by Unknown
“That’s ridiculous. I told you, Monday was the first time I’ve been there in six years.”
“That’s what you told me, Thomas, but other people are telling different.”
“I—” McTurk had said that in any future interview he should be accompanied by his attorney, but Tom had come alone. It seemed to him that to enter the courthouse building in the company of a criminal lawyer could only deepen his troubles. He disliked McTurk, whose last action had been to slide the bill for lunch into the new folder labeled “Janeway,” but he badly wanted him by his side now. It was as if solid ground had abruptly given way to a bog of floating moss, and that no matter where he planted his foot, he’d find himself up to his neck in black slime. “They’re wrong. I wasn’t anywhere—”
“In a case like this, a lot of people start remembering things that didn’t happen.”
“Thank you.”
The detective opened a tin of Sucrets and began sucking on a lozenge. Tom smelled the mint on his breath.
“Something you didn’t tell me, Thomas. Your wife . . . Elizabeth. Few weeks ago, she moved out of the marital home. She’s living in a condo in Belltown.”
“Why should I tell you that? It’s nothing—”
“Things sometimes have to do with things in ways you wouldn’t believe. Your boy, Finn: you got a parenting agreement for him?”
Humiliated, Tom explained the weekly schedule that he and Beth had worked out, but didn’t mention that he hadn’t seen Finn since Sunday.
“That sounds pretty close to joint custody. You find it difficult to swing that quality of access, Thomas?”
“No. She and I just divided up the week, and because the house is so close to his preschool—”
“You’re lucky. My kids? They get to stay with me two Saturday nights a month . . .”
“You have them tonight?”
“No.”
“That must be hard. I find it hard enough with—”
“My wife’s dad hired her a big-time lawyer. From San Francsico. An older broad, a real feminist. In court, she tied my guy up in a bag and took him out with the garbage. I should have had a woman, too. Should’ve seen it coming. That’s why I’m studying family law at the U. You’d think, me being involved with legal work and everything, I’d have all that shit figured out. But I wasn’t too bright. Came out of that courtroom without a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of.” Nagel glowered, as if the lawyer from San Francisco was sitting in Tom’s chair. “I’ll tell you something, Thomas. When it gets to the divorce, you better find yourself a smart female attorney.”
Feeling greatly encouraged by this shift in the detective’s tone, Tom said, “You know, I’m not sure, but I think I did remember something.”
“Yes?”
“The bridge—the one near where . . . There’s a parking lot there, not big, just a square of gravel by the side of the road?”
“I’m with you.”
“It may not have been the only vehicle there, but there was one that I seem to remember—a scruffy sort of camper van. Not a minivan or an RV, but the prefab add-on kind . . .”
“Truck conversion?”
“Yes, that would be it. It was dirty-white, with a bit of yellow on it, I think. But old and scratched-up. All the shine was gone from the bodywork. I believe I saw floral curtains in the windows.”
“You notice the license plate?”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly remember the num—”
“I’m not asking you for the numbers. Was it an in-state plate, or out-of-state?”
“Alaska!” Tom said, astonishing himself. “I’m almost sure it said ‘Alaska.’ ”
“That’s pretty good, Thomas. In fact, that camper has Washington plates, but the shell says ALASKAN, the company that made it. It’s an ’84 Dodge truck with an Alaskan shell. The owner—he lives in that wreck— was walking his dogs and says he was way up in Bothell when . . . Well, it checks out. But I think we’re finally getting somewhere. You remembering this camper—it shows you live in the same world as the rest of us, some of the time anyhow. Which I was beginning to doubt.”
