Vanishing Act (19 page)

Jane sat up, laughing. "You know, that’s true."

"Of course it is. And things always seemed to go just fine. They bought railroad stock, and the railroads went up. They were the sort of people who would have their lawn infested by sables."

"I still don’t see what this has to do with the ocean."

"I was talking about Amanda. She was a grown woman by the time I remember her. But when she was little, maybe two years old, she was swinging on a swing in the front yard. The sun was right in her eyes, and one of the neighbors heard her say, ’Daddy! Move the sun!’ And he smiled at her and stood there and stared up at the sun for a long time, and that was that."

"That was what?"

"Well, you have to think about it. What was he doing?"

"What was he doing?"

"People said later that he did it. He moved the sun about an hour forward. They say the city people didn’t seem to notice it, since the position of the sun didn’t mean much to them. That evening they just looked at their watches one extra time to be sure the hand was on the number that said, ’Go to bed,’ and that was that. The story goes that the scientists with their equipment sure did, but they hushed it up because they couldn’t explain it. The farm folks talked about it for some time, but there wasn’t much they could do about it except add Herndons to the list of things they couldn’t control, like rain and frost."

"That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard."

"Well, you know how these things get going. Little Amanda also told several reliable and veracious children that there were two moons, not one. But people remained divided on that issue since it could have been her idea of a joke, and she never said it again after she reached the age of discretion."

"You made all that up, didn’t you?" she asked. "Admit it."

"Not at all. Myself, I’ve always thought the story had to do with daylight savings time. Once you reached the point when the president of the United States could tell you what time it was, as though the sun, the moon, and the rotation of the earth were mere distractions, people realized that anything could happen. There was no limit, or any reason to have one."

She smiled. "Do you really think that’s what it’s about?"

"Maybe," Jake said. "But maybe it’s only about love."

"And maybe it’s about talk." Now she began to do her sit-ups.

"Well, I’m at the stage of life where I’m examining the things I’ve picked up along the way and trying to distribute them where they’ll do some good. This is how I got them, so I talk."

"You always talked too much," she said. "You can’t pull that deathbed-legacy stuff on me."

"I didn’t say the story was going to change your life," he said. "But we live by picking up the belongings of the dead as they fall. The first few things you learn tend to be the most important—the mental equivalent of a pocket full of money or a serviceable revolver. After you’re a little older—"

She said, "Wait ..." She picked up one of the monitors and listened, then put it down and held the other near her ear. "Did you hear that?"

21

Jane slipped out the door of the laundry room, stepped along the side of the apartment building quietly, then sat down beside a bush against the corner of the building. The scent of the yellow night-blooming wisteria and jasmine and what else—the jacaranda trees, probably—was overpowering. She had seen the petals falling on the ground like purple snow. It must be the jacaranda because the bright explosions of cerise and orange bougainvillea climbing up the walls didn’t smell at all.

She made herself small, hugging her knees and keeping her head down to listen. There was a faint noise of slow, careful footsteps beside the building. It sounded like the walk of a man who was in good shape—he held his body in tension, then eased to the next foot, but he wasn’t very good at this. She kept listening, but she didn’t hear another set of feet. It could be John.

She let the man reach the window of Harry’s apartment and listened to his breathing. He was taking in breaths through his open mouth and blowing them out quietly to keep himself calm. She judged the level, and felt the disappointment. He was only about six feet, a little taller than she was. Not John, then.

Maybe it was a policeman checking the window. Jane waited, holding her crouch. It was too late to slip away now. He was too close. She waited for the flashlight. She could make it over the fence to the next building in a couple of seconds, while he was still saying "Stop or I’ll shoot," but she decided not to. There was no such thing as one policeman: It was like one ant. She could survive what he would do if he saw her. She had rented the apartment, so this would just be a loss of anonymity.

Then she heard the man fiddling with something in his pocket, rattling keys or change or something, and then a click. Next there was a scraping noise, and she decided to look. The man was wide at the shoulders, wearing a sportcoat the way a cop would to cover a weapon, but he was prying out the window screen. When he had set it on the ground, he slipped his knife blade in farther, and she heard a metallic scrape and a clank.

He was breaking in. He was one of them. What was he doing here? Harry was already dead. The man slowly slid the window to the side, then reached in, grasped something solid, and pulled himself up. She was glad she had seen that. She would stay away from those arms.

His upper body was inside. Keeping his legs from working and scuffing the wall, he pulled himself in like a snake. She stood and moved along the wall toward him. This would be the time to attack, incapacitate the legs somehow, but she hesitated. She had to find out what he was doing here. If he was back because he had left some evidence, she would need to know what it was.

