A String of Beads (4 page)

Jane used the farthest stall and thought about the luxury of it after three days on
the trail. She came out the door and sidestepped along under the eaves, where there
was a curtain of water coming down. She stopped at the men’s room door and knocked.
“Jimmy?”

“Coming.” She heard a flush.

She waited until he opened the door a few inches. “Come on in.”

She said, “No, it smells like pee. Let’s wait it out in the ladies’ room.” She remembered
thinking that men and boys’ anatomies gave them the option of missing, but didn’t
want to say anything that would start that kind of discussion.

“Okay,” he said. They sidestepped to the ladies’ side and entered.

There was a switch on the wall like the ones in hallways at school that kids weren’t
supposed to be able to operate because only teachers had keys. But the girls Jane
knew had discovered by second grade that a bobby pin was just as good as the principal’s
light key. She had a couple of pins in her jeans pocket, so she took one out and stepped
to the switch.

“We don’t want light,” said Jimmy. “It’ll attract attention.”

When they started out they’d both been convinced that they had a perfect right to
be exploring a part of the Seneca homeland on foot. They also believed that if the
state police came along they’d be arrested and their mothers forced to drive to a
remote police barracks to bail them out. “Yeah, you’re right,” Jane said, and put
away the pin. There was light coming through the small, high window from a streetlamp
lighting the parking lot, so they could see well enough.

They sat down on the concrete floor together and listened to the rain. “It’s raining
harder,” she said. “We’re lucky we found this place. We’d better plan to sleep here.”

Jimmy shrugged. “When we get home let’s not tell people we slept a night in a bathroom.”

Jane imitated the shrug. “In the old days the warriors would have loved a nice, dry
girls’ bathroom to stay in.”

Jimmy laughed. “But one of them would have said, ‘Let’s not tell anybody.
’
”

They unrolled their sleeping bags and found that they were only soaked around the
edges, where their covers had left an end exposed. Then they took out a few items
to see if they had also stayed dry. Jane was already thinking about the awkwardness
of changing clothes in the restroom, but she was pretty sure she was going to try.
She had packed fairly well, with her clean clothes in a couple of plastic trash bags,
and her snacks in another. The maps and other papers had been in a pocket on the side
of her backpack, but even they seemed salvageable.

She opened the road map they had used the most because there were details besides
roads, and held the paper under the hand dryer on the wall for a couple of minutes,
until it was crinkly but dry. At the same time she surreptitiously moved her lower
body under the dryer too, and found that the hot blast of air helped. She turned around
to look at her friend. “Jimmy,” she said. “What’s that?”

In his left hand was the frame of a small gun-blued revolver, with the cylinder pulled
out and to the side. He was wiping it carefully with a rag made from a torn-apart
cotton undershirt. He had emptied the cylinder onto his sleeping bag, and Jane could
see nine .22 long rifle rounds. “I’ve got to wipe it down so it doesn’t rust.”

“Where did you get a gun?”

“It was my dad’s,” he said. “I guess that makes it my mother’s now. It’s only a twenty-two,
but it holds nine rounds. He was going to take me out shooting cans and things, but
I didn’t get old enough in time.” Since Jimmy and Jane had both lost their fathers,
she was familiar with the feeling that she hadn’t grown up fast enough to do things
with her father that she would never do now.

“Can I see it?”

She could tell he was reluctant, but he knew he had to acquiesce because Jane was
his friend, and he could hardly bring out a gun and then refuse her. As he held the
revolver out, he turned the barrel downward toward the concrete floor and left the
cylinder open. “See?” he said. “You always look to be sure the cylinder is empty.”
His right to state the rules was all he insisted on keeping for himself.

Jane took the pistol. Engraved on the barrel was
EUREKA SPORTSMAN MODEL
196. She swung the cylinder in and aimed the gun at the Tampax dispenser mounted
on the wall across the room. Then she slowly turned the cylinder and appreciated the
clicks as it reseated each of its chambers between the hammer and barrel. “It’s cool,”
she said. “If my mother knew you had this, she wouldn’t have let me out of the house.”
She gave the gun back to him, her carefulness displayed as respect for its powerful
magic.

“I wasn’t planning to take my gun out, so nobody would ever know unless I needed it.”

“For what? Are you suddenly afraid of bears?”

“This wouldn’t kill a bear,” he said. “But it might sting him enough to make him leave
us alone.”

Jane smiled. “Or maybe you could just bravely hold him off while I run two or three
miles to the next town.”

Jimmy laughed. He finished wiping the gun down, used a separate rag from a plastic
sandwich bag that smelled like oil, and then reloaded it and put it into its own pocket
inside his pack. Jane couldn’t help memorizing its exact position, because knowing
was power too.

They sat in the dim light, listening to the rain.