Chick was nowhere to be found. Tom left three messages on his pager, and drove slowly around the reticular grid of streets looking for the black pick-up truck. Everywhere he saw contractors of the grander sort, but Excellent Construction had vanished into the city’s wintry labyrinth. On Queen Anne’s eastern brow, Tom stopped the car and looked down over Seattle, incontinently sprawled over its lakes and timber-spotted hills. From here, the gray slurry of development appeared not to stop until it reached the snowfields of the Cascades, some forty miles away. The contractor and his band of Mexicans might be anywhere. Chick had no habits that Tom knew of, no contacts or connections: he’d popped into existence like the plants that suddenly appear on new volcanic islands, their seed carried there in seagull shit. He was a creature of pure accident, it seemed to Tom, and there was no predicting the next rock on which he might take temporary root.
Back at the house, a long strand of plastic tape had broken loose from the porch deck and was flying in the wind, a wild red question mark. Gingerly straddling two raw joists, Tom let himself in by the front door. As he was turning to close it, he could have sworn he saw a lightning-bolt, though he heard no thunder and the sky above was empty except for a few streaks of high cirrus. He looked up and down the street. There was no-one about. He must’ve been imagining things.
Up in his third-floor eyrie, he retrieved the still unfinished ALIENS.doc, but was too jumpy and distracted to write. He found his copy of American Notes, but reading Dickens on the Atlantic Ocean in a hurricane roused only a sharp, unwelcome memory of the turbid water of Sammamish Slough. Finally, Tom did what he’d shied away from doing for the past several days: he went on the Internet in search of Hayley Topolski.
He clicked back and forth between the online editions of the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer, following the story as it grew from the kernel of a bare police report into a ripe journalistic tragedy. Tom’s own role in it was smaller than he’d feared: the “person of interest” sought by the police at the outset had come forward and been interviewed by detectives. A spokesman for the King County Sheriff’s Office declined to release his name and said he was not regarded as a suspect.
More than a hundred volunteers had combed the neighboring fields, and the slough had been dragged. A volunteer was quoted as saying, “At least we didn’t find what many people were afraid of finding.” Neighbors had spent Saturday tying ribbons to the branches of the poplars along the trail to remind people of Hayley. An impromptu shrine had arisen outside her house, where well-wishers left cards, prayers, cut flowers, balloons, teddy bears, and Beanie Babies. A candle-light vigil had been held at the Community Baptist Church on the outskirts of Woodinville.
Hayley had entered the limbo of the missing, where she was spoken of, insistently, in the present tense, but in terms that took her death for granted. “She is a little piece of sunshine,” said her pastor. “She’s a wonderful little girl,” her kindergarten teacher said. “She’s a well-behaved sweet girl.” “She’s a quiet girl who laughs a lot.” To these people, Hayley had become the incarnation of childhood itself, and they talked as if what had in fact gone missing on Sammamish Slough was innocence itself. As a neighbor said, “She is an angel.” It was left to Maddie, her older sister, to strike the lone realistic note: “She loved karaoke.” And for a moment, Tom was able to see her as a real child, jigging, out of sync, mike in hand, to Britney Spears.
Hayley’s parents—in their “routine of anguish and agony”—had given no interviews, but Tom could picture them from the reports. He was a loader operator, she worked part-time at Denny’s; their ranch-style bungalow on Route 202 was described by the Times as “modest” and by the P-I as a rental. Both Ed and Sharon were on their second time around. Maddie was the child of his previous marriage, Taylor of hers.
How often, then, must the Topolskis have been gripped by
the instinctual, reflexive paranoia that keeps parents watching out for their children’s safety? Tom thought of Finn, at two and three, tottering at speed down supermarket aisles: in the time it took to grind half a pound of coffee beans, or choose the greenest bananas, he would be lost to view around a corner, with Tom ricocheting from trolley to trolley and shopper to shopper in a torment of anxiety. The day Finn was born, the world suddenly filled with baby-snatchers, child-molesters armed with bags of candy, drivers yakking into cellphones who carelessly squashed small bodies beneath their wheels, along with the unguarded machinery, deep water, precipitous stairwells, electrical outlets, sharp knives, and prescription drugs that made any child’s survival to adolescence seem an against-all-odds miracle.
