INTRUDERS
Michael Marshall

Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2007

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Cover photographs © BBC Worldwide

Michael Marshall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008114954

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007325313

Version: 2014-10-27

Dedication

For Nathaniel

– I did it

How can we be sure we are not impostors?

Jacques Lacan

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part 2

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Part 3

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Bad Things Extract

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By Michael Marshall

About the Publisher

Prologue

Thump, thump, thump. You could hear it halfway up the street. It was bizarre the neighbours didn’t complain. Or do so more often, and more stridently. Gina sure as hell would – especially if the music sucked this bad. She knew she ought to go upstairs as soon as she got indoors, yell at Josh to turn it down. She also knew he’d look at her in that way teenagers have, like they’re wondering who you are and what gives you the right to bother them and what the hell happened in your life to make you so boring and old. He was a good son at heart though, and so he’d roll his eyes and nudge the stereo down a notch, and then over the next half hour the volume would creep up until it was even louder than before.

Usually Bill was around to get into it with him – if he wasn’t hidden in his basement, tinkering – but tonight he was out with a couple of faculty colleagues. That was good, partly so he could get the bowling out of his system without involving Gina, who couldn’t stand the dumb sport, also because he went out very seldom. They usually managed to grab a meal somewhere once every couple weeks, just the two of them, but most evenings this year had seen him disappearing downstairs after dinner, wrench in hand and a pleasurably preoccupied look on his face. For a while he’d generated his own strange noises down there, low booming sounds you felt in the pit of your stomach, but thankfully that had stopped. It was healthy for a guy to get out the house now and then, hang with other guys – even if Pete Chen and Gerry Johnson were two of the geekiest dudes Gina had met in her entire life, and she found it impossible to imagine them cutting loose at bowling or drinking or indeed anything at all that didn’t involve UNIX and/or a soldering iron. It also gave Gina a little time to herself, which – no matter how much you love your husband – is a nice thing once in a while. Her plan was a couple hours in front of the tube with her choice of show – screw the documentary channels. In preparation she’d gone to the big deli on Broadway, picked up groceries for the week and a handful of deluxe nibbles for right now.

As she opened the door to the house and stepped into a zone of even higher volume, she wondered if Josh ever considered that his vanilla mom might have rocked out on her own account, back in the day. That before she’d fallen in love with a young physics lecturer called Bill Anderson and settled down to a life of happy domesticity, she’d done plenty time in the grungier venues of Seattle-Tacoma and its environs, had been no stranger to high volume, cheap beer and waking up with a head that felt like someone had set about it with hammers. That she’d bounced sweatily to Pearl Jam and Ideal Mausoleum and even Nirvana themselves, back when they were local unknowns and sharp and hungry instead of hollow-faced and dying, and most memorably on a summer night when she’d puked while crowd-surfing, been dropped on her head and still got lucky in the soaking and dope-reeking restrooms with some guy she’d never met before, and never saw again.

Probably not. She smiled to herself.

Just went to show kids didn’t know everything, huh.

An hour later, she’d had enough. The thumping was okay while she was just watching with half an eye – and the volume had actually dropped for a while, which maybe suggested he was doing some homework, which was a relief – but it had started ratcheting up again and in ten minutes there was a re-run of a West Wing episode she’d never seen before. You needed a clear head and peace and quiet to follow what the hell was going on with those guys, they talked so fast. Plus, Jesus, it was half past nine and getting beyond a joke.

She tried hollering up at the ceiling (Josh’s bedroom was directly overhead) but received no indication she’d been heard. So she sighed, put her depleted plate of goodies on the coffee table, and hoisted herself off the couch. Tramped upstairs, feeling as if she was pushing against a wall of noise, and banged on his door.

After a fairly short time it was opened by some skinny guy with extraordinary hair. For a split second Gina didn’t even recognize him. She wasn’t looking at a boy any more, nothing like, and Gina realized suddenly that she and Bill were sharing their house with a young man.

‘Honey,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to cramp your style, but do you have anything that’s more like actual music, if you’re going to play it that loud?’

‘Huh?’

‘Turn it down.’

He grinned lopsidedly, and went back into the room to jack the volume down. He actually cut it in half, which emboldened Gina to take a step into his room. It struck her it had been a while since she’d been there when he was also present. In years past she and Bill had spent hours sitting on the floor here together, watching their tot careering around on wobbly legs and bringing them random objects with a triumphant ‘Gah!’, thinking how magical it all was; and later tucking him in and reading a story, or two, or three; then perched on the bed in the early years of homework and puzzling out sums.

At some point in the last year the rules had changed. It was a solo mission now when she came in to fix the bed or sweep up piles of t-shirts. She was in and out quickly, too, remembering her own youth well enough to respect her child’s space.

She saw that, amongst the chaos of clothing and CD cases and pieces of at least one dismembered computer, there was evidence of homework being tackled.

‘How’s it going?’

He shrugged. Shrugging was the lingua franca. She remembered that too. ‘Okay,’ he added.

‘Good. Who’s that you’re listening to, anyway?’

Josh blushed faintly, as if his mom had asked who this Connie Lingus was, that everyone was talking about.

‘Stu Rezni,’ he said, diffidently. ‘He …’

‘Used to hit sticks for Fallow. I know. I saw him at the Astoria. Before they knocked it down. He was so wasted he fell off his stool.’

She was gratified to see her son’s eyebrows shoot up. She tried not to smile.

‘Can you keep the volume sane for a while, honey? There’s a show I want to watch. Plus people are staggering up the street with bleeding ears, and you know how that lowers the tone.’

‘Sure,’ he said, with a genuine smile. ‘Sorry.’

‘No problem,’ she said, thinking I hope he’s going to be okay. He was a nice boy, polite, a slacker who still got (most of) his chores done eventually. She hoped without a trace of egotism that he’d taken on enough of her, too, along with the big old helping of Bill he’d absorbed. This young man already spent a lot of time alone, and seldom seemed more content than when taking something apart or putting it back together. That was cool, of course, but she hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she saw evidence of his first hangover. Man cannot live by coding skills alone, not even in these strange days.

‘Later,’ she said, hoping it didn’t sound too lame.

The doorbell rang.

As she hurried downstairs she heard the volume drop a little farther, and smiled. She still had this expression on her face when she opened the front door.

It was dark outside, the street lamps at the corner spreading orange light over the fallen leaves on the lawn and sidewalk. A strong breeze rustled those still left on the trees, sending a few to spiral down and around the crossroads where the two residential streets met.

A figure was standing a couple of yards back from the door. It was tall, wearing a long dark coat.

‘Yes?’ Gina said.

She flipped the porch light on. It showed a man in his mid-fifties, with short, dark hair, sallow skin in flat planes around his face. His eyes seemed dark too, almost black. They gave no impression of depth, as if they had been painted on his head from the outside.

‘I’m looking for William Anderson,’ he said.

‘He’s not here right now. Who are you?’

‘Agent Shepherd,’ the man said, and then paused, for a deep cough. ‘Mind if I come inside?’

Gina did mind, but he just stepped up onto the porch and walked right past her and into the house.

‘Hold on a second there, buster,’ she said, leaving the door open and following him. ‘Can I see some ID?’

The man pulled out a wallet and flipped it open at her without bothering to look in her direction. Instead he panned his gaze methodically around the room, then up at the ceiling.

‘What’s this about?’ Gina asked. She’d seen the three big letters clearly enough, but the idea of having a real live Fed in the house didn’t even slightly compute.

‘I need to talk to your husband,’ the man said. His matter-of-factness made the situation seem even more absurd.

Gina put her hands on her hips. This was her house, after all. ‘Well, he’s out, like I said.’

The man turned toward her. His eyes, which had appeared flat and dead before, slowly seemed to be coming alive.

‘You did, and I heard you. I want to know where he is. And I need to take a look around your house.’

‘The hell you do,’ Gina said. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but …’

His hand came up so fast she didn’t even see it. The first she knew was when it was clamped around the bottom of her face, holding her jaw like a claw.

She was too shocked to make a sound as he began to pull her slowly toward him. But then she started to shout, substituting volume for the articulation denied her by being unable to move the lower half of her mouth.

‘Where is it?’ he asked. Matter-of-fact had become almost bored.

Gina had no clue what he was talking about. She tried to pull away, hitting at him with her fists, kicking out, jerking her head back and forth. He put up with this for about one second and then whipped his other hand around to smack her across the side of her head. Her ears rang like a dropped hubcap and she nearly fell, but he held her up, wrenching her jaw to the side in the process, making it feel like it was going to pop out.

‘I’m going to find it anyway,’ he said, and now she knew she could feel something tearing at the side of her head. ‘But you can save us both some time and trouble. Where is it? Where does he work?’

‘I … don’t …’

‘Mom?’

Gina and the man turned together, to see Josh at the bottom of the stairs. Her son blinked, a deep frown spreading across his face.

‘Let go of my mom.’

Gina tried to tell Josh to get back upstairs, to just run, but it came out as desperate, breathless grunts. The man stuck his other hand in the pocket of his coat, started taking something out.

Josh hit the ground running and launched himself across the living room. ‘Let go of my …’

Gina just had time to realize she’d got it wrong before, that her son wasn’t a man after all but just a little boy, stretched taller and thinner but still so young, when the man shot him in the face.

She screamed then, or tried to, and the tall man swore quietly and dragged her with him as he walked over to the front door and pushed it shut.

Then he pulled her back into the room where her son lay on the floor, one arm and one leg moving in twitches. Her head felt like it was full of bright light, stuttering with shock. Then he punched her precisely on the jaw and she didn’t know where she was.

A second or several minutes passed.

Then she was aware again, sprawled on the floor, half-propped against the couch she’d been curled up in ten minutes before. The plate of food lay upside down within arms’ reach. Her jaw was hanging loose, she couldn’t seem to move it. It felt as if someone had pushed long, thick nails into both of her ears.

The man in the coat was squatted down next to Josh, whose right arm was still moving, lazily smearing through the pool of blood seeping from his head.

The smell of gasoline reached Gina’s face. The man finished squirting something from a small metal can over her son, then dropped it on him and stood up.

He looked down at Gina.

‘Last chance,’ he said. His forehead was beaded with sweat, though the house was not warm. In one hand he held a cigarette lighter. In the other he held his gun. ‘Where is it?’

As he sparked the lighter up, holding it over Josh and looking her in the eyes, Gina knew that – whatever this was – it wasn’t a last chance to live.

Part 1

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc – is sure to be noticed.

Søren Kierkegaard

The Sickness Unto Death

Chapter 1

There was this girl I knew back in high school. Her name was Donna and even that was wrong about her, as if she’d been mislabelled at birth. She wasn’t a Donna. Not in real terms. She made you realize there must be an underlying rhythm to the universe, and you knew this purely because she wasn’t hitting it. She walked a little too quickly. She turned her head a little too slow. It was like she was dubbed onto reality a beat out of true. She was one of those kids you saw at a distance, toting a pile of books, standing diffidently with people you didn’t realize were even at the school. She had friends, she did okay in class, she wasn’t a total loser and she wasn’t dumb. She was just kind of hard to see.

Like all schools we had a pecking order of looks, but Donna somehow wasn’t on the same scale. Her skin was pale and her features fine-boned and evenly spaced, faultless except for a crescent scar to the side of her right eye, legacy of some toddling collision with a table. The eyes themselves were inky-grey and very clear, and on the rare occasions when you got to look into them you received a vivid sense she was real after all – which only made you wonder what you thought she was the rest of the time. She was a little skinny, maybe, but otherwise slightly cute in every way except that she somehow just … wasn’t. It was as if she released no pheromones, or they operated on an inaudible waveband, broadcasting their signal to sexual radios either out of date or not yet invented.

I found her attractive, nonetheless, though I was never really sure why. So I noticed when it looked like she was hanging out with – or in the vicinity of – a guy named Gary Fisher. Fisher was one of the kids who strode the halls as if accompanied by fanfare, the group that makes anyone who’s been through the American school system instantly wary of egalitarian philosophies later in life. He played football with conspicuous success. He was on the starting basketball line-up, played significant tennis too. He was good-looking, naturally: when God confers control of sport’s spheres he tends to give the package a buff too. Fisher wasn’t like the actors you see in teen movies now, impossibly handsome and free of facial blemish, but he looked right, back in the days when the rest of us stared dismally in the mirror every morning and wondered what had gone wrong, and whether it would get better, or even worse.

He was also, oddly, not too much of an asshole. I knew him a little from track, where I had a minor talent for hurling things a long way. I’d gathered from the jock grapevine that a realignment had taken place among the ruling classes, principally that Gary’s girl Nicole was now going with one of his friends instead, in what appeared to be an amicable transfer of chattels. You didn’t have to be too keen an observer of the social scene to perceive a degree of interest in taking her place – but the truly weird thing was that Donna seemed to believe herself amongst the runners. It was as if she had received intelligence from somewhere that the caste system was illusory, and actually you could fit a square peg in a round hole. She couldn’t sit at the same table at lunch, of course, but would wind up on one nearby, close to Gary’s line of sight. She would engineer bumps in the corridor, but manage nothing more than nervous laughs. I even saw her a couple of Fridays out at Radical Bob’s, a burger/pizza place where people tended to start the weekend. She would stop by whatever table Fisher was sitting at and deliver some remark about a class or assignment which would fall to the floor like a brick. Then she would wander off, a little too slowly now, as if hoping to be called back. This never happened. Other than being mildly perplexed I doubt Fisher had the slightest clue what was going on. After a couple weeks a deal was done in some gilded back room – or the back seat of a gilded car, more likely – and one morning Gary was to be found in the company of Courtney Willis, textbook hot blonde. Life went on.

For most of us.

Two days later, Donna was found in the bathtub at her parents’ home. Her wrists had been cut with determination and only one testing slash on the forearm. The adult consensus, which I overheard more than once, was it could not have been a fast way to go – despite a last-ditch attempt to hasten progress by pushing a pair of nail scissors deep into her right eye socket, as if that crescent scar had been some kind of omen. There was a hand-written letter to Gary Fisher on the floor, the words blurred by water which had spilled over the edges of the tub. Lots of people later claimed to have seen the letter, or a photocopy, or overheard someone saying what was in it. But as far as I know, none of this was true.

News spread fast. People went through the motions and there were outbreaks of crying and prayer, but I don’t think anyone was shaken to their core. Personally, I was not surprised or even particularly sorry. That sounds callous but the truth was it felt like it made sense. Donna was a weird chick.

A strange girl, a dumb death. End of story.

Or so it seemed to most of us. Gary Fisher’s reaction was different, and at the time it was the most surprising thing I had ever seen. Everything was new and strange back then, events backlit by the foreshortened perspective of a fledging life. The guy who did something halfway cool one time became our very own Clint Eastwood. A party that happened a year before could take on the status of legend, generating nicknames that would last a lifetime. And when someone went haring out into the farther reaches of left field, it tended to stick in your mind.

On the following Monday we heard Fisher had quit the team. All the teams. He withstood being bawled out, and walked away. Maybe these days you’d get some kind of slacker kudos for that kind of shit. Not in the 1980s, and not in the town where I grew up. It was so out there it was disturbing – the Alpha Teenager Who Resigned. Fisher became the guy you’d see wandering across the campus in transit between the library and class, as if he’d slipped into Donna’s slot. And he worked. Hard. Over the next months he hauled his grade point average up, first a little, and then a lot. He went from being a C student – and some of those had been massaged through sports prowess – to Bs and some regular As. Maybe he was getting parent-funded extra tuition after school, but actually I doubt it. I think he just jumped tracks, decided to be some other guy. By the end you hardly ever saw him except in class. The masses dealt with him warily. No one wanted to get too close, in case the madness was catching.

