I looked at her. “I don’t remember that.”
“I said I didn’t think it was so terrific an idea to use what’s basically the KC&H company hotel, when I was in town on scout. I could have run into anyone in the lobby, which would not have been cool.”
“What do you mean, ‘scout’?”
She smiled with affection—and a little exasperation. “Sweetie, we went through this, remember? We talked it through over dinner here—what, a week ago?”
I made a face that suggested I might be on the brink of recall, though in fact I wasn’t. “There you go.” She grinned. “The renowned Whalen brain clicks back in. I knew it would—I’m your biggest fan.”
“So why didn’t you tell me what hotel you were in?”
“I thought I did. Anyway, what’s the difference? We always talk on the cell.”
“But you had a note saying ‘Hotel Malo’ on your computer screen.”
“Yes, that’s right, Columbo—it’s a note to me. I left my book there on the last trip. It’s no huge deal, but it was a present and a signed copy, and I meant to call them before I left. I’m pretty sure I mentioned that, too. It was from Natalie last year?”
I rubbed my temples. “Why didn’t you call when you realized you’d lost your phone?”
She laughed. “I couldn’t remember the damn number. Isn’t that ridiculous? Though actually it’s kind of not funny. I think I’m getting old. Am I getting old?”
“No. The curse of speed dial,” I muttered as Blanchard’s smug face swam into my head. Simple lack of number recall, he’d said. She’ll be at home wondering where you are, he’d said.
“And the modern age in general, right. But listen.” She reeled off what I assume was my cell number. “I made a point of memorizing it this morning when I got back. Please feel free to test me on it at random intervals.”
I took a sip of coffee, trying to work out what my next ten questions should be, and in what order.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly more serious. “Were you worried?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. Guy says he’s found your phone. I call the hotel I believe you’re at, you’re not there. I go to Seattle and there’s no sign of you. I even tried to file a missing-persons report.”
“What?”
“Exactly. Plus…I talked to Todd Crane. Trying to find where you were.”
She winced. “Really? That’s not so good.”
“Don’t worry, you’re fine. I said you were visiting a friend and I was just covering all bases.”
“You certainly were. Long way to go to pick up my phone, babe. I mean, it’s sweet, but I had it canceled ten minutes after I realized it was gone. A replacement will be here Monday.”
“Canceled?” I got the phone out and handed it to her. “I used this to call Bobbi this morning.”
She frowned. “Well, that’s weird. I’ll get onto it.”
“It’s okay. No sign anyone else tried to use it before I got a hold of it.”
“Sure. But if I cancel it, I want it canceled. You could have been anyone. It’s not good enough.”
More vintage Amy. I waited for her to show some sign of being uncomfortable with the fact that I’d had her phone in my possession, even used it. There was nothing. Instead she stepped a little closer.
“I love that you went looking,” she said. She touched my arm. “And I know that going to the cops couldn’t have been easy, and I’m really sorry I didn’t call. I just figured you’d know I was okay.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t live in a world where I assume people will be okay. I haven’t for a long time.”
“I know,” she said, quietly. “It was dumb. It won’t happen again.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I just got…”
“I know.” She kissed me, her arms warm around me. “Really. I promise.”
I stood under the shower for a long time, staring at the expensive limestone of the stall wall. I’d had very little sleep and was still suffering from a bad hangover, and so maybe that’s why I felt like I did. I realized that I hadn’t actually eaten anything the whole time I’d been away, which probably didn’t help.
When I was clean and dressed, I went to the kitchen and fixed some eggs. I ate them methodically, hunched over the counter and without registering them as food. My body felt stiff and awkward. I thought maybe I should go for a run, try to iron the kinks out, but the idea made me want to go throw up.
Amy was back in position on the sofa, sitting Indian style and surrounded once more by paper. She was absorbed and didn’t even sense me enter until I was a couple of yards away. I noticed that the paperwork seemed more text-dense than usual, bereft of bullet points and draft sketches, looking more like the product of a typewriter than a word processor. Also that the sheets didn’t sport the relentless logo-branding characteristic of KC&H documentation.
“What are you working on?”
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 recor
ded 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.
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