Chapter 18 #2
“This woman, she isn’t just some woman. I know her, who she is.
When the Russian gangsters caught me in that house, she was with them.
She was tall and thin and had black hair, and one of the men with her even made some stupid remark about how I looked like her.
When you and Jake came in the morning, all the men who’d slept upstairs were dead, but she and one of the men were just gone.
After a couple of years went by, and nobody broke into that house again, I told myself the two of them were gone forever.
Maybe they just thought I must be dead like the others.
It doesn’t matter. She’s alive and she must know I’m alive.
If she’s brought a crew of gangsters to my house, it must be to capture me again.
I don’t know how long it will take her to find out something that leads them here. ”
“May.”
“Yes,” she said. “They can’t be allowed to get near her.”
“And now Katie too. We can start by getting her out of this right away.”
“Right.” said Jane. “We do, but not the way you think. She isn’t Katie. Or she is, but only because I’ve been making her into Katie.”
“She’s one of your runners? You couldn’t tell me?”
“I could, but I didn’t think I had the right to do that just because it would have been easier for me. She’s being hunted by police. She’s only sixteen years old, so there’s no way she could hide out on her own.”
“You were protecting her from me?”
“I was protecting you from knowing something that was against the law, that could kill your career and put you in prison if the authorities found out you knew. If you don’t know something, you can’t accidentally slip and reveal it, and nobody can hurt you and make you tell.”
“What the hell did she do?”
“She stuck a knife into a twenty-six-year-old rapist while he tore her clothes off.”
“Wow. So here we are.”
“Here we are. We might have hours, but I don’t think we have days. The man Karen sent to my house isn’t going to survive once this woman realizes he can’t take her to me.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“I wouldn’t dignify it with the term ‘plan,’ ” she said. “If you have one, I’ll listen to it.”
“I’m starting from way behind. I didn’t know the things you knew, let alone anything you didn’t know. I thought this stuff was over and didn’t know we still might need to run for our lives.”
“I think you start by getting the hospital to give you family leave or a sabbatical or something. Then we put everything that might help anyone trace us into a storage pod and have the storage company come and pick it up. That doesn’t solve the problem, but it buys us some time. Then we leave by car.”
“For where?”
“For what I hope will look like a much-delayed family vacation. Mountains. A fancy hotel on a beach. Whatever you want.”
“How long should I say I’ll be gone?”
“As long as they’ll give you without looking for your replacement. I’ve got to get started—I suppose I’ll have to start by telling Katie what’s up—and then begin packing.”
“I’ll go call Bronson at the hospital and see how much time he can get me.”
Jane wrapped her arms around him again and said, “I wish I hadn’t been such a disaster as a wife. If we get through this, I’ll keep trying.”
Jane hurried downstairs, took May from Katie, and said, “We’ve got troubles.
They’ve got nothing to do with you, but we’re all going to have to get out of here within the next few hours.
What you need to do now is pack a suitcase and a trash bag.
Put the clothes you arrived in into the trash bag.
All of them. Then pack your suitcase with clothes we bought.
Make sure you include the new clothes we bought when we were shopping for school.
We also need to include all of the paper we used to construct your identity. ”
“What’s the—”
“We’ll talk about it later on the road.”
Katie scurried to the stairs and climbed them two at a time.
Jane set May in her bouncy chair again, moved it near the dishwasher so she could see everything, and loaded the pots, pans, and dishes into the machine and started it.
Then she searched the internet for the storage company she’d seen leaving storage pods around town, and called them.
She asked whether they had a storage container they would be able to deliver to her house immediately.
The man on the phone said, “That’s not how we do things. We need some time to get the pod loaded onto the truck and some time to find a place for it in storage. We need to get all of your information and check you out before we even start.”
“This is a family emergency. I’m willing to pay an extra thousand dollars for your priority service.” She had no idea whether there was such a thing as priority service.
“For fifteen hundred we might be able to put a rush on it.”
“Wonderful. Thank you.” She told him the address, arranged for a container pick-up at 8:00 P.M., gave him the information he needed, then hung up.
She called Jake Reinert, the elderly family friend who lived next door to her old house. When he answered, she said, “Hi, Jake.”
“Janie?”
