The Intruders

by Michael Marshall

  She looked up. “Deep background,” she said, reaching out to gather some of the debris toward her. “And, frankly, bordering on the dull.”

  “Going to let me know how it went, later?”

  “Yes, sorry. Got a headful right now. Need to get it straight. And sorry it’s such a mess in here.”

  “No problem. Going to try to do a little work.”

  “How’s it going, scrivener man?”

  “Very slowly.”

  “Slowly as in…‘backward’?”

  I smiled. “Maybe a little to the side.”

  “Well, the journey of a thousand miles…”

  “Starts with me staring out the window. Right.”

  “I have faith. You’ll get where you’re going,” she said. “You always do.”

  I went into my study, half closing the door behind me. I spent a while opening my research boxes and getting stuff out, making enough noise that it should be obvious what I was doing. Every book, magazine, or clipping made me want to grunt with boredom, but nonetheless I arranged them in piles on the counter. As I get older, I find I have a desire to have things in rows. Books, magazines, DVDs. I want them neat. I want them consecutive. I am coming to suspect that having the row may be more important than any specific issue or volume. It’s the order I seek, rather than the contents.

  When this task was completed, I moved my chair to the far side of the desk, so the screen wasn’t facing the door. If need be, I could tell Amy I’d moved around to remove the distraction of the view, which was now behind my back, but she never entered the room when I was working. I was just being…what? Cautious? Sneaky? Weird, most probably. I opened the laptop, and the screen revealed itself once more, the same document with the same “Chapter 3” heading at the top. There were no chapters two or one. There was nothing written underneath “Chapter 3.” But then I wasn’t here to write.

  I hesitated a moment. When I heard the distant shuffling of papers, confirming that Amy was still on the other side of the room, I got my cell phone out and put the laptop into “Bluetooth Receive” mode. When it was ready, I navigated through my phone to the relevant sections.

  Then I sent to my laptop the things I had copied off Amy’s phone before I left Seattle.

  I didn’t expect to be able to divine anything more from the text messages now that I was home, and I hadn’t bothered to take them off my phone. All I’d transferred were the pieces of music, the sound file, and the three photographs. I plugged earphones into the side of the laptop and loaded up the first sound file. Hearing it louder and without background noise just confirmed what I’d heard in the bar. It was a man laughing. I turned up the volume until the sound stopped meaning anything, in the hope of spotting some kind of texture behind it, an indication of where the recording had been made. I couldn’t hear anything. It was just a man laughing, somewhere neither unusually silent nor noisy. It had an unpleasant quality, but that could be because I didn’t like hearing another man’s laughter on my wife’s phone. She could have been messing with it in an idle moment and recorded a sound from another table in a restaurant.

  The pictures didn’t do much for me either. They were bigger on my laptop screen than on the phone but remained dark and hazy, and I doubted I could recognize the guy if I saw him on the street. At first the other two pictures didn’t seem to be of anything at all. Darkness with some lighter patches. Gradually I made out that one seemed to have been shot across a convenience-store parking lot and showed a man entering the store. I couldn’t make out the second environment—a dark bar, perhaps?—but again there seemed to be a figure in it.

  I put the files in a folder and lost it a couple of levels deep on my hard disk. Transferring them off Amy’s phone had felt like stealing, and I was pissed off that nothing more had come of it. I still had Blanchard’s words running around in my head, and I felt foolish. There was only one thing preventing me from feeling completely and utterly dumb, and I couldn’t check it right now.

  I heard a sound and looked up to see Amy standing a couple of feet into the room.

  “Hi,” I said, startled.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t want to disturb you. You looked deep in thought.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Bored, bored, bored,” she said. “Heading up to the village for a couple things. I don’t know what yet. You need anything while I’m finding out?”

