Free A String of Beads by Thomas Perry Page A

thigh that startled her and made her wonder for an instant whether
     her leg would give way under her. From time to time she felt the twinge again, but
     the leg held.
    “We seem to be heading south,” Jimmy said. “That’s not toward home.”
    “We don’t have much choice. The direction we’ve been taking is just away .”
    “Then what? Circle back at night?”
    “Maybe. Somehow we’ve got to lose this cop and get you back up to the reservation.”
    “So I can surrender to a different cop.”
    “Yes. That’s what it amounts to, but running makes you seem guilty. And being a fugitive
     in a murder case is highly risky. Any cops you meet will almost certainly draw their
     sidearms, and sometimes a nervous cop will misinterpret any movement as hostile. When
     we’re home we’ll get you a great defense lawyer, and get some private detectives going
     on investigating your case. While we’re out here running through the woods nobody’s
     doing anything to clear you.”
    Jimmy said, “Clearing me sounds like it costs a lot of money.”
    “Enough will be available,” Jane said.
    “The clan mothers set aside money for this kind of thing?”
    Jane didn’t bother to correct his impression.
    They moved along the stream bed, careful not to step on the mossy rocks right near
     the water because they were slippery. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have thought
     that you’d do something like this.”
    “Then why did you leave me a message in the ladies’ room by the expressway?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess being there again brought that trip back to me,
     and I had been feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t really expect you to find it.”
    “Just because I don’t live on the reservation I’m not suddenly a stranger. I never
     lived there anyway, except in the summer when my father was working far away.”
    “That’s part of it,” he said. “And the other part is that you can be Indian or not
     whenever you want.”
    “That’s not how it works. I don’t get to pick, and never did. My mother had eyes so
     blue they looked like the sky reflected in ice water, and skin like cream. She’s the
     one who chose, and she wanted to be Seneca because she loved my father. After the
     Wolf clan women adopted her, she was never anything else. And I’ve never been anything
     else.”
    “You have blue eyes just like hers.”
    She laughed. “Don’t sound like that. I didn’t steal them.”
    “I meant you can pick.”
    “If I wanted to, I could pass as something besides Seneca, and so could you—at least
     outside New York, where everyone’s used to seeing Haudenosaunee people. Having black
     hair and a dark complexion opens up a lot of possible ethnic identities. But I don’t
     forget who I am. And when the clan mothers say I’m the one to do something, I know
     who they are too.”
    “Janie, you’re not still a true believer in the old religion, are you?”
    “What I believe in these days is pretty much dominated by what I learned in science
     classes. But I sometimes like remembering that I’m not just one person. I’m part of
     a group of people like me. And I’ve never heard anything to make me think the old
     people were stupid.”
    “I get you,” he said.
    They kept trotting along the stream bed for a time, and then they both heard a faint
     hoot of a train’s horn, then another. They moved on, making their way downhill. As
     the stream bed flattened and no longer kept them hidden, Jane altered her course a
     little. The train horn sounded again, this time a long wail, then another hoot.
    “There must be a town down there,” she said.
    “How do you know?”
    “They’re blowing their horn for a crossing—two short, one long, one short. They’re
     warning the vehicles that might not see them coming.”
    They ran on for a few minutes and then saw, stretched across the bottom of the valley
     below, the train tracks. The double line of steel rails was coming out of a