For most of the time Madison spent in the doorway, she wasn’t even really sure if she was asleep or awake. But after a while it seemed to her that she was, and that it had started to become light, and she left the alleyway and started walking once more.
As soon as the stores opened, it got easier. She followed where all the people were going and found herself in an open area in downtown. Across the street was a Barnes & Noble. She went inside and knew she’d be okay for a while. You could spend as much time as you liked in a bookstore, as long as you had a nice coat. She looked at books and then at the magazines. When someone with a name badge came over to ask if she was okay, she said yes and then waved over the man’s shoulder as if to someone on the other side of the store. The man smiled and left her alone after that. He was nice and reminded her of Uncle Brian.
There were some other girls about her age in the section, but they looked kind of weird to her now, after her dream. She felt that she was looking at them for a little too long. So she went up to the Starbucks and bought a water and a coffee and two things to eat. She did this without planning it, but when she got to the cash register, she realized that it had been clever. What a grown-up girl Maddy was, being allowed to go to the counter on her own, watched over by a mother sitting…just over there! She drank the coffee and ate the carrot cake and put the water and the granola bar in her pockets, which were now getting a bit overstuffed. Good to be prepared, though.
She had provisions. She was doing okay.
She went back up to the children’s section and found a seat, then got out the battered notebook and leafed through it, hiding it inside a Richard Scarry.
The more Madison read from the notebook, the more different she felt. She couldn’t understand why. The notebook was not laid out like a story. It wasn’t as if it started out at the beginning and went from there, and you could follow what was going on, and then it ended—which was the case with all the books she’d encountered so far. Except for the really baby books, which had always driven her father nuts: Molly the Mouse gets out of bed, Molly stands on a hill near some flowers, Molly goes and looks at the sea with her friend Neville the Narwhal…The End. Her dad used to rant and rave about these books, saying there was no actual story and where the hell had Neville suddenly come from anyway? The notebook was like that. Just a bunch of stuff, with no shape, no beginning, no end. The big difference was that the baby books went all out to make things as clear and simple as possible. The hill would be big, the flower would be obvious and super-bright, Neville the from-nowhere Narwhal would fill most of one page. The whole point of them was to teach you how to read, to find out which words meant what.
The notebook wasn’t like that. A lot of the time, it seemed that whoever had written it had put things in a way that you weren’t supposed to understand, unless you knew what it was talking about in the first place:
I have always lived here.
For a long time trees were the only story.
But then the invaders came: breaking down the door as if it never occurred to them other people already lived here and called it home. I will be brief, the detail left as an exercise for the not-so-gentle reader.
In 1792, Vancouver and crew first enter Puget Sound. In 1851, claims are laid by the members of the Denny party. The local Duwamish and Suquamish Indians provided food for the settlers at Alki Point during the hard winter of 1851/2. You might have thought they would have learned their lesson by then, but I guess they just weren’t very smart. Chief Seattle at least had the wisdom of many lives, and encouraged “Doc” Maynard to join the settlement in 1852, knowing his friend was conversant with local lore, and might help preserve the integrity of this special place. Maynard staked the mudflats which are now Pioneer Sq and the International District, a curious choice, one might think. Denny/Bell/Boren took the ridges around Elliott Bay (now Downtown, Denny Triangle, Belltown), and in October 1852 one Henry Yesler arrived with a sawmill, looking for a site. After this the town started to grow. King County was created Dec 22, 1852, and in 1853 came a visit by the Territory’s first governor, Colonel Isaac Stevens—his mission to remove the tribes from their lands. In 1854, Seattle gave the speech which comes as close to telling the truth as anyone ever has out loud. Paleface did not get the message, naturally. Paleface never fucking does.
In 1889 the town was razed, the blaze allegedly starting from a glue fire in a cabinetmaker’s workshop. Though is it not more likely it was a last attempt to prevent a permanent settlement from covering the site? It was too late. Nobody thought to question why the Lushootseed name for this village had been Djijila’letc, “the crossing-over place”—because surely that referred only to the path across the inlet that could once be found there at low tide. It is still there, that place, the land around it charged now with the blood of the departed hosts.
I like to think I have done my part.
It was all like that, a list of things and facts. It looked as if it had been written in a hurry, too, and some words seemed to have lots more of some letters—i, and j, for example—than they should, and she didn’t really understand about apostrophes, but she knew you didn’t have them in the middle of long words.
She kept reading nonetheless, letting her eyes run over the red-brown ink, finding it obscurely comforting. There were pages with names, too, and addresses, but none of them meant anything to her either.
In the end she found herself on her feet again and back outside in the square. She noticed that there was a small mall on the other side of it, but she knew that it would feel strange going in there without her mom, and as soon as she realized this, she felt more like herself than she had in two days, and she started to cry.
It was as if something had been held down inside her and then set free, and suddenly her eyes were running with tears, her face cramped with a cry she could not get out, her chest hitching up and up as if it would never go down again, as if it would keep going until it burst.