I did see him this one afternoon, though. I’d been out training for our last ever track meet, and stayed on after the rest of the team left. Theoretically I was practising the javelin but really I just liked being there when no one else was around. I’d spent a lot of hours running that track and it had started to dawn on me that the end was coming and some things were happening for the last time. As I pounded up the approach, back and forth, refining my run-up, I saw a guy walking from the far end. After I while I realized it was Gary Fisher.

He wandered the periphery, not headed anywhere in particular. He’d been one of our star sprinters before he quit, and maybe he was there for the same kind of reason that I was. He wound up a few yards away and watched for a little while. Eventually he spoke.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Not going to win, though.’

‘How’s that?’

I explained that a guy from another school had recently revealed himself not only to be good at throwing, but to care about it also. After easy wins had stopped being a given, my interest had waned. I didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the bottom line.

He shrugged. ‘Never know. Could be Friday’s going to be your day. Be cool to go out on a win.’

For a moment then, I found I did care. Maybe I could do it, this last time. Fisher stood a while longer, looking across the track, as if hearing the beat of feet in races gone by.

‘She was provisional,’ I said, suddenly.

It was like he hadn’t heard me. Then he slowly turned his head. ‘What’s that?’

‘Donna,’ I said. ‘She never really … locked in, you know? Like she was just renting space.’

He frowned. I kept going.

‘It was like … like she knew it might just not work out, you know? Like she came into the world aware that happy-ever-after was a long shot. So she put all her chips on one bet to win. Came in red instead of black, so she just walked away from the table.’

I hadn’t rehearsed any of this, but when I’d said it I felt proud. It meant something profound, or sounded like it might – which is plenty good enough when you’re eighteen.

Fisher looked at the ground for a minute, and then seemed to nod faintly. ‘Thanks.’

I nodded back, all out of words, and went thudding down the track to hurl my spear. Maybe I was showing off, hoping to impress the Gary Fisher of eight months before. Either way I pulled my arm over far too fast, reopened an old split on the tip of my middle finger, and wound up not making the last meet after all.

The end of school came and went. Like everyone else I was too busy rushing through celebrated rites of passage to pay much attention to people I didn’t really know. Tests, dances, everything hurried as our childhoods started to run out of gas. Then – bang: out into the real world, which has a way of feeling like that super-test you never got around to studying for. It still feels that way to me sometimes. I don’t think I heard Fisher’s name mentioned once during the summer, and then I left town to go to college. I thought about him every now and then over the next couple years, but eventually he dropped out of my head along with all the other things that had no relevance to my life.

And so I was not really prepared for the experience of meeting him again, nearly twenty years later, when he turned up at the door of my house and started talking as if no time had passed at all.

I was at my desk. I was trying to work, though a time management study would probably have suggested my job consisted of staring out the window, with only occasional and apparently random glances at a computer screen. The house was very quiet, and when the phone rang it jerked me back in my chair.

I reached out, surprised Amy was calling the land line rather than my cell, but not thinking much more about it than that. Being on the phone to my wife meant a break from work. Then I could make more coffee. Go have a cigarette on the deck. Time would pass. Tomorrow would come.

‘Hey, babe,’ I said. ‘How stands the corporate struggle?’

‘Is this Jack? Jack Whalen?’

It was a man’s voice. ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up and paying more attention. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Hang onto your hat, my friend. It’s Gary Fisher.’

The name sent up a flag straight away, but it took another second to haul it up through the years. Names from the past are like streets you haven’t driven in a while. You have to remember where they go.

‘You still there?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just surprised. Gary Fisher? Really?’

‘It’s my name,’ the guy said, and laughed. ‘I wouldn’t lie about something like that.’

‘I guess not,’ I said. I had question marks right across the dial. ‘How did you get my number?’

‘A contact in LA. I tried calling last night.’

‘Right,’ I said, remembering a couple of blank calls on the machine. ‘You didn’t leave a message.’

‘Thought it might come across kind of weird, getting in touch after nearly twenty years.’

‘A little,’ I admitted. I found it hard to imagine Fisher and I had anything to discuss unless he was running the class reunion, which seemed unlikely in the extreme. ‘So, what can I do for you, Gary?’

‘It’s more what I might be able to do for you,’ he said. ‘Or maybe both of us. Look – where is it you live, exactly? I’m in Seattle for a few days. Thought it might be cool to meet up, talk about old times.’

‘Place called Birch Crossing. Hour and a half inland. Plus my wife’s got the car,’ I added. Amy has claimed that if you could get enough unsociable people together in a room to vote, they’d make me their king. She’s probably right. Since my book came out I’d been contacted by a few other people from the past, though none as far back as Fisher. I hadn’t bothered to reply to their emails, forwarded via the publisher. Okay, so we used to know each other. What’s your point?

‘I’ve got a day to kill,’ Fisher persisted. ‘Had a string of meetings cancelled.’

‘You don’t want to just tell me on the phone?’

‘Would be a long call. Seriously, you’d be doing me a favour, Jack. I’m going nuts in this hotel and if I walk round Pike Place Market one more time I’m going to wind up with a big dead fish I don’t need.’

I thought about it. Curiosity struck a deal with the desire not to work, the terms brokered by a small part of my soul for which – absurdly – Gary Fisher’s name evidently still held something of a charge.

‘Well, okay,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

He arrived a little after two. I’d achieved nothing in the meantime. Even a call to Amy’s cell phone for a hey-how are-you had dead-ended in her answering service. I was becalmed in the kitchen thinking vaguely about lunch when I heard someone pulling around in the drive.

I walked up the polished wood steps and opened the front door to see a black Lexus where our SUV usually sat – a vehicle that was currently in Seattle, with my wife. The car door opened and some late-thirties guy got out. He crunched over the gravel.

‘Jack Whalen,’ he said, breath clouding up around his face. ‘So you grew up. How did that happen?’

‘Beats me,’ I said. ‘Did everything I could to avoid it.’

I made coffee and we took it down into the living room. He looked around for a few moments, checking out the view of the wooded valley through the big plate glass windows, then turned to me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Still got that good throwing arm?’

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Don’t get much occasion to throw stuff these days.’

‘You should. It’s very liberating. I try to throw something at least once a week.’

He grinned, and for a moment he looked pretty much how I remembered him, albeit better dressed. He reached a hand across the coffee table. I shook it.

‘Looking good, Jack.’

‘You too.’

He was. You can tell men in good condition just from how they use a chair. There’s a confidence in their poise, a sense that sitting is not a relief but merely one of the many positions in which their body is at ease. Gary looked trim and fit. His hair was well cut and not-grey, and he had the skin that healthy eating and non-smoking delivers to those with the patience to endure that type of lifestyle. His face had matured into that of a youthful senator from somewhere unimportant, the kind who might have a shot at Vice President some day, and his eyes were clear and blue. The only thing I had over him was that the lines around my mouth and eyes were less pronounced, which surprised me.

He was silent for a few moments, doubtless making a similar assessment. Meeting a contemporary after a long time personifies the passage of time in a serious and irrevocable way.

‘I read your book,’ he said, confirming what I’d suspected.

‘So you’re the one.’

‘Really? Didn’t do so well? I’m surprised.’

‘It did okay,’ I admitted. ‘Better than. Problem is, I’m not sure there’s another.’

He shrugged. ‘Everyone thinks you’ve got to do things over and over. Nail your colours to the mast, make it who you are. Maybe one was all you had.’

‘Could be.’

‘You couldn’t go back to the police force?’ He saw the way I looked at him. ‘You thank the LAPD in the acknowledgements, Jack.’

Slightly against my will, I smiled back. Fisher still had that effect. ‘No. I’m done there. So how do you earn a buck these days?’

‘Corporate law. I’m a partner in a firm back east.’

Him being an attorney figured, but didn’t give me a lot to work with. We knocked sentences back and forth for a little while, mentioning people and places we’d once known, but it didn’t catch alight. It’s one thing if you’ve kept in touch over the years, lit beacons to steer you across the seas of time. Otherwise it seems strange, being confronted with this impostor who happens to have the same name as a kid you once knew. Though Fisher had referred to old times we didn’t really have any, unless pounding around the same sports track counted, or a shared ability to remember the menu at Radical Bob’s. A lot had happened to me since then, probably to him too. It was evident that neither of us counted classmates as friends or retained ties to the town where we’d grown up. The kids we’d once been now seemed imaginary, a genesis myth to explain how we’d used up our first twenty years.

‘So,’ I said, swallowing the rest of my coffee. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’

He smiled. ‘You’re done with the small talk?’

‘Never really been a core skill.’

‘I remember. What makes you think I’ve got something to say?’

‘You said you did. Plus, until you got my new number, you evidently thought I still lived in LA. That’s not a couple hours’ drive from Seattle. So you started looking for me for some other reason.’

He nodded, as if pleased. ‘How’d you find this place, anyway? Birch Crossing? Is it even on maps?’

‘Amy did. We’d talked about getting out of LA. I had, at least. She got this new job. It meant we could basically be anywhere as long as she could get to an airport once in a while. She found this place online or somewhere, came and checked it out. I took her word for it.’

‘Liking it?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Kind of a change from Los Angeles, though.’

‘That was partly the point.’

‘Any kids?’

‘No.’

‘I got a couple. Five and two years old. You should try it. They change your life, dude.’

‘So I hear. Where are you based these days?’

‘Evanston? Though I work downtown Chicago. Which brings me to it, I guess.’

He stared at his hands for a moment, and then started talking in earnest.

Chapter 2

‘Here’s what I know,’ he said. ‘Three weeks ago two people were murdered in Seattle. A woman and her son, killed in their own home. The police were called after a neighbour noticed smoke and came outside to see flames in the house. When the police get in they find Gina Anderson, thirty-seven, lying in the living room. Someone dislocated her jaw and broke her neck. The other side of the room was Joshua Anderson. He’d been shot in the head and then set on fire. According to the fire department it wasn’t this that burned the house, though: the flames had only just got to that part when they arrived. The main blaze had been set in the basement, where the woman’s husband, Bill Anderson, had a workshop. From the debris it looked like someone had trashed the place, emptied out a bunch of filing cabinets full of notes and papers, and put a match to it all. I don’t know how well you know Seattle, but this is up in the Broadway area, overlooking downtown. The houses are close to each other, bungalows, two storey, mainly of wooden construction. If the fire had really gotten going it wouldn’t have taken much to jump to the ones around it and wipe out the whole block.’

‘So where’s the husband?’ I asked.

‘No one knows. In the early part of the evening he was out with two male friends. He’s a lecturer at the Community College, about a half mile away. They have a semi-regular night out, every six weeks. These guys confirm Anderson was with them until a quarter after ten. They split up outside a bar, went their separate ways. Nobody’s seen Anderson since.’

‘How are the police handling it?’

‘Nobody saw anyone come or go from the house during the evening. The prevailing assumption is Anderson is the suspect, and they’re not looking anywhere else. Problem is working out why he’d do this. His colleagues say he seemed distracted, and they and others claim he’d been that way for a few weeks, maybe a month or more. But no one’s got anything on problems he might have had, there’s no talk of another woman or anything along those lines. Lecturers don’t make a whole lot of cash, and Gina Anderson wasn’t earning, but there’s no evidence of a drastic need for money. There’s a life insurance policy on the wife but it’s hardly worth getting out of bed for, never mind killing someone.’

‘The husband did it,’ I said. ‘They always do. Except when it’s the wives.’

Fisher shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. According to the neighbours, everything was fine. Their son liked his music a little loud, but otherwise all was good. No arguments, no atmosphere.’

‘Bad families are like the minds of functioning alcoholics. You have to live inside to have the first clue what’s going on.’

‘So how do you read it?’

‘Could be one of any number of scenarios. Maybe Bill was laying into Gina that night over something you and I will never understand. Son hears the noise, comes down, yells at dad to stop. Dad won’t. Son’s been seeing this all his life, tonight he’s not taking it any more. He goes to the closet and gets his father’s gun. Comes back and says he means it – stop beating up on Mom. They fight, dad grabs hold of the gun, or it goes off accidentally, whatever. Son gets shot. Wife’s screaming the place down, his son’s lying on the floor, Anderson knows he’s not walking away from this. So he sets a fire in the part of the house that’s known to be his domain to make it look like an intruder, then makes sure there’s no witnesses to tell the story another way. Right now he’s the other side of the country and drunk and practically out of his mind with remorse, or else halfway to convincing himself they brought it on themselves. He’ll either commit suicide within the week or get caught in eighteen months living quietly with a waitress in North Carolina.’

Fisher was silent for a moment. ‘That works, I guess,’ he said. ‘But I don’t believe it. Three reasons. First is Anderson is the nerds’ poster nerd, a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. He doesn’t present as someone who could physically dominate two other people.’

‘Body weight is irrelevant,’ I said. ‘Domination is mental. Always.’

‘Which also doesn’t sound like Anderson, but I’ll let that pass. The second reason is there’s a witness who claims to have seen someone who looked like Anderson entering the street at around twenty to eleven. No one’s paying much attention to this woman because she’s old and seminuts and loaded to her back teeth with lithium, but she claims she saw him get far enough down the road to see his house, then turn and run away.’

‘Not someone you’re going to put on the stand,’ I said. ‘And even if she did see him, it could be Anderson setting up an alibi. What else you got?’

‘Just this. Joshua Anderson died from the burn injuries in the end, but he was already leaving the world care of the gunshot wound to the face. But no bullet was found at the scene. The pathology report suggests it got trapped in the skull, bounced around, never made it out the other side. There’s no exit wound. But there are indications of subsequent trauma from a sharp instrument. So the person who killed him then stuck a knife in the mess and dug out the shell, while the kid’s clothes were on fire. That doesn’t sound to me like something a physics lecturer could do. To his son.’

He sat back in his chair. ‘Especially when he didn’t own a gun in the first place.’

I shrugged.

‘Sure,’ I admitted. ‘There’s loose ends. There always are. But the smart money stays on the husband. What’s your interest in this, anyhow?’

‘It relates to an estate we’re handling back home,’ he said. ‘I can’t get into it more than that right now.’

For just a moment Fisher seemed evasive, but the details of his professional life were not my concern. ‘So why are you telling me about it?’

‘I want your help.’

‘With what?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really.’

‘It would benefit me, benefit us, to find out what actually took place that night.’

‘The police are on it, aren’t they?’

‘The cops are all about proving Anderson murdered his wife and son, and I don’t think that’s what happened.’

I smiled. ‘So I gather. But that doesn’t mean you’re right. And I still don’t get why you’re here.’

‘You’re a cop.’

‘No. I was a cop.’

‘Same thing. You have investigative experience.’

‘For once your research fails you, Gary. I was with Patrol Division all the way. A street grunt.’

‘Not formal experience, no. I know you never made detective. I also know you never even applied.’

I looked hard at him. ‘Gary, if you’re going to tell me you somehow got access to my personnel files, then …’

‘I didn’t need to, Jack. You’re a smart guy. You wanted to make detective, you would have. You didn’t, so I figure you didn’t try.’

‘I’m not very susceptible to flattery,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘I know that too. And I remember you would rather not try than try and fail, and maybe that’s the real reason you spent nearly a decade on the streets.’

It had been a while since someone had spoken to me that way. He saw this in my face.