  For a moment I wondered why she hadn’t asked if I wanted to go with her. Then I remembered I was supposed to be working in here and that she was being considerate by not leading me into temptation. This, even more than the tableau I’d discovered her in on my return, was the essence of my wife. Subtle by nature, blunt when required, the kind of woman who would breeze into the bathroom while I was shaving and say, “Yo, shithead—you going to fix that shelf like you said, or do I have to take you back to Husbands-R-Us?” I brought this up with a yard-yelling couple one time, suggested they try a more direct approach to managing their nebulous resentments. I got a Christmas card at the precinct from them every year after that, signed “The Shitheads—still together.” I count it as one of my bigger successes on the force.

  “I’m okay,” I said, smiling, heart beating a little harder, feeling love toward her and thus all the more guilty for what I had to do, which she was about to make easier for me. “I got everything I need right here.”

  “Cheap date,” she said, and left. She clanked around in the kitchen for a while and then called good-bye.

  I gave it three minutes, then left the study and went quickly up the stairs. I made it to the window by the side of the front door in time to see our car pulling out of the driveway. I stood for a few more minutes, until I was sure it wasn’t going to come back. Then I walked down to the lower level of the house and into Amy’s study.

  An hour later I was a couple of miles from the house, running a hiking trail in the forest. I have never liked running. It’s grim in prospect, arduous in actuality, and it makes no basic sense. The human body isn’t designed to run for long periods. My mind isn’t designed for it either. But, though I hate to concede the fact, it does seem to meet the body’s need to sometimes be taken seriously. The first stretch made my head ache badly, and I had to pause to cough up a lung a couple of times, but now I was moving smoothly and consistently through the trees. I was running in penitent mode, trying to overlay what had happened the night before. I am the kind of man who runs, you will observe, not the type who wakes up in parks.

  I was running also in the hope of achieving some kind of clarity. Amy’s computer screen had been blank when I’d gotten into her study. I’d considered switching it on, but with an unpredictable boot/shutdown time I didn’t like the idea of her suddenly reappearing and finding me in there doing that. She’d consider it an intrusion, and she’d be right. I picked up the personal organizer instead. Looked at what it told me for a while, then turned it off, put it back on charge, and got changed to go running.

  It was getting colder. I could feel the temperature dropping as I ran, and moisture was clouding more and more thickly up out of my mouth. When I could see the sky through the canopy of trees, it had a leaden quality, and muted light was turning the pines and firs a bluer shade of green. I decided to turn and head back toward the house. The light would be gone before too long anyhow.

  What I’d seen on the PDA had been straightforward. An event bar marked “Seattle”—which is what I remembered. It was one of the reasons I’d been so confident she’d been there. But the bar ended on Saturday morning.

  That was not how I remembered it.

  When Amy had led me up to the kitchen and pointed at the pencil-and-paper diary on the side of the fridge, it had looked plain wrong. I knew I’d understood her to be there only until Friday. That had been what was in my head, what I believed I’d been told, and I knew I’d felt—when I saw it on her desktop machine—a simple confirmation of what I’d already known. So how come it now said Saturday on the PDA,
and presumably also on her computer? There were only two possible explanations: She had been due back yesterday, as I’d believed. Something weird had happened—I had no idea what—but she’d gotten back this morning and decided to bull through with it. Made an quick entry on the fridge diary—she’d certainly been very confident of its being there, and quick to take me to see it. In the meantime she’d already changed the entry in the diary on her main computer, then done a sync to get it reflected on the PDA—just in case her husband required three forms of documentary evidence. A concerted campaign of tampering in order to throw me off, in other words. A risky one, too, because if I was sure of what I’d seen, then her making that kind of change would put up a huge red flag. But I hadn’t been. And maybe…

  Maybe I’d just gotten it wrong.

  Maybe Saturday had been her return day all along. I’d been freaked out when I checked her machine on Thursday night. I’d already somehow gotten it into my head that she was coming back Friday, and that’s what I’d seen confirmed on the screen. If I tried now to conjure an image of the diary with a bar stopping at Friday, I couldn’t do it. It went to Saturday. Was that just because it was what I’d seen most recently, or wasn’t it far more likely it had always been that way?

