A String of Beads by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

terrible beating to protect her. It was unlikely he could have
     grown into a man who would do something as cowardly as ambush and murder a witness
     against him. People changed, but she was sure Jimmy hadn’t changed that much. And
     as she allowed herself to repeat the feelings of that horrible night, she knew a second
     reason why she had come. It was her turn.

5
    J ane felt trepidation as she came from the brush on the side of the Southern Tier Expressway.
     She stood perfectly still for a full minute as she studied the cars in the lanes close
     to her. She looked in each direction and reassured herself that all the threats were
     simple and visible. She walked onto the parking lot. Nothing had changed in this place
     since she’d been here twenty years ago. She kept looking ahead for signs of Jimmy.
     She had guessed that when he decided to escape, he would think of the path they had
     taken the summer when they were fourteen. Maybe she’d been wrong.
    She looked at the small building at the end of the parking lot as she approached,
     and her stomach tightened. She hadn’t imagined she would ever return to this rest
     stop. She walked directly to the ladies’ room door on the small, lonely building.
     She pushed the door so it opened against its spring, and then closed as she came in.
     She looked around her. The initials scratched in the mirror over the sinks were gone.
     Probably someone had gone all the way and broken the mirror at some point, so it had
     been replaced. Today there was graffiti on the walls. Had there been twenty years
     ago? No. If Jimmy came here and saw the writing, he might have left a message to her
     here. When she had the thought she realized that was what she had been searching for—not
     Jimmy himself, but a message only for her, to tell her where he was hiding. Jimmy
     wasn’t somebody you could just track down and find at the end of a trail. He had to
     invite her, allow her to find him.
    Jane stepped to the spot away from the door where she and Jimmy had sat that night
     and tried to get their sleeping bags to dry. There were the same three sinks on the
     right, the three stalls beyond them, and the same hand dryer on the opposite wall.
     She took out a hairpin like the one she hadn’t used twenty years ago and walked toward
     the switch plate for the lights. She stopped. Last time, when they were fourteen,
     Jimmy had stopped her. Keeping the lights off hadn’t kept that horrible man from finding
     them, but the darkness had probably saved her from being raped. This time she used
     the pin to turn on the lights, then stepped to the wall and began to read.
    She knew his message wouldn’t be any of the big, bold marker lines. His would be one
     of the small pencil messages that a person had to look for. “They’re cute when they’re
     little, but don’t bring one home,” some woman had written. “They grow up stupid.”
     She kept reading the small handwriting on the wall. “Kylie, Mona, and Zoe were here,
     but wish they were somewhere else.” Somebody had replied, “We wish you’d never come
     back.” There it was. “J. If you’re here to help me out, I’m heading for the oldest
     place. J.”
    Jane knew what Jimmy meant by the oldest place. When they had come this way twenty
     years ago they had been on a summer camping trip. But they had also been trying to
     go back in time. They had wanted to feel the way they would have felt if they’d been
     an Onondawaga boy and girl long ago. For them the easiest way to do that was to turn
     away from everything that had happened since the 1600s, and that meant entering the
     forest. In the second-growth woods between the Tonawanda Reservation and the southwestern
     part of Pennsylvania, they felt like ong-we-on-weh , “the real people.” They were on parts of the land that had not been damaged much.
     They were where the past still was.
    Jane found the pencil in her backpack, took it out, put her face close to the