She waited for a moment beside the window, then she saw him pull down the shade and close the curtain. She stepped to the next window, where the kitchen was, and tried to hear him moving around, but the glass muffled the sounds. He pulled that curtain too. In a moment a light came on, and Jane moved back to the first window, slowly raised her head to the corner, and lifted the shade a quarter inch.

She could see him on his knees in the middle of the room. He had put a towel along the bottom of the door. Was that it? No, he had done that to keep light from shining under it into the hallway, and now he was looking at something on the floor.

She moved the shade aside a little and stood higher to see it. Blood. There was a huge reddish brown stain in the middle of the dirty shag carpet. She ducked down again and felt sick. Harry must have lain there dying for a long time.

She was staring away from the window at the cinder-block fence when there was a bright flash of light that made the porous texture of the wall visible for an instant, then left it in darkness again. She cringed for a second, heard the click and whirr before she identified it—not a gun, a camera. She moved to the window again and listened. There was another flash, then the same click-whirr. She looked while he was still holding the camera to his eye. It was a Polaroid that unfolded with a bellows. He aimed the camera away from her at the door, down by the latch where the black fingerprint powder was thick, and it flashed again.

She had been comfortable with the theory that he had forgotten something when he had killed Harry, but taking pictures didn’t make sense. That was what cops did. If he was a cop, why break in at night? Was he a reporter or something? Even they didn’t have to break in to take pictures, and it was hard to imagine a paper printing pictures that didn’t have a body in them. She ducked and slipped back along the wall of the building, picked up the transmitter in the flower pot, slowly slid the louver of the bathroom window up and reached in to find the one on the sink, then hurried across the patio to the other side.

She could see Jake through the window, not sitting on the couch where she had left him, but standing by the door with one of the shotguns in his hands. She hoped what she was about to do wouldn’t give the old man a heart attack or, worse, make him whirl and open up on her. She reached up and knocked on the window. He turned, the shotgun ready, but something must have told him that nobody raps on a window if what they really intend is to shoot through it.

He held the muzzle upward and hurried to slide the window open. "You scared me," he whispered.

"Not as much as you scared me," said Jane. "Bring me the car keys."

He reached into his pocket and produced them, then unlatched the screen to slip them through. "I think there’s somebody across the hall."

"There is." She handed Jake the two transmitters. "I’ll be back when I know who it is."

"Wait for me," he said.

"You can’t go out the door. He’ll hear."

Jake handed her the shotgun. "Take this," he said, then handed her the other one, and picked up his coat. He put one leg through the window, then the other, turned onto his belly, and lowered himself to the ground. He had done it very well, but he seemed a little stiff as he followed her down the walk. They stopped under the thick bower of wisteria at the front comer of the building and looked out into the street.

They could see the man’s car at the curb. Sitting behind the wheel was a second man.

"Can you see his face?"

"You mean you can?"

"Come on," she said. She pulled him around the edge of the fence to the next apartment building and waited.

"I still can’t see his face," he whispered.

"The guy in the apartment building will come out and get into the car with his buddy. The second they’re around the corner, we sprint for our car. If they go to the police station, we forget it."

"If I have to sprint, we can forget it now. What if they go somewhere else?"

"We’ll see." Jane was preoccupied. If the killers were still here, they must be waiting for John, and that meant he was alive. It occurred to her that the pattern was to frame John for everything they could think of. Maybe the man had planted something that had belonged to John in the apartment. But why would he take pictures? And how could he expect to plant something after the police had already spent days going over everything? Nothing she thought of made sense.

Then she saw the man. She touched Jake’s shoulder. The man walked casually, his arms swinging and his head up, almost skipping down the three steps from the building to the sidewalk. He stepped across the lawn to the car. Jane whispered, "When he opens the door."

When the man grasped the handle and pulled, the dome light came on. It took three full seconds for him to swing it open, sit down in the passenger seat, and swing it shut again. They were both in their mid-thirties, dark-haired.

"It’s them," said Jake.

The car moved ahead slowly a hundred feet before the headlights came on. At the comer it turned right. "Let’s go," she said, and they hurried down the steps to their car.

Jake held both shotguns across his lap while Jane wheeled the car around and went after them. At the first block, she glanced down the long street on her left and saw nothing, and then the next, and the next. On the fourth street she saw a set of taillights a block away, so she followed them. "I hope it’s the right car."

"I think so," said Jake. "It’s green like the other one."

The car pulled straight across Milpas to the freeway entrance ramp, and then the light changed and Jane couldn’t follow. She kept moving, turned right onto Milpas to the next intersection, extended a left turn into a U to come back at the light, turned right, and came up the ramp.

