The Intruders

by Michael Marshall

  “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 thanks to 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 that 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 that 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 awhile since someone had spoken to me this way. He saw it 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 unraveled. 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 L.A., 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 toward a more leaden gray. “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 gotten 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 on the playground and asked if I wanted to join his game, and I’d 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 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 that this thing was heading toward 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 gotten 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 curb 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 canceled.

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

  chapter

  THREE

  A beach on the Pacific coast, a seemingly endless stretch of sand: almost white by day but now turning sallow gray and matte 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 exclusive 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 stories high and each a decent distance from its neighbor. Some are squat white oblongs in need of replastering, 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 silver in these unfamiliar mirrors and children who stand a little taller and a little farther from the adults who were once the center
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 a 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 since Dad was not here, it was obviously the cottage this time. Dad’s 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), 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 sand. They got up early and walked along the beach, then back again. The day was spent sitting and swimming and playing—with a break midday 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 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’d been sailing under different colors. 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, something 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’d 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. Midafternoon 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’d 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 could.

  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 gray 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 they 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 colors 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 dings around the edges. It was a dirtier gray 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 that 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 were flying up the tide line toward 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 the cold winds from a storm now boiling across the sky like a purple-black second sea. The man was motionless, hands pushed deep into 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 that 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, 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 toward 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 right away, when she had a bigger advantage. Just got up, walked home. Now she’d have to rely on surprise, on the fact that the man was probably assuming that if she hadn’t run before, 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, looking to see why Maddy 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 came 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 were 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 it carried.

  Madison hurriedly looked away, heart thumping. Unthinkingly protecting the flat shell still in her left hand, she braced her right palm, too, into the sand 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 that Madison barely saw it happen.