A couple of years ago, Finn had disappeared on the crowded beach at Golden Gardens. It was hot, in the eighties, the air stinking of suntan lotion and barbecue smoke. Tom and Beth, talking fondly and intently, had relaxed their guard for a few instants, and when they looked up he was gone. In raging panic, Tom waded into the sea, fully expecting to see a pale shape like a drifting jellyfish in the suck and swash of the tide, while Beth sprinted across the low dunes to the parking lot, having spotted a man hurrying a child towards a car in the far distance. Finn, as it turned out, had attached himself to another family and was helping two girls to build a sand-castle; but in the nearly ten-minute interval, Tom experienced fear of such pure intensity that he hadn’t known it lay within his being to be so possessed by a single emotion. It was a feeling beyond, or beneath, language, a howling emptiness in the heart. He’d seen Finn dead. Later, he plowed groggily through the sand to the rest-room by the swings and vomited himself dry in the toilet.
The Topolskis would have lived through all the usual false alarms and learned, as Tom had done, to try to control such mad blazes of apprehension. Your child always turned up safely in the end. Always. Then came the day when yellow ribbons were in the trees and flyers on telephone poles, and all those fears—banal, irrational—became true prophecies.
Poor Maddie. Tom imagined her father shouting, and the blaming, appalled gaze of her stepmother. She’d let thirty minutes go by before looking for help. Only thirteen, and lacking the in-built fright-machine of a parent, she’d probably thought Hayley a tiresome brat when she failed to answer, and kept on walking. Tom could see her in her bomber jacket and pink pants; an anemic pinched face, with damp fair hair hanging in rat-tails around her ears; and earrings—big braided hoops of many colors.
She hadn’t worn earrings in the snapshot on Paul Nagel’s desk, Tom was certain of it. Only memory, unbidden, unexpected, could have supplied that detail. She was stopped on the trail, with the boy dawdling ten or fifteen yards behind. Hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat, head down, he passed them both. Dickens was on his mind, or at least Dickens’s America, an enormous and unlovely landscape of swamps, jails, and lunatic asylums. Concentrating hard now, he stared into the inky foliage of the holly tree, seeing the arch of the bridge that carried the road over the slough, and beyond the arch, on the trail, something, or someone: not so much a figure as a shifting disposition of space and shadow.
A cloud of bushtits took wing from the holly, and the image, such as it was, crazed over like a windshield hit by a rock. Lighting a cigarette, Tom set to reasssembling it piece by piece. He got the bridge in view again, and the muddy puddle underneath it that had made him step out into the rough grass on the bank of the slough. Stop there. Leafless brown brambles. A poplar. A stand of tall, parchment-colored sedge. It was like Find Waldo, except that Tom didn’t know if he was scanning the picture to find Hayley, her presumed abducter, or a casual passer-by. But he was convinced that the picture was somehow incomplete, that memory was withholding the crucial bits of information that would make it spring into full focus.
Then he got it. He knew where he’d seen Maddie’s cheerful hoop earrings—just yesterday, on a checkout girl at Ken’s. He wasn’t recovering memories but building a fiction, planting a bogeyman under the bridge to please Paul Nagel and get himself off the hook.
Thirty feet up, harnessed by a rope to the trunk of a big old fir, Chick got his rental chain-saw going by holding the toggle of the starter-cord and letting the saw itself fall free. The sucker screamed, like someone was killing a pig. He’d learned this trick from Lázaro, who called it “gravity start.” Hauling up the live, throbbing saw, Chick narrowly avoided cutting off his right leg at the knee. He grinned down at Lázaro and Ernesto, leveling the saw at them like a gun.
Trees were a major liability in this rain-soaked city. Their spreading roots made sidewalks heave and crack. They leaned at tipsy angles. When the wind blew, they tipped over, flattened cars, took down telephone lines, and crashed into the roofs of neighboring houses. You got a tree in your yard, you better have good insurance.
