Chapter 16 #2
Molly said, “Katie and I can get started on the photographs now. Maybe you and Jane can talk about the rest.”
“Thanks, Molly.”
Katie followed her down the hall into another room that seemed to have once been a bedroom.
Now it was only furnished with a white screen, a digital camera on a tripod, a monitor, four long clothing racks on wheels, crowded with clothes on hangers, and a chair.
She closed the door and said, “How old are you?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“All right. We’re going to take pictures of you in some different kinds of clothes, different hair, and so on.
Some will be summer clothes, some winter, and some in between.
They’re for identification cards and so on.
But in your case, we’ll also take some that will still work when you’re quite a bit older, and maybe a couple that make you younger, so you have a past. I’ve done this about a hundred times, so trust me.
I work fast, and so will you. We’ll start with the school picture, the kind that ends up in a school yearbook. ”
“Okay.”
“Put these on.” She gave her a pullover cashmere sweater and a thin white gold necklace chain with a tiny diamond on it. When Katie was ready, Molly seated her on the chair in front of the screen, brushed her hair, and posed her, then went to the camera. “Now smile.”
She looked through the viewfinder. “Really smile. Not like you. Smile like that dumb-ass girl that always gets the male attention. Think cheerleader.” She took the picture, turned her slightly, and took another. “Here. Take a look.”
Molly hurried off to pick another outfit while Katie got up and looked at the monitor’s screen. She hated the expression of the girl in the picture, but she recognized what Molly had done. She saw a completely different person who had her features.
Next there was an outfit Molly called “passport.” The main thing she was concerned with was the size of the image of her face. With slight adjustments, they took the picture for “driver’s license.”
Then there was one she called “class president.” That was followed by several she said were “work ID card.” Some were simple blouses or jackets from suits, and others were more like the clothes she’d worn to school in Oklahoma.
Next Molly said, “Now I’m going to age you as much as I can, but gradually.
First, ‘senior prom.’ ” She went to work first on Katie’s hair, pulling it into a tight ponytail, and making it into a French twist and then working on her makeup.
Katie felt like she had when she was seven and tried her mother’s makeup in front of a mirror.
It felt thick, overdone. But she was not displeased with the picture.
“Now let’s try a graduation picture. I’ll pick out a cap and gown that’ll fit you.”
In the studio, Jane and Stewart were talking about the identification. Jane paced back and forth carrying May while Stewart sat at his work table and took notes.
“She’s sixteen. I wanted her to have a different birth date, so I registered her at school as a sixteen-year-old sophomore with a birthday of August 19.
I would like the works for her—birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license, passport, as much of it as possible real.
I also want two other identities—let’s say Martha Wilkes and Megan Phelan—in case she has to bail out.
Those are names I’ve got credit cards for.
What matters is some government-issued ID to make it all stick. Is that still possible?”
“The methods are different now, but the results are the same,” Stewart said.
“It’s more expensive. I seem to say that every time I see you, but it’s true.
I got into this at the beginning because I was good at the art.
The eye is still necessary but the hand is useless now.
The first name will run fifty thousand, the others twenty. ”
“It’s about what I expected,” she said. “I can give you part in cash, and write you a few checks on different accounts for the rest. All right?”
“If you want to, but I know you’re good for it,” Stewart said.
“I don’t know much more than that about you, and I haven’t ever tried to find out anything.
But I see you have this beautiful baby now, and I wonder.
I don’t think you’re going to leave her with a babysitter and go off with a sixteen-year-old to set her up as a freestanding adult somewhere.
You said you registered her for school. I think that means you’re going to hide her yourself. ”
Jane said, “There’s no other choice. I want her to be safe. I think that will take somebody who knows how it’s done to give her the years she needs to grow up.”
He looked at her for a second, and then turned his attention to the paper on his desk. “I’ll get to work on this later tonight. Is the old PO box number still good?”
“The one in Chicago? Yes.”
Molly and Katie appeared in the doorway. Molly said, “We’re done. Come and see what we’ve got.”
They went into the photography studio and looked at the pictures on the monitor.
Stewart said, “That’s good. That one too.
Love that. We can use either of these. This one might be stretching the age a little, but it looks professional.
This one’s a little safer, I think. Pretty can be dangerous, if it tends toward the sexy.
We don’t want a picture that sticks out among four hundred.
These are all good. Great work, Molly. Can you make a set of proofs so I can remember what the options are while I’m working on this? ”
“Sure.”
“I think that’s all we need,” Stewart said. “You can stay the night or take the kids home now, if you want.”
“I’ll do that,” she said. “But I want to pay you first.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “I trust you.”
Jane intentionally didn’t look at Katie. “I want to. These days I don’t find it easy to travel.”
They went back to the studio. Jane opened the larger baby bag she had brought, pushed aside a blanket and some tiny clothes, and took out three ten-thousand-dollar stacks of banded hundreds, and four checkbooks.
The checks had different women’s names and addresses printed on them, but they were all accounts in different banks where she stored money.
She wrote checks for odd numbers, none of them the same.
There were four for about five thousand, four for about four thousand, three for about eight thousand.
When she finished, May began to cry. Jane said, “Trifecta. Wet, hungry, and poopy. As soon as I take care of her, we’ll head for home. ”
Jane drove patiently and with strict attention to speed limits and traffic regulations.
She had always been aware that anything that made her car stand out could trigger a traffic stop and bring on the police curiosity that might end her runner’s life.
