The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “Look,” the man said. “You had an accident, that’s all. You fell over on the beach. You saw me there and thought I meant you harm. You started to run, you banged your head. Your hurt yourself. That’s why you keep blacking out. That’s why you’re having these strange—”

  “Oh, do shut up, Shepherd. I’m going to ask you to find out something. Then I’m putting the phone down. I’m going to call again in fifteen minutes from a different location. If you don’t give me the information—and make me believe in it—I’m going to start doing things that really will make your life difficult. Doing things and telling things. Understand?”

  “Madison, you’ve got to trust me.”

  A wheedling note had entered the man’s voice, but Madison knew that this was fake—him trying to appear weak, caught off guard, in the hope she’d fail to take him as seriously as he deserved. This man didn’t wheedle. “I’ve done everything you want….”

  “No,” she said coldly. “You haven’t. But you’re going to. You really are. You and everyone else.”

  She told him what she needed and put the phone down without waiting for a reply. Checked the time and headed toward the elevators. This was a pretty big hotel. She could lose herself in the corridors for fifteen minutes without people bugging her, she thought, and it would be a change from pounding the streets.

  As she got into the elevator, she passed a slim young woman in a smart suit and blouse, eyes bright and hair sleek. She caught the faint scents of coffee and breath mints and knew that the woman had been sitting alone in her hotel room until moments before, muttering self-confidence mantras, reapplying her corporate mask before some drab meeting, trying to convince herself she was a grown-up now, no longer a little girl.

  “Nice tits,” Madison said.

  The doors closed on the woman’s astonished face.

  As the elevator climbed, a car was rapidly approaching the outskirts of the city. Simon O’Donnell was driving. Alison was in the passenger seat with two maps and her cell phone. She had just gotten off a call which had succeeded in getting her put through to someone in the Missing Persons Bureau of the Seattle Police Department, a man named Blanchard, who had appeared to take her seriously. He said he would meet them, at least.

  “This exit?” Simon asked.

  “Next one,” she said. “I think. I should remember, but…”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  It had been a little over ten years, in fact, a figure that was easy to remember because they’d moved out of the city soon after Alison learned she was pregnant, soon after they had decided to name their baby after the street in the city where they had first met. Simon started to pull through the lanes of traffic, doing so with his usual judicious care. There’d been times when this had irritated Alison. Right now it did not.

  They’d spent the last twenty-four hours waiting with a desperation that would prevent the passage of time from ever seeming the same again. The police said there had been a possible sighting of a girl trying to get on a plane in Portland, but that she’d been prevented from doing so, and so they should just stay put and wait. And so they had. But they had also talked. The absence at the center of their life was so vast it seemed pointless not to open all the drawers and pull everything out, to make the void universal. Alison admitted the friendship she’d maintained with a man her husband had never met, swearing—truthfully—that it had never been more than that. As she did this, a bubble burst in her head, revealing that nothing had ever been inside.

  Inconsequential, too, had become many of the things she’d thought were wrong with Simon, with their relationship. It wasn’t that they didn’t exist or had just blown away. But if everything in the world seemed wrong and broken, maybe that actually proved the opposite. Not everything could be wrong about the universe. Simon (for once) had the tact not to say this out loud. He didn’t need to. She got there by herself, somewhere during those hours of talk, or perhaps during the few hours of sleep that followed. It didn’t solve anything, didn’t make everything all right—but it turned things around, tilted them so they reflected the light differently, and for the moment that was enough.

  Simon meanwhile had admitted that he sometimes behaved as if Alison’s moods swings were deliberate, and this wasn’t fair. Also—and this was only to himself—that his accidental one-night stand with a colleague three years ago actually did count, and the price he might have to pay for this event’s having remained secret could be cutting his wife some slack, not least because his own drunken error had caused him more confusion and discomfort than anything Alison had ever done. The behavior of others can be withstood. Less so the occasions when we stab ourselves in the back. A brief hatred of someone else can be refreshing to the soul. Not so a hatred of one’s other self, which is never brief.

  Both of them knew, but did not admit, that they said or thought these things as offerings, to whichever power held their daughter in his hands. No matter how long they talked, however, the absence stretched with every additional minute the phone failed to ring.

  In the end it became too wide to speak across, and they were left in silence, staring out windows into the dark.

  Finally they’d lain down on the bed together, closer than for some time. At 3:02, Alison had woken to the sound of her cell phone. She scrambled across the bed, fell off the other side, and sent the phone clattering to the floor. Got it open and to her ear just in time to hear someone talking loud and fast. It was barely two sentences, but the voice cut through Alison’s head like a knife. Then the line went dead.

  Alison turned, eyes wide, to see Simon levering himself up onto one elbow.

  “Who’s that?” he slurred. “Police?”

  “No,” she’d said, trying not to start running in all directions at once. “It was Madison. I think she just told us where she is.”

  chapter

  TWENTY-NINE

  When the door to the house didn’t open, I was confused, until I realized that Amy must have gone out. I unlocked the bolt and let myself into a space that was supremely quiet, suffused with the distinctive emptiness caused by the absence of the person with whom you share your life.