Chick had ambushed the old lady while she was taking shopping bags out of the trunk of her Coupe de Ville. It was as if she’d been expecting him, so quickly did she agree that the fir needed to come down. His first thought was to ask $250, but when he said $500, she jumped at the price like it was real cheap. Lázaro had gone up first, taking off the branches. Chick watched him carefully, then claimed the bare trunk for himself. He was excited by the chain-saw’s manic ferocity and noise, and liked the idea of himself, high aloft, armed with this great howling two-handed weapon.
Lázaro showed him how to make the deep notch in the trunk on the side where you wanted the tree to fall. Legs braced, throwing his whole weight out hard against the harness, he drove the chain into timber soft as meat, spraying himself with resin-scented dust. Down in the yard, the Mexicans held the line that Lázaro had tied to the trunk ten feet above Chick’s head. He gave them a thumbs-up sign. At the end of his second cut, a chunk of wood the shape of a fat watermelon slice fell neatly out of the tree, and he maneuvered himself around the trunk to make the back-cut. This was the difficult bit. You had to stop just before the chain reached the angle of the notch, so the treetop was still joined to the trunk by a thin hinge of uncut wood. Biting his lip, he went in as far as he dared, then looked up to see the tree above him shudder indecisively for a second or two before it slowly teetered over, like a wilting flower, and then slammed with a bounce onto the lawn, exactly along the line he and Lázaro had planned for it. The din of the saw made the fall appear soundless, but he felt the thump as the tree hit the ground. It was beautiful to see. His first time, too.
From his perch atop the amputated fir, Chick surveyed roofs encrusted with moss, plants sprouting from gutters, splayed siding, swarming ivy, sagging porches, houses choked in greenery. Wherever his eye rested, he saw work: between the rotting stuff that needed to be rebuilt and the growing stuff that had to be cut down, a man could keep himself busy for a lifetime and never even make a difference. Things rotted so fast and grew so fast that the size of the job would always stay the same.
He stopped the chain-saw and lowered it to Lázaro, who set to work slicing the fallen section of trunk into logs. A black guy had a firewood lot down on Rainier and paid $40 a cord. Or they could sell the wood direct off the trucks. It was a fine call, time against money, and he hadn’t yet made up his mind. Feeling for toeholds in the rutted bark, he clambered down to where Ernesto stood with a shit-eating smile on his face.
Chick followed the direction of the smile and was shaken to see that it led to Mr. Don, sitting at the wheel of his high-riding 300-horse Ford truck. He was mouthing words, but the noise of Lázaro’s sawing drowned them out and Chick had to step down on to the sidewalk to hear.
“That’s a pretty line of business you’re into—being an arborist.”
“Is a job,” Chick said, fighting his habit of deference. He didn’t like the Mexicans seeing him standing while Mr. Don was seated; him looking up and Mr. Don looking down.
“There’s a handy profit in trees. I’m happy for you. Here.” From his top pocket, he brought out two small cigars and passed one out of the cab window.
Although he hated smoking, Chick thought that to share a cigar, boss to boss, would impress the Mexicans, so when Mr. Don produced his lighter, he leaned into the flame, sucking warily. The lighter reeked of kerosene; the smoke tasted unpleasantly of cherries.
Breathing feathery contrails from his nostrils, Mr. Don said, “I’ve missed you.”
“I be busy.”
“I got to worrying. You know, about where you’re at and what you’re up to.”
Chick stifled a cough. “Been doing okay.”
“Yeah, so I see.” He nodded at the black pick-up. “You did a fine job there. You’re a hard worker, pardner. I admire that.”
Standing at his full height, Chick could see Mr. Don’s dog curled up snoozing in the passenger seat, like a pile of tarred rope. “Scottie,” he said, trying to deflect attention from himself.
“You been working on your English. Listening to you now, I could take you for an American. Hey, you even look like an American.”