Chapter 1
The early spring morning was perfect, still cool but with enough sun to show that the western New York winter had lost its bite. There were thin remnants of snow in the deeply shaded spots near buildings, but crocuses were already poking green unopened leaves like spears through some of them.
Jane drove along Sheridan Drive and turned into the vast parking lot of the Amherst Commons.
She checked her mirrors to see what the next two cars to turn in looked like.
Black Chevrolet sedan. Red Toyota SUV. She took a left turn up the third aisle and looked in her mirror again.
Neither car had followed. The first one, the one she had paid most attention to because there were two young-looking men in it, had parked by the fitness place.
The woman in the red SUV didn’t appear to be much of a threat, but Jane didn’t appear to be a threat either, so she watched the woman as she parked at the DSW shoe store and went inside.
Jane followed her ritual of scanning the rest of the parking lot to see who else was in it.
Police cars were neutral or good. Civilian cars parked and containing more than one man were worth a second look.
Vans with their business names on magnetic signs instead of painted were to be avoided, and any car that had its trunk lock punched out was probably stolen and might be there for a bad purpose.
She saw none of those, and nobody who appeared to know her or be looking at her for too long.
She parked in a row near the Wholesale Warehouse, got out of her car, took a shopping cart, and entered the store.
She instantly resumed her scanning, but saw nobody who raised her suspicion.
Her days were all special days now, and she intended to make practical use of this one.
This was a time to stock up. She liked the giant big-box store, which had a no-nonsense look, with wide aisles between the tall steel racks containing large-quantity versions of the staple foods and supplies that families needed.
She started with the dense items she wanted on the bottom of her cart—detergents, trash bags, coffee—and finished with things like the soft fruits and eggs on the top.
She joined the checkout line, paid, and was out the door, wheeling her cart to her car.
She loaded the trunk with her usual efficiency, making sure every item was in its ideal spot, with frozen food keeping the meat and fish cold, and the big heavy items from the bottom of her cart holding the other things hemmed in place.
Jane returned the cart, got into the driver’s seat, and made her way to the Sheridan Drive exit.
She pulled out into traffic and headed for home.
As she did, she saw unexpected motion in the corner of her eye.
She looked into her mirror. Another car was pulling out too, but it was out of turn, and someone behind it was offended, and leaned on his horn.
She couldn’t see which car had honked, but she could see the first car very well.
It was the sedan she had seen before, with the two men in it.
Could she have taken long enough for those two to have finished a workout?
She returned her attention to the road ahead.
Sheridan was a busy thoroughfare, with businesses and major intersections.
She slowed slightly to put some more space between her and the car ahead.
She heard the sound of an engine accelerating behind her and saw the black car had pulled out of the left lane to straddle the double lines, coming from behind fast. Was the driver trying to evade somebody with a case of road rage, or was it something worse?
Had those men committed a crime? Could they have been looking for her?
Jane looked for a chance to switch to the right lane and pull off Sheridan into a lot.
She saw her opening and veered into the right lane, but so did the car in front of her, and then it stopped abruptly partway in the entrance to the lot.
Jane stomped on her brake pedal and managed to screech to a stop, but the car behind her slammed into her, pounding her car into the right rear side of the other car, spinning her around and into the left lane, which was where she was when the black Chevrolet hit her.
Her airbag burst open, pinning her in the seat.
Things had happened so fast that there had been only about three seconds of loud impact bangs and then trailing sounds of scraping metal and broken glass as the motion ended.
There was a moment of curious silence so profound that Jane wondered if she had lost her hearing.
She undid her seat belt, felt for her purse, opened it, found the pocketknife in the zippered pocket, opened it, and stabbed the airbag twice to deflate it.
She saw the cubes of broken safety glass all over the interior of the car, reclined her seat as far as it would go, and crawled to what remained of the back seat, pushing the jagged remnants of the rear window’s glass away with her purse.
She climbed out over the bent and sprung trunk, and slid down the side of the car to the street.
She stared at the windshield of the black Chevrolet, and saw the milky impact marks in front of each seat that looked like pounded ice. There was blood in the centers of both, but the two men were not visible. She came closer.
She walked along the side of her car to the side of theirs. Jane realized she had been right. They were gone.
She stepped to the car that had stopped in front of her, and looked in. The woman in the driver’s seat was sitting with her hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. Jane leaned in, and said, “Are you hurt?”
“Me? No,” the woman said.
“Her?” It was a male voice, behind her. She turned to look. He was a cop. “I think you’re losing your water, ma’am.”
Jane already knew the cop was right. He lifted a handheld radio. “One Zebra sixteen, we’ll need one more ambulance at the Amherst Center.”
There seemed to be only a minute or two before the pain arrived, and that worried her. Everything was happening too fast.
While Jane was lying in the ambulance, she heard the doors slam, and felt the vibration of the engine, and then the movement. Thoughts flooded her consciousness.
She remembered that at first she had not really considered marrying Carey McKinnon, and a child was far from her mind.
She had known Carey in college, and when he had shown up at her door years later, she had been glad to see him.
By then he’d completed medical school and residency and had just accepted a new job at Buffalo General.
They resumed their friendship, and in time she had allowed herself to love him.
She had been happy having an intimate relationship with him, perfectly willing to continue indefinitely, but refused to marry him.
How could she? She wasn’t the business consultant he thought she was.
She was a guide who took people who knew they were about to be murdered and made them disappear.
Carey had asked her again and again. She had realized after a year of his pestering that she loved him enough to make one more person disappear. The guide Jane Whitefield would vanish. She would be Mrs. McKinnon, the loving wife of a surgeon in Amherst, New York.
Sometimes their life together would go quiet for a while. After one such quiet stretch, Jane and Carey had decided it was time to have a baby.
At first, they were confident that if they took no action to prevent a pregnancy, it would simply happen.
That confidence eroded. Every month there was probability, then possibility, and then disappointment.
Carey had turned them both over to the specialists for an explanation and a cure, but they all came up with the same result—no physical problems detected in either of them, and no explanation for the infertility.
She had thought long and deeply about babies each month. She had listened to the doctors, and then had begun reading the scientific papers published about various aspects of the problem. It was later, after Carey was asleep, that she thought with other parts of her brain.
Her ancestors, alive in her mind, would have said that there were men’s things and women’s things, and she had spent the years after college doing men’s things.
What she called being a guide was essentially leaving home to go into the forests to war.
Had she triggered some unspeakably ancient bit of nature that made her less womanly, unable to conceive?
The old people had believed the ideal state of the universe was Sken:nen, a Seneca word which meant both health and balance.
Or maybe the years of using medicine to prevent conception had somehow changed her permanently.
The universe was complex, and actions had costs— consequences and side effects that people didn’t always understand.
Jane had chosen a room in the big old McKinnon house and furnished it for a baby, bought baby clothes, toys, and supplies, and hung an antique Seneca cradleboard on the wall.
It was an heirloom made of bent wood and covered with black cloth embroidered with a tree covered in bright yellow flowers.
The design represented the great tree that brought light to the Sky World before there was an earth.
When the tree was pushed over, a hole appeared where its roots had been and pregnant Sky Woman fell through, bringing with her the first human life to the world below.
One day, after years of trying and failing to become pregnant, Jane took the blankets and little socks and T-shirts and one-piece outfits, folded them into the drawers of the dresser, took the cradleboard down, wrapped it up again in acid-free archival paper, and stored it in the attic.
After that, her old, dangerous life gradually drew her back.