The Intruders

by Michael Marshall

  “It starts to come home.”

  “Exactly. Fox disappears from Cranfield’s world in the mid-nineties, can’t find anything more about him. The third name I can’t get anywhere with at all until I have another scout around the Kerry, Crane, and Hardy Web site, where I spot someone with the same first name.”

  It wasn’t hard to find, even in a page dense with the minutiae of property law.

  The third name was Amy Dyer.

  Seeing her name in print made me feel as if the car had finally smacked into me. It took me a while to notice that the document was dated 1992, six years before I’d met her.

  “You knew about this when you came to see me.”

  “Yes, Jack. I found out that Amy Dyer was now Amy Whalen and that her husband is you. But at that stage she was still just a name on a piece of paper. I came to talk to you, and I heard your view, and I backed off. But I’m kind of camped out in Seattle for the time being and—”

  “You’re spending a lot of time away from home.”

  “While I sort this out, yes. And meantime I’ve developed a habit of walking past that building once in a while. Last Friday I spent a couple hours up at the next corner. There’s another coffeehouse there. It’s an okay place to sit. And toward the end of the afternoon, when I’m getting cold and beginning to feel ridiculous—and not for the first time, believe me—I see someone turn up at that door. And those pictures show what I saw.”

  “Do you have any more?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to be too obvious. Surveillance is not my field. Plus, there were some ominous street people walking around, and I don’t have your easy manner with them. I stayed the hell back and just snapped those two pictures. Never got a decent look at the guy. Honestly.”

  The door to the bar opened, and a group of parched-looking individuals entered in a brief glare of light. The start of the lunchtime crowd. Fisher sat in silence as I watched, though I was not really seeing them. In my mind’s eye, I could see two people, a man and a woman, close together as they headed down a street.

  I stubbed out my cigarette. “I want to see the originals of the photographs you took.”

  Fisher promptly pulled a small digital camera from his pocket, popped the memory card, and handed it to me. “Does this mean…?”

  “For now yes,” I said. “Give me everything you have on Bill Anderson. Then go away and leave me alone.”

  chapter

  TWENTY-ONE

  Todd Crane was sitting in his office. Most of his desk was lost under paper, which was in turn covered with bullet-pointed lists and slogans and sketches. He was supposed to have read, digested, and commented on it all. Creative teams were standing by. A pile of DVDs from commercial directors stood to one side. He was supposed to have watched all these, too, and passed down his views so that account handlers and production managers could get busy with checking availability and fees and booking talent and generally kicking KC&H toward further glorious triumphs in the pursuit of getting people to buy shit they didn’t actually need.

  He had done none of these things.

  Instead he’d turned his chair to face the big window and was gazing blankly down across Elliott Bay. From up here you could see the piers, the roof of the market building hard to the right, and the sprawling docks over on the far left. Behind all this was the gray-blue expanse of the bay itself, and beyond that the cloud-shrouded Olympic Mountains. For many years Todd and a few college buddies had a habit of spending a long weekend every year in the forests of those mountains, hiking and drinking beer in moderation and openly one-upping each other on material success. He couldn’t remember the last time this had happened. Six years, seven? Ten? Could be. In time, presumably, the memory would become a pleasurable thing, another example of the life-affirming activity he’d enjoyed as part of the richness of his existence, further evidence that you could—if you possessed character and money (and a tolerant wife)—live within one long advertisement for your own life.

  But right now it felt like something that was slipping away, like the idea that he would ever become fluent in French or visit the carved-rock temples of Petra or play decent finger-style blues guitar. He didn’t even really know why these things were important to him, or ever had been. He’d just assumed they’d happen sooner or later, that they’d be part of his life. For some reason he was no longer sure of that.

  Sitting on the floor in one corner of the office was an old radio, which he’d come across in his den a few weeks before. It had been a present from his parents, back when Todd was in his early twenties. An upscale device, a significant gift from two people now both dead. It worked for a couple years, then stopped. It was likely that the problem was minor, and radios were easy and economical to fix, but somehow in thirty years he hadn’t gotten around to it. It had sat on shelves, in drawers, drifting in and out of awareness, never formally sidelined or retired, forever on the verge of repair. It was absurd. He’d brought it into the office a week ago, in the hope that this would galvanize him to getting the job done. Yet there it sat. Maybe it was just never going to get fixed. Maybe life held a lot of things like that.

  Todd turned irritably from the view. He was fifty-four years old, for God’s sake. Barely middle-aged these days. So why did it feel like life was beginning to get away from him? Why was he becoming prone to notice the things he had not done instead of the multitude of things he had achieved? He wasn’t sleeping well. He knew that this had nothing to do with the pincer movement of projects represented by the mess on his desk. He’d been busy all his life and slept like a baby ninety-nine nights out of a hundred. So what was the problem? Faced with no rational explanation, his famously creative mind had offered up several that made little sense. He’d become convinced for a few weeks earlier in the year, for example, that when he walked the streets of this city, something felt different about them. That they seemed unseasonably crowded. He’d even briefly taken to sitting outside coffeehouses in the midafternoon, ostensibly to work in peace, in fact to monitor the number of people on the streets. When he did this, he could see that they were not crowded at all. His analyst was no help. She never had been, with anything, even during the five months they slept together. The fact that they’d now successfully regained a straightforward therapeutic relationship suggested to Todd that neither the sex nor the therapy had ever made much impact on either of them.