‘Look,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘This isn’t coming out right. I’m sorry. What happened to the Andersons isn’t actually a huge deal to me. It’s just a little weird and might make my life simpler if I could get it unravelled. I read your book. It seemed to me you might be interested. That’s all.’

‘I appreciate the thought,’ I said. ‘But that feels like another life now. Plus I was on the job in LA, not Seattle. I don’t know the city and I don’t know the people. I couldn’t do much more than you, and I can do a lot less than the cops. If you genuinely think there’s a problem with the way they’re investigating this, it’s them you should be talking to.’

‘I tried,’ he said. ‘They think the same as you.’

‘So probably that’s the way it is. A sad story. The end.’

Fisher nodded slowly, his eyes on the view outside the window. The light was beginning to turn, the sky heading towards a more leaden grey. ‘Looks like heavy weather. I should probably be heading back. I don’t want to be driving over that mountain in the dark.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, standing. ‘After that drive I guess you were hoping for more.’

‘I wanted an opinion, and I got one. Too bad it wasn’t the one I was looking for.’

‘Could have got you this far on the phone,’ I smiled. ‘Like I said.’

‘Yeah, I know. But hey – been good to see you after all this time. To catch up. Let’s keep in touch.’

I said yes it had, and yes we should, and that was that. We small-talked a bit longer and then I walked him to the door and watched as he drove away.

I stayed outside for a few moments after he’d gone, though it was cold. I felt a little as if a bigger kid had come up to me in the playground and asked if I wanted to join his game, and I had said no out of pride. Growing older, it appears, does not mean growing up.

I went back indoors and returned to my desk. There I wasted probably the last straightforward afternoon of my life gazing out of the window, waiting vaguely for time to pass.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d been working harder that morning, let the machine take Fisher’s call. Even if he’d left a message I’d have been unlikely to get around to calling him back. Most of the time I don’t think this would have made any difference. I believe this thing was heading towards me regardless, on the horizon, inevitable. I’d like to claim I had no warning, that it came from nowhere out of a clear blue sky. It wouldn’t be true. The signs and causes were there. At times in the last nine months, perhaps the last few years, I had noticed little differences. I’d tried to ignore them, to keep going, and so when it happened it was like falling off a log, a sturdy trunk that had been floating down the same river for many years, to discover there’d never been any water supporting me after all and I was suddenly flat on my back in a strange land I didn’t recognize: a dusty plain where there were no trees, no mountains, no landmarks of any kind, no way of telling how I might have got there from wherever I had been before.

The fall must have been coming for a while, gathering pace below the threshold of discernible change. At least since the afternoon on the deck of the new house, probably for months or even years before that. But digging up the roots of chaos is like saying it’s not the moment the car hits you that’s important, or the split second when you step off the kerb without looking. You can argue that as soon as you stopped checking when you crossed the street, that’s when the trouble really began. The moment of impact is what you remember, however. That breathless instant of screech and thud, the second when the car hits and all other futures are cancelled.

The beat in time when it suddenly becomes clear that something in your world is badly wrong.

Chapter 3

A beach on the Pacific coast, a seemingly endless stretch of sand: almost white by day but now turning sallow-grey and matt in the fading light. The afternoon’s few footprints have been washed away, in one of nature’s many patient acts of erasure. In summer kids from inland spend the weekends here, gleaming in the sun of uncomplicated youth and pumping default-value music out of baby speakers. They are almost never picked off by sharpshooters, sadly, but go on to have happy and unfulfilled lives making too much noise all over the planet. On a Thursday a long way out of season the beach is left undisturbed except for the busy teams of sandpipers who skitter up and down at the waterline, legs scissoring like those of cheerful mechanical toys. They have concluded the day’s business and flown to bed, leaving the beach quiet and still.

Half a mile up the coast is the small and bespoke seaside town of Cannon Beach, with its short run of discreet hotels, but here most of the buildings are modest vacation homes, none more than two storeys high and each a decent distance from its neighbour. Some are squat white oblongs in need of re-plastering, others more adventurous arrangements of wooden octagonal structures. All have weathered walkways leading over the scrubby dune, down to the sand. It is November now and almost all these buildings are dark, the smell of suntan lotion and candle wax sealed in to await future vacations, to welcome parents who each time glumly spy a little more grey in these unfamiliar mirrors, and children who stand a little taller and a little farther from the adults who were once the centre of their lives.

There has been no precipitation for two days – very rare for Oregon at this time of year – but this evening a thick knot of cloud is coalescing out to sea, like a drop of ink spreading in water. It will take an hour or two to make landfall, where it will turn the shadows rich blue-black and strip the air with relentless rain.

In the meantime a girl is sitting on the sand, down at the tide line.

Her watch said it was twenty-five minutes before six, which was okay. When it was fifteen minutes before six she had to go home, well not home exactly, but the cottage. Dad always called it the beach house but Mom always said the cottage, and as Dad was not here it was obviously the cottage this time. Dad not being here made a number of other differences, one of which Madison was currently considering.

When they came to spend a week at the beach most days were exactly the same. They would drive up to Cannon Beach, have a look around the galleries (once), to get groceries from the market (twice), and see if there was maybe something cool in Geppetto’s Toy Shoppe (as often as Madison would make it happen, three times was the record). Otherwise they just lived on the sands. They got up early and walked along the beach, then back again. The day was spent sitting and swimming and playing – with a break mid-day in the cottage for sandwiches and to cool down – and then around five o’clock a long walk again, in the opposite direction from the one in the morning. The early walk was just for waking up, filling sleepy heads with light. At the end of the afternoon it was all about shells – and sand dollars in particular. Though it was Mom who liked them the most (she had saved all the ones they’d ever found, in a cigar box back at home) the three of them looked together, a family with one ambulatory goal. After the walk everyone showered and there were nachos and bean dip and frosted glasses of Tropical Punch Kool-Aid in the beach house and then they’d drive out for dinner to Pacific Cowgirls in Cannon Beach, which had fishermen’s nets on the walls and breaded shrimp with cocktail sauce and waiters who called you ma’am even if you were small.

But when Madison and her mom had arrived yesterday they had been sailing under different colours. It was the wrong time of year, and cold. They unpacked in silence and dutifully walked up the beach a little way, but though her mother’s eyes appeared to be on the tide line Madison didn’t see her bend down once, even for a quartz pebble that was flushed rose pink at one end and which she’d normally have had like a shot. When they got back Maddy managed to find some Kool-Aid from last time in the cupboard but her mom had not remembered to buy Doritos or anything else. Madison had started to protest but saw how slowly her mom was moving and so she stopped. Cowgirls was closed for winter renovations so they went somewhere else and sat by a window in a big empty room overlooking a dark sea under flat clouds. She had spaghetti, which was okay, but not what you had at the beach.

That morning it had started out freezing and they had barely walked at all. Mom spent the morning near the bottom of the walkway over the dunes, huddled in a blanket, wearing dark glasses and holding a book. Mid-afternoon she went back inside, telling Madison it was all right for her to stay out but she had to remain within forty yards of the cottage.

This was okay for a while, even kind of fun to have the beach to herself. She didn’t go into the sea. Though she had enjoyed this in the past, for the last couple of years she had found herself slightly wary of large bodies of water, even when it wasn’t this cold. She built and refined a castle instead, which was fun. She dug as deep a hole as she was able.

But when it got close to five o’clock her feet started itching. She stood up, sat down. Played a little longer, though the game was getting old. It was bad enough skipping the walk in the morning, but not doing it now was really weird. The walking was important. It must be. Or why else did they always do it?

In the end she walked down to the surf alone and stood irresolute for a few moments. The beach remained deserted in both directions, the sky low and heavy and grey and the air getting cool. She waited as the first strong breeze came running ahead of the storm, worrying at the leg of her shorts and buzzing it against her leg. She waited, looking up at the dunes at the point where it hid the cottage, just over the other side.

Her mother did not appear.

She started slowly. She walked forty yards to the right, using the length of a big stride as a rough guide. It felt strange. She immediately turned around and walked back to where she’d started, and then another forty yards. This double length almost felt like walking, nearly reached the point where you forgot you were supposed to be going anywhere – because you weren’t – and instead it became just the wet rustle of waves in your ears and the blur of your feet swishing in and out of view as your eyes picked over shapes and colours between the curling water and the hard, wet sand.

And so she did it again, and again. Kept doing it until the two turning points were just like odd, curved steps. Trying to make the waves sound like they always had. Trying not to imagine where they would eat tonight, and how little they would talk. Trying not to …

Then she stopped. Slowly she bent down, hand outstretched. She picked something out of the collage of seaweed, driftwood fragments, battered homes of dead sea-dwellers. Held it up to her face, scarcely believing.

She had found an almost complete sand dollar.

It was small, admittedly, not much bigger than a quarter. It had a couple of dinks around the edges. It was a grottier grey than most, and stained green on one side. But it would count. Would have counted, that is, if things were counting as normal. Things were not.

What should have been a moment of jubilation felt heavy and dull. She realized the thing she held in her hand might as well be as big as a dinner plate and have no chips in it at all. It could be dry, sandy-golden and perfect like the ones you saw for sale in stores. It wouldn’t matter.

Madison sat down suddenly and stared at the flat shell in her hand. She made a gentle fist around it, then looked out at the sea.

She was still sitting there ten minutes later when she heard a noise. A whapping sound, as if a large bird was flying up the tide line towards her, long black wings slowly beating. Madison turned her head.

A man was standing on the beach.

He was about thirty feet away. He was tall and the noise was the sound of his black coat flapping in cold winds from a storm now boiling across the sky like a purple-black second sea. The man was motionless, hands pushed deep in the pockets of his coat. What low light made its way through the cloud was behind him, and you could not see his face. Madison knew immediately the man was looking at her, however. Why else would he be standing there, like a scarecrow made of shadows, dressed not for the beach but for church or the cemetery?

She glanced casually back over her shoulder, logging her position in relation to the cottage’s walkway. It was not directly behind, but it was close enough. She could get there quickly. Maybe that would be a good idea, especially as the big hand was at quarter to.

But instead she turned back, and once more looked out at the dark and choppy ocean. It was a bad decision, and partly caused by something as simple as the lack of a congratulatory clap on the shoulder when she’d found what she held in her hand; but she made the call and in the end no one else was to blame.

The man waited a moment, and then headed towards her. He walked in a straight line, seemingly unbothered by the water that hissed around his shoes, up and back. He crunched as he came. He was not looking for shells and did not care what happened to them.

Madison realized she’d been dumb. She should have moved straight away, when she had a bigger advantage. Just got up, walked home. Now she’d have to rely on surprise, on the fact the man was probably assuming that if she hadn’t run before then she wouldn’t now. Madison decided she would wait until the man got a little closer and then suddenly bolt: moving as fast as she could and shouting loud. Mom would have the door open. She might even be on her way out right now, come to see why she was not yet back. She should be – she was officially late. But Madison knew in her heart that her mother might just be sitting in her chair instead, shoulders rounded and bent, looking down at her hands the way she had after they came back from the restaurant the night before.

And so she got ready, making sure her heels were well-planted in the hard sand, that her legs were tensed like springs, ready to push off with everything she had.

The man stopped.

Madison had intended to keep looking out at the waves until the last second, as if she wasn’t even aware of the man’s presence, but instead found herself turning her head a little to check what was going on.

The man had come to a halt earlier than Madison expected, still about twenty feet away. Now she could see his face she could tell he was way older than her dad, maybe even past Uncle Brian’s age, which was fifty. Uncle Brian was always smiling, though, as if he was trying to remember a joke he’d heard at the office and was sure you were going to enjoy. This man did not look like that.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. His voice was dry and quiet, but carried.

Madison hurriedly looked away, heart thumping. Unthinkingly protecting the flat shell still in her left hand, she braced her right palm into the sand too now, ready to push off against it, hard.

‘But first I need to know something,’ he said.

Madison realized she had to reach maximum speed immediately. Uncle Brian was fat and looked like he couldn’t run at all. This man was different that way too. She took a deep breath. Decided to do it on three. One …

‘Look at me, girl.’

Two …

Then suddenly the man was between Madison and the dunes. He moved so quickly Madison barely saw it happen.

‘You’ll like it,’ he said, as if he had done nothing at all. ‘I promise. You want it. But first you have to answer my question. Okay?’

His voice sounded wetter now and Madison realized dismally just how stupid she had been, understood why moms and dads said children had to be back at certain times, and not to stray too far, and not talk to strangers, and so many other things. Parents were not just being mean or difficult or boring, it turned out. They were trying to prevent what was about to happen.

She looked up at the man’s face, nodded. She didn’t know what else to do, and hoped it might help. The man smiled. He had a spray of small, dark moles across one cheek. His teeth were stained and uneven.

‘Good,’ he said. He took another step towards her, and now his hands were out of his coat pockets. His fingers were long, and pale.

Madison heard the word ‘Three …’ in her head, but it was too quiet and she did not believe in it. Her arms and legs were no longer like springs. They felt like rubber. She couldn’t even tell if they were still tensed.

The man was too close now. He smelt damp. There was a strange light in his eyes, as if he had found something he’d been looking for a long time.

He squatted down close to her, and the smell suddenly got worse, an earthy odour on his breath, a smell that spoke of parts of the body normally kept hidden.

‘Can you keep a secret?’ he said.

Chapter 4

I got home around quarter after nine in the evening. Apart from milk and coffee the trip had been make-work: Amy kept the cupboards well stocked. I’d walked into town from the house, which took twenty minutes. It was a pleasant stroll and I’d have done it that way even if the car hadn’t been unavailable. I sat outside the coffee place and stretched an Americano while leafing through the local paper, learning several things: the trajectories of two cars had intersected a few nights before – nobody was hurt, not even a little bit; some worthy got re-elected to the schools board for the twelfth straight year, which seemed borderline obsessional; and the Cascades Gallery needed a mature person to help sell paintings and sculptures of eagles and bears and Indian braves. Experience was judged unnecessary but candidates were instructed to bring a willingness to follow a dream. That didn’t sound like me, even if the writing project remained stalled. I hoped the gallery did find someone, however, and that they were sufficiently mature. I hated to think of limited edition art prints being sold in a juvenile manner.

I prowled the aisles of Sam’s Market for longer than necessary, picking items up and putting them back. Found a couple things too outré to have featured on more enlightened shopping agendas, chiefly beers, and at the checkout added a paperback Stephen King. I’d read it before but most of my books were still in storage down in LA, plus it was right there in front of me, in a rickety spinner full of second-hand Dan Brown and triple-named romantic women done out in lurid gilt.

Back in the lot I loaded the bag into my backpack and stood irresolute. A pickup truck sat ticking in the silence. I’d seen the owner inside, a local with craggy features and moss in his ears, and he’d ignored me in the way incomers deserved. I’d made a point of saying hi, just to mess with his head. A couple emerged from Laverne’s Rib across the street, rolling as if on the deck of a ship. Laverne’s prided itself on the magnitude of its portions. The couple looked like they’d known this ahead of time. A tired-looking woman pushed a stroller past the market with the air of someone not engaged in the activity for the sheer fun of it. Within, her baby fought the night with everything it had, principally sound. The woman saw me looking and muttered ‘Ten months’, as if that explained everything. I looked away from her awkwardly.

Down the road, a stop light blinked.

I still wasn’t hungry. Didn’t want to go drink a beer somewhere public. I could walk up the street, see if the little bookstore was still open. It wasn’t likely and I now had a novel to read, which was what ultimately took the wind out of the night’s sails. The expedition was over, run aground on an impulse purchase.

So now what? Pick your own adventure.

