"

"Food that we can eat without a lot of cooking. There’s a refrigerator in there, so get whatever you want. Two shotguns, short-barrel-something like a Winchester Defender or a Remington 840. One box of double-ought buckshot—make that the little boxes that hold five each. Get six. Two blankets, a pillow if you need one. An electric baby monitor. There are lots of kinds, but Fisher-Price makes a good one. No, two of those, and batteries for them. And a roll of electrical tape."

"What are you going to be doing?"

"I’m going to the library to see if there was anything in the local papers that the wire services didn’t pick up. Then to the police station to see if John is hanging around trying to strike up a conversation. That kind of thing."

She pulled over on Figueroa Street. "Can you remember all that stuff?"

"Sure," he said. "When do you want me to pick you up?"

"I don’t. See you later."

The supplies didn’t take much thought. It seemed to Jake that the differences between places had virtually disappeared during his lifetime. If you blindfolded somebody, put him on a plane, and set him loose on the main drag of any decent-size town in the country, he would be hard-pressed to say where he was. If there were palm trees or snow, all he’d really know was a list of places where he wasn’t. The supermarkets just had different names.

The shotguns took some thought. He kept himself from ruminating on the implications of them by concentrating on composing some small talk that would carry him through if there was some custom out here that required him to answer any questions. He decided he had no choice but to be Jake, the retired codger from Deganawida, since he suspected you couldn’t make this kind of transaction without showing somebody some identification. He decided that buying double-ought in May was highly suspicious, since as far as he knew, deer season anywhere on earth had to be in the fall, to give the does and fawns a fighting chance. He finally hit on the idea that he was buying the guns as a gift for a friend who had a ranch up near—he studied the map—New Cuyama. He suspected the peculiarity of buying two at once was actually an advantage, since nobody who needed a shotgun to commit suicide or rob somebody would need two.

When he went into the store, he was almost disappointed that he didn’t need to say anything to the clerk except that he was paying cash. He supposed that having a story to tell had made him look self-assured. He bought a cleaning kit while he was at it because they always test-fired the damn things at the factory and left them dirty.

The sun was getting low by the time he finished. He took a turn and drove toward the sunset for a few blocks. He figured he should at least see the Pacific if he was this close to it. The street came out on a winding road through a kind of suburb, but still the ocean didn’t turn up. Finally, he accepted his failure and checked the map. Sure enough, around here the coastline wasn’t to the west at all but to the south, which was damned inconvenient for visitors who were accustomed to thinking of the relationship of the sun and the continent and the ocean as pretty well stabilized.

He turned left, found the ocean immediately, and was glad. He stood on a broad lawn under some fifty-foot palm trees and stared past the white sand at the endless blue that extended out past the slow rolling waves, and across the world. It made the air smell different and dropped the temperature ten degrees. What he was looking at seemed as infinite as the sky. The word infinite was full of frustration; it was just another word for "so far you can’t see it." There was something that made him want to see beyond the horizon.

As he walked back to the car, Jake tried to formulate his complaint. If seeing was detecting light, and light could curve, then under certain circumstances a person ought to be able to follow the surface of the ocean past the horizon, around the whole world. Then he realized that what he would see at the end of it was himself, from behind. If infinity was looking at his own ass, he supposed he could pass it up. He felt satisfied with his decision not to give up on the Pacific, and relieved that he hadn’t been unable to find the biggest thing on earth.

When he made it back to the apartment building again, Jane was there to help him unload. When they had everything inside, she closed the door and locked it, and he set about unboxing the two shotguns on the kitchen table. She picked one up and sighted it, then pumped the action and clicked the trigger a couple of times and looked into the chamber. After that she let Jake sit at the table to clean and oil them while she went into the bedroom with the baby monitors.

Jane watched the street through the bedroom window as she put the batteries into the monitors and put tape over the little glowing ON lights. It was dark before she saw the last of the police cars drive off. She went out the door, walked around the side of the building, put one of the baby-monitor transmitters into an empty flowerpot, and set it in the bushes beside the building. Then she walked until she found the bathroom window. She had noticed that the bathroom window in the apartment she had rented had louvered slats that could be cranked open. She examined the bathroom window of Harry’s apartment, found that it was the same and that the glass slats didn’t fit any better than hers did. She was able to push one of them up out of its holder just enough to fit the second transmitter in and set it on the sink. Then she went back to her own apartment, set the two receivers on the kitchen counter, and turned them on.

When Jake was satisfied that neither shotgun would blow up in his face if he had occasion to pull the trigger, he put them inside the hall closet. He saw that Jane had made the only bed and put the other blanket on the couch. She came out of the kitchen, picked up the shotguns, and pushed four shells into each one. He approved of her not putting a shell in the chamber. She also had enough sense to lay them flat on the floor by the door instead of propping them up. Then she went back into the kitchen to cook two frozen dinners of steaks and mashed potatoes and broccoli, and he approved of this even more, so he left her alone. By now Jane had virtually disappeared; she was living entirely inside her head.

After dinner they washed the two dishes he had bought, and Jake sat on the couch. He had expected Jane to sit down with him, but she brought the two little baby monitors into the living room, got down on the floor, and started doing stretching exercises like dancers did while she listened to the static. As he watched her, he thought about how odd it was to watch children grow up. Miraculously, the little seven-pound animals that looked like hairless monkeys changed into something that looked like this, and what was in their heads at the end of the process seemed to get farther and farther away from what you would expect.

He couldn’t keep silent any longer. "I had a funny thing happen today," he said. "I couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean."

"Remind me not to let you navigate." He could see her move her lips, returning to her counting.

"I found it eventually, through sheer persistence. But it reminded me of the Herndons. Did any Herndons come up with you?"

"There were two. Betty was my age—valedictorian of my class, I think—and she had an older brother. He had a streak of gray when he was about fifteen, and everybody thought he was handsome and mysterious. Actually, I guess he looked like a skunk."

"Paul, that was. He’s an engineer or something way out west. Maybe around here."

"Is, that why the Pacific Ocean reminded you of the Herndons?"

"No. The part about being mysterious did. The one I was thinking of would be Paul’s grandfather’s sister. Amanda was her name. People always said the money came from some Herndon who invented something in the 1800s, but you’d never hear it from them. There used to be rumors about them when I was a kid."

"What kind of rumors?"

"Well, there was never a dumb Herndon. Some people used to say that the good Lord chose to have every Herndon born with a complete knowledge of the principles He uses to make the universe work."

"Come on," said Jane. She stopped doing push-ups and looked at him.

"The secret would have been safe with them. They were, every last one of them, too inert to do anything about it and too secretive to tell anybody who wasn’t another Herndon."