Chapter 38
The storage pod was delivered to the McKinnon house the day after the family returned from their two and a half months away.
It took Carey, Jane, and Katie a week to put everything they owned back in its place, restock the house with food and supplies, and recreate the routines that they were used to.
The special telephone that Jane reserved for conversations with a very small number of people rang as August was about to turn to September.
The voice on the phone was Karen Alvarez. Jane said, “I didn’t expect to hear from you this soon. Is everything all right?”
Karen said, “With me? Sure. You know, over the past few weeks I’ve discovered that it takes a lot to get to me. Maybe I’m starting to grow up, finally.”
“It’s a theory.”
“The reason I called is that I promised our friend Katie that I would keep track of a legal case she’s interested in. There are developments.”
Jane carried May and the phone into the room where Katie was reading. “Here you go,” Jane said. “It’s Karen Alvarez. There are developments.” She handed Katie the phone and started to leave.
Katie said, “Wait. Karen, is it okay if Jane stays to hear this?”
“Only if you want her to.”
“I do.”
“Okay, then. Put me on speaker.”
“You’re on.”
“Katie, a few days ago the district attorney in Oklahoma announced that they were dropping the murder charges against Clare Markham due to insufficient evidence. He didn’t disclose any plans he or the State of Oklahoma had for the future.”
Jane used her free arm to hug Katie. “Great!”
“Thank you, Karen. I can’t believe it.”
Karen said, “Let me explain the legal situation as clearly as I can. It’s good news, for sure, but it’s not everything.
The death of Gerard Fenton has been ruled by the coroner to be a homicide.
That isn’t going to change. Somebody stabbed him and he died.
So while the DA doesn’t think they have enough evidence to convict Clare Markham, there is no statute of limitations on a homicide.
If, ten or fifteen years from now, some cop finds something that changes the DA’s mind, he can refile the charges.
Or if he loses the next election in a year and there’s a new DA, the new DA might decide that the evidence they have is sufficient and refile the murder charge, or file a charge of manslaughter, which is usually easier for a jury to convict on.
He or she might instead charge Clare Markham with fleeing to evade prosecution for a felony, which could carry jail time, allowing them to imprison Clare and keep her available for a while—years—until they can make a case. ”
“Wow,” Jane said. “That’s a lot of information to think about. Thank you, Karen.”
“I also consulted Elizabeth Howarth, who is another lawyer friend we both know,” Karen said.
“One of the points she made was that this Clare Markham person is a sixteen-year-old girl. It would take a couple of years, maybe much more, before a trial could happen. By then the defendant is likely to appear much more mature, and some of the jury could be swayed by that.”
Jane said, “That is something to keep in mind.”
Katie spoke in a voice so soft that it was hard to hear what she’d said.
“What?” Karen said.
“I said I’m not going back.”
“No?”
“I’m grateful to you for all of this, Karen,” Katie said, “Right now, it seems like I would be stupid to put my life in the hands of a DA who doesn’t believe my story and already charged me once, or maybe some random person who wins his job next time.
I would miss May and Jane and Carey. And Jane went to a lot of trouble and risk and got me into a good school. I want to stay here.”
“Jane? What do you think?”
“I think she’s a smart kid,” Jane said. She watched Katie carry her book out of the room. “She’s gone.”
“So tell me what else you think,” Karen said.
“When I went to her hometown, I didn’t see much reason to believe that they could guarantee her a fair trial.
I think the only way I would advise her to go back there is if a court dismissed the case because it was self-defense and ruled it could not be refiled in the future.
I mean, this was a child defending herself against a grown man, using the knife he had on him.
There was no way for her, or for anyone, to be sure he wasn’t planning to kill her afterward. ”
“It happens,” Karen said.
“She’ll probably do very well in school here. She spent some time this summer reviewing last year’s work and getting a taste of next year’s, and since then she’s been doing a lot of reading. She’s a relative of mine and May’s, and we all love having her here.”
“I understand. I’ll let you know if anything changes,” Karen said.
“Thanks. How is your medical treatment going?”
“Three operations so far, and two ‘procedures.’ They seemed suspiciously like surgery too, but those are the terms. There will end up being some marks, but clothes will cover them, and when there are no clothes involved, I’ll be very sexy and very responsive so the guy doesn’t notice them.”
“Is there a particular guy?”
“Well, there’s a promising candidate, but this one is too smart and too attentive to fool, so I’m not sure. I told him I’d been in a car accident. I can tell he knows I was lying, but he still keeps coming around.”
“Give him a chance.”
“As soon as the bandages come off. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Bye.”
Jane ended the call and carried May upstairs to the bedroom she and Carey shared. She set May in the room’s playpen and talked to her while she picked out the clothes she would wear that night, carried them down the hall to one of the spare bedrooms, and hung them in the closet.