In the end I walked back the way I’d come, past the hundred yards of stores which constituted Birch Crossing. Most were single storey and wood-fronted, a dentist, hair salon and drug store interspersing places of more transitory appeal, including the Cascades Gallery itself, from which Amy had already acquired two aimlessly competent paintings of the generic West. The blocks were rooted by stolid brick structures built when the town’s frock-coated boosters believed it would amount to more than it had. One of these held Laverne’s, another was a bank no longer locally-owned, and the last offered the opportunity to buy decoratively battered bits of furniture. Amy had availed herself of these wares, too, an example of which currently served as my desk. The street petered out into a small gas station that had been tricked out long ago to look like a mountain chalet, and finally the local sheriff’s office, set back from the road. I had to fight an impulse to look at this as I passed, and wondered how long it would take before some part of me got the message.

I crossed the empty two-lane highway before taking the last left in town. This led into the woods, the fences sparsely punctuated with heavy-duty mailboxes and gates leading to houses down long driveways. After ten minutes I reached the box labelled Jack and Amy Whalen. Rather than open the gate I vaulted over it, as I had on the way out. I forgot to compensate for the weight in the backpack, and almost reached the other side face-first. I’d started exercising again recently, taking runs through the National Forest land that started at the boundary of our property. Now the initial aches had worn off I felt better than in a while, but my body wasn’t ready to forget it was a year since I’d been truly fit. Though there was no one to see I still felt like an ass, and swore briskly at the gate for fucking me around. My father used to claim inanimate objects hate us, and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.

I walked up the rutted track towards the place a rental agreement said was now home. It was colder again and I wondered if tonight was going to be when the snows finally dropped. I wondered also – not for the first time – how we were going to get in and out when that happened. The locals referred to snow without starry-eyed romanticism. They talked about it like death or taxes. The realtor had breezily said something about a snowmobile being advisable in the deepest months. We didn’t have a snowmobile. Weren’t going to be getting one either. Nowhere in my life-plans did ownership of a snowmobile feature. Instead I was laying in reserves of fuse wire, canned chilli and sauerkraut. Always been a bear for sauerkraut, not sure why.

The drive curved down into a hollow before climbing back up along the ridge. About a half mile from the road it widened into the parking area. From this side the house wasn’t much to look at, a single-storey band of weathered cedar shingles largely obscured in summer by trees. It had been that way in the photo I’d seen on the internet, and looked rustic and cute. In winter and real life it looked like a nuclear bunker caught between the legs of dead spiders. It was only when you got inside that you realized you’d entered at the top of two-and-a-half levels, and there was double height glass along most of the north face of the building, where the hillside dropped away sharply. In daylight this gave a view across a forest valley that climbed up to the Wenatchee Mountains, segueing into the Cascades and from there to Canada by and by. As Gary Fisher had found, you tended to just look at it for a while. From the deck you could also see a pond, about a hundred and fifty yards in diameter, which lay within the property’s four acre boundary. In the afternoons birds of prey floated across the valley like distant leaves.

I unloaded the backpack’s contents into their pre-determined slots in the kitchen. The answering machine was on the far end of the counter. The light was flashing.

‘About time,’ I said, the first words the house had heard since Fisher left.

But it wasn’t. Two people had called, or one person twice, but left no message. I sent beats of ill-will to the perpetrator/s and another to myself for not getting Caller ID working yet. The box claimed it was possible but the manual had been translated from Japanese by a halfwit prairie dog. Just changing the outgoing message had required technical support from NASA. I knew the caller/s couldn’t have been Amy, who knew how much non-messages piss me off, and would at least have intoned ‘No message, master’ in a gravely tone.

I got out my cell and pressed her speed dial number, hooking it under my ear while I got a beer from the fridge. After five rings I was diverted to the answering service, yet again. Her business voice warmly thanked whomever for calling and promised she’d get back to them. I left a message asking her to do just that. Again.

‘Soon would be nice,’ I muttered, when the phone had been replaced in my pocket.

I took the drink through to my study. As the person earning actual money Amy had a grander lair on the floor below. Mine had nothing in it but a file box of reference material, the expensively distressed table from the store in town and a cheaply distressed chair I’d found in the garage. The only thing on the table was my laptop. It was not dusty because I made a point of wiping it with my sleeve every morning. It was not nailed shut because we didn’t have any nails. I dimmed the lights and sat. When I opened the lid the machine sprang into life, not learning from experience. It presented me with a word processing document in which not many words had yet been processed. This was partly because of the panoramic view of bitterbrush and Douglas firs from the window, which I’d found myself able to stare at for hours. When the snows did come I knew I might just as well leave the computer shut. It was harder to be distracted in the room at night, however, because aside from a few branches picked out by the light from the window, you couldn’t see anything at all. So maybe now my fingers and mind would unlock and start working together. Maybe I’d think of something to say and fall into it for a while.

Maybe I’d be able to ignore the fact that after only a month I was bored out of my tiny mind.

I was sitting at the table because two years ago I wrote a book about certain places in LA. I say ‘wrote’ but mainly it was photographs, and even that word stretches the truth. I took the pictures with the camera in my cell phone: one day I happened to be somewhere with my phone in my hand, and I clicked a picture off. When I transferred it to the computer later, I realised it was actually okay. The technical quality was so low that you saw through the image to the place, caught in a moment, blurred and ephemeral. After that it became a habit, and when I had enough I threw them into a document, jotting a comment about each. Over time these annotations grew until there was a page or two of text accompanying each photograph, sometimes more. Amy came in one evening when I was doing this, asked to read it. I let her. I felt no anxiety while it was in her hands, knowing she would be kind, and had only mild interest in what she’d say. A couple days later she handed me the name and phone number of someone who worked at an art house publisher. I laughed hard, but she said try it, and so I mailed the file to this guy without thinking much more about it.

Three weeks after that he called me one afternoon and offered me twenty thousand dollars. Mainly out of bafflement, I said sure, knock yourself out. Amy squealed when she heard, and took me out to dinner.

It was published eight months later, a square hardcover with a grainy photograph of a nondescript Santa Monica house on the front. It looked to me like the kind of book you’d have to be out of your mind even to pick up, let alone buy, but the LA Times noticed it, and it got a couple other good reviews, and weirdly it became something that sold a little, for a while.

The world rolled on, and so did we. Stuff happened. I quit my job, we moved. If I was anything now, I was the guy who’d written that book. Which meant, presumably, I now needed to become a guy who’d written some other book. Nothing had come to mind. It kept continuing to fail to come to mind, with a steady resolve that suggested not coming to mind was what it was all about, that failing to come to mind was its chief skill and purpose in life.

A couple hours later I was in the living room. I’d drunk more beer but this hadn’t seemed to help. I was adrift in the middle of the couch, mired in the restless fugue state characteristic of those who’ve failed to conjure something out of thin air. I knew I should unpack the box of web ‘research’ I’d half-heartedly accumulated. But I also knew if I hit the clippings and nothing shook out of it, then walking back into town and buying some good, long nails would move up to Plan A. The laptop had done me little deliberate harm. I wasn’t ready to kill it yet.

I took an unearned work’s-done cigarette from the pack on the table and headed out to the deck. I stopped smoking indoors the year Amy and I got married. She’d tolerated it at first because she’d done a little tobacco herself, back in the day and long before I’d known her, but had taken to using air freshening devices and raising an eyebrow whenever I lit up. Subtly, and sweetly, and for my own good. I didn’t especially mind the new regime. I could smoke all I wanted at work, and now house guests couldn’t accuse me of attempted manslaughter by passive smoking, and it just made life easier all round.

I leaned against the rail. The world was silent but for the confidential whispering of trees. The sky was clear and cold above and midnight blue. I could smell firs and faint wood smoke from a distant hearth fire – likely our neighbours, the Zimmermans. It was good here, I knew that. We had a fancy house. The landscape was rugged and not much had changed for it in a long time. Birch Crossing was real without being an ass about it: pickups and SUVs were equally represented and you could buy a very fancy spatula if you wanted. The Zimmermans were a five-minute drive away but we’d already had dinner at their house twice. They were a brace of retired history professors from Berkeley and conversation had not exactly flowed the first time, but the gift of a single malt on our second visit had oiled the wheels. Both were sprightly for people in their early seventies – Bobbi filled the CD player with everything from Mozart to Sparklehorse, and Ben’s black hair was barely flecked with grey. He and I now chatted affably enough on the street when we met, though I suspected his wife had the measure of me.

And yet a week ago I had been standing right there on the deck, when something had happened.

I was watching Amy through the glass doors as she chopped vegetables and supervised a saucepan on the stove. I could smell simmering plum tomatoes and capers and oregano. It was only mid-afternoon and there was enough light to appreciate both the view and the house’s good side. Instead of being in the office until after nine my wife was at her kitchen counter happily making mud pies, and she remained appealing from both sides and front and back too. I’d even got an idea down that morning, and halfway believed that I might produce another book about something or other. The spheres were in alignment, and nine tenths of the world’s population would have traded places with me in a heartbeat.

Yet for a moment it was as if a cloud drifted across the world. At first I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Then I realized I had no idea where I was. Not just the name of the town, I couldn’t even remember what state I was in. I couldn’t recall what had happened to me, or when, had no idea of how I’d got to this place and time. The house looked unfamiliar, the trees if they’d been slipped into position when I wasn’t looking. The woman the other side of the big window was a stranger to me, her movements foreign and unexpected.

Who was she? Why was she standing in there, holding a knife? And why was she looking at it as if she couldn’t remember what it was for? The feeling was too pervasive to be described as panic, but I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I blinked, looking around, trying to lock into something tangible. It wasn’t a reaction to the newness of the environment. I’ve travelled a lot and I’d been sick to death of LA. I was tired because I hadn’t been sleeping well but it wasn’t that either, nor the usual shadows that came to haunt me. It was not about regrets, or guilt. It wasn’t specific.

Everything was wrong. With everything.

Then the cloud passed. It was gone, just like that. Amy looked up and winked at me through the glass, unquestionably the woman I loved. I smiled back, turned to the mountains to finish my smoke. The forest looked the way I had come to expect. Everything was okay again.

Dinner was good, and I listened while Amy went over the structure of her new job. She’s in advertising. Maybe you’re familiar with it. It’s a profession that seeks to make people spend money, so folks they don’t know can buy an even bigger house. In this way it is somewhat like organized crime, except the hours are longer. I said this to Amy once, suggesting they should tell clients to dispense with ads and demographics and encourage people to buy their wares through direct threats against their person and/or property. She asked me never to say this in front of her colleagues in case they took it seriously.

The revised basis of her employment was important to us because her new position as roving creative director across her company’s empire – with offices in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and back down in LA – was what had enabled us to get out of LA. It was a big change for her, a California girl born and bred, who’d liked being close to the family who still lived in the city where she was born. She had painted her willingness to move as related to the sizable hike in salary, but she’d never really been obsessed about money. I believed instead that she had done it mainly for my sake, to let me get out of the city, and over dessert I told her I was grateful.

She rolled her eyes and told me not to be a dork, but she accepted the kiss I offered in thanks. And the ones that came afterwards.

When I’d finished my cigarette I pulled the phone out of my pocket to check the time. It was half past eleven. Amy’s job involved many client dinners, especially now, and it was possible she hadn’t even got back to her hotel yet. I knew she’d pick up her messages as soon as she could. But I hadn’t heard from her all day and at that moment I really wanted to.

I was about to try her number again when the phone chirped into life of its own accord. The words AMY’S CELL popped up on the screen. I smiled, pleased at the coincidence, and put the phone up to my ear.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Busy, busy?’

But the person on the other end was not my wife.

Chapter 5

‘Who is this, please?’

The voice was male, rough, loud. Coming from Amy’s number it was about as wrong as could be.

‘It’s Jack,’ I said. It sounded dumb. ‘Who …’

‘Is this home?’

‘What? Who are you?’

The voice said something that might have been a name but sounded more like a random collection of syllables.

‘What?’ I repeated. He said it again. Could have been Polish, Russian, Martian. Could have been a coughing fit. There was a lot of noise in the background. Traffic, presumably.

‘Is this home?’ he barked again.

‘What do you mean? What are you doing with …’

The guy had one question and he was going to keep asking it. ‘This is number says “Home”?’

A light went on in my head. ‘Yes,’ I said, finally getting what he was driving at. ‘This is the number listed as “Home”. It’s my wife’s phone. But where’s …’

‘Find in cab,’ the man said.

‘Okay. I understand. When did you find it?’

‘Fifteen minutes. I call when I get good signal. Phones here not always so good.’

‘It belongs to a woman,’ I said, loudly and clearly. ‘Short blonde hair, in a bob, probably wearing a business suit. Have you just carried someone like that?’

‘All day,’ he said. ‘All day women like this.’

‘This evening?’

‘Maybe. Is she there, please? I speak her?’

‘No, I’m not in Seattle,’ I said. ‘She is, and you are, but I am not.’

‘Oh, okay. So … I don’t know. What you want me?’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Stay on the line.’

I quickly walked downstairs and into Amy’s study. Stuck dead centre to the flat screen of her computer was a Post-it note with a hotel name written on it. The Malo, that was it.

All I could hear down the phone was a distant siren. I waited for it to fade.

‘The Hotel Malo,’ I said. ‘Do you know it?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Downtown.’

‘Can you take it there? Can you take the phone to the hotel and hand it in at reception?’

‘Is long way,’ the man said.

‘I’m sure. But take it to reception and get them to call the lady down. Her name is Amy Whalen. You got that?’

He said something that sounded very slightly like Amy’s name. I repeated it another few times and spelt it twice. ‘Take it there, okay? She’ll pay you. I’ll call her, tell her you’re coming. Yes? Take it to the hotel.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Twenty dollar.’

My heart was still thudding after he’d hung up. At least I knew the score. No reply to my last message because Amy hadn’t heard it, which gave me a time before which she had to have lost the phone. When had that been? Around nine, I thought. Or could be she’d lost it earlier in the day and elected to wait until she got back to the hotel to fill me in. Either way, she needed a heads-up to deal with this guy, assuming he was on the level. When phones are stolen the thieves will sometimes call a home number, pretending to be a helpful citizen, in the hope of reassuring the owner that the phone isn’t lost. That way the victim will hold off getting the phone killed at the network, leaving the perpetrator free to use the hell out of it until the agreed handover time, when they just drop it in the trash. If this guy was using that scam there wasn’t a lot I could do about it – I wasn’t going to cancel Amy’s phone without talking to her first. The hotel’s number wasn’t on the note, unsurprisingly – we always communicated via cell when she was out of the house, which is how come mine was down as ‘Home’ in her contacts list.

Ten seconds on the internet tracked down the Hotel Malo. I called the number and withstood the receptionist’s mandatory welcoming message, which included highlights of the day’s restaurant specials. When he was done I asked to be put through to Amy Whalen. A faint background rattle of someone typing. Then: ‘I can’t do that right now, sir.’

‘She’s not back yet?’ I checked the clock. Nearly midnight. Kind of late, however important the client. ‘Okay. Put me through to voice mail.’

‘No, sir, I meant I have no one here under that name.’

I opened my mouth. Shut it again. Had I got the dates wrong? ‘What time did she check out?’

More tapping. When the man spoke again he sounded circumspect. ‘I have no record of a reservation being made under that name, sir.’

‘For today?’

‘For the past week.’

‘She’s been in town two days,’ I said patiently. ‘She arrived Tuesday. She’s in town until Friday morning. Tomorrow.’

The guy said nothing.

