“You can’t pretend things never happened.”
“I’m not. I’m just not wallowing in it. I don’t want that crap anymore. I want to be someone else.”
“Congratulations, it’s already happened.”
“That’s an asshole thing to say.”
“Well, you’re being an asshole.”
And then we were at each other like vicious children, two people shouting at the end of a pier, and passersby watched us curiously and either changed their course to avoid the embarrassing couple or slowed a little to catch a sentence or two, neither knowing nor caring that they were witnessing a universe as it split in half.
For this to be happening, and happening here, made me so sad that my words started to catch in my throat. I could barely hear what Amy was saying.
“Amy, just look me in the eyes and tell me this isn’t about some other guy.”
Asking the question out loud made me furious, and sad, and exposed: There’s little difference between it and saying, “Mommy, why don’t you love me anymore?” It made me feel fourteen years old. This only worsened when she didn’t answer me.
“Jack, this is stupid.”
“Is it Todd Crane?”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t laugh at me, Amy. I’m asking you an adult question. Are you having an affair with Crane?”
“I…Look, a long, long time ago, years before you and I even met, Crane and I were an item. Briefly. Not since. There’s nothing inside that guy’s head, Jack.”
“So who is it? This guy Shepherd?”
She stared at me. I hadn’t scored a hit—at least, not of the right kind—but I’d clearly unbalanced her in some way I didn’t understand.
“What…how do you know about him?”
“Yes or no, Amy?”
She looked away, eyes clouded. “Of course not.”
“This relationship with Crane—would that have been around the time the company bought the building in Belltown?” Amy had started to look very unsettled now, and I realized that Gary Fisher had been right about at least one thing: The building was important after all.
“Jack, you really…you shouldn’t be getting into this. It’s got nothing to do with you, and it’s not something you’re going to understand. Believe me.”
I was unable to stop pushing now that I’d started, and I tried the remaining name I’d heard in the last few days, the name that appeared on the building’s papers, along with Amy’s and Crane’s.
“What about Marcus Fox?”
Amy’s face dropped. She actually looked pale. I nodded, suddenly disbelieving anything she had to say. Disbelieving Amy, period. All that had happened to us in the last few years no longer seemed like events we’d weathered together. Instead, the time had coalesced between us, like ice: transparent at first, stealthily growing harder and more opaque with every day that passed.
“Last chance to do this right,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, her hands shaking a little. She took the last one, lit it, and threw the empty pack over the rail. A woman who, when I first met her, took part in volunteer walks to pick litter off the beach.
“I don’t respond well to threats,” she said.
Her gaze was level and flat and cool. The fingers curled around the cigarette ended in splashes of pink. I realized I did not know this woman. Someone, some person who for now existed only in the shadows, had pushed his way into my life. He’d found his way in and was destroying the things that mattered most to me, either stealing or changing them so they were no longer mine. I’d thought I kept my house empty, protecting myself from the outside. But I had not. Amy had been inside all along, and it was she that he had come in to find.
And somehow he was taking her away from me.
I felt something very bad and dark rising in my head, a shaking I knew I might not be able to control.
“You’re not you anymore,” I said, thickly.
“Yes, Jack, I am. I’m sorry. But this is me.”
“I really hope not. Because I don’t even know this person. And she’s very hard to like.”
I walked away.
I left her standing there and stormed to the bottom section of the pier, walking stiff-legged around the final bend to where I could not see her. I was blinking fast and mechanically, my hands in fists by my sides, my arms and shoulders feeling as if they were under someone else’s control.
When I reached the very end, I forced myself to stop, to take a series of long, deep breaths. The pier felt as if it were rocking under my feet, but I knew it was not. It was the whole world, and I understood now that this was what had been in my head when I’d stood out on the deck of the house in Birch Crossing and been unable to remember where I was.
An intuition that for many years I’d been living inside a dream, and that I was now about to wake up.
When I got back, she’d gone.
I headed quickly along the pier toward land, no longer angry. I had to dodge in and out to get through the packs and couples of contented, random people, and it felt like being a ghost. I started to run.
When I got to the beginning of the pier and gazed up the ramp, I could see someone who looked like Amy, sixty yards away, almost at Ocean Avenue. I shouted her name.
If she heard me, she didn’t turn around. She walked straight to a car that was waiting on the corner, opened the back door, and got inside. The car pulled out quickly. There was no way I could catch it.
I grabbed my phone and dialed. It went to voice mail. She wasn’t taking calls from me now.
“Amy,” I said. “Call me. Please.”
Then I dialed another number and asked someone if he would find something out. While I waited for him to call me back, I hiked up the slope to the avenue and sat heavily down on one of the benches in the park. My phone rang five minutes later.