It was after 2:00 A.M. when Jane opened her eyes and slipped out of the bed.
She looked down at her sleeping husband for a full minute to be sure he was not about to wake, then walked to the spare room.
She dressed, went down the stairs and out the door without making a sound.
She’d had a decade to learn the places to step and how to navigate the big old house in the dark without disturbing her husband, or more recently, her baby.
She went outside and started her car while it was still in the closed garage, and only opened the garage door after the engine was idling.
She shifted, let it drift out of the garage, and then turned it and let it coast down the long driveway to the street and make the turn without stepping on the brakes or switching on the headlights.
In a moment she was driving along the road at forty miles an hour, heading for the small town along the Niagara River.
It was where her mother, the blond, blue-eyed woman who never said much about her past, and her Seneca father had raised her.
Her mother had told her that the only part of her life that she was willing to spend a minute remembering had started on the day she’d met Jane’s father in New York City, where he and some friends had gone to work on the steel skeleton of a tall building.
They had both been dead for a long time now, her father from a fall from a bridge under construction in the state of Washington, and her mother from cancer’s slow, painful descent.
They had been the best kind of parents, an unlikely matching of opposites.
Jane hated what she was going to have to do tonight, which was why she was going about it so quickly.
The house had been one of her easiest ways of feeling closer to both of them, and to her grandfather and grandmother, the young couple of almost a century ago, the man who built the house and the woman who had inhabited it and loved it and scrubbed every inch of it so each floorboard gleamed at sunrise when the light shone in the front windows and down the hallways.
It had been a special place then, and it had played a big part in everything that Jane had done since then. There were a lot of people who were alive and living under names Jane had given them because that house had been there. It was their first stop after terrifying escapes from monsters.
While she was waiting at the light at Amherst and Delaware, she took out her phone and pressed the name Jake Reinert. The silence was replaced by Jake’s voice. “This is Jake.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“I’ll be awake.”
“Thanks, Jake. I’ll talk to you in a day or two.”
“Right. Good-bye.”
The red traffic light went off, and the green light came on.
Jane drove the rest of the way into town, left her car between the buildings of the long-closed factory, put her hair under a cap, and trotted along the empty street, reached the inhabited section, and used the deeper darkness under the old trees to keep herself invisible.
She had run this route with Brian Finlay weeks ago, and had never heard anything to indicate that they had appeared on anybody’s security cameras.
She had noticed a long time ago that a person who looked like she was out jogging wasn’t of much interest to the suspicious, even at some weird hour.
She made it to the house, kept going to the kitchen door, opened it, and went inside.
She walked through it without stopping, opened the door in the hallway, and went down the stairs in the basement.
She didn’t turn on the light, simply turned on her phone.
She looked up at the five rounded air ducts that extended from the top of the old coal furnace, along the wooden boards above her head and then upward into the first floor and beyond.
She had used those old ducts since her mother died to hide things—guns, money, documents—and only removed the last of them a few days after she’d returned from the West. She walked to the far end where her father’s old workbench was.
The bench had a number of paint cans, a few cans of thinner and turpentine that dated from the days before he had died.
She had selected one of the turpentine cans a few days ago because it had apparently been left outside at some point, and had rusted along the bottom edge.
She had used a nail file to scratch at the thin, rusted area to find the weakest spot, made a tiny open space in the rust, set it on the wooden workbench, and refilled it with another can and watched the turpentine drip its fresh contents onto the unfinished wood.
The smell was strong right now. She looked at the nearby outboard motor that was clamped to the wooden stand her father had made.
There was a five-gallon can of gasoline beside it.
The big oil tank along the wall in the middle of the basement near the furnace had been refilled during the spring, as always.
Jane went to the bench, took the lighter out of her pocket, and flicked it.
She looked at the flame, then held it to the dark spot where the turpentine had soaked into the wood.
The flame flickered, then caught, dancing on the wood, making the basement brighter as Jane walked away from it and climbed the stairs, two at a time.
She took a last look from the top, and the whole bench was going up, the flames rising toward the old rounded wooden beams that supported the planks of the ground floor of the house.
Then she went out, leaving the basement door open so the fire wouldn’t run out of oxygen.
In ten steps she was outside, turning around to lock the kitchen door.
Then she stood still. In the old language she said, “Grandfather, Grandmother, you know why I couldn’t use your house anymore.
You know why I couldn’t sell it or have anybody living there when the next bad people come.
Father and Mother, you know that I had to do this.
We’re done here. I’m turning this place into memories.
Nobody else is going to die here because of me. ”
She took a last look, turned, and began to run. She kept her face lifted to the night sky and breathed so deeply that the air felt like freedom.