‘Could you try “Amy Dyer”?’

I spelt ‘Dyer’ for him. This had been her name before we married, and it was credible that someone in her office might have made a booking for her in that name seven years later. Just about credible.

Tapping. ‘No, sir. No Dyer.’

‘Try Kerry, Crane & Hardy. That’s a company name.’

Tapping. ‘Nothing for that either, sir.’

‘She never checked in?’

‘Can I help you with anything else this evening?’

I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. The guy waited a beat, told me the hotel group’s URL, and cut the connection.

I took the Post-it from the screen. Amy’s handwriting is extremely legible. You can make out what it says from low-lying space orbits. It said Hotel Malo.

I dialled the hotel again and got put through to reservations. I re-checked all three names. At the last minute I remembered to get myself transferred back to the front desk, this time reaching a woman. I told her that someone would be bringing in a cell phone, asked if she’d hold it under my name. I gave her my credit card number against twenty bucks to pay the driver.

Then I went back on the web. Did searches for hotels in downtown for anything similar to ‘Malo’. I found a Hotel Monaco, only a few streets away. Their website suggested it was exactly the kind of place Amy hung her coat on trips: funky decor, restaurant specializing in Pan-Cajun this, that and the other, complementary goldfish in the rooms. Whatever the fuck that meant.

I looked at her note again. It could just about be ‘Monaco’, if written in a hurry or while having an embolism. It might even be she’d misheard the name when being told where she’d been booked, and written it down wrong for me. Mal-o/Monac-o. Maybe.

I called the Monaco front desk and got someone human and responsive. She was able to quickly and regretfully establish that my wife was not, and had never been, resident in the hotel. I thanked her and put the phone down. I did this calmly, as if what I’d done made the slightest sense. As if I could really have misread the note, or Amy misheard something from an assistant, and as a result happened to name a hotel that actually existed, only a couple of streets away in the same town.

I stood up. I rubbed my hands together, cracked my knuckles. The house felt large around me. There was a sudden clatter from the floor above, as the fridge dropped a new load of ice into the tray.

I am not an especially imaginative man. The flashes of intuition I’ve experienced in my life usually have a basis in something obvious, even if only in retrospect. But right then I felt untethered, unguarded, as when I’d stood out on the deck a week before. It was after midnight now. I’d last spoken to my wife around eleven the previous evening. A shorthand debrief between two people who’ve loved each other for a while. Your day, my day; errand reminders; kiss kiss, goodnight. I’d idly pictured her sitting Indian-style on a turned-down bed, a pot of coffee by her side or on its way, her expensive and doubtless too-tight business shoes kicked halfway across the floor of her room, in this Hotel Malo.

Except she hadn’t been there.

I put my hand on the mouse to her computer. Hesitated, then found her personal organizer software and double-clicked it. It felt like an intrusion, but I needed to check. The diary window popped up on screen. A bar across four days said ‘Seattle’. The space in between was peppered with meetings, plus a clutch of client breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Except for this evening. Tonight had been clear from 6:30.

So why no earlier call?

There had been a couple of attempts at contact via the house phone. But she always called the cell. She knew I was supposed to be at home working but also that my desk and I acted like magnets with the same charge, and it was highly possible I would be elsewhere. And she always left a message. Amy had strong views on hotels. Maybe she got to the Malo and didn’t like it, checked herself in somewhere else. Didn’t mention it because it was trivia and didn’t affect our communication. Back-to-back meetings, then had herself booked into this week’s most fashionable Seattle eatery, table for one, briefings and demographics to read while she ate – leave calling Jack until she gets back to the room. Her phone slips out in the cab on the way there. She runs into someone from work, stays for an extra glass of wine. Would be getting back to the hotel round about now, reaching into her bag … and thinking shit, where’s the phone.

Yeah, maybe.

I looked around her desk again. Other people’s working spaces are like the ruins of lost civilizations. It’s impossible to understand why they’d have that thing there, put the other here. Even with Amy’s, which is blisteringly neat and looks like an office supplies serving suggestion. The desk looked as it always did, in I’ll-be-back-later mode. Except that her PDA was sitting in its dock. Amy was the only person I knew who actually used an organizer instead of merely owning one. She kept lists and her diary on it, maintained addresses, took notes, referred to it twenty times a day. She always toted it with her on business.

But there it was. I lifted it out, turned it on. A mirror of the diary I’d seen on the main computer. To Do lists. Slogans-in-progress. I put it back. So she elected to take one less piece of equipment on the road this time. Rock and roll. Amy had her systems. In her world there was a place for everything and everything stayed in its place, if it knew what was good for it.

And yet tonight, she was not in her allotted space.

So now what? Her phone was taken care of. I’d run down every available route for trying to talk to her, and hit dead ends. It all probably meant nothing. My rational mind was braced for an incoming phone call, a tired/apologetic Amy with a complex tale of screwed hotel bookings and phone-loss woe. I could almost hear how shrill the ring would sound, and was halfway to deciding to go have a cigarette on the deck while I waited. Either that, or just go to bed.

Instead I found myself in the living room, standing in front of the big windows, hands down by my sides. Minutes passed, and I did not move. The house was quiet around me, so silent in the continued absence of a phone call, that after a time the background rustle of moving blood in my ears began to seem very loud, appeared to swell until it sounded like the tyres of a car on a wet road, some distance away yet, but coming closer.

I could not shake off the ridiculous idea that something had happened to my wife. That she might be in danger. As I stared past my reflection in the plate glass, out towards the dark shapes against the blue-black sky, I began to feel dimly certain that this unknown car was heading inexorably toward me.

That I had always been its target, and now the time had come. That this was the night when the car hit.

Chapter 6

Oz Turner sat in the seat he’d pre-selected, wall-side of the booth nearest the door. This position was obscured from most of Blizzard Mary’s other patrons by the coat rack. It gave him a good view onto the parking lot, cars and pickups whose sole shared characteristic was that of not looking too new. He’d been to the bar twice the day before, in preparation. Office workers at lunch, young moms sharing salads. Late at night the clientele switched to lone men interspersed with middle-aged couples drinking steadily in silences companionable or otherwise. Meanwhile their vehicles waited outside, like old dogs, pale and ghostly in the dark. Beyond the lot was the little town of Hanley. A few streets away, through the small and prettified knot of the old quarter, was a wide, flat watercourse. Either the Mississippi itself or the Black River. Oz wasn’t sure. He didn’t really care.

He was nursing a beer to earn his place. He’d ordered one of the specials too, but barely touched the gluey Buffalo wings. This was only partly due to nervousness. Over the last year his habits had changed. He’d once been something of a gourmand, in his own way: a connoisseur of quantity. He made his coffee with three big spoonfuls of Maxwell House. He took his meals super-sized. He’d enjoyed the tastes of these things, of course, but also responded to the comfort of sheer bulk. He no longer found solace there. After a time the waitress came and took his plate, and he felt no sense of loss.

He checked his watch again. Well after midnight. The bar was dim but for lamps and neon beer advertisements. The television was on low. There were only ten, fifteen people left. Oz was going to give the guy another quarter hour, then go.

As he was telling himself this, a car pulled into the lot outside.

The man who entered the bar wore old denim and a battered Raiders jacket. He had the air of a person who spent his days on the wide flat plains, near farm machinery. The Raiders didn’t hail from anywhere near here, of course, but geography has become malleable now. It could also, Oz realized, be intended as a signal. To him. He turned to the window and watched the man’s reflection in the glass.

He went up to the counter, got a beer, exchanged the pleasantries required to pass as no one in particular. Then he came straight over towards the booth. He had evidently used the mirrors behind the bar to scope the room, so he could look like he was coming to meet a friend, not searching for a stranger.

Oz turned from the window as the man slid into the opposite side of the booth. ‘Mr Jones?’

The man nodded, looking Oz over. Oz knew what he was seeing. A man who looked ten years older than he should. Grey stubble over the dry jowls of someone who used to carry an extra sixty pounds. A thick coat that looked like it doubled as the bed blanket of a large dog.

‘Glad you agreed to meet in person,’ the man said. ‘A little surprised, too.’

‘Two guys in a bar,’ Oz said, ‘they’re the only people ever have to know. Emails, anyone can find out what was said. Even after both of you are dead.’

The man nodded appreciatively. ‘They want to find you, they gonna.’

Oz knew this only too well, having been attacked by Them a year before. He still wasn’t sure who They were. He’d managed to fix the damage they’d tried to cause before it became insuperable, but still felt he had to leave town. He’d kept moving ever since, leaving behind a job on a small local newspaper and the few people he had called friends. Joining the undertow. It was better that way.

Jones didn’t know about this, of course. He was referring instead to the fact that every email you send, every message you post, every file you download, is logged on a server somewhere. Machines see nothing, understand less; but their memories are perfect. There is no anonymity on the internet, and sooner or later a lot of solid citizens were going to discover emails to lovers were not private, nor hours spent bathed in the light of other people’s nakedness. That people were watching you, all the time. That the web was not some huge sandpit. It was quicksand. It could swallow you up.

‘So how come Hanley?’ the man asked, looking around. A couple in the next booth were conducting a vague, whispered fight, bitter sentences that bore no relevance to what the other had just said. ‘I know Wisconsin, some. Never even heard of this town.’

‘It’s where I am right now,’ Oz said. ‘That’s all. How did you get my email address?’

‘Heard your podcast. Made us want to talk to you. Did a little digging, took a chance. No big deal.’

Oz nodded. Once upon a time he had a little late night radio show, back east. That stopped when he left town, of course. But in the last couple of months he’d started recording snippets onto his laptop, uploading them onto the web, started spreading the word again. There were others like him, doing the same thing. ‘It concerns me that you were able to find my email address.’

‘Should worry you even more if I couldn’t. Otherwise I’d just be an amateur, right?’

‘And what did you want to say to me?’

‘You first,’ Jones said. ‘What you said in the ’cast was pretty oblique. I threw you a couple bones in my email, hinted what we know. Let’s hear you talk now.’

Oz had thought about ways of communicating the bottom line while remaining circumspect. He took a sip of his beer, then set it back on the table and looked the man in the eye.

‘The Neanderthals had flutes,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘To play tunes,’ the man shrugged.

‘That just rephrases the question. Why did they believe it important to be able to replicate certain sounds, when just getting enough to eat was hard labour?’

‘Why indeed.’

‘Because sound is important in ways we’ve forgotten. For millions of years it couldn’t be recorded. Now it can, so we concentrate on the types with obvious meaning. But music is a side alley. Even speech isn’t important. Every other species on the planet gets by with chirps and barks – how come we need thousands of words?’

‘Because our universe is more complex than a dog’s.’

‘But that’s because of speech, not the other way around. Our world is full of talking, radio, television, everybody chattering, so loud all the time that we forget why control of sound was originally important to us.’

‘Which was?’

‘Speech developed from prehistoric religious ritual, grew out of chanted sounds. The question is why we were doing this back then. Who we were trying to talk to.’

The man had begun to smile faintly.

‘Also why, when you look at European stone age monuments, it’s clear that sound was a major design factor. Newgrange. Carnac. Stonehenge itself – the outside faces of the uprights are rough, but the interiors are smooth. To channel sound. Certain frequencies of sound.’

‘Long time ago, Oz. Who knows what those guys were up to? Why should we care?’

‘Read the Syntagma Musicum, Praetorius’s ancient catalogue of musical instruments. Back in the sixteenth century all the major cathedral organs in Europe had thirty-two foot organ pipes, monsters that produce infrasound, sounds too low for the human ear to even hear. Why – if not for some other effect these frequencies have? Why did people feel so different in church, so connected with something beyond? And why do so many alternative therapies now centre on vibration, which is just another way of quantifying sound?’

‘Tell me,’ Jones said, quietly.

‘Because the walls of Jericho story is not about sound breaking down literal walls, but figurative ones,’ Oz said. ‘The walls between this place and another. Sound isn’t just about hearing. It’s about seeing things too.’

The man nodded slowly, and in acquiescence. ‘I hear you, my friend, if you’ll excuse the pun. I hear you loud and clear.’

Oz sat back. ‘That enough?’

‘For now. We’re on the same page, that’s for sure. I’m curious. Where did you first hear about this?’

‘Met a guy at a conference a couple years ago. A small convention of the anomalous, down in Texas.’

‘WeirdCon?’

‘Right. We kept in touch. He had some ideas, started working on them in his spare time. He was building something. We emailed once in a while, I shared my research on pre-historical parallels with him. Then nearly a month ago, he dropped off the face. Haven’t heard from him since.’

‘Probably he’s fine,’ the man said. ‘People get spooked, lay low for a while. You two ever discuss this in a public forum?’

‘Hell no. Always private.’

‘You never email anyone else about it yourself?’

‘Nope.’

‘Never know when They might be listening, right?’

This was both a joke and not a joke, and Oz grunted. Amongst people trying to find the truth, the concept of ‘Them’ was complicated. You knew they were out there, of course – it was the only way to make sense of all the unexplained things in the world – but you understood that talking about Them made you sound like a kook. So you put inverted commas around it. Someone said Them with double underlining and a big, bold typeface, and you knew he was either faking it or a nut. You heard those little ironical quote marks, however … chances were the guy was okay.

‘Isn’t that the truth,’ Oz said, playing along. ‘You just never know. Even if They don’t actually exist.’

The man smiled. ‘I’m going to talk to my friends, see about getting us all together. Glad we met, Oz. Been waiting a long time to connect with someone like you.’

‘Me too,’ Oz said, for a moment feeling very alone.

‘We’ll hook up soon. Take care of yourself in the meantime,’ Jones said, and left.

Oz watched the man get back in his car, drive out of the lot and take the turn towards the freeway. Then he slowly finished his beer. He did not hurry, for once. He was feeling almost as if he was just sitting in a bar, rather than hiding there. The people at the counter were talking, laughing. The arguing couple were now chewing face across their table, the woman’s hand hooked meatily around the man’s neck. Oz wished them well.

When he eventually stepped outside it was cold and windy, the streets deserted. People with normal lives were home asleep. Oz was going to join them now. Home for the time being was an anonymous motel on the edge of town, but any kind of home is better than none.

As he walked he considered the man he’d just met, what he represented. There were countless groups interested in the underbelly, in finding the hidden truths. JFK obsessives who met once a month to pore over autopsy shots. Online 9/11 nuts with their trajectory modelling software, Priory of Sion wannabes, Holocaust revisionists, circle jerks for everything that might or might not ever have been true. Jones’ people sounded very different, or Oz would not have agreed to make contact in the first place. A tight, focused group of men and women who studied the facts without previous agenda, who met in secret, who weren’t too close to one particular issue to miss a glimpse of the whole. This was what Oz needed. People with rigour. People with dedication.

Just some fucking people, bottom line.

Maybe, after his time in the wilderness, things were going to start turning around. Oz picked up the pace a little, idly wondering if his motel had a snack machine.

It did not, and the soda machine didn’t work. After establishing these facts and becoming resigned to them, Oz let himself into his room, first noting that the strip of scotch tape he’d laid across the bottom of the door had not been disturbed.

Once inside he stood irresolute. It was late. He should go to bed. Get on the road early. Keep on the move. But he still felt hopped up from the meeting, and knew that if he lay his head down it would get locked in a long spiral that would leave him exhausted and headachy in the morning.

He turned instead to the ancient console television next to the room’s shabby desk. The huge screen warmed slowly, to reveal a re-run of a show so old Oz barely remembered it. Perfect. A little background noise, the kind that creeps inside your head and tells you everything’s all right. Comfort sound.