  I headed down into the living area, sneakily glad of time to myself, a period to decide how to broach the subject of the photographs I’d seen and the fact of her name being on the paperwork Fisher had shown me. The living room was tidy. The current work frenzy was over, or in abeyance, and presumably she’d walked up into the village. In which case maybe I should call her, go meet up. Grab lunch. Talk to her long enough to overlay the dark aftermath of the morning and decide what to do about everything else. We’d always been able to talk the world away. I hoped this was still the case.

  I’d traveled a couple more steps before I stopped, however, looking through the door into Amy’s study.

  What I saw would not have struck anyone else the way it did me. You’d have to know Amy, to have been married to her, and to understand how important her work spaces were. Her office was where she lived and who she was. And what I saw was not the way it should be.

  The computer was on, the screen a mass of open windows. Amy closed computer windows the way old men keep a single bulb burning in their house, turning lights on and off as they move from room to room. The surface of her real desktop was covered in papers, notepads. Box files had been removed from the shelves and left open. Whoever had been here had hardly trashed the place—many people’s studies probably never looked this neat—but they had been thorough. Her laptop was gone. So was her personal organizer.

  I pulled out my phone to raise Amy right away but stopped as two more things struck me. First that she would have called me if she’d known that someone had broken in. She had not. So this must have happened very recently.

  And secondly that the front door had been locked.

  Thumb hovering over Amy’s speed-dial number, I went out into the living room. Stood and listened, letting my mouth drop open. The house was as quiet as
when I’d first arrived. I walked quickly and silently to glance into the other rooms on the main level, then up the stairs. My study looked as it had, laptop lonely in the middle of the table.

  I searched the rest of the house. Within five minutes I was confident there was no one there.

  And by no one, I now meant Gary Fisher. I couldn’t imagine who else might have come here. He not only knew where I lived but had tied Amy in to the story he was building around Cranfield’s estate. If he’d walked straight out of the hospital to his car and gotten on the road, he could have beaten me here.

  Though not by much—and there was still the issue of the front door. Only way he could have managed that was with a set of keys. I still had mine, and there’d been no opportunity for him to copy them. Unless when he’d come to visit, he swiped the spare set from the bowl in the kitchen…

  The keys were still there. Across from the breakfast island was access to the garage, but a quick twist of the doorknob confirmed that this door was locked, too. That left one remaining option. I headed back down the stairs and over to the windows. Grabbed the handle of the sliding door and yanked it to the right, hard, expecting it to slide open. But it did not.

  I unlocked it and stepped out onto the deck, finally pressing the speed-dial number on my phone. It took Amy a while to pick up, and when she did, she sounded distracted.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “It’s me. Look…”

  “Who?”

  “Who does it say on the screen, honey?”

  There was beat. “Answered without looking. Sorry, miles away.”

  Again, I added silently. “Look, where are you?”

  “Home,” she said. “Where are you?”

  I turned back to the window, prey to the bizarre idea that I’d somehow missed her, that she was inside the house doing something mundane, working, making coffee, or tea, that she’d just happened to move from room to room in such a way that I’d not seen her since I got back.

  “At home?”

  “What time are you getting back?”

  “Amy, you’re not at home. I’m in the house now. You’re not here.”

  There was a pause. “Not in the house.”

  “In Birch Crossing?”

  “No. I’m in L.A.”

  “You’re in Los Angeles?”

  “Yes. The city where I was born? Grew up? Did that back-in-the-day stuff?”

  “What are you talking about? Why are you in L.A.?”

  “I left a message on your phone,” she said. She sounded confident now, as if she’d worked out the precise way in which I was being obtuse. “Like, about an hour after we spoke last night? I flew into LAX last night.”

  “Why?”

  “KC and H called a big powwow. God and his angels are flying in, business class.”

  I held the phone away from my ear, looked at the screen. There was an icon there to show I had voice mail.

  “I didn’t notice it come in,” I said. “Amy…” I didn’t know what to say and instead got mired in the trivial. “And you couldn’t conference-call instead?”

  “My point entirely, honey. I fought tooth and nail. But apparently not. This is face-to-face action.”

  “So how long are you down for?”

  “Meeting’s tomorrow A.M., stupid early. Been at the office all morning. I’m on my way to Natalie’s for the afternoon now—thought I’d catch up with the brat, be big-sisterly at her. She’s probably feeling under nagged.”

  “Right.” I was distracted by a tiny spot of unexpected color, pale and sandy, deep in the undergrowth twenty feet below the deck.

  “You still there?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was leaning over the rail now. “Was everything okay at the house when you left?”

  “Well, sure,” she said. “Why—is there a problem?”

  “No. Just feels…kind of cold, that’s all.”

  “So check the furnace, caveman. That where big fire spirit lives. Want you nice and toasty while you work.”