Everything came at her at once. The realization that she was miles from home and her mom and dad and had no idea where she was. She could suddenly remember more about the last couple of days, but as if from a different perspective: Things that had seemed okay now seemed wrong and frightening. Sneaking past her sleeping mother and stealing her change, being on the bus to Portland and feeling excited but bad and confused, being in the car of the nice lady who had agreed to take her to Seattle because of a long story Madison had told her but then had started to look at her funny and gone off to the restrooms holding her cell phone and…
No, she couldn’t remember that part. But everything else she could, momentarily. Including…
Her mom’s cell-phone number.
Bang—suddenly there it was, right in the middle of her head, as if a cloud had moved out of the way.
Madison stopped crying, glanced around quickly, trying to spot a pay phone. She started running fast along the sidewalk, spinning around, looking for somewhere she could make a call. Finally she spotted one across the street and darted straight off the curb. Horns blared, and a yellow cab had to swing out to avoid plowing into her, but she kept running. At the other corner of the square was a bank of phones, and she knew she had to get there before she forgot the number again, before the cloud came back. The bottle of water fell out of her pocket, but she kept going, running directly toward the phone at the end, hands already reached out for it, going through the number again and again in her head….
But by the time she’d punched two of the numbers, the rest of it had gone.
She shouted in frustration, smacking the phone viciously against the wall. Where had the number gone? Why had it gone?
“Hey,” a passing man said. He was big around the stomach. “Careful, there. Or—”
Madison swung around to look at him, and he stopped talking, very abruptly.
“Get lost, fat boy,” she snarled, and he stared at her, eyes wide, before hurrying on.
Madison was aghast. She’d never been that rude to an a
dult before—or to anyone, in fact. Ever. Not even in her head. That was worse than with the man at the airport. What was wrong with her?
She was motionless for a moment.
Then she blinked and put the phone carefully back on its cradle. She suddenly felt very clear in the head. She no longer wanted to call her mother. There was another number she could use, she remembered—one written on the white business card tucked in the front of the notebook. But she’d called him once before, and he’d been extremely bossy. For reasons she didn’t understand, she also had a sense he was untrustworthy.
She turned from the phone and looked out across the square. It seemed odd to her that she’d been crying moments ago. Now everything seemed fine. She was away from home, away from Mom, from Dad, from everything that said she was a little girl and could be told what to do. For some months now, she’d been prey to a sense that it didn’t have to be this way. That she had power. That people could be made to do what she wanted for a change. Sure, she’d get in touch with Alison and Simon. She wanted to ask them some things. But it didn’t have to be right this minute. She was hungry again, and she knew what she wanted, and it was not a granola bar. She wanted a man-size breakfast, eggs easy up, home fries and hot sauce. She knew the place to get it, too.
She set off down the street toward the market. Her stride was long and her head held high, and now if people noticed her, they didn’t wonder what such a young person was doing out by herself or where her parents were—but instead what was it about this little girl that made her look so self-possessed, so grown-up, so whole.
chapter
NINETEEN
I was in Seattle over an hour before we were due to meet. I used some of the time in a book and record store on Fourth. I went into the jazz section, found the clerk who looked least like he’d rather be snowboarding, and got my cell phone out. I played him one of the MP3 files I’d transferred from Amy’s phone. The clerk stooped with his ear cocked, listened for barely two seconds, and then vigorously nodded his head.
“Beiderbecke,” he said. “‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ A classic. And so true.”
He led me into the section, ran his hands down the CDs as if down the spine of a man he loved, and plucked one out. The cover showed a black-and-white-era guy holding some kind of neo-trumpet device. I allowed the clerk to sell it to me.
“Such a shame,” he said as we waited for my card to be authorized. “Bix, I mean. A prodigy. Could barely read music but played like an angel. Dead at twenty-eight. Drank himself to death.” And then he sighed, as if it had been a personal loss.
I walked up Pike Street to the market and got a place at one of the tables outside the Seattle’s Best across the street. I was still early. Fisher had refused to tell me anything more on the phone, probably judging—correctly—that he wouldn’t get to see me in person if he told me what he knew. My head felt empty and bright. The atmosphere the previous evening had been stilted. I could not help feeling that Amy was being more normal than usual. She’s one of those people who can grab random handfuls of ingredients, throw them up in the air, and have them land in bowls looking good and tasting great. Last night the food had been barely edible, and I don’t think that was just a result of the churning in my stomach. Afterward she worked in her study for a while and emerged later seeming distracted. When I had a cigarette out on the deck toward the end of the evening, I watched through the window as she sat flicking through coffee-table books, as if looking for something she couldn’t find. I’d seen her like this a few times over the last couple of years, but when I asked her if she was okay, she always said yes.
When I’d left her that morning, saying I was heading to the city to try to make some crime contacts, she looked up sharply, hesitated, and then shrugged.