There was a knock on the door.

Oz turned fast, heart beating hard.

The television wasn’t on loud enough to provoke a complaint. It was hard to imagine why else someone should be outside. The bedside clock said it was 2:33 a.m.

The knock came again, more quietly this time.

Oz knew the flickering of the television screen would be visible around the edges of the curtains. He went and stood behind the door. This was the moment he’d feared, the prospect that kept him awake at night, and he realized suddenly that he’d never really come up with a plan for when it came to pass. So much for the Lone Horseman of the Unknown.

‘Mr Turner? It’s Mr Jones.’

The person outside had spoken very quietly. Oz stared at the door for a moment, put his ear closer. ‘What?’

‘Could you let me in?’

Oz hesitated, undid the lock. Opened the door a crack, to see Jones standing shivering outside.

‘What the hell do you want?’

Jones kept well back from the door, didn’t crowd him. ‘I got a few miles down the road and realized there were a couple things I forgot to say. I turned around, saw you walking through town, followed you back here.’

Oz let the man into the hotel room, annoyed at how careless he’d been to allow someone to spot him on the street.

‘You scared the fucking life out of me, man,’ he said, closing the door and locking it. ‘Jesus.’

‘I know. I’m sorry, really. It’s just I came all this way. And, you know, I think meeting up was kind of a big deal for both of us. The start of something bigger.’

‘You could say that.’

‘Right. So I just wanted to make sure we got everything said.’

Oz relaxed, a little. ‘So what was it?’

The man looked sheepish. ‘First thing, well, it’s embarrassing. It’s just that Jones isn’t my real name.’

‘Okay,’ Oz said, confused. He’d already assumed the other guy might have given a false one. ‘No big deal.’

‘I know. Just, you were going to find out later, and I didn’t want you to think I’d been jerking you around.’

‘That’s okay,’ Oz said, disarmed, wondering if he should offer the guy a drink and realizing he didn’t have anything. The motel didn’t run to coffee-making facilities. It barely ran to changing the towels, and didn’t fudge the issue with cheery crap about saving the environment, either. ‘So – what is it? Your name.’

The man moved slightly, so he was farther from the door.

‘It’s Shepherd,’ he said.

Oz held his gaze, noticing for the first time how dark the man’s eyes were. ‘Well, mine really is Oz Turner. So we’re straight on nomenclature. What was the other thing?’

‘Just this,’ the man said. He pushed Oz in the chest.

Oz was caught off-guard. He couldn’t maintain his balance against the calm, firm shove, especially when the man slipped his right foot behind one of Oz’s. His arms pinwheeled but he toppled straight over backward, catching his head hard against the television.

He was stunned, and barely had time to slur a syllable of enquiry before the man quickly bent down over him. He grabbed handfuls of Oz’s coat, careful not to touch flesh, and yanked him halfway back to standing.

‘What?’ Oz managed. His right eye was blinking hard. He felt weak. He realized the man was wearing gloves. ‘What are you …’

The man put his face up close. ‘Just so you know,’ he said, ‘They do exist. They send their regards.’

Then he dropped him, twisting Oz’s shoulder forward just as he let go. Oz’s head hit the side of the television again, at a bad sideways angle this time, and there was a muffled click.

Shepherd sat on the end of the bed and waited for the man’s gasps to subside, watching the television with half an eye. He couldn’t remember the name of the show, but he knew just about everyone on it was long dead. Ghosts of light, playing to a dying man. Almost funny.

When he was satisfied Turner was done, he took a fifth of vodka out of his pocket and tipped most of it into Oz’s mouth. A little over his hands, some on his coat. He left the bottle on the floor, where it might have fallen. A diligent coroner could question either stomach contents or blood alcohol level within the body, but Shepherd doubted it would come to that. Not here in the sticks. Not when Turner looked so much like a man who had this kind of end coming to him sooner or later.

It took Shepherd less than three minutes to find where the man had hidden his laptop and notebook. He replaced these with further empty vodka bottles. He shut the room door quietly behind him as he left, and then took only another minute to find the back-up disk duct-taped under the dashboard of Oz’s car in the lot outside. All three would be destroyed before daybreak.

And that, he believed, was that.

When Shepherd got into his own vehicle he realized his cell phone was ringing. He reached quickly under the seat for it, but he’d missed the call.

He checked the log. He didn’t recognize the number, but he did know the area code, and swore.

A 503 prefix. Oregon. Cannon Beach.

He slammed the door and drove fast out of the lot.

Chapter 7

If you lay still, really still, you could hear the waves. That was one of the best things about the cottage, Madison thought. When you went to bed, assuming the television in the main room wasn’t on – it usually wasn’t, because time at the beach was for reading and thinking, Dad said, instead of watching the same old (rude word) – you could lie there and hear the ocean. You had to tune yourself first. The dune was in the way, and depending on the tides the water could be quite a distance down the beach. You had to let your breathing settle, lie flat and very still on your back with both ears open and just wait … and gradually you would begin to hear the distant rustle and thump that said tonight you were sleeping near the edge of the world. And sleep you would, as the waves seemed to get closer and closer, tugging gently at your feet, pulling you into friendly warmth and darkness and rest.

If you woke up in the night you heard them too. It was even better then, as they were the only sound anywhere. Back in Portland there was always other noise—cars, dogs, people walking by. Not here. Sometimes the waves would be very quiet, barely audible above the ringing of your ears, but if there was heavy weather they could sound very loud. Madison could remember one time being really scared in the night when there had been a storm and it sounded like the waves were crashing right into the next room. They hadn’t been, of course, and Dad said the dune would protect them and they never would, so now when she heard them in the night she enjoyed it, feeling adventurous and safe, knowing there was a vigorous, chaotic universe out there but that it could never harm her.

So when Madison realized she was awake, the first thing she noticed was the waves. Then that it was raining, and beginning to rain harder, drumming onto the roof of the cottage. The storm she’d seen heading down the beach earlier had arrived. Tomorrow the sand would be pocked and grey, and probably strewn with seaweed. It got thrown up onto the beach in bad weather, and felt weird and squishy under foot. Assuming they even went for a walk tomorrow at all, which …

Suddenly she sat up.

She stayed absolutely still for a moment, staring straight ahead. The rain on the roof above her sounded like hail, it was so loud. Madison looked at her bedside table. The clock said 1:12. So why was she awake? Sometimes she had to go to the bathroom. She didn’t now, though, and usually when she woke in the night it was a vague and fuzzy kind of awake. Now she felt like she’d never been asleep. Ever. There was a question going around in her head, urgently.

What was she doing here?

Next to the clock was a small, round shape. She picked it up. A sand dollar, small. She remembered finding it that afternoon, but that felt like it was something that had happened a while ago, like last time they’d come here, or the summer before. She brought it up to her nose and sniffed. It still smelled like the sea.

She could remember being on the beach as the storm headed south towards her. Sitting there knowing she’d have to go in the cottage soon. Then … she just couldn’t quite … It was like sometimes when you were in the car on a long drive and suddenly you realized a chunk of time had passed. One minute you were twenty minutes from home and then suddenly you were pulling into the driveway. It wasn’t like you’d been asleep, more like you hadn’t been paying attention, day-dreaming, and the world had gone on regardless. The world, including your own body. You must have been awake, because you’d done stuff, but it had happened without you thinking or noticing. Like putting a car on cruise, as Daddy did on the freeway. Then, boom – you reached an interchange and there you were, noticing things again, taking back control.

Though … now she could remember being in the cottage afterwards. When she’d come in from the beach Mom had been sitting in her chair without a book and without the TV on. Doing that looking-at-her-hands thing. She said hi when Madison came in, but nothing else – which was weird, because Maddy was late. At least a half hour. In fact … now she even remembered looking at the clock in the kitchen and realizing it was seven o’clock – which was a whole hour later than she was supposed to come back.

She’d taken a shower to get the sand off, and when she came out Mom said she didn’t feel like going out to eat tonight and what did Madison think about calling for pizza? Madison thought this was a world class idea, because Mario’s in Cannon Beach did what her Dad called ‘real serious pies’ and you could only get them here because they weren’t a chain. It was strange that Mom was suggesting it because her usual position was Mario’s put too much cheese on and not all the toppings were certified organic or GM-free, but, whatever: ‘Yes, please’ was the answer whichever way you cut it.

But then Mom couldn’t find the menu and she was going to call directory assistance but it grew later and later, and after a while Madison got the idea that pizza wasn’t going to happen after all. She found a packet of soup in the cupboard and made that instead. Her mother didn’t want any. Madison didn’t either, but made herself eat about half, and then spent a while reading one of her history books. She liked history, enjoyed knowing about how things had been in years gone by.

Then she’d gone to bed. Got into her jim-jams and climbed in. Then she must have fallen asleep.

And now she had woken up.

Madison opened her hand and looked at the sand dollar again. She could remember bending down to pick it up. She could remember sitting with it. So how come she couldn’t remember what had happened right after that? Sand dollars were big news. Surely she would have come running in right away to show her mom, maybe thinking it might cheer her up? Why couldn’t she remember doing that?

Madison lay back, pulling the covers up under her chin. Her memory was good. She performed well in tests at school, and triumphantly took on all comers at Remember, Remember and Snap – Uncle Brian said she could win a Remember, Remember World Series, if there was one. But now it was like the world was a big television, showing two shows at once – or as if the signal had got confused and the screen was showing one thing but the sound was from another movie altogether. And even though she’d mainly sorted out the question of what she was doing here, it didn’t seem to answer anything. She was here because it was the beach house, and she was here with her mom, and it was night so she was in bed.

But was that what she’d actually meant?

She was breathing a little quickly now, as if expecting bad news or hearing a sound that meant that somewhere, something bad was coming towards her. Something felt wrong and crooked and out of kilter.

And … hadn’t there been a man?

Hadn’t he given her something which she had put in the drawer of the bedside table? A card, like one of Dad’s business cards but very plain and white?

No. Absolutely not.

There had been no man. She was sure of that. So there could be no card. She did not need to check.

But she did, and found that there was in fact such a card in the drawer. It had a name printed on it, and a phone number added in ballpoint. There was a design drawn on the other side. The symbol looked as if someone had drawn a number ‘9’, then rotated the card a little and drawn another 9, and kept doing that until they came back around to where they’d started.

Barely aware that she was doing it, Madison reached to the phone on the bedside table and dialled the number. It rang and rang, sounding as if it was trying to connect to the other side of the moon. Nobody answered, and she put the phone down.

She forced herself to lie back in bed. To try to listen beyond the rain, to focus on the sound of the waves, behind this temporary storm: to find the reassuring sound of crashing water, drawing its line at the end of the world. She kept her eyes closed, and listened, waiting for the tide to pull her back into the dark. Tomorrow she would wake and everything would feel normal. She was just tired, and half asleep. Everything was okay. Everything was just like always.

And there had been no man.

When Alison O’Donnell woke at 2:37 it was the sound of rain that she first noticed, but she knew this had not been what had woken her. She pulled the covers back and swung her legs out of bed. Grabbed her robe from the end and pulled it on. She was foggy with bad sleep and mechanical dreams but a mother’s feet operate outside her own control. Doesn’t matter how tired you are, how worn, how much your body and brain wants to climb into bed again and stay there for a week, a month, maybe even the rest of your life. There are sounds that speak to the back brain and countermand your own desires.

The discomfort of your young is one of them.

She padded out of her room and into the hallway. Through the window she glimpsed trees pulled back and forth in high winds, white lines of water speeding across the glass. There was a sudden gust and rain hit the window like a handful of stones.

Then she heard the noise again.

She shuffled down to the door at the end of the hall. It was slightly ajar. She gently opened it a little farther and looked inside.

Madison was in bed, but the covers had been thrown down to her waist. Alison’s daughter was moving, slowly, her head turning from side to side. Her eyes were closed but she was making a low, moaning sound.

Alison walked into the room. She knew this sound well. Her daughter started having nightmares a little before the age of three, and for a few years they were pretty bad. It got to the point where Maddy had been afraid to go to bed, convinced that whatever she saw there – she could never remember, when she woke up – would come for her again, that the feeling of constriction and suffocation would descend upon her again. A year or so ago they had just petered out, become a thing of the past. But now, here was that noise again.

Alison wasn’t sure what to do. They’d never found a successful approach. You could wake her, but often it took a long time for her to find sleep again, and sometimes the nightmare would simply return immediately.

Suddenly Madison’s back arched, startling Alison. She’d not seen that before. Her daughter let out a long, rasping sound … and then slowly deflated. Her head turned, quickly, but then she sighed. Her lips moved, a little, but no sound came out. And then she was still. And not moaning any more.

Alison waited a few minutes more, until she was sure her daughter was sleeping soundly. She carefully reached out and pulled the covers back over her. Stood for a moment longer, looking down at her sleeping face.

Make the most of it, kiddo, she found herself thinking. A nightmare is just a nightmare. You don’t know anything about real sadness yet.

As she turned away she noticed something on the floor, lying on the bare wood just the other side of the old rug that went under the bed.

She bent down and discovered that it was a sand dollar. It was small, grey. It had been broken in half.

She picked up one of the pieces. Where had it come from? Had Madison found it that afternoon? If so, why hadn’t she said? There was a reward …

Abruptly Alison realized why her daughter hadn’t said anything, and felt toxically ashamed. The piece Alison held in her hands was firm. Snapping the shell in half must have taken effort, and been deliberate.

She dropped the fragment to the floor and left the room, pulling the door almost closed behind her. Then she went back to her own bed and lay there for a long time, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the rain.

Chapter 8

I got to the Hotel Malo just before ten a.m. I’d been awake since before six, but realized I could not call Amy’s office for several hours. So I put myself in movement instead. Seven was the earliest I could arrive at the Zimmermans’ and borrow a car without looking too strange. Inspired by Fisher’s visit the day before, I told them I’d got a call from an old friend and was heading to the city for lunch. Bobbi looked at me a beat longer than was necessary. Ben got straight to explaining how steering wheels worked.

I headed west on 90, joining 5 as the rush hour was starting in earnest, and fought my way off at James Street. Familiar territory so far, the route we’d taken when we came to spend a day in the city a week after we moved up north. Amy had showed me a couple of major draws like the Pike Place Market and the Space Needle, but she was more familiar with the city’s boardrooms than its tourist attractions. The sky was low and an unrelenting grey. It had been that way the previous time too. I eventually spiralled onto 6th Avenue, a wide downtown canyon with tall concrete buildings on either side, lined with small and well-behaved trees bearing little yellow lights.

I pulled up outside the Malo, joining the back of a line of black town cars. The hotel had an awning of red and ochre stripes. A guy in a coat and hat tried to take my car someplace but I convinced him not to. The lobby was done in limestone and rich fabrics, a big fireplace on one side. The luggage trolleys were of distressed brass, and the bellhops were demure. Something unobtrusive and New Age floated discreetly from hidden speakers, like the smell of vanilla cookies almost ready to come out of the oven.

The woman behind the desk was the one I’d spoken to a little after midnight. I was surprised to find she did have an envelope for me, and a receipt for my twenty bucks. Also that she’d had the initiative to get the driver to write down his name – which is more than I’d done – together with the company he worked for. His first name was Georj, the second a collection of crunchy syllables from not-around-here. The company was Red Cabs. She relayed this information in a way that implied guests at her hotel usually employed more upscale or funky means of transport, like native bearers or cold fusion hoverboards. I got her to check a final time for a reservation, implying I was a colleague, believed my assistant had made one and that he was going to catch seven shades of hell if he had not. No record, still.