“What do you know about this guy?” Blanchard asked.
“Just the name. Why?”
“Fox was a businessman. A pretty big deal in the city for a while, apparently.”
“Was?”
“He disappeared nine, ten years ago.”
“Owing money?”
“No. But it sounds like Homicide was beginning to pay him a little attention. A witness maybe put him in the area when a young girl disappeared, up in the Queen Anne District, four, five blocks from his house. There’d been other missing girls in the city over the previous few years. More than a few. Detectives got access to Fox’s property and found a very clean basement.”
“Suspiciously clean?”
“Maybe. But he was gone. I talked to one of the guys who was in the house, and he said it was like the Mary Celeste. Uncorked bottle of wine on the table, a cigar cut and ready to smoke, the whole deal. The file is still open, but it’s full of dust, and I should stress that nothing ever got tied to him. So what’s he to you, Jack?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m not sure I believe that,” Blanchard said, sounding tired. “The guy I spoke to said someone else was asking about Fox, a few weeks back. This other person said he was a lawyer. Do I need to spell it out?”
“No,” I said.
I called a final number.
“You’ve been lying to me,” I said, before Fisher had a chance to speak. “I’m coming to Seattle. You’re going to meet with me or I’m going to come and find you. If I wind up doing that, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
I cut the connection and walked across the road to hail a cab to the airport or a motel or bar, somewhere I could camp out for the night before flying north.
chapter
THIRTY-TWO
Rachel stood at the corner, mouth open. She looked up the street, then down again. Turned in a melodramatic circle, as if it might help. It didn’t. Son of a bitch.
She’d really gone.
Oh, beautiful.
Thanks, Lori. A perfect end to another stellar night.
> Naturally, it was agreed that if either woman met someone five-star, then she was authorized to take off with him without having to track down the other to explain. The arrangement was more pertinent to Rachel, though, because Lori always insisted on driving and so was never the one who got abandoned outside Seattle’s hottest bar (this week only), facing a walk home that would get longer and longer as the last glass of wine wore off. A walk in a skirt not designed for locomotion. And without a sensible coat.
“Fuck,” Rachel said, wearily. But no use crying over spilt milk. Or split girlfriends. Ha. Was that funny, or just clever? Was it even clever?
Given that the exchange was happening inside her own head, did it even fucking matter?
She glanced indecisively back at Wanna: Be. She guessed she could go into the bar again and see if they knew any special cab-summoning spells, but there was no telling how long she’d have to wait. Nor did she relish trying to talk her way back past the doorman, a tall, smooth black dude flushed with self-importance and clearly unaware that a month from now he’d be on the streets again, handing out passes to drunks just to keep the background hubbub up to marketable levels.
“Fuck,” she muttered, again. She arranged her wispy coat around her neck like a scarf and sent up a prayer that Lori’s new best friend would turn out to have major issues and a dick the size of a cashew nut. Said “fuck” a final time, quietly.
And started walking home.
“Twenty-seven,” Rachel said under her breath.
She was keeping careful count. She didn’t want to be ballpark about it. She wanted the exact number to insert between the phrases “I had to walk…” and “…fucking blocks” in the e-mail she was sending Lori first thing in the morning.
She took the opportunity to rest for a minute. Another couple blocks would get her to the correct cross street, and then it would be fifteen minutes before she got to her house, a dinky place in a semimarginal neighborhood. Her house, where she kept her things, and slept, and ate in front of the television. Home, she guessed, and she knew she was lucky to have it and that without help from her dad she’d be sharing some dope-reeking dive with three other people drifting through their early twenties.
Eventually she started walking again, more slowly now. The streets were deserted but for an occasional car rocketing up or down or across, other people doing whatever it was they did. Rows of decent houses were set behind small and well-tended yards, every window dark. Nobody stayed up late around here. They’d already gotten what they needed and didn’t need to pretend that it could be found in cool-for-this-night-only bars full of light and chatter, which still felt like the insides of empty closets. Who needs that crap when you’ve got a two-car garage? Everybody here was tucked in happy and warm. Everyone except for…
…whoever was making that noise.
Rachel stopped, turned. The noise was footsteps. It pissed her off that the sound affected her this way—so there were footsteps, what ever—but it was dark and late, and she couldn’t help it.
There was no one behind her. The steps sounded like they must be a little distance away, they were so quiet and light. Rachel flipped open her purse, got out her phone.
“Right,” she mumbled into it. “But penguins are always like that, you know? Most of them can’t even drive a car. Except those ones with the big crests. The CIA bred them for cross-country rally competition.”