  Another thing that hadn’t helped was the visit of the ex-cop. Amy’s husband. There was something about the man that made you want to build a high wall around you. More unsettling still, Todd believed that the man had not been telling the truth. He didn’t believe that Whalen had the faintest idea of what his wife was doing in Seattle, and he didn’t buy the lost-phone story either. But it was likely that Amy had actually been in town; her husband didn’t seem the kind of guy who’d be wrong about something like that. So what had she been doing here? A side deal? Possibly, in which case he didn’t care. But maybe it wasn’t that simple. Maybe it had to do with other matters. Something told him this was more likely, especially considering the fact that Bianca had on that afternoon deflected another man, who had come to ask questions about a certain building. Something told him that it was this that was creating the hard, dark lesion in his stomach, that people were knocking on the door of a part of his life he’d never really understood.

  He had never been a man prey to self-doubt or prone to concern about the passage of time. But now he was. And why would that be, unless it was something about this past that was bothering him?

  He’d finally begun dealing with the paperwork when he was startled by the buzzing of the intercom. He stabbed the button.

  “Christ, yes?”

  “It’s Jenni, at reception?”

  Todd considered reminding her that everyone except Bianca had been advised not to bother him with anything short of world-shaking news. Unfortunately, he believed he had a reputation as a good boss, which meant only chewing out the staff once in a very great whil
e. He’d realized long ago that being a good boss sucked, but it was too late to break the habit. “What is it, Jenni?”

  “There’s somebody here from Meadow’s school,” she said. “They’d like to talk to you.”

  He frowned. Someone from his youngest daughter’s school? “What do they want?”

  “She wishes to speak with you privately.”

  Todd told her to bring the person up. He grabbed the phone to call Livvie, to see if she knew what was going on, but then remembered that his wife had Pilates or yoga or some other body magic this afternoon. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t gotten to be CEO of the Pacific Northwest’s most profitable advertising agency without being able to deal with people unbriefed. And there was a limit to how much trouble a twelve-year-old could have gotten into, surely.

  Hopefully.

  He took a minute to check his reflection in the hand mirror he kept in his bottom drawer. He looked tired but otherwise fine. The door opened, and his assistant entered, accompanied by someone who was clearly not a teacher at his daughter’s or anyone else’s school. Todd froze, halfway to his feet.

  “Who’s this?”

  Bianca indicated via a raised eyebrow that she had absolutely no idea. Meanwhile the person in question looked at him steadily and answered for herself.

  “My name’s Madison,” she said.

  Bianca hovered. Part of her job was to second-guess and covertly undermine every call made by whichever girl was currently working reception. Thus were the subtle hierarchies of the corporate world maintained where they really mattered—at the bottom.

  “Are you—”

  “I’m fine,” Todd said. She nodded once and left.

  “So,” he said warmly, coming around to sit on the edge of the desk and indicating the nearest chair, “you’re at school with Meadow, right?”

  “No,” the girl said as she sat neatly in the exact center of the chair. “I’ve never met her.”

  “But you told—”

  “How else was I going to get up here?”

  Todd didn’t have an answer for that. The girl pointed at the photograph on the corner of his desk. “She’s what? Thirteen?”

  Todd nodded, wondering at what point he should get Bianca back in. Soon, he was thinking. Maybe even…very soon. “Yes. Nearly.”

  The girl smiled cheerfully. “And I’m nine. But I told the woman downstairs we were in the same class. And she believed me. So I guess she’s not very bright, huh?”

  “She’s…never met Meadow. I’m sure she was just being polite.” This came easily into Todd’s mouth, though privately he was wondering what had gotten into Jenni, letting a random child into the building.

  The girl nodded. “Maybe. Are you sleeping with her?”

  Now she had his full attention. “What?”

  “You look a bit ancient, it’s true. But I’m sure you can still hear reasonably well. And still do the old dirty bop.”

  The…what? “Look, kid, whatever your name—”

  “Madison. I just told you.”

  Todd moved back around to the chair side of his desk. It was time to get Bianca the hell in here.

  But then a thought occurred to him. He hesitated, hand over the phone. “If you’re not at school with her, how do you know my daughter’s name?”

  The girl made a face. “Actually, I don’t know. I just do. Like I know that your other daughters are a lot older. And your wife used to drink, too—”

  She stopped talking, and her head slowly dropped. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s really rude.”

  For a moment she appeared blank. Then she looked up again suddenly, and her face seemed different. She was blinking rapidly and seemed extremely agitated.

  “Please,” she said, “can I have a piece of paper? And a pen?”

  Todd’s hand was still over the button on the phone system that would summon his assistant. He moved it to point at a Post-it pad. The girl grabbed a pen from his desk and wrote something on the top note. It looked like a series of numbers.

