Chapter 10
The past few days at the McKinnon house had proceeded much as they had before the arrival of Clare from Oklahoma. Jane took time out when the baby was sleeping or playing with her new friend to make progress on Clare’s safety.
Jane searched the internet again for recent news from Oklahoma, particularly for anything about violent crimes, or people whom the police considered suspects or persons of interest in crimes.
She also tried obituaries, funerals, burial notices.
She glanced at Clare. “What’s the name of the man you stabbed? ”
“Gerry. Gerard Fenton.”
“And you’re sure he died?”
“That’s what the police said.”
“The police are allowed to lie when they’re questioning a suspect. What did your lawyer say?’
“She said he was dead too.”
Jane had searched the newspapers: the Tulsa World, Oklahoma City Oklahoman, and then anything out of Norman, but the story had not attracted much interest with the press, since it had nothing to do with those cities.
When Carey came home from the hospital, he came in the kitchen door, kissed Jane, and took May into his arms and lifted her up and carried her around the room.
He talked to her in the soft, cheerful voice he used with her.
“Hello, May. What was your day like? Did you learn anything about the world? Hear any funny new words?” He looked at Jane, and saw that her welcoming smile had faded. His eyebrows went up.
Jane responded. “I’ve got to go out of town for a day or two.”
“Why?” he said.
“It’s about one of my runners, as you probably expected. It’s not dangerous, and I’m not going to be with the runner. I’m going alone to check on some facts. What I expect to find is that the problem has gone away or even never existed.”
“What about May?”
“If I do it right it’ll be one day, and Katie will be here for all of it. I’ll take a red-eye flight, get in early, and catch an early flight home.”
His eyes settled on Jane and stayed there.
She shrugged. “I’m sorry, Carey.”
“I guess I just wasn’t ready for this now. I guess when it seems like everything changes, not everything does. When are you going?”
She stepped close and hugged him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You know I don’t want to do this, even for an hour.”
“It’s all right, Jane. The baby has two parents. Just make sure there’s enough milk.”
She touched his shoulder, began to massage it, and then moved her hand down his back. “Come on, Carey. You feel like you’re made of iron.”
He consciously relaxed the muscles of his upper body. “You know I love you. I had just assumed…” He paused. “Something that wasn’t true. Maybe it couldn’t be true. When do you have to go?”
“I checked your schedule. You’re going to be in surgery every day this week until Friday, when you see patients in your office.
I know there could be emergencies, but Friday looks like the best. So I thought I’d go for a flight Thursday evening after your last one and any follow-ups or walk-ins.
Then I have a hope of getting home Friday, probably late evening. ”
“That sounds well planned.”
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Think that because I bothered to consider your schedule, I must be a master schemer, and not just your wife who loves you.”
He gently pulled her to him and held her for a few seconds, and then a few more seconds. She popped up and kissed him, then turned away and walked across the kitchen.
As she walked out and across the living room toward the den she used as an office, the voice in her head was saying, I do love you, and I’m sorry. She heard Carey go to the playroom with May.
While she heard him talking to Katie and then to May, she made the reservation on the computer, but it was to Springfield, Missouri, and it was for Nora Jean Gibbs, whose home address was in Los Angeles.
This was one of Jane’s oldest and deepest identities, one that she took the time and effort to keep fresh and viable.
She had gone in to the DMV in Van Nuys, California, only about two years ago to renew Nora Jean’s driver’s license and upgrade it to an official Real ID to conform to the change in the law that had been postponed about eight times before being implemented in that state.
She bought a ticket for Thursday evening from Buffalo to Chicago, another an hour later from Chicago to Springfield, Missouri, a third for Springfield back to Chicago with an open date.
She charged them to Nora Jean Gibbs’s Visa card.
As she printed her itineraries, she thought about how much more difficult what she was doing had become over the years.
It was already nearly impossible to build an identity as strong and old as Nora Jean Gibbs was.
She hoped that she could find a way to do it again for Clare.
What she was hoping for most was that she would find that Clare wouldn’t need it.
On Wednesday night Jane followed a policy that her mother had told her when she was in college.
The way to preserve a marriage was to remember always that she was in love and act that way.
When Jane and Carey were going to be apart, even for a day or two, she made sure that the night before she left didn’t go by without being together so each had fresh memories of the other.
The flight from Buffalo to Chicago was an hour and a half.
There was an hour between flights, and the one from Chicago to Missouri was an hour and twenty minutes, but there was a delay of a half hour taking off.
She reached Springfield-Branson Airport at nearly midnight, checked into the nearby Best Western, and slept for six hours.
She put on the outfit she had chosen—black pantsuit, hat that hid her hair, big sunglasses to hide her eyes and change her profile, loose raincoat for the late spring weather and to hide her body.
Then she went back to the airport to pick up Nora Gibbs’s rental car and got on the road.
She drove south to Interstate 44, then west. She made it into Oklahoma before it was fully light out, and was in Stanton before eight.
As she drove, she thought about the things she’d read about homicide laws in Oklahoma during the days before this trip.
With a population of four million, it was the state that had held the second most executions since they’d been allowed again in 1976, exceeded only by Texas, which had a population of thirty million.
The methods were lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, and firing squad, to be tried in that order, in case the first one didn’t work.
There were provisions in the law for “excusable homicide” and “justifiable homicide,” but she didn’t have enough information to be confident in whether they would be applied in Clare’s case.
The idea that a sixteen-year-old had even been charged in such a clear instance of self-defense didn’t make Jane want to know.
She parked the rental car in a municipal lot that only had a few cars in it at this hour, paid the machine for a full day at the pedestrian exit, took her receipt, and left.
She had been in this northeastern corner of Oklahoma once, about fifteen years ago, with a runner.
The few Seneca people she had met were elderly even then.
She remembered Clare’s grandmother, Dorothy Woods.
Jane wished she could talk to her now to get a sense of things, but she was dead.
Jane was almost alone on the street this morning.
There was a remnant of spring fog in the still, early morning air, and sounds carried better than sight.
She dimly remembered that there was a popular diner in the middle of town.
She didn’t see it, but while she walked, she passed the office of the local newspaper, which was called the Clarion.
The masthead said it was published twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The office was still dark, but they had covered the big storefront windows with the last few issues.
She had read some of the major stories online at home.
The pages in the window were mostly local-interest stories.
There was a lot of news about children’s events, a surprising number of obituaries of people with dates of birth in the 1920s and ’30s, but no police blotter, which was what Jane had been hoping for.
The only crimes she could find were a middle-aged woman arrested for bad checks and a marijuana grower who had been raided, but it wasn’t clear from the story what the crime was.
The high school senior class had 180 graduates at commencement.
The Cherokee nation had donated a large sum for the development of the new fairgrounds.
When Jane continued down Main Street, she found a restaurant that was not the diner she remembered, but looked larger and as busy as that diner had been.
She went to the front entrance and saw a “Please seat yourself” sign, so she sat down in the third booth along the side and faced the back wall, where she could see most of the room, but not have newcomers see her face as soon as they came in the door.
After a few minutes the lone waitress—a middle-aged woman with short, blond hair and sinewy muscles in her forearms—came with her order pad.
Jane smiled and ordered fried eggs, wheat toast, orange juice, and coffee.
Then she looked down at the prepaid burner phone she had bought for cash a few months ago while she was refreshing the bugout kits she had always kept for Carey and herself.
When the waitress saw the phone appear she went away, and Jane returned the phone to her coat pocket.
For the moment she had not put the battery in, because she had no need to make a call or use the internet, and no reason to have it pinging off any cell towers and creating a record of where she had been.