  She said she would keep me updated and was gone.

  I’d barely heard the last few sentences. I went to the end of the deck and ran down the flight of stairs to the path. It wasn’t designed to enable access to the area directly underneath the balcony, which was heavily sloped, but to deliver you to the more landscaped area below. I had to come off it and push my way through bushes to get to where I’d been looking.

  It took me a couple of minutes to find the first one. Soon afterward I’d found three more.

  I made my way back out to the path and stood with them in the palm of my hand. Four cigarette butts. Each had been stubbed out on something firm, then dropped over the side. The color and condition of the filters said they hadn’t been there long. Yesterday at most, this morning more likely; overnight mist would have made them soggy and dull.

  I walked back up to the deck. Found the point above where I’d found the butts and discovered a discolored patch on the upper surface of the rail. I always stubbed mine underneath, precisely to avoid causing this. I didn’t just drop the remains into the bushes either but carried them indoors to put in the trash.

  Somebody had been standing right here, smoking.

  There were two things I didn’t understand about this. The first was, whoever was out there should have been visible from the house if anyone was inside.

  The second was, I knew that Gary Fisher didn’t smoke.

  Another question occurred to me. The SUV had been with me in Seattle. So how had Amy gotten to the airport? Birch Crossing didn’t exactly rate a cab ser vice. The only solution I could think of was one I’d taken advantage of myself, a few days before. The Zimmermans. This made me remember something else.

  The Zimmermans had keys to our house.

  They were, in fact, the only people in the world who did. I couldn’t for a moment see either of them letting themselves in. But they were helpful folks. If someone came to them with a convincing story, I was far from sure they wouldn’t have tried to help. Ben, at least—Bobbi would have been a harder sell. But wouldn’t even Ben have come into the house with them, hovered in the background?

  Five minutes’ search failed to turn up their phone number in the house. I decided to walk over there instead. The first question was settled as I walked up their drive. Both Zimmerman vehicles were present.

  I went to the front door and rang the bell. The door opened immediately. Bobbi stood there holding a glass of wine. The broad smile on her face faltered but then reattached in a slightly different shape.

  “Jack,” she said. “How are you?”

  The Zimmermans’ house was arranged all on one level, ranch style. Over Bobbi’s shoulder I could see that some kind of get-together was taking place in their living room, a wide, open space with a view of the creek. There were people standing there, at least fifteen, perhaps twenty. Ben didn’t appear to be among them.

  I stepped inside, trying not to be overly aware of the people in the living room or the way some of them seemed to be looking at me.

  “Wanted to check something with you,” I said quietly. “You’ve got a set of our keys. Has anyone asked for them? Or asked you to let them into our house?”

  Bobbi stared at me. “Of course not,” she said. “And I wouldn’t have let them in if they did.”

  “Right,” I said quickly. “I didn’t think so. It just looked a little like someone might have been hanging around the property. Is Ben home?”

  She shook her head, started explaining that their friend had taken a turn for the worse again and that Ben had gone back down to be with him. I tried to listen but found myself distracted. I realized that I recognized some of the people in the other room. Sam, the fat and bearded man who owned the grocery store. A gaunt, gray-haired woman whose name I didn’t know, but whom I believed to be the proprietor of the bookstore. The smooth-looking gent who owned the Cascades Gallery and others also who appeared familiar. I was aware that I should probably feel embarrassed for Bobbi that I’
d arrived to witness a gathering we hadn’t been invited to. But that wasn’t what I felt. The people who glanced my way didn’t look like they were preparing to greet another guest. It felt more like being a kid who had wandered into the wrong classroom by mistake, to be confronted with a group of older children, their faces familiar but their gazes flat and closed.

  “I’m sure it’s just my imagination,” I said, smiling. “Sorry to have disturbed you. What’s the occasion?”

  Bobbi took me by the elbow and led me gently to the door.

  “Just a little reading group,” she said. “Give my regards to Amy, won’t you?”

  And then I was back outside, the door closed behind me. I stared at it, then turned to go. As I walked down the drive, I saw someone else I recognized.

  The sheriff nodded to me as he passed and continued on his way up to the Zimmermans’ house.

  He’d never struck me as a man who read a lot.

  I stood out on our deck and smoked as I drank a succession of cups of coffee. I tried to find something to eat. I tried to do most things I could think of, but in the end I did what had been brewing all along.

  First I called Natalie in Santa Monica. She said Amy had just left, which meant she couldn’t have spent barely an hour there. So then I called the other number, the main switchboard for Kerry, Crane & Hardy in Los Angeles. My heart was thumping hard. Someone perky answered.

  “Hey,” I said. “Seattle mailroom here. Got a package needs to get to, uh…Ms. Whalen, I think, for the meeting tomorrow. You know where she’s staying, or can I just ship it direct to your office?”

  “Well, sure. Which meeting is that, by the way?”

  “No idea,” I said. “It just says ‘the meeting, Thursday A.M.’ Some big thing, I guess.”