“Yes. The reason I called is that I just found out that the woman who was part of the crew who chained me in my basement that time is inside my old house right now, and she has four men with her. I’m sure they’ve come for another chance to kidnap me.
When she realizes I’m not coming to get captured, she might try going to your house to ask questions. Get out now.”
“Thanks for calling. I’ll call Valerie to come pick me up a couple of blocks away, and sneak out the side door that she can’t see from your house.”
“Be careful, Jake. Don’t take chances.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I’m sorry about this.”
“It’s okay. I knew what this was from the day you admitted to me years ago who those people coming and going from your house were, and who you had grown up to be. You can’t be much of a do-gooder without also attracting some people who are the opposite. If you need anything, I’ll be at Valerie’s.”
“Bye, Jake.”
Jane had been prepared, but not for this.
For the past ten years she’d always imagined that if a day like today ever came, she and Carey would walk out the door with the go bags she had made containing money and a few carefully built identities, and drive off.
What she had not anticipated was that when this day came, there would no longer be just two of them, and the trouble they had would not be one problem, but several at once.
She collected things that she knew would be needed by one member of the family or another, and put them in suitcases.
She had always kept her financial records compact and in one place so she could burn them if she needed to, and over the years she had kept the family’s records small, and stored them in large safe-deposit boxes in banks.
Right now, she was mostly concerned about leaving anything that belonged to Katie, because it might hold prints, and would certainly carry her DNA.
When the whole process was finished, she and Carey loaded his BMW and her Volvo. She told Carey that it was necessary to take both cars because Katie had been in her car nearly every day, and because she’d been arrested, they couldn’t leave it in the garage to be tested.
At eight o’clock, the man from the storage company came and set the storage pod in front of the house.
He said he would bring the truck back at ten to pick it up.
Jane and Carey loaded the pod during those two hours, and when the driver returned and took it away, the house was as empty of documents, evidence of Katie’s presence, and other vulnerabilities as they could make it.
At eleven, Jane gathered them in the kitchen.
“Carey, I think the easiest way is if you get the kids out of western New York while I stop at Ellen Dickerson’s house on the reservation to drop my car off with her.
I can’t leave it where it can be dusted for fingerprints.
When you reach your first destination, call me, and I’ll fly there and meet you.
Katie, you ride with Carey and help with May. ”
“I don’t know,” Carey said. “I think I’d rather just follow you to Ellen’s together, and we can all go on from there.”
“And then we’d have to explain to her and whoever else is there who Katie is, and why we’re taking a baby and a teenager and leaving the house at eleven at night, and where we’re going, and on and on. I can handle her questions if I can keep everyone else out of it.”
“Okay,” he said. “See you later.” He handed May to Katie, took the bouncy chair and the two suitcases, and went to his car.
A few minutes later, Jane watched Carey drive down the driveway to the road.
Then she went back inside the house and turned on the surveillance system.
She’d had keyhole security cameras wired into the house in various places while she was pregnant with May.
The rooms on the ground floor had them in unobtrusive spots.
There was one in an upper shelf of each of the two bookcases that covered walls in the living room.
There was one hidden inside the kitchen clock in the center where the hands joined, and another inside a vent for the heating and cooling system.
The staircase to the second floor had two keyhole cameras focused on it.
Jane had never had an alarm system in either her old family house or the McKinnon house.
The last thing she’d wanted was security people or police answering any alarms. The surveillance camera recordings could be watched on her phone or computer from anywhere.
She locked the door, went out to her car, drove it out of the garage, closed the door with her remote control, and left.
She looked at the house in her rearview mirror once more, aware that this might be the last time that she saw it, or her husband or her child.
Getting caught lying to Carey was terrible for Jane.
For most of their ten years of marriage she had managed to avoid lying.
On the occasions when she’d had to make exceptions to her resolve to never make a runner disappear again, she had not lied to him.
She had simply told him she was going on the road again, and that she couldn’t tell him anything more.
But when Clare had come, she had lied about who Clare was.
It seemed to her that once she’d done that, almost everything she’d said to him had been a lie. Her last lie was the biggest.
She wasn’t going to drive to Ellen Dickerson’s house to hide her car when she knew there was a runner in her house with the woman who had been one of her torturers. The idea was unthinkable.