  That’s not the law’s problem…. It’s just yours.

  Without the conflicting diary entry, I had nothing, and that most likely meant there never had been anything. As I pounded along the trail back toward where the national land crossed over into our own lot, I became even more convinced. The feeling spread into my body as a softening across the shoulders. I felt embarrassed, too. The stuff on the phone remained odd, but other people’s ephemera always are, and though it’s hard to remember sometimes, your partner remains other people at heart. Amy’s lack of concern at my access to her phone didn’t jibe with its being an electronic den of iniquity. A running joke with a colleague was more likely, or snippets from an upcoming guerrilla marketing campaign. For a while my head had been full of darkness of an almost tangible kind, as if I’d been able to feel a weight suspended above it.

  I recognized the feeling, knew that it had been born from things that had happened to me, and to us, in the last couple of years. I had come to find myself perpetually half braced for chaos and intrusion. For the sound of a window breaking at the back of the house, the scream of tires as a car flipped up the sidewalk and flew toward my back. A phone call to announce that one or the other of us had cancer, though neither of us had taken tests or had any plans or need to.

  None of these things had happened. Other things had, but neither had been predictable. I hadn’t received forewarning of the plans of the God of Bad Things. That’s not the way he works, and it didn’t mean something would happen again. I didn’t have to be on my guard, expecting the worst, fabricating possibilities if necessary. Everything was okay.

  I found myself repeating this under my breath, using it to keep my rhythm, as I hit the last, long hill hard and pounded up between the trees toward the house.

  Everything is o-kay. Everything is o-kay.

  It’s a good rhythm to run to.

  Amy was back when I reached the house, soaking in the tub and listening satirically to some public-radio conspiracy nut ranting about dark and hidden forces behind the previous year’s bombings in Thornton, Virginia, as if normal terrorists weren’t bad enough. I washed and changed and then did what I always did, somewhat perversely, after a run. I took a beer from the fridge and headed out to the deck to have a cigarette.

  The deck lights came on automatically as I stepped out, and I went through my standard process of wishing they didn’t, then remembering that to stop it from happening you had to flip a switch inside, which never occurred to me unless I had just stepped outside, in which case I couldn’t. Amy preferred the lights on, but as she felt the cold more than I did and so didn’t come out here at night, it was my call. I bookmarked the thought as usual, swearing this time I’d remember when I got indoors, and went to lean against the rail. A wind was picking up, moving the tops of the trees and making the tip of my cigarette glow brightly.

  When I was done, I stubbed it on the underside of the rail and returned the butt to the pack. On the way back, I noticed a few flecks of ash on the deck, left from the last time I’d smoked out here. It struck me how chance and geometry could dictate that none of the last couple days’ breezes had quite managed to move them on, how there are always particles of yesterday left lying around in the now. As I watched, a gust finally caught the ash and vanished it across the deck and over the edge.

  chapter

  SIXTEEN

  He drove fast but accurately, and he kept under the speed limit. He was careful to appear, as always, like just another man on the road. Though he’d enjoyed many privileges throughout his life, Shepherd understood the costs that came attached. You paid, somewhere down the line. The highest price, the one that could never be recouped, was that of time. You never get a minute back. If he got pulled over by the cops, he would lose half an hour, maybe more. He couldn’t afford that. So he kept driving steadily up Interstate 5, hoping matters could be resolved tonight. It had been a simple plan. He had not suspected that things could go so wrong so quickly.

  It was now over twenty-four hours since the girl had disappeared.

  He hadn’t expected his first stop to yield anything, but he had lived by doing things methodically, and checking the O’Donnell house first made sense. Before leaving Cannon Beach, he’d been up and down the highway and out onto the sands without expecting anything to come of it. The local cops were making a decent job of the search. If the girl had been there, they would have found her. She was not. So she’d gone somewhere else.