‘Can you do me another favour?’ I asked, having also planned this on the journey. ‘I’m sure we’ve booked her in here before. Can you check back a few months?’

She tapped and squinted at the screen for a minute, nodded, then tapped again.

‘Okay,’ she said, pressing her finger on the screen. ‘Ms Whalen did stay with us three months ago, two nights. And before that I have a reservation back in January. Three nights that time. You want me to go farther?’

I said no, and went back outside. Walked up to the corner, where I was beyond the influence of the doorman and his familiars, who remained keen that I do the right thing with my car. I still wasn’t sure if I was over-reacting, and I knew from experience that I have a tendency to stomp on the gas pedal when sitting and waiting would be the more considered option. But now I knew Amy had stayed in this hotel before, and that changed things. Not because it confirmed she’d been in Seattle on those occasions – I knew that – but because it meant she was familiar with the Malo and unlikely to have turned up and rejected it this time. I knew from an enquiry via their website that the hotel had vacancies for this week. So it wasn’t a screwed-up booking either.

I went over to the doorman, gave him some money and told him I’d be right back. I zigzagged the few blocks to the Hotel Monaco on 4th Avenue. Amy would have liked this place too – God would have liked it – but a quick conversation confirmed neither had stayed there in the recent past.

The hotel had always been a dead end. It was time to forget about it. Time to forget about the whole thing, probably. I’d made the decision to come to the city around one o’clock the previous night, telling myself it was to do Amy the favour of retrieving her phone. A hundred plus miles is not a huge deal in the Pacific Northwest. But it wasn’t just that, of course. Amy had made business trips six, seven times a year ever since I’d known her. We had a standard operating procedure. We didn’t go for whole days without being in contact, however brief. But … bottom line, she hadn’t been staying in the hotel she’d used before. That was all I had, and in the light of day it didn’t amount to a whole lot. I felt embarrassed for being there and was not entirely inclined to dismiss the voice in my head which claimed it was merely an excuse for leaving my desk for the day.

When I got back to the Malo I went inside and perched on a chair by the big window. I opened the envelope and got out Amy’s phone. It was easy to recognize, though I noticed she’d changed the picture she used as her background. It was a standard cell phone, and no more: in an uncharacteristically anti-corporate stand she’d resisted getting sucked into BlackBerry hell. I pressed the green button. The ‘outgoing’ list showed a call to my cell at the top – from cab guy late last night – preceded by names and numbers I didn’t recognize, until it showed incoming from me the afternoon before last.

I switched to her Contacts and scrolled through it, searching for Kerry, Crane & Hardy, Seattle. It wasn’t there, of course. She’d know these people by first name and direct line, rather than hacking her way in through the general switchboard.

I noticed the battery indicator was flashing about two seconds before the cell went dead.

Using my own I rang directory assistance and got a number for KC&H. I called the number and heard a perky voice sing out the familiar three letters. I asked to talk with someone who worked with Amy Whalen. I figured I’d find some underling who knew Amy’s schedule, come up with a time and place to meet her. She might even be right there in the office. I could take her to lunch.

The phone went quiet for a while and then I was talking to someone’s assistant. She worked for a person named Todd and confirmed he’d be the guy to talk to, but he was in a meeting right now. I was told he’d phone me just as soon as he possibly could, if not sooner.

Then I called Red Cabs and tried to learn how to get in contact with Georj Unpronounceable. He was off duty and the dispatcher was cagey but claimed he’d tell the guy to get in touch with me when he came back on stream. I ended the call knowing it would never happen.

So I left the hotel and walked across the street to a Seattle’s Best. I sat at a table outside there with a big, strong coffee, smoking and watching the rain and waiting for someone – anyone – to call me back.

By half past eleven I was cold and getting pissed off. The ten bucks I’d left with the Malo’s doorman had worn off and he’d gotten uptight about the car’s continued presence outside the hotel. The Zimmermans’ second-best SUV did not make a great advertisement for the establishment. For any establishment, actually. Retired professors apparently don’t care a great deal about mud and dents, and the faded anti-war stickers in the back window were large and strident. Finally the guy in the hat crossed the street to come give me grief and I agreed to move along.

I drove around the block until I found an underground lot. When I re-emerged I spent a couple of minutes with a downtown map I’d scored from the Malo reception. It was optimized toward shopping and eating opportunities and it took me a while to locate the agency’s street. It wasn’t where I expected, either. I’d assumed the agency would be located a zillion floors up in one of the corporate behemoths that surrounded me. Instead it seemed to be in a narrow street near the Marketplace.

I walked down a couple of vertiginous blocks until I found the big Public Market Center sign, then asked directions from a guy running a news stand. He directed me down a narrow road that went under the main market and swerved sharply and steeply left. A sign confirmed this was Post Alley. It looked more like a locale for loading and unloading fish and/or selling drugs. After a hundred yards, however, it suddenly segued into a section remade in 1990s post-modernist, with hanging baskets, a sushi restaurant and a little deli with a row of people sitting in the window eating identical salads. Soon after I saw a restrained sign hanging from a picturesque wooden beam and knew I was in the right place.

I walked in, deciding how to play this. Our working lives had always been very separate. I’d gotten to know Amy’s assistant in LA a little from crisis phone calls and occasional flying visits to the house, but she’d left to have a baby a couple of months before Amy re-aligned her working conditions. I’d heard colleagues’ names mentioned, some enough to vaguely remember. I was pretty sure a Todd was among them. Could be this one, could be some other. There was probably a Todd working in every advertising agency in the country, on a quota basis. The whole deal would have been easier to handle on the phone – I could pretend I was still back out in the sticks and trying to casually get in touch with her – but I was tired of waiting for a return call.

Reception was an existential statement and they’d spent a lot of money on it, mainly in an attempt to make it look like they hadn’t, which is presumably the kind of thing that impresses the hell out of other advertising folk. Each chair cost far more than the woman behind the desk earned in a month, but she didn’t seem put out by this. She was all in black and willowy and big-eyed – yet also possessed of a fierce intelligence, you could just tell – and came across like a girl who inhabited the best of all possible worlds and was keen to spread the joy around.

I asked for Todd and was asked if I was expected.

‘Oh no,’ I said, shrugging in what I hoped was a charming way. I didn’t have much practice. ‘Just here on the off-chance.’

She beamed, as if this was simply the best possible way of stopping by, and got on the phone. She nodded vigorously at the end of her conversation, so I assumed that either I was good to go or she had mildly lost her mind.

Five minutes later someone eerily identical appeared from behind a frosted glass door at the end of the room. She beckoned and I got up and followed her into the offices beyond. This woman evidently inhabited only the third or fourth best of all worlds, and was not disposed to mirth or unnecessary chatter, though I did learn she was called Bianca. We took an elevator up two floors and then marched along a corridor with glass walls, past funky little rooms in which pairs of short-haired people were working so hard and creatively it made me want to set off a fire alarm, preferably by starting an actual fire.

At the end she opened a door and ushered me through.

‘Todd Crane,’ she announced.

Ah, I thought: only at that moment realizing I was about to talk to a third of the people who made up the company name.

I found myself in an austere space with big windows on two sides, giving a wide view of Elliott Bay and the piers. The remaining walls were covered with framed certificates and awards and huge and celebratory product shots, including a few campaigns I knew Amy had been involved with. In the middle of the room there was a desk big enough to play basketball on. A trim man in his early fifties was coming out from behind it. Chinos, well-pressed lilac shirt. Hair once black now streaked with flecks of grey, bone structure so blandly handsome he could have been cast in a television spot for just about anything good and wholesome and reasonably expensive.

‘Hey,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘I’m Todd Crane.’

I’ll just bet you are, I thought, as I shook it. And I don’t like you.

He was smooth, though. I guess half his job was making strangers feel at home. There was a framed photograph on one corner of his desk, a studio portrait showing Crane with his arm around a glossy woman, flanked by three daughters of widely spaced ages. Curiously, it was angled not towards his chair, but out into the room; as if it were another credential, like the certificates on the walls. There was a retro radio on the floor in the corner of the room too, 1970s era, presumably another character statement.

‘So, Jack,’ he said, leaning back. ‘Great to finally put a face to the name after all this time. I’m amazed it never happened before.’

‘Didn’t get out of LA often,’ I said. ‘Until we moved.’

‘So what brings you to the city today? You’re in books now, right?’

‘I have a meeting. Plus Amy managed to leave her cell phone in a cab yesterday. So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, get the phone to her right away. She must be in withdrawal by now.’

Todd laughed. Ha, ha, ha. The beats were separate, as if the sequence had been composed, practised and perfected in private many, many years before.

Then he paused, as if waiting for me to say something else. I thought that was weird. I had been expecting him to be the one to start volunteering information.

‘So,’ I said, eventually. ‘What’s the best way of me doing that?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Crane said. He looked confused.

‘I assumed someone here would have her diary.’

‘Well, not really,’ he said, folding his arms and pursing his lips. ‘Amy’s our roving trouble-shooter now. As you know, of course. Finger in a lot of pies. A global view. Strategic. But fundamentally she still reports to the LA office. They’d be the people who’d—’

He stopped, as if he’d just put things together in his head. Looked at me carefully.

‘Uh, Amy’s not in Seattle this week, Jack,’ he said. ‘At least, not with us.’

I was as fast as I could be, but my mouth must still have been hanging open for a second. Maybe two.

‘I know that,’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘She’s visiting friends. I just wondered whether she was expected to touch base at any point. As she’s here anyway.’

Todd shook his head slowly. ‘Not that I know of. But maybe, you know? Have you tried her hotel? We always book people in the Malo. Or is she staying with her … friends?’

‘I left a message for her there already. Just wanted to get this phone back to her as quick as I can.’

‘Understand that,’ Todd nodded, all smiles again. ‘Lost without them these days, right? Wish I could help you more, Jack. She stops by, I’ll tell her you’re on the hunt. You want to give me your number?’

‘I left it already,’ I said.

‘That’s right, sorry. Hell of a morning. Clients. Can’t live with them, not recommended business practice to shoot them in the head. Or so they say.’

He clapped me on the shoulder and walked me out back along the corridor, filling the journey with praise of Amy and a sustained meditation on how her new position was going to shake things up for the company, and in a good way. It was not difficult to imagine him greeting his wife and kids in a similar manner every morning, a goals and achievements spiel capped with assurances of his best attention at all times, cc-ed to his personal assistant.

He left me at the door and I walked out across reception alone. I turned my head just before stepping back out into the world. It seemed to me that there might be someone standing behind the frosted glass door, watching me leave, but I couldn’t be sure.

I walked down the alley slowly. I hadn’t brought Amy’s organizer but I remembered the contents. Three days full of meetings. Sure, I hadn’t read the details and they could theoretically have been in LA, San Francisco or Portland – the last only a three-hour drive away – but I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d confused the city. Plus I had her phone in my pocket, found here in this city last night. Amy had come here, and until the night before last had been in contact as usual. Now she was nowhere to be found. The hotel was a blank. The people at her job didn’t know where she was, or said they didn’t.

And neither did I.

Post Alley deposited me in a stubby dead-end, over which the beginnings of an elevated street set off towards the bay, before banking sharply left to join the Alaskan Viaduct above. The concrete supports had been covered in graffiti, over what looked like many years. ‘Rev9’, and ‘Later’ and ‘Back Again’ it said, amongst other things. While my eyes were wandering over this I felt a sudden itch in my shoulder blades.

I turned, slowly, as if that was simply what I was doing next. A few people were walking back and forth at the end of the road, going about their business in the shadow of the elevated highway, getting in or out of cars, moving stuff here and there. Beyond that there was a wide road and a couple of piers, and then the flicker of light hitting water out on Elliott Bay.

No one was looking in my direction. Everyone was in motion, walking or driving. Traffic rumbled over the elevated highway above, sending deep vibrations through the buildings and sidewalks around me, until the whole city almost seemed to be singing one long, low note.

Chapter 9

I found a bar downtown. I scored a table by the window and ordered a pot of coffee – employing the last of my charm to get the waitress to let me use a socket behind the bar to plug in a power adapter for Amy’s phone, which I’d bought on the way. While I waited for the coffee I watched people at the other tables. Bars used to be a place where you came to get away from the outside world. That was the point. Now everyone seemed to be sucking free wi-fi or talking on cell phones.

Nobody did anything interesting enough to distract me from the interlocking dialogues in my head. The fact Amy wasn’t in town on Kerry, Crane & Hardy business could be explained. I knew that. I was calm. It was still possible there was nothing strange going on here except inside my own head, and it reminded me of a time a year or so before, when Amy went through a period of talking in her sleep. At first it was just a mumbling and you couldn’t make out anything within it. After a while it got stronger, words and sections of sentences. It would wake me up, night after night. It began to screw with both our sleep patterns. She tried adjusting her diet and caffeine intake and spending even longer in the gym on the way to work, but nothing helped. Then it just stopped, though it was a couple of weeks before I started sleeping soundly again. In the meantime I had plenty of time to lie in the dark and wonder what made the brain do such a thing, how it must be organized so that when all of the conscious functions had apparently checked out, some part was still verbalizing about something. How was it doing that, and why? Who was it talking to?

That’s what it felt like my brain was doing right now. The part under my conscious control was sticking fingers in dykes and providing rational explanations. It was doing good work, suggesting Amy might indeed be here on the quiet in the hope of bringing clients to KC&H as a lock, stock and barrel triumph that couldn’t be group-owned. She lived and breathed office politics. Could even be that was what she had been trying to explain the evening when I didn’t listen properly.

But meanwhile other bits of my head were running scatter-shot in all directions. Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order, and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along. Or perhaps that’s just me.

When Amy’s phone had enough charge I retrieved it from behind the bar. Sitting with it in my hands felt strange. This was the only device through which I could talk to my wife: but it was currently with me, and thus made her feel even farther away. We have evolved now, gained a sixth sense through the invention of email and cell phones – an awareness of the utterances and circumstances of people who are not present. When this sense is taken away, you feel panicked, struck blind. I had a sudden idea and called the phone back at the house, but it rang and rang before switching to the machine. I left a message saying where I was and why, just in case Amy got home ahead of me. It should have felt like a good, sensible thing to do. Instead it was as if another road had just been washed away in the rain.

Amy’s phone was a different brand from mine and the keys were a lot smaller. As a result my first brush with the interface put me in the music player section by mistake. There were eight MP3 tracks listed, which surprised me. Like any other occupant of the twenty-first century who wasn’t Amish, Amy owned an iPod. She wasn’t going to be using her phone for music, but while I could imagine a device might come with a couple of songs preloaded, eight seemed a lot. Seven of the tracks were simply numbered Track 1 to Track 7, the other a long string of digits. I tried Track 1. Tinny music came out of the earpiece, old jazz, one of those crackly 1920s guys. Very much not Amy’s kind of thing – she’d gone on record more than once as hating jazz, or basically anything that pre-dated Blondie. I tried another track, then one more, with similar results. It was like holding the world’s smallest speakeasy.

I took another scroll through the Contacts section, this time not looking for Kerry, Crane & Hardy but for anything else that stuck out. I didn’t see anything to make me linger. I didn’t recognize all the names, but I was never going to. Your partner’s workplace is like another country. You’ll always be a stranger there.

So I headed to the SMS section. Amy had picked up the joy of SMS messaging from the younger blades in the agency, and she and I now exchanged texts regularly – when I knew she would be in a meeting, or she wanted to convey information that didn’t need my attention right away. Usually just to say hi. Sure enough, there were four from me there, going back a few months. A couple from her sister, Natalie, who lived back down in Santa Monica, in the house where she and Amy had been born and grown up.

