Free Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry Page B

him, the boy was left with nothing but the military to keep bread in his mouth. So he did what tens of thousands of fathers all over Europe had been doing with boys like that since 1492, and got him on a ship to America.
    Now that Jake had grown up, he suspected there had probably been a bit of self-interest in the decision, since there were advantages to being able to ship a juvenile delinquent to the other side of the world. But Jake knew there was sincerity, too. It was just about at the point in history when men riding full-speed on horseback waving swords were pretty sure to run into artillery and machine guns, even in that part of the world. No man would want his son in on that.
    Jake’s father must have learned a lot in his apprenticeship. He had come over at sixteen and never had much trouble finding work. He had made fine furniture, done the interior woodwork of the fancy cabin cruisers they built down at the boatworks even carved some of the beautiful, fanciful animals they mounted on the merry-go-rounds at the Mitchell-Bauer carousel plant.
    Jake was at the stage of life where he had come down here enough times to find his brushes hardened into paddles, so he soaked them for an hour or two in fresh turpentine after the visual evidence said they were clean. He also could look out the cellar window from here and see the light in the side window of Jane Whitefield’s house. The lights would come on shortly, and then he would be able to see shadows on the ceiling and, sometimes, silhouettes in the window.
    The world was old now. Most of the unexplored territory left was in the space between people’s ears. Jane Whitefield’s mother had comported herself with dignity and modesty during her marriage to Henry Whitefield. But Jake’s wife, Margaret, had once regretfully implied that she had quite a past. Jake had asked a few questions, to see if he had glimpsed a side of Margaret that he hadn’t suspected—jealousy or some need to put any strange woman who showed up in her bailiwick under suspicion—but he hadn’t.
    Her hint had been based on certain knowledge, some woman-to-woman confidence, and it was what it had sounded like. Jane’s mother had been left without resources in New York City at the age of twenty. There was a myth that said that there was a time in our society when a twenty-year-old girl could not be left without resources, even in a big city. Somebody would pick her up and let her belong, just as a lost fingerling swims into a school of fish and disappears. Jake was always willing to admit the possibility that such a thing might once have been real, but even in those days it wasn’t true to the experience of anyone then living. He supposed that was what small towns were for. Jane’s mother hadn’t been in a small town. Instead, she found herself a succession of boyfriends who periodically vacationed in places like Elmira and Attica.
    Margaret had never been one to be critical of anyone for having had a lot of sex. That would have been completely alien to her nature. The way she always said it was "People have a right to try to be happy. It’s in the Declaration of Independence." But she implied that Jane’s mother had tried harder than most before she was finally able to bring it off. Margaret had a genuine sympathy for that, because sympathy was the thing that came easiest to her.
    On the whole, Jake was a nurture-over-nature man, but he could not rule out any possibility that science hadn’t ruled out first. When Jane was younger, he had sometimes watched her behavior for the sort of sweet tooth that her mother had. Whatever else had been true of Jane’s mother, she had never turned it into a business.
    Young women, even young women of considerable intelligence and self-reliance, had been known to get themselves into trouble with this sort of activity. They had even been known to be found dead. Because no matter what sort of caution a young woman had, once she was in a private place, out