  He needed to work out where—and fast.

  He was Agent Shepherd again when he parked outside the house in the northwest district of downtown Portland, just a couple blocks from upscale shopping on Twenty-second and Twenty-third avenues. He knocked on the door, waited, and then let himself in. He was inside for six minutes. She wasn’t there.

  He went back out and sat in the car. He considered his next step. It was getting dark. There was one obvious location to head for. It had been the most likely destination from the get-go, but it meant committing himself geographically. If he went up there and she was still wandering dazed in Oregon somewhere, it was only a matter of time before she talked to someone, let something slip—bringing untold new variables into play.

  Shepherd did not like variables. For over thirty years, his existence had been largely free of uncertainty, and he liked it that way. It was one of the advantages of the life he lived—the freedom to disregard the strictures that bound the lives of others. With freedom comes responsibility, however, the awareness that you have built your own fate and have little recourse to spreading the blame. He remembered sitting in a hotel bar a couple hours north from here, being given a proposition, and knowing that it spelled trouble, meant taking a risk with everything he’d spent his life moving toward. One look at the person on the other side of the table had been enough to let him know he would do it anyway. As marginalized as this person had become, Shepherd understood he wasn’t someone whose wishes you denied. Shepherd had done things other people wouldn’t like to think about, yet he knew who was in charge in that meeting, whose boundaries were the most absent, and whose will would prevail.

  And then, of course, there was the money.

  A very great deal of it.

  So he had listened, and he’d left the meeting knowing he would do as he’d agreed to do. In the last few months, he had started to develop his own, alternative plan, but until then Shepherd had played his agreed-upon part over the years. He’d kept an eye out, studiously, even after the target moved to a different state. He’d been on hand, invisible in the background, making an adjustment here and there to the course of personal histories, simply by being close enough to deflect the fates. He had, ten days previously, issued a warning to a man that had resulted in the abrupt cessation of a f
riendship Alison O’Donnell had been enjoying for the past five months. This friendship had threatened to become a variable. Shepherd cleaved to constants, always: The family needed to remain stable. This cessation had caused, in large measure, Alison’s sudden decampment to Cannon Beach. Naturally, she had not told her husband what had been behind this new low in her intermittent depression, just as Mr. Golson had not revealed to her why he was no longer able to find time for coffee after work, that a man had sat down next to him in a Starbucks and quietly told him to drop it or face a very high personal cost.

  It was likely that nothing would ever have happened between the girl’s mother and her friend, but that was not a risk Shepherd had been prepared to take. Taking risks was not what Shepherd did.

  Except once, in that hotel bar.

  It had seemed an acceptable risk at the time, a farsighted plan to better his own future. Recently his position had changed. And so, a long time ahead of schedule, he’d done what he’d done, and immediately it had started going wrong. He’d claimed his due. That part had worked just fine. But when he returned to implement the short and violent second half of his personalized version of the plan, the girl was gone.

  The phone call came half an hour later. He ignored it initially—assuming that it was the woman who’d been on his case for weeks and with whom he didn’t feel like dealing right now—but grabbed the phone hurriedly when he realized it was not.

  The call was short and came from a pay phone. He recognized the girl’s voice immediately and asked her precise questions. She sounded confused and frightened, and he got little but for two words—“Creek” and “Rest”—before the call cut off. A look at the map gave him a destination within credible range. It would have been a needle in a haystack had it not lain in the direction he’d suspected right from the very start.

  Given the distance, it might become one again.

  So he drove fast out of Portland and up past Kelso and Castle Rock, along miles of near-empty night highway lined on both sides with gray trees, a vacant landscape that wore civilization like a thin overcoat recently acquired. It started to rain, but Shepherd kept his speed constant through Chehalis, Centralia, past other dots along what was effectively a tunnel north to Seattle, up the west side of Washington State.