She paused a moment—faking conversation in the hope of putting off a stalker made her feel dumb, but a friend of Lori’s claimed it had saved her butt more than once—then listened again.
Silence now. Whoever walked alone had gone some other way. Cool. She kept the phone in place, however, as she turned the corner that put her just six blocks from home. Then her hand slowly drifted down from her ear.
Someone was standing twenty yards up the street.
It wasn’t a very tall someone, but Rachel couldn’t determine much more than that because there was a streetlamp behind them.
She walked a little farther, slowing down, squinting.
The silhouette resolved into the shape of a little girl, standing neatly in the middle of the sidewalk.
“I’m lost,” the girl said.
“Where are you supposed to be?” Rachel asked.
“Somewhere else.”
“Okay, then. How…um, how come you’re out this late anyway?”
The girl ignored the question. Rachel didn’t blame her. She knew she was crap at relating to kids, with the exception of her baby sis. No children worked in her office or went to her gym. Or hung out in bars, much. So the only other shorties she encountered belonged to her older sister, who never left them alone with her but always hovered in the background, as if she suspected that Rachel might try to borrow money off her brood or try teaching them to smoke.
Nonetheless, she tried bending down, to seem more friendly. “Does your mom know where you are?”
“No.”
“Where do you live, honey?”
“I just want to be indoors. I don’t want to go home.”
Uh-oh, Rachel thought. Suddenly this was looking more complicated. A lost kid was one thing. Chance to be a good neighbor. A runaway was different. Problems at home. Weird Uncle Bob. The whole nine yards.
“Why not?” she asked. “It’s late. And cold. Be nicer to be home, don’t you think?”
The girl waited patiently for her to stop talking. “Where is your home?”
Rachel raised her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“Where is it?”
“It’s not far,” Rachel said. “But—”
“Take me to your home.”
“Look,” Rachel said firmly, “I’ll help you find your own house. Your folks must be flipping out. But—”
Suddenly the child flew at her.
Rachel wasn’t ready. She threw a hand out to break her fall but crashed awkwardly anyway, the momentum from the child’s attack causing her head to crack resoundingly against the concrete. The whole thing took about a second. Whiteness filled her head, as if light were splitting across the night sky.
Then she saw the bulbous shadow of the little girl’s face above hers. “Take me to your home.”
Rachel pushed herself back along the sidewalk, her wrist yelping in a bony way. “What’s wrong with you?”
The girl’s face had swum into focus. Her mouth was a thin line. “Take me to your home.”
“I’m not taking you anywhere, you fucking freak.”
The girl hesitated, kicked her in the stomach, and then ran off. Rachel caught a final glimpse of the child as she clambered quickly over a low fence into someone’s front yard, and then she disappeared.
Rachel was moving fast as soon as she was on her feet. Within a couple of blocks, she’d started shaking, as shock kicked in. She thought about calling the cops to tell them they should get the hell out here and to bring a big net, but decided she’d wait until she got home.
It started getting odd once more when she was only a couple of blocks away. At first she thought she could hear the footsteps again. This time they stopped her dead in her tracks. She heard only silence. She turned in a slow circle, expecting to see a small figure standing shadowed under a streetlamp, some distance away but not far enough.
Nobody.
She was just spooked. That was all.
She started walking even more quickly. Her ears felt like they were sticking six inches out from her head. Her shoulders felt strange, too, as if she’d banged them up a little bit. But she kept her feet moving regularly, in a marching rhythm. Click-click-click, as the heels came down again and again. She tried to keep her eyes looking straight forward. To just keep moving…
Then she snapped her head to the left.
She saw a pair of houses, almost identical, standard-issue ranch style with a little fence in between. Silent and motionless under thin moonlight. But hadn’t she seen someone slipping over the fence, way in back? Her brain wasn’t sure, but her heart was beating hard en
ough to sound confident. And very unhappy about it.
She hesitated. She’d turned quickly. There were five, six yards between the fence and the side of the next house. Could a little girl really have made the distance in that time? Probably it was just a cat, prowling its territory. Jumped the fence, catching her eye, melted back into darkness in time-honored feline fashion.
But…if it had been the kid, it meant she was now ahead of Rachel. She could be waiting a few houses along the street, hidden behind one of the fences.
No. It was just a cat.
And if not…what was Rachel going to do? Run Christ knows how many blocks back to the bar, ask the cool black guy to come help? Or call the cops? Right, ma’am, and how much did you have to drink tonight? Really— that much?
And besides, it was only a kid. She’d had the element of surprise. This time Rachel would just deck the little nutcase.
Nonetheless, she covered the last block and a half at a trot, keeping a close eye on each fence as she approached. Her neighborhood signaled a small drop in the size and value of the