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between Fort George where Lake Erie flowed into the river, and Fort Niagara, where the river emptied into Lake Ontario. Jane made her way south, heading for one of the old trails that her ancestors had worn into the forest hundreds of years ago. It was the western end of the Wa-a-gwenneyu, the trail that ran three hundred miles from the spot that was now the foot of Main Street in Buffalo to the end of Iroquois territory, where the Mohawk River met the Hudson.
    Jane drove eastward for twenty minutes in silence. The road gradually became more suburban, and then the streetlamps and
lighted buildings were farther apart. The darkness of houses with windows blackened for sleep enfolded them for longer periods, and the quiet and calm reassured Jane. Night highways were usually deserted, and when they weren't, the darkness and the glare of headlights provided anonymity.
    Christine said, "Why were you at that party? Do you work at the hospital?"
    "No. My husband is a surgeon. I was one of the people who volunteered to put on the benefit. It's the kind of thing that people expect of you if you're a doctor's wife. It's a good thing to do, and it's part of the role—the disguise." She turned to Christine. "I suppose that brings us to an unpleasant aspect of our relationship."
    "Ours? You and me?"
    "Yes. When I agree to take you away from your troubles, I'm saying that I know it's possible that someday your enemies will trace you partway and find me. In your case, that's pretty likely. They saw me, and they saw my car. I'm prepared for that."
    "You're prepared? How can you be?"
    "I mean that if they catch me, I won't tell them where you are. I'll die with that information in my memory, and only there." Jane turned again to look at Christine.
    "Oh my God," Christine whispered. "You want me to say that I'll do the same for you, don't you?" Her expression was a mask of uncertainty and discomfort.
    "No," said Jane. "I don't want you to say that. If you did I wouldn't believe you, and I would be disappointed in you for saying something that can't possibly be true. I only want you to begin thinking seriously about what you would do. No normal person walks around having made a plan for every bad thing that can ever happen. But if I ask you in four months, or six months, I'll expect
that you've thought about it. For most people this kind of secret doesn't exist. For you, as of tonight, it does."
    "What if I think about it and realize that I simply can't do that?"
    "Then I want you to tell me, and we'll both know it, and we'll have to prepare in some other way to keep our families safe, no matter what happens to us."
    The girl didn't know yet. Jane reminded herself that they never knew in the beginning. The reason that decent human beings could go on from day to day was that they didn't darken their lives with thoughts of catastrophe. They didn't even think about dying in the normal ways. This girl was scared, alone and pregnant. It was too much to expect her to be able to keep her mind on anything but that.
    Jane would not consider telling her what keeping secrets really meant. In her purse each time she went out, even for the past five years, she carried a pretty cut-glass bottle. The liquid inside looked like perfume, but it was not perfume. It was the extract of the roots of the water hemlock, a plant that grew wild in most of the marshy places of New York State. It was the traditional Seneca means of suicide. To say that she was willing to die without having at hand the means of fulfilling the promise would have made it a lie.
    The suburban highway became a country road and the only lights for a mile or two at a time came from the sparse line of headlights behind her, changing as the road left the lake plain and began to meet hills and curves. There were farms now, and old trees with dark, leafy canopies growing close to the road in some places. A few of them had signs advertising stands that would sell fresh corn when the sun came up