The only time that was different was when she was being chased.
This night there were two extremely precious lives in her hands, and she was aware of it every second.
“Talk to me,” she said. “It keeps me from getting bored and falling asleep.”
“Is there anything else you haven’t told me we have to do?” Katie said.
“There will be something. I just don’t know which problems are going to come up and need to be solved, and which ones are going to pass us by.
We’ve got the obvious ones. I knew we were going to need to find you a protected place to be until you got a little older, and we’ve settled that.
You’ve gotten yourself admitted to a nice school for fall, and it’s the kind a runaway sixteen-year-old wouldn’t be able to get into.
We just made a start on the hardest and most risky part.
I knew that before too long you were going to need masterpiece-grade fake identity documents and a couple of substitute sets in case one name got burned. ”
“That was dangerous?” Katie said. “They seemed so chill about it.”
“Stewart and Molly are successful. That means they’re in more danger every day of being destroyed by their success.
If you’re the best, people will love you or hate you.
Either way they’re likely to talk about you.
If the authorities hear the talk, they’ll arrest them.
If competitors find them, they may try to sabotage, rob, or kill them.
We’re lucky to know them, and lucky we’ve got them started on your identification. ”
“But now it’s done, right? Nothing else is going to happen?”
Jane hesitated for a second. In the next few weeks, Stewart and Molly would be doing the riskiest part, trying to insert Katie Barnes into governmental records.
The process began logically with a birth certificate, then a Social Security number, and then a driver’s license.
At each step there were sophisticated and changing methods of catching someone doing exactly what Stewart and Molly would be doing.
Someday Katie would have to know all of it, but not tonight.
She said, “Everything we had to do now is finished and you’ve done perfectly so far.
Starting tomorrow, just concentrate on what you can do to help yourself.
Get ahead on your studies, practice your backstory, and give me a hand with May a couple hours a day when Carey is home so he takes you seriously.
During the next week or so I’d like to take you shopping and get you more clothes and things other girls are likely to have—a phone, a watch, some simple, tasteful jewelry, a purse. That kind of thing.”
“That doesn’t sound serious. It sounds like fun.”
“It’s both. Life isn’t simple. I met your grandmother, so I know you were raised, as I was, to know that setting your heart on ‘having nice things’ is stupid.
But in this situation, you’re being smart.
You’re building a disguise that will help you fade into a crowd of conformists.
It’s always safer to be indistinguishable from the herd. ”
“I’ve been thinking about the herd since we started looking for schools.
At home I had friends—real friends, and we’d do anything for each other.
My best friend drove me halfway across the country to get to you, even though she knew it would mean driving back alone, and might get her fired and in trouble. ”
“Part of what that tells me is that you were a good friend to her,” Jane said.
“You’ll make good friends here, too. You just have to be careful.
People love to tell their friends everything and listen to all of their thoughts and stories.
You can still do most of that. You just have to stick with the story about your past that you and I made up, and tell it the same way always.
There can’t be one special friend you tell the other story, or even parts of it.
I’m afraid that’s always going to be true. ”
“It’s funny. I used to try to keep from telling lies. Now I’m afraid I won’t be good enough at it.”
“You’ll get better and better at it. You can talk about things that are universally true.
I don’t know—the river is beautiful, but it looks best when the sun is out and the blue sky can reflect off it.
You can say things about your parents, whom they’re never going to expect to meet because we’ll probably keep them working in a foreign country as long as possible.
Nothing exciting, though, or too specific.
Maybe they work for the government maintaining trade agreements in various countries.
You’ll have to mention your aunt Jane. But the best strategy is to talk to them about them.
Ask questions, be interested in their lives. ”
“I guess I can do that,” she said.
“The main thing is to keep your secrets while appearing to have no secrets. You’re afraid.
Fear isn’t always a weakness. It can keep you safe.
I guarantee that if any of the people you meet knew the full story, the rest would know it in a day, and within a week or so, you would be in a cell in Oklahoma.
If you ever make a mistake, don’t ignore it.
Tell me about it that day. I’ll figure out what has to be done, and if I need to, I’ll get you far away fast.”
“There’s so much to remember, and so many chances to do the wrong thing.”
“Yes. Remember you’re brave. You were the victim who fought back.
It’s true that now you have to make an effort to be invisible and stay safe.
It’s not fair and it’s not easy, but I’ve seen a lot of people do it.
What they had to learn at the start was that they couldn’t be the person they’d always been.
The next thing they learned was that it also gave them a new opportunity. ”
“What kind of opportunity?”
“The reason a lot of them had to come to me was that they had made a mess of their lives. Having to start over gave them the chance to erase all that and become a new person—the one they would have wanted to be if they’d known more at the beginning.
That’s not you, but you have an even better chance to become exactly the adult you want to be, and you have a lot more years to think about it and prepare yourself for it. ”
The night drive home was faster than the trip to Stewart and Molly’s house.
The speed limits hadn’t changed, but the Thruway traffic was thin, and there were no delays.
They stopped once to buy gas and snacks and use the restroom, and then were off again.
By 3:00 A.M. they were on the last stretch of road to the McKinnon house.
Jane drove slowly to look at every one of the properties along the road, every spot where a vehicle could park, making sure that nothing had appeared since they had left in the afternoon.
When she was satisfied that it was safe, she turned into the long driveway, around the house, and up into the garage.