  She got four or five down and then faltered. “No,” she said, angrily. “No…”

  She quickly added two numbers to the beginning. Tore off the note and stuffed it deep in the pocket of her coat, looking for an instant like some juvenile street person, hiding her favorite piece of string from aliens or the CIA or naughty ghosts. Then she threw herself back into the chair and covered her face with her hands.

  Todd watched all this wide-eyed. Soon he could hear her crying behind them. It was a low, measured sound, more exhaustion than sobs. He stood again, disconcerted. Why on earth had he let Bianca even leave the room?

  “Look,” he said, trying to sound more friendly than nonplussed. “Can I get you something? A drink?”

  The girl said nothing, and Todd began to think she couldn’t have heard. Then, in a voice muffled by the hands in front of her face, he heard her say, “Coffee.”

  “Coffee? Really? Not…a soda? Or water?”

  She shook her head. “Coffee. Black.”

  He went to the machine in the corner, poured a cup. Brought it back over. He slipped into the role of subservient waiter easily, having done it often enough with his own daughters. Sometimes an apparent reversal of power was the only thing that would placate a kid enough to get them to do what you wanted. Children seemed to arrive with keenly political natures, to understand how things worked right from the start.

  “Here,” he said, realizing she couldn’t see him.

  Slowly she pulled her hands down. Looked at the cup and reached for it with both hands. She brought it to her face and took a long, deep sip, though Todd knew that it came off the plate hot enough to sear. Cradled the cup in her hands afterward, looking down into the remaining liquid.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. Then she turned her face up toward him and slowly smiled.

  “So, Todd,” she said. “How have you been?”

  He blinked at her. Everything about her—her voice, her smile—seemed different. The distraught child had been replaced by…he wasn’t sure what. But he did know that he didn’t want her in his office anymore.

  “You’re going to have to leave now,” he said. “I can get someone to call you a cab if you need a ride home.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking past him out the window. “Always generous with the small things.”

  “Look—who are you?”

  “Guess,” she said.

  “I really have no idea,” Todd said firmly. “You got in here claiming to be a friend of my daughter’s. We both know that’s not true.”

  “Please,” she said. “Tell me. Tell me who I am.”

  “You’re a little girl.”

  She laughed, apparently genuinely, an uproarious guffaw that took him entirely by surprise.

  “I know,” she said. “Isn’t it priceless?”

  “It’s a riot,” he said, leaning over to press the button to summon Bianca.

  “Don’t do that,” the girl said. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Listen,” Todd said briskly, “I’m done with this. I don’t know what you’re doing here, and you seem to me to be an odd little person. That’s your parents’ problem, thankfully, not mine. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Oh, hush,” she said. “I’ve got no desire to spend a moment longer in your company than necessary, believe me. You recall the saying about the organ grinder and the monkey? You’re a flea on the monkey’s ass, and you always have been. But beggars can’t be choosers, and so you’re going to do a few things for me. Lucky boy.”

  “I’m not doing—”

  She ignored him. “First, somewhere for me to stay. I need a shower, and I’m tired of dealing with street trash from a position of weakness. Not to mention that I could use a good night’s sleep. As could you, by the look of it.”

  Her voice was firm and confident now, and Todd could see how she might have been able to convince Jenni to let her up here. He was also horribly reminded of his cousin, when
she’d been in the hospital recovering from a bad car accident, back in ’98. During most of the critical period, she’d floated on a river of morphine, but occasionally she fought her way free of chemicals and pain to deliver remarks whose normality came to seem extraordinary and bizarre. The contrast made the hairs rise on the back of your neck. This girl had the same effect, even though you knew she could only be mimicking some adult she knew.

  She seemed to take his silence as acquiescence. “When I arise, bright like a phoenix from Lethe’s snoozy flames, there’s someone I very much want to meet again. A mutual friend. You’re going to make it happen.”

  “I can’t imagine who you’re talking about,” Todd said, finally pressing the button, glad to be on solid ground. “We don’t feature anyone from boy bands or TV shows. It’s a policy.”

  “A ‘boy band’? What on earth are you talking about?”

  He heard his assistant’s door opening along the corridor, then her hurried footsteps. Bianca was paid 20 percent more than anyone else at the same job level in the company. She was worth it.

  The little girl heard it, too. Her face darkened. “Toddy, this is one of those times where you can make a bad choice or a good one. Don’t fuck it up.”

  The door opened, and Bianca came striding in. “This person’s going to leave now,” Crane told her.

  The girl sighed histrionically. He ignored her. “If she makes a fuss, call the police. She’s here under false pretenses, wants to meet a celebrity.”

  Bianca stood by the chair, looking balefully down at the girl. “On your feet,” she said. “Now, princess.”

  “Oh, you tedious people,” the girl muttered wearily. She stood, ignoring the hand Bianca held out, her eyes still on Crane. “I don’t want to cause a fuss. You’re forcing my hand, don’t you see?”

  Todd retreated stiffly behind his desk. Bianca would handle this, had indeed already taken the girl’s upper arm in her hand and gotten her as far as the open door.