Chapter 27
In the night, Jane and Carey lay on their sides facing each other with their heads on the same pillow and whispered. “We can’t keep the kids here for too long,” Jane said.
“We’ve only been here for two days,” Carey said. “People go on vacations that last three or four weeks.”
“Right,” she said. “But when you’re running, whether you get found or not depends mostly on who is looking.”
“Are a bunch of gangsters going to look for us in a nice hotel hundreds of miles from home?”
“The gangsters who are after me aren’t the only threat we have.
The Oklahoma police think that Katie is a murderer, and that means they’re hunting for her the way they hunt murderers.
They send information and pictures all over the country.
One way that local police search for fugitives is to ask hotels if the person has been there.
And now we have Brian Finlay to worry about.
His former boss is a billionaire with connections to the sort of men who kill people for money. ”
“I get all of it,” he said. “What are you thinking we can do about it?”
“Our first responsibility is the kids,” she said.
“Agreed.”
“There are a few people around the country who think they owe me their lives. More than a few.”
“I’m sure they’re right.”
“They’re alive, but it’s mostly because they did it themselves—lived wisely, year after year. They’re new people now. They sometimes send me things to let me know they’re safe and happy—cards, presents, always unsigned, always mailed from cities where they don’t live.”
“I know.”
“A few of them have kept themselves invisible for so long that the ones who wanted to kill them have died. This may be the time when I need to accept help from one of them.”
“Do you have somebody in mind?”
“Several, actually. They’ve thrived since I left them.
Some were people who had just started out with a lot of bad luck—born in the wrong place, met the wrong guy, whatever—and ended it by starting fresh.
Others had realized that if they could change something about themselves, they would do better, and they did.
A few met and married somebody who was good for them. ”
“What do you want them to do?”
“Hide the girls. Hide you.”
“Not you?”
“You asked me what I want them to do. I told you what I want most. We have to keep the girls safe, and what we’ve done so far has been good.
It’s like chess. We jumped from one city where we were in danger to another where we weren’t.
We didn’t get caught at it, and it’s bought us at least two days of going dark. ”
“What’s next?”
“We’re a frog on a lily pad in the middle of a shallow lake. Under the water are a lot of big frog-eating northern pike swimming around. What we’ve got to do is stay absolutely still and watch for signs of where they are, then when it seems safe, jump to the next lily pad.”
“I don’t exactly understand what that means.”
Jane gave him a kiss. “I’ll think of another way to say it in the morning. Sleep tight.” She turned away from him and the silence and accumulated exhaustion let them sleep.
In the morning Jane was the first one awake.
She bathed, changed, fed May, and packed a small bag with a few essentials.
When Katie and Carey were awake, she took their orders for breakfast and called room service.
As soon as they’d finished eating breakfast, she said, “I’ve got to go out alone for a while. ”
Carey looked at her with curiosity.
She said, “Checking lily pads.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
As she went down the hall to the elevators, she thought about the people she was considering asking for shelter.
There were the two women in the Midwest who had thanked her by creating birth certificates in false names, different sexes and ages, inserting the originals into the records of the counties where they worked in the county clerks’ offices around Chicago, and sending copies to Jane.
That was a long distance to drive. Chicago was also where Bart Stillivant’s headquarters were, and Brian Finlay was going to need to be out of sight for a while.
Bringing him back to Chicago might be asking for a chance encounter with some employee of Stillivant’s.
There were quite a few runners who had made successful transitions to new lives.
One of the most recent runners who came into Jane’s mind was Sara Doughton, now Anne Bailey.
She was bright and flexible, but she lived in Quincy, Massachusetts, and that put her near Boston.
The faction of Russian gangsters who had supplied the men who’d followed Jane into the Hundred Mile Wilderness a few years ago had come from Boston.
There was Jimmy Sanders, a Seneca man she had known since they were both toddlers.
When her parents had taken Jane out to the Tonawanda reservation for visits, they used to play together.
She had helped him get through an attempt to frame him for murder.
He had come back to live on the reservation afterward.
Anybody looking for Clare Markham would eventually get around to checking each of the reservations for her, so he was out.
The person Jane asked for help would have to be one of the people she had helped at least ten years ago.
One part of Jane felt that it was unfair to ask someone who had survived and succeeded in making a new life to bring themselves back into jeopardy after this much time.
These people, however, were older and better established than newer runners, and far less vulnerable.
The hunters searched hard for a week, a few months, even a year or two.
They seldom kept looking hard after that, and once the trail was cold and the traces faded, no place was more promising than another.
Carolyn Anne Striker. The name came into Jane’s mind and it seemed promising.
Jane had just begun helping people disappear from the places where people wanted to kill them, teaching them to become new people, and establishing the new people in new places.
The woman had originally been Lois Polk, and she had been about Jane’s age at the time—twenty-two or twenty-three.
At nineteen, Lois had been partway through college in New York City.
The job that her university had given her as financial aid—working in the library—had not brought her enough to feed herself, so she had used an older friend’s driver’s license to get a second job waiting tables at a bar until late at night.
In those years about half of all college girls had the same long, straight brown hair, and so the license easily satisfied the bar manager.
The result was a semester that put her on probation, and a second semester that flunked her out.
Her parents gave up on her, so she stayed in New York, moved into another friend’s dorm room, and took on more hours at work.
She met a boy at the bar, got to know him, and when her friend graduated a few months later, moved into his apartment with him.
She didn’t know that what paid for his apartment was selling cocaine.
One night some competitors followed him home, killed him, and took his supply and his money.
Lois came home from work and saw them leaving.
She remembered having seen them at the bar talking to people she knew, so she went to the police and told them.
As soon as the police questioned the first killer, the others knew who the witness was.
Probably what saved her was the false driver’s license she had used to get the waitress job, because people at the bar knew no other name for her.
She hid with another university friend, who began asking others if they knew of a way to keep Lois from getting killed.
There was someone who knew someone who knew about Jane, and how to find their way to her.
Jane had taken Lois out of her life as Lois and changed her into Carolyn Anne Striker.
She found her a hybrid half-rural and half-suburban town in western Pennsylvania where most people at the time were not interested in cocaine and wouldn’t have known where to find a dealer if they had been.
Jane had manufactured a college degree for her, a BA from Carstonia College in Missouri, a liberal arts school that had closed its doors about five years earlier.
Jane had ordered a stack of diplomas from an engraver.
She had already established that one of her post office boxes was the current address of Carstonia College, so she was able to answer potential employers’ inquiries.
She had manufactured a work history for her, and helped her invent a biography that would be difficult to challenge.
For years afterward, the frauds Jane invented for Carolyn Anne Striker, she also used for later runners.
Carolyn Anne Striker had, during the succeeding years, been careful to use what Jane had taught her.
She had also become famous, something that had been so unlikely that Jane had never thought of cautioning her against it.
Carolyn had started writing stories because it was something that helped relieve the boredom of living a quiet life in her Pennsylvania suburb.
She had been very reluctant to date after her first serious lover turned out to be a dealer.
Most of the men in town were either married or too young for her, but that never prevented them from trying, so she had an exciting but quiet social life.
While her solitude lasted, the stories she wrote became longer and more structurally complex, and then more subtle and nuanced.
She specialized in novels that had a distinctly romantic tone.