“I just don’t think it’s so great an idea,” she said, and went back to work. But after I’d been on the road barely twenty minutes, I got a text from her:
Good luck:-D
I didn’t really know what to think, and I sat there in the cold early-morning sunshine not-thinking it. I heard a story once, about the early settlers of the region. It told that when Europeans finally landed on the northwestern shores of America, feeling like conquering heroes in a new world, they were disconcerted to find that the locals were not surprised to see them. This was not because unknown white men had forged a route overland from the East, however, but because over the last several generations the tribes had very occasionally seen trading ships far out to sea—once every ten, twenty, fifty years. They knew these could not be the work of local people and therefore surmised that some other group of men or beings were on their way, however slowly.
When I first heard this story, I shivered. I don’t even know whether it’s true, but it has stayed with me: the idea of these hazy visitations, of inexplicable form, seen from afar, never coming closer—but, once seen, impossible to unsee. A first indication that the world held more than had been bargained for, a foreshadowing of events that would be impossible to change, impossible to hurry, impossible to stop. Portents of unknown type and provenance, far out in the mist of the seas, a future held in abeyance, for now, but irrevocably on its way.
The local people watched and saw, then turned their backs on the sea and got on with their lives.
I didn’t think I was going to be able to do that.
When Fisher arrived, I was struck first by how tired he looked. He sat down in the chair on the other side of my table, took a deep swallow of the coffee he’d brought.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
I just stared at him.
“Okay.” He reached into his coat pocket, hesitated. “I’m going to show you something. Then I’m going to tell you something before I explain what you’re seeing. It’s going to take a few minutes, and you’re not going to want to listen, but you have to, or you’re not going to understand my interest here. Okay?”
I nodded. He pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. I opened it and withdrew the contents. Two photographs, six-by-four. Both had the muddy, blown-out quality of digital pictures taken beyond the limits of the lens range.
The first showed a woman standing outside an unremarkable-looking doorway, in a street that could have been pretty much anywhere. The door was open. The woman’s face was in profile. It was Amy.
When you looked a little closer, you could see there was someone else in the picture, a shadowed shape in the doorway. The quality of the light suggested that the photo was taken in the late afternoon.
“Big deal,” I said. Fisher said nothing.
The second photograph was of another street, or the same street from a different angle. It showed a man and woman walking together, shot from behind. They were fairly close together, and the man had his arm around the woman’s shoulders. From the angle at which the picture had been taken, it was impossible to tell whether this man was the one I’d seen in the photo on Amy’s phone. He was a little over average in height, wearing a suit, could be either blue or black, dark hair. You couldn’t see their faces, but the clothes the woman wore were the same as in the other photograph.
I glanced up. Fisher had his eyes elsewhere.
Photographs do lie, and one of the ways is by only capturing instants. Advertising people are tactile. Amy could have been walking along the street with a colleague or client, and he’d grabbed her shoulder to make some point or celebrate a corporate victory. Or she could have said she was cold and he’d momentarily looped his arm around her, awkward, feeling it was a man’s job to do something and knowing that convention allowed this brief intrusion on personal space. Captured at the right instant, frozen beyond their true duration, any of these gestures could have looked like more than they were. Or so I wanted to believe. “Where are these from?”
“Taken in Seattle last Friday,” Fisher said.
When I was also here in town. I took a long, slow breath. I’ve spent a lot of hours getting statements from witnesses. If you want them to talk, you have to let
them. And you’re not allowed to hit them first.
“So talk,” I said.
He stood up. “Walk with me.”
Fisher led me out of the antiderelict enclosure around the coffeehouse and up First. He took us north for a couple blocks, then steered several rights and lefts.
“I told you my interest in the Anderson murders came from an estate,” he said as we walked. “A client of the firm. Name was Joseph Cranfield. Heard of him?”
“No. Should I?”
“I guess not. Old patriarchal business type. Tough, six foot and still square-shouldered in his late seventies. Started work at thirteen—one of those kids who had a job when he was in diapers, crawls around delivering papers with his teeth. You ever wonder how some people are ready from the get-go, looking for the main chance and knowing what to do when they find it?”
I’d met people like that in my own life, the ones who hit the ground running. I’d never thought too much about it, and I wasn’t in the mood to start now.
“I guess.”
“By the 1950s Joe was into failing mills in New England, turning them around and then reselling them. Soon as that was killed by overseas markets, he sidestepped to retail, franchises, anything that kept money coming in. From there into real estate, became a partner in some of the earliest supermalls in Illinois. It wasn’t like he never made a mistake. But he took the hits, moved on.”
“An American hero,” I said. “There should be statues everywhere.”
Gary nodded. “Right. Could have been the smuggest asshole to ever draw breath. I met him when I was fresh out of law school. After a couple weeks, they sent me to Cranfield’s office, to advise on some tiny thing. I was scared. I’m twenty-three, I’ve lucked into an all-star firm. If I fail this rite of passage, I’m history. So I show up in my new suit and shiny briefcase knowing that this is a meeting where my life can split two ways. My gastrointestinal tract was empty, I’ll tell you that.”
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