Chapter 5
Jane put May into a onesie suitable for the warm spring day, cradled her in her left arm and put the handles of the baby bag over her right, armed the security system, locked the kitchen door and pocketed the keys, then walked to her car and strapped May in the baby seat in the back.
Jane hadn’t gotten used to everything about her new car yet, even though it was just a newer version of the one wrecked in the accident the day May was born.
As she went to get into the driver’s seat she said, “We’re going to visit the house where I grew up.
” She kept up the cheerful tone. “Our oldest friend Jake called to tell me he’d noticed something there. ”
While Jane would never have taken May with her to the old house like this, she had nobody to leave her with, and what Jake had seen was a very young woman, maybe even a teenager, knocking on the door and then looking in a window.
It was probably nothing to worry about—a kid selling candy for her class trip or something.
She started the car and backed out of the long driveway.
“My grandfather built the house with the help of a bunch of his friends. He was very young. He was about twenty when he bought the lot, the piece of land. He had just married my grandmother, and he wanted to make them a place to live as soon as possible. In the old days, a husband would always go to live in the longhouse that belonged to the women of his wife’s clan.
But by then nobody had lived in longhouses for two hundred years.
He and grandma were living in her parents’ regular wooden house on the Tonawanda reservation.
He had just gotten a job in a grinding wheel factory, and it was too far away from the reservation to go back and forth.
“He and his friends came to the lot with shovels and wheelbarrows and began to dig a huge hole for the cellar. It took weeks of very hard work just to dig a hole ten feet deep and thirty feet wide and fifty feet long with shovels.” Jane drove along Brighton Road, past the cemetery.
In the mirror on the sun visor, she could see May was looking out her window at the acres of green grass and the rows of gray stones.
May saw only the beauty of this place. Jane waited at the traffic light at the corner, crossed Delaware Avenue and kept going onto Knoche Road, then turned right onto Military Road, which would change names where it reached the town border to be called Main Street.
“In those days Haudenosaunee boys didn’t have enough money to buy all the building materials the way we would now, so he had to do it other ways.
He traded his work to the stores and construction companies for things he couldn’t make, and did everything he could himself or with his friends.
He might go to a building site and work for a certain time in exchange for a keg of nails or some cans of paint.
” She made it to Main, and turned left on Wheeler Street.
When she reached the street where her old house was, she turned onto it and took her foot off the gas pedal.
“Oh, look at that beautiful red bird! It’s called a cardinal. They like to come and eat the seeds that Mrs. Ronkowski puts in her feeder. I’ll just pull the car over to the curb so we can watch him for a minute or two.”
The drive from the McKinnon house in Amherst where Carey had grown up to the Whitefield house where Jane had grown up was about twenty minutes for a person who only wanted to get from one to the other.
May’s world was not like that yet. May was just seeing things for the first time, and Jane didn’t want her to miss any part of it.
Jane had memories of the town—every part of it and her father and mother showing her things.
She wanted her child to have as many memories as she could give her.
The cardinal flew up into a tall oak tree at the corner of the block, leaving the bird feeder swinging above Mrs. Ronkowski’s lawn.
A moment later, several dark, short-tailed starlings landed on the lawn below the feeder, where many seeds had been spilled by the birds that had visited.
The starlings strutted around down there eating up the spilled seeds.
“Those are starlings,” Jane said. “Ready to go now?”
She got out of the car and opened the curbside rear door to release May from her car seat.
She kept her in her arms and carried her past the old Whitefield house.
The house was one of four old two-story houses on the block, all of them narrow, with front porches.
The one to the right of hers belonged to Jake Reinert.
He had been a close friend of her father, Henry Whitefield, and after her father had died, Jake had assumed a role like an uncle for Jane—not ever prying or telling her what to do, but always saying hello and asking her how she and her mother were and doing things for them.
When his trees’ peaches or apples ripened, there would be a full basket on the Whitefield porch.
Jake’s wife, Norma, had baked pies and left one of those sometimes, and Jake’s daughters were friends of Jane’s.
She rang Jake’s doorbell, but didn’t hear Jake coming, so she looked to see if he seemed to be at home. He didn’t.
Jane was frustrated. She had been planning to leave May with him for a few minutes—just as long as it took to check her house—so if there was a problem, May would be safe. She went down Jake’s front steps carrying May, and walked across his lawn to her old house, and around the back.
Jane was holding May up close. While Jane had immediately immersed herself in May’s world, she didn’t inhabit that world.
Her mind was still the same, the mind of a woman who had stayed alive for years of taking endangered people away from the enemies who wanted them dead.
Death had been near many times. She was alive because she had been alert, and that could never change.
She walked around the house looking for broken windows or doors that had been tampered with.
As she walked, she kept talking so quietly that only May could hear.
“I wanted you to see this place. It will belong to you some day, because I can’t get rid of it.
The buyers would go to sleep one night and wake up with some poor scared person at their door looking for the kind of help I used to give before I was your mother, or some bad person.
But maybe that’s already over and I’m just being overly careful to worry. ”
When they reached the back steps, she climbed up, looked at the motion sensor light above the door to be sure the bulb was intact and turned on when approached.
It did. She had never had an alarm system in this house, for many reasons.
One was that if the police were summoned by the alarm service, they would probably find either a runner Jane was hiding or some of the unregistered weapons, traveling money, or forged documents Jane kept hidden there.
She glanced at the big dog bowl near the back steps.
Jake had been good about keeping the water in the bowl full and fresh.
She had never had a dog here—she had not lived here since she’d married—but she’d made it look as though she had.
There were even a few dog toys at random places in the backyard.
They were secondhand, ones that had been chewed by a friend’s Doberman before he’d died of old age—a couple of tennis balls and a big rubber bone with his teeth marks.
Since she had moved into Carey’s family house, she had returned here regularly, staying aware of the state of the place, cleaning it, making sure the timers were turning the lights on and off at the right times, and examining the markers she always left—single hairs on the tops of interior doors for an intruder to dislodge, holding a layer of flour in the palm of her hand and blowing it into the air to form a film on the floor of a dark hallway that would show a footprint, vacuuming the living room carpet to leave a particular pattern.
She unlocked the kitchen door, but didn’t step inside.
She inhaled. The air had the reassuring stale smell that indicated the house had been closed up since her last visit.
There was no movement of the air, probably because she had set the thermostat for her new heating system at fifty.
That had made it only turn on during cold weather to keep the water in the pipes from freezing.
She stepped into the kitchen and closed the door.
She walked past the dining room door and saw the thin layer of flour on the hardwood floor had not been disturbed.
Then she noticed that during all the walking, May had fallen asleep.
She spread her blanket in the middle of the soft carpet in the living room, set her down on it, and went to see whether the hair she had left on the top of the door between the kitchen and dining room had been dislodged.
She heard something. It was faint and high-pitched, from behind her. She turned to bring her ears into that direction. It sounded like May, but it also didn’t sound like May. She felt the hairs on her arms standing up.
Jane took long, fast steps to get to her baby.
As she crossed the hall into the living room she saw a standing figure with long hair, a woman facing away, holding May in her arms. The woman started to walk.
In an instant Jane’s left arm was around the woman’s neck.
She whispered in her ear, “Turn around and carefully give me the baby. It would take a second to kill you.”
The woman said in Nundawaono, “She opened her eyes and was worried because she couldn’t see you.”
Jane turned her around. She was young—very young—and she had the dark skin that many Senecas had.
The girl was frightened. “I said—”