And eleven from somebody else.

The messages from Natalie and me had our names attached. These others didn’t, just a phone number. It was the same number each time.

I selected the earliest. It was blank. An SMS communication had been sent, and received, but there was no text in it at all. The next was the same, and the next. Why would you keep sending texts without anything in them? Because you were incompetent, maybe, but by the third or fourth you’d think anyone could have gotten the hang of it. I kept scrolling. I’d grown so used to the single line of nothing in each message that when the sixth contained something else it took me by surprise. It didn’t make much sense, either.

yes

No period, even. The next few messages were blank again. Then I got to the final one.

A rose by ny othr name wll sml as sweet … :-D

I put the phone on the table and poured another cup of coffee. Eleven messages was a lot, even if most of them had nothing to say. Besides, Amy wasn’t the type to let her phone be clogged with other people’s Luddite errors. She was not sentimental. I’d already noted she’d only kept the texts from me that contained information of long-term use. A few thinking-of-you ones I’d sent a couple of days before, and which she’d replied to, had already been erased. The couple from Natalie looked like they’d been saved because they were especially annoying, and could be used later as evidence against her.

So why keep someone else’s blanks? And under what circumstances would you receive this many messages from someone and yet not have their name in your list of contacts? The others came up as ‘Home’ – my phone – and ‘Natalie’. These just listed the number. If you’re that regularly in contact, why not go to the minuscule trouble of entering the person’s name into your phone book? Unless it’s something you don’t want found?

I flipped over to the made/received calls log. The number didn’t appear anywhere on it. Communication from this source evidently only came in the form of text, or at least no call had come from it in the last month.

This gave me an idea, and I went back to the first SMS message and found it had been sent a little over three months previously. There had been a month gap between the first and the second. Then another two weeks. Then they had started coming more frequently. The one saying ‘yes’ had been sent six days before. And the one about roses had arrived just yesterday, late in the afternoon. Amy had seen this message – she must have, otherwise it would still have been filed under UNREAD. Then some time in the next few hours she had lost the phone, during the course of an evening which her schedule listed as blank.

Then she had, so far as I could tell, lost herself.

I navigated sideways from Received Messages into the section recording texts that Amy had sent. The list there was very short. A couple of replies her sister, and to me. And one other. It had been sent two minutes after the last message to her, and consisted of the following:

Bell 9. Will b waitng, whenever yr redE, 2dy, nxt wk, nxt year xoxox

The waitress swung by at that moment to see if I wanted fresh coffee. I said no. I asked for beer.

One thing my father was always good at was answering questions. He didn’t have infinite patience in other directions, but if you asked him something – how the moon was created, why cats slept all the time, why that man over there had only one arm – he’d always give you a grown-up answer, except for this one occasion. I was about twelve. I’d heard an older kid at school being pretentious and been somewhat impressed and came home and asked my dad what was the meaning of life, thinking it made me sound at least sixteen. He seemed unaccountably annoyed, and said it was a dumb question. I didn’t understand. ‘Say you come back to your house one afternoon,’ he said, ‘and there’s someone at your table, eating your food. You don’t ask him “What the hell are you doing, sitting there, eating my dinner?” – because he could simply say he was hungry. Which is an answer to what you asked him, sure enough. But not to your real question, which is what the hell are you doing in my house?’

I still didn’t get it, but I found I remembered this from time to time when I was older. It probably made me a slightly better cop, less prone to ask witnesses my questions instead of just letting them tell me what they knew. I remembered it again as I sat there in the bar in Seattle and started my first beer.

My head felt heavy, and cold, and I was coming to suspect the day was not going to end well. I realized that maybe I had to stop asking where Amy was, and start thinking about why.

Chapter 10

Meanwhile a girl was standing in an airport concourse. A big clock suspended from the ceiling said it was twenty-four minutes to four. As she watched, the last number changed, going from 16:36 to 16:37. She kept watching until it flipped to 16:39. She liked the ‘9’. She didn’t know why it should seem compelling, but it did. A recorded voice kept telling people not to smoke, which Madison suspected must be annoying for them.

Madison was not sure where she was going next. She had not, for a couple of minutes, been sure where she was right at this moment. She recognized it now. It was Portland airport, of course. She’d been here several times in the past, most recently when they went to visit Mom’s mom down in Florida in the spring. Madison could remember browsing around the little Powell’s bookstore, and drinking a juice at the café where you could watch planes landing and taking off. Mom had been nervous about flying and Dad had joked and made her feel better about it. There had been more joking in those days. A lot more.

But today? Madison remembered early talk of a trip up to the grocery store in Cannon Beach that morning, discussion that hadn’t come to anything. Then a little time on the beach. It had been cold and windy. There had been no walk. A quiet and threadbare lunch, in the cottage. Mom stayed indoors afterwards, so Madison went back out to hang on the beach by herself.

After that … there was this gap. Like when she’d woke last night and couldn’t remember the time on the beach. It was like there was a cloud in the way.

Mom wasn’t here at the airport with her, that was clear. Mom wouldn’t have walked off and left her by herself. Madison was wearing her new coat too, she realized. That was also strange. She wouldn’t have gone out to the beach in her new coat. She would have worn her old coat, because it didn’t matter if that got sand on it. So she must have gone into the cottage after the beach, to change, and snuck back out.

Then what? How had she gotten from there to Portland? Maddy knew the word her Uncle Brian would use for this: perplexing. In every other way she felt fine. Just like normal. So what was the deal with the blank spot? And what was she supposed to do now?

She realized the hand in her pocket was holding something. She pulled it out. A notebook. It was small, bound in stained brown leather, and looked old. She opened it. The pages were covered in handwriting. The first line said:

In the beginning there was Death.

It was written in a pen that smudged occasionally, in an ink that was a kind of red-brown. There were drawings in the book, too, maps and diagrams, lists of names. One of the diagrams looked exactly like the drawing on the back of the business card she also had in her possession, the interlinked nines. Even the handwriting looked the same. Slipped in the front of the notebook was a long piece of paper. It was a United Airlines ticket.

Wow – how had she bought that?

These questions didn’t make her feel scared. Not quite. For the time being there was something dreamlike about her situation. Maybe all that mattered was going where she needed to go, and she could worry about everything else later. Yes. That sounded good. Easier.

Madison blinked, and by the time her eyelids had flipped back up she had largely stopped worrying about trivia like how she had travelled the fifty miles from Cannon Beach to Portland airport, or purchased an airline ticket costing over a hundred dollars, or why she was alone.

Instead she turned to look at the departures information, to find out where it was she needed to go.

As far as Jim Morgan was concerned there was a simple secret to life, and it was something he’d learned from his Uncle Clive. His father’s cadaverous brother spent his entire working days in security at the Ready Ship despatch warehouse over in Tigart. Checked trucks as they came in, checked them as they went out. He’d done this five days a week for over thirty years. Jim’s dad never hid the fact that as a (junior) executive in a bank he considered himself many steps up the ladder compared with his older sibling – but the curious thing was that while his father spent his life moaning and feeling put-upon, Uncle Clive seemed utterly content with his lot.

One evening when Jim was thirteen his uncle had spent an entire Sunday dinner talking about his job. This was not the first time – and Jim’s father and mother were not subtle about rolling their eyes – but on this occasion their son listened. He listened to information about schedules and shipping targets. He listened to discussion of procedures. He came to understand that every day, between the hours of eight and four, getting in and out of the Ready Ship warehouse was like shoving a fat camel through the eye of a needle. Uncle Clive was that needle. Didn’t matter who you were or what you were carrying, how late or urgent your shipment or how many times he’d seen your face before. You showed your badge or pass or letter. You were polite. You dealt with Uncle Clive in the proper manner. Otherwise you didn’t get past – or at least not without a protracted exchange involving two-way radios and head-shaking, from which you would limp away feeling like an ass. Which you were. The rules were simple. You showed your pass. It was the law. You couldn’t get this through your head, it wasn’t Uncle Clive’s fault.

Fifteen years later Jim had taken this to heart. You could do things the hard way or the right way, and it was always someone’s god- or government-given job to make sure you did like you’d been told. There was something else to be learned from this, a way of living your life. You took your pleasures where you could, and you made sure you were king of your own domain. Amen.

Jim’s domain was the Portland airport security line. He ran a tight ship. People stood where and how they were supposed to stand, or they faced Jim’s wrath – he had no problem with stopping the checking process and walking slowly down the line of fretful travellers to tell the assholes at the back to keep the line straight. Jim had a system at the front too. The person he was dealing with was allowed to approach. All others (including that person’s spouse, business partner, mother or spirit guide) stood the hell back at the yellow line and waited their turn. Failure to comply would cause Jim to again stop what he was doing and step forward to explain it at uncomfortable length. He actually did have all day to spend on the matter, or at least a set of three two hour shifts. The people in line weren’t on the side of the troublemaker at the front. They wanted to get on with their journey, buy a magazine, take a dump. Anyone obstructing these goals became an enemy of the people. Jim’s philosophy was ‘divide and rule’, or it would have been if he’d ever thought to articulate it. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t his job to explain things. His way was just the way that it was.

At 16:48 all was well in Jim’s world. He had his line moving in a well-ordered manner. It was neither too long (making Jim look inefficient) nor too short (suggesting he was insufficiently thorough, which would be far worse), and it was very straight. Jim nodded curtly at an octogenarian from Nebraska who – he was now confident – was unlikely to be carrying a cigarette lighter, hand gun or atomic weapon, and waved her on to the X-ray machine. Then he took his own good time about turning back to the line.

A little girl was standing there. About nine, ten maybe, long hair. She seemed to be alone.

Jim cupped his hand, indicated she should come forward. She did so. He raised his head, the signal for ‘turn over your documentation and make sure it’s in the right (though unspecified) order, or I’m going to make you feel a dork in front of everyone.’

‘Hello,’ she said, smiling up at him. It was a nice smile, the kind that secured second or third visits to toy shops, the smile of a little girl who had always been pretty good at getting people to do what she wanted.

Jim did not return it. Security was not a smiling matter. ‘Ticket.’

She handed it to him promptly. He looked it over for his standard period, three times longer than was necessary. With his eyes firmly on the self-explanatory piece of paper, he demanded: ‘Accompanying adult?’

‘Excuse me?’

He looked up slowly. ‘Where is she? Or he?’

‘What?’ she said. She looked confused.

Jim prepared to deliver one of the stock phrases to deal with diversions from set procedure. His versions were famously brisk. But this was just a kid. The two guys behind her in line were now taking a mild interest in the proceedings. Jim couldn’t just chew her out.

He smiled inexpertly. ‘You need an accompanying adult to get you to departure,’ he said. ‘It’s the law.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Uh-huh. “Unaccompanied minors must be brought to the gate by a parent or responsible adult”,’ he added, quoting, ‘“who must remain at the airport until the child boards and the airplane departs the gate.” You need all this arranged and booked ahead of time, too. You can’t just turn up at the gate and fly, kid.’

‘But … I’m going to visit my aunt,’ the girl said, sounding slightly panicky. ‘She’s waiting for me. She’s going to be worried.’

‘Well, maybe your momma should have made sure you …’

‘Please? I do have someone with me. They … had to go outside to smoke. They’ll be here in a minute, really.’

Jim shook his head. ‘Even if I let you through here, which I ain’t gonna, they’ll check again at the gate. You’re not getting near that plane without an adult.’

The girl’s smile slowly faded.

‘Sorry, kid,’ Jim said, making what was for him quite an effort to hide the fact that he was not.

She looked up at him for a moment. ‘Watch your back,’ she said, softly. Then she ducked under the rope and walked away across the concourse, where she was quickly lost amongst the other evening travellers.

Jim watched her go, open-mouthed. When it came to kids he was phoning it in from the land of Who Gives A Shit, down a really bad line. But … shouldn’t he maybe go after her? Check she really was here with someone?

On the other hand the line was getting long and some of the people in it looked bad-tempered and if the truth be told Jim just didn’t really care. All he wanted was to close out his shift, get home and drink a series of beers while watching the tube, then get on the net and find some porn. There was that, plus …

Of course it was absurd, just a little girl using a phrase picked up from a movie. But there’d been something in her tone that made him think if she’d been a couple feet taller he would have taken the threat seriously. Even from a woman. He didn’t want to have to explain this to anyone. So he went to the next person in line, who turned out to be French, so while he had identification it wasn’t American identification, which mandated Jim to stare even longer and harder than usual at his documents and to look up at the guy’s face in a suspicious and ‘Don’t think we’ve forgotten about you punking out over Iraq’ kind of way. By the end of this he was King of the Line again.

He didn’t think about the little girl until the detectives turned up the next day; and it wasn’t until he realized he’d missed the opportunity to prevent a nine-year-old girl from vanishing into thin air that he understood there were smaller holes than he’d ever realized, and he was about to spend a while being pulled back and forth through one of them.

Meanwhile Madison had made her way back outside the airport building, and was standing forlornly on the sidewalk.

Now what?

Frowning, trying to remember why she’d been so convinced she had to fly when getting a cab to the house and her father would make most sense, Madison noticed a guy standing ten feet away having a cigarette. He was looking at her as if he was wondering what she was doing here by herself. He seemed like a nice man and the kind who might ask her if she was okay and Madison was not sure what the answer to that was. She wasn’t sure she trusted herself to speak, either: she’d been almost rude to the man in the airport, which was not like her at all. Maddy was very polite, always, especially to grown-ups.

She crossed the street quickly and went into the multistorey parking lot, as if that’s where she’d been going all along. Seeing the smoking man stirred a memory from the blank period earlier in the day. Another man had looked at her, she thought, after she had … of course.

That’s how she’d got to the city.

By bus, duh. She’d arrived at the Greyhound station on NW 6th Avenue. Then she’d walked for a long time, she remembered, looking for an address. It was in a place she knew but somehow she didn’t know where that place actually was. The area was not very nice. A lot of the store fronts were boarded over and had letters above them that did not make words in English. There were cardboard boxes all over and the smell of rotting fruit in gutters. The parked cars looked old. It had been different also to the parts of Portland that Madison knew in that it seemed to be a place where only men lived. Men, standing in dirty grocery stores. Men leaning in doorways, by themselves or with someone just like them, not talking to each other but watching everyone who went past. Men, on street corners, shivering. There were white men and black men and Asian men, but they all looked more or less the same and like they all knew about the same things. Maybe this was what her mom meant when she said the colour of someone’s skin made no difference. At some point there had been a man in particular, two men, in fact. They had a dog on a chain. They’d come towards her purposefully, looking all around as they got closer, but then their dog suddenly started going nuts and they crossed the street instead.

Did she find the place she was looking for? She still couldn’t remember that part. But she knew she didn’t have the small notebook when she left the house that morning. So maybe that’s where it had come from. Good. Call that squared away. She got to Portland by bus.

Once she’d filled every one of these little gaps, everything would be back to normal.

Inside the parking lot it was dark and cool. People walked back and forth with suitcases that made clackety sounds. Cars pulled out of spaces and went swishing out onto the road. Big white and yellow and red buses with sliding doors and hotel names on them let people off or picked them up. It was a place full of people who didn’t know each other. That was good. Madison decided she would find somewhere she could sit and think in quiet. She walked down the centre of one of the aisles. Everyone was talking or laughing or paying cab drivers or keeping track of their own children. It was like they couldn’t see her at all. This reminded her of something, though she couldn’t remember what.