The green car was far ahead now, and Jane pushed the rented car up to seventy until she could see the two dark heads in the back window, then dropped back and let a station wagon pass her. She went along behind it for a while and then let a big shiny steel tanker truck slip in front of her, too. "I can’t see him anymore," said Jake.

"And he can’t see us," she answered. "Just watch the exit ramps to the right."

Most of the familiar parts of town had slipped past them when the car suddenly moved to the right and coasted up the ramp at Sueño Street. Jane kept her direction for as long as she could before she too peeled out of the traffic and coasted up the ramp. What caught her eye now was the big blue sign at the end of the ramp that said SHERIFF. Maybe she had just stumbled on to something that had nothing to do with anybody, the local cops spying on each other. But the green car kept going past the lighted one-story sheriff’s complex, and past a taller building with a sign that said COUNTY ADMINISTRATION and an older, bigger one that said HOSPITAL, and then turned around in the street and came back at them. Jane said, "Get ready," speeded up, and flashed past the car as it came down the road back toward Santa Barbara. She took her foot off the gas pedal and kept going slowly, watching the car in her mirror.

It moved along a road parallel to the freeway, then turned to get back onto it. "Do you think they were trying to lose us or to see us?" asked Jake.

"I don’t know," she said. She turned around quickly and speeded up the road after it. "I think it was just a precaution."

The car kept going back through town and left the freeway at the Cabrillo Boulevard exit. Jane followed it, keeping the distance as great as she could without losing it. But instead of staying on the winding road past the bird sanctuary and on to the beaches and the harbor, it turned left toward Montecito.

Jane watched it until it moved up one of the little streets below the freeway. She pulled the car to the side of the road and turned out the lights.

’’This doesn’t feel right," she said.

"You think they know we’re following them?"

"You’re sure those are the men who tried to break into my house?"

"Positive."

’’The last time I saw them, they did something like this. They went ahead on a dark country road and waited for us." Jake was silent, so she took a deep breath. "Okay. Then we’re at crazy time now."

"What’s that?"

"I can’t just let them go away this time. They killed Harry. If they go now, chances are they’ll get John, too, sooner or later. Do you understand?"

"You’re saying you’re going to follow two killers up a dark road that’s probably a dead end," he said. "Sounds perfectly sensible to me."

"No, I’m saying it’s time for you to get out."

"You know anybody who does what you tell them to?".

"Lots of them."

"Oh," he said. "Should have brought them."

She drove ahead and pulled over on the gravel shoulder at the end of the street where the car had disappeared. Jake wrapped the two shotguns in his coat and got out of the car.

They hurried away from the roadside, into the darkness, where headlights wouldn’t reach them. Jane knew that walking along the road, even twenty feet from it, was probably what the men wanted them to do. There was a low fence beside her, with thick shrubs and vines entangled above it. She pushed some of the plants aside and stepped over, then held them so Jake could climb over too. When she looked around her, the land she saw didn’t seem to have the silhouette of a house on it. There was a long, curved plot of open grass. She moved along the fence in the direction the car had gone.

As they walked she began to feel more sure. They would be up ahead somewhere, waiting just out of sight of the road. When she had walked along the fence for a hundred feet, she saw the green car. It was on the other side of the field, just below the elevated hill that carried the freeway, parked behind a big grove of trees, its lights off, just about where it would be if the men were waiting for someone to drive up the dark street outside the fence into an ambush. She crossed the lawn above it and looked down.

"What is this?" asked Jake.

"I don’t know. A park or golf course or something," she said. She reached out and tapped the bundle Jake had wrapped in his coat.

He handed her one of the shotguns and put his coat on.

"Last chance," she said.

"No talking," he whispered.

Suddenly, there was a rattle of a car starting, but it came from the wrong place. Jane pulled Jake to the ground and aimed her shotgun toward the sound. There was a second car. This one was white. It was up along the hedge at the edge of the field, and now it was slowly moving along toward them. She pushed the safety off with her trigger finger and then put her hand on Jake’s sleeve. "Not yet."

The car moved closer and closer to them. She waited for the lights to come on, the window to come down. As it drifted past them, she kept her hand on Jake’s arm. She could hear the soft swish of its tires on the grass. She looked up and saw there was someone in the passenger seat beside the driver. On the bumper there was some kind of rental sticker, and then the car was going on into the darkness. There had to be a gate somewhere in that direction. In a moment she saw it coming back up outside the fence. She ducked down before the lights went on, and then it was gone.

She took her hand off Jake’s arm and started to make her way toward the green car, with Jake at her side. They moved onto the grass and approached the car from the side, keeping low along the hedge at the edge of the lawn. Jane touched Jake and put her mouth close to his ear. "Get down and get ready. If somebody shoots, take your time. You’re invisible until you pull the trigger."