Jane couldn’t remember when she first became aware that there was trouble. Afterward
she thought that she had heard trouble in the sound of the car coasting off the highway
into the rest area. The engine was too loud, a burbling sound that meant it had a
rusted-through muffler. There were deep puddles in the rest stop lot, and when the
car went through them she could hear the spray whishing up against the thin sheet
metal, and an occasional squeak of springs. The headlights were bright, stabbing through
the small, high window and lighting the women’s restroom.

They saw the light go out, then heard the car door creak as it opened and then slammed,
and then a man’s footsteps splashing a few steps to the shelter. They heard him enter
the men’s room, and then there was silence for a time as he was, she imagined, relieving
himself.

Jane and Jimmy didn’t need to tell each other to remain still and silent. There had
been only one set of footsteps heading into the men’s room. That was good. In a minute
or two maybe they would hear him leave. They listened, but it didn’t happen. Instead,
the door of the women’s restroom swung open, and the spring pulled it shut.

“Well, well.” A man’s voice, not young. It sounded slightly raspy and cracked, and
they could smell cigarettes. There was a slightly Southern elongation of the two words
that told Jane he was from the Pennsylvania side of the road, a few miles south. “Where
did you two come from?”

Jimmy said, “If you need to use the bathroom, we can go next door and give you privacy.”

“Me?” The man laughed. “No. I just did that, and I’m not shy.” He took out a cigarette
and flicked his lighter. The flame cast an eerie wavering light like a weak candle,
but the glow made his eyes gleam. He was about forty, but he had long hair that was
longer in the back, and a tattoo on his left hand. “Oh, my Lord,” he said. “A girl
too. And you’re both all wet.” His lighter snapped shut, throwing the room back into
darkness. “You two run away from home?”

“No,” said Jane. “We were just walking and the rain got worse. We don’t live too far
from here.”

The man said, “Yes you do. Nobody who lived close by would choose to spend the night
in a shit house.” There was no rancor in his voice, but no kindness either. It was
simply an observation, a fact.

“We figured the rain will stop before long,” she said.

“You’re probably right,” the man said. “Tell you what. I’ll hang out for a while,
so you’ll be safe, and when it stops, I’ll give you a ride.”

“We’re fine,” Jimmy said. “We don’t really need a ride.”

The man chuckled. “Hell, the two of you sitting in here shivering wet, you need some
adult supervision. First thing you got to do is get some dry clothes. That hand dryer
over there work?”

“Yes,” said Jimmy. “But we’re fine.”

“I wasn’t thinking of you so much as her,” said the man. He kept talking as though
nothing they said mattered, looking straight at Jane. “A young girl like you could
catch her death sitting all night in wet clothes.” He leaned forward to look at her.
“I’ve seen that happen. What’s your name?”

Jimmy said to Jane, “I think the rain’s slowing down. Let’s go.” He began rolling
his sleeping bag.

“Okay,” the man said to Jane. “I’ll give you a name, then. How about Jenny? Or Jill.
Or—”

“Thanks for the offer, but we’re leaving,” Jane said. She began to pack her things
hurriedly.

“If you’re too shy to change among friends, I’ll help you,” the man said, and stepped
toward her.

Jimmy lunged and collided with the man in a football tackle that pushed him into the
wall, but the man wasn’t entirely taken by surprise. When Jimmy tried to disentangle
himself and fight, the man held him in a headlock and punched him in the face three
times, then brought his knee up into Jimmy’s face. Then the man tossed him to the
concrete floor, where he lay unmoving.

“Your playmate’s plan seems to have slipped his mind,” said the man as he took his
next step toward her. “If you’d like to take your clothes off yourself, get started.”

Jane’s hand was already in Jimmy’s backpack feeling for the gun. She closed her fingers
around the handgrips just as the man clutched her arm. He yanked her arm up out of
the backpack, but with it came the gun, and Jane pulled the trigger.

The shot was a bright flash of spitting sparks, and the small caliber charge gave
a loud, reverberating report in the tiny concrete room. The man completed his tug
and pulled Jane to her feet, but she didn’t release the gun. Instead, she squeezed
the trigger and the bright light and loud noise ripped the air again. It was then
that the man realized he had been hit by the first round. “Bitch.”

Jane kicked her foot toward his groin, and probably missed, but she kicked his thigh
where he had been shot, and he pushed off backward and retreated toward the door.

“Wait,” Jane yelled. “Take out your car keys and drop them on the floor.”

“Are you kidding?”

She gripped the gun with both hands to keep it from shaking. “Do it.”

The man began to fumble in his pocket.

“Pull a knife,” she said. “Please try it.”

He changed hands and pockets, and then dropped the keys at his feet.

Jane said, “That’s it then. I’m not the only one with a gun. When he wakes up, he’s
going to be mad. If you’re not gone, he might kill you. So get going.”

“How am I supposed to walk out there after you shot me in the leg?”

“It’s not my problem, but you’d better get as far as you can, because if either of
us ever sees you again anywhere, we’ll kill you.”

The man went out through the door, and she heard the spring pull it shut. Jane moved
to stand along the wall at the hinge side of the door, the gun in her hand, watching
the door for the next half hour before Jimmy came back into consciousness. Now as
the grown-up Jane approached the rest area in daylight, she thought about the fourteen-year-old
boy who had taken that terrible beating to protect her. It was unlikely he could have
grown into a man who would do something as cowardly as ambush and murder a witness
against him. People changed, but she was sure Jimmy hadn’t changed that much. And
as she allowed herself to repeat the feelings of that horrible night, she knew a second
reason why she had come. It was her turn.

5

J
ane felt trepidation as she came from the brush on the side of the Southern Tier Expressway.
She stood perfectly still for a full minute as she studied the cars in the lanes close
to her. She looked in each direction and reassured herself that all the threats were
simple and visible. She walked onto the parking lot. Nothing had changed in this place
since she’d been here twenty years ago. She kept looking ahead for signs of Jimmy.
She had guessed that when he decided to escape, he would think of the path they had
taken the summer when they were fourteen. Maybe she’d been wrong.

She looked at the small building at the end of the parking lot as she approached,
and her stomach tightened. She hadn’t imagined she would ever return to this rest
stop. She walked directly to the ladies’ room door on the small, lonely building.
She pushed the door so it opened against its spring, and then closed as she came in.
She looked around her. The initials scratched in the mirror over the sinks were gone.
Probably someone had gone all the way and broken the mirror at some point, so it had
been replaced. Today there was graffiti on the walls. Had there been twenty years
ago? No. If Jimmy came here and saw the writing, he might have left a message to her
here. When she had the thought she realized that was what she had been searching for—not
Jimmy himself, but a message only for her, to tell her where he was hiding. Jimmy
wasn’t somebody you could just track down and find at the end of a trail. He had to
invite her, allow her to find him.

Jane stepped to the spot away from the door where she and Jimmy had sat that night
and tried to get their sleeping bags to dry. There were the same three sinks on the
right, the three stalls beyond them, and the same hand dryer on the opposite wall.
She took out a hairpin like the one she hadn’t used twenty years ago and walked toward
the switch plate for the lights. She stopped. Last time, when they were fourteen,
Jimmy had stopped her. Keeping the lights off hadn’t kept that horrible man from finding
them, but the darkness had probably saved her from being raped. This time she used
the pin to turn on the lights, then stepped to the wall and began to read.

She knew his message wouldn’t be any of the big, bold marker lines. His would be one
of the small pencil messages that a person had to look for. “They’re cute when they’re
little, but don’t bring one home,” some woman had written. “They grow up stupid.”
She kept reading the small handwriting on the wall. “Kylie, Mona, and Zoe were here,
but wish they were somewhere else.” Somebody had replied, “We wish you’d never come
back.” There it was. “J. If you’re here to help me out, I’m heading for the oldest
place. J.”

Jane knew what Jimmy meant by the oldest place. When they had come this way twenty
years ago they had been on a summer camping trip. But they had also been trying to
go back in time. They had wanted to feel the way they would have felt if they’d been
an Onondawaga boy and girl long ago. For them the easiest way to do that was to turn
away from everything that had happened since the 1600s, and that meant entering the
forest. In the second-growth woods between the Tonawanda Reservation and the southwestern
part of Pennsylvania, they felt like
ong-we-on-weh
, “the real people.” They were on parts of the land that had not been damaged much.
They were where the past still was.

Jane found the pencil in her backpack, took it out, put her face close to the wall,
and erased Jimmy’s message. She checked it from several angles to be sure it couldn’t
be read or brought back, then wrote in the same tiny space, “J., I’m going to the
oldest place to find you. If I miss you come see me. J.,” put the pencil away, turned
off the lights, and went into the cleanest stall to use the toilet, then headed to
the door, pushed it open, and looked in both directions. It was at that moment that
she realized she wasn’t alone.

She saw the man on the north side of the divided expressway. He was tall and thin,
with blond hair, a reddish face, and big hands. She watched him emerge from the trees
beyond the expressway. He began to trot toward the highway. He ran at about half speed
and looked comfortable loping along, even though he was in the high weeds and uneven
ground of the margin. As he neared the chain link fence, he sped up slightly, ran
up the fence high enough to get his toes into some links at midpoint and his hands
at the top at a vertical post, and hoisted himself up and over. As his feet hit the
ground, his knees bent to absorb the shock. He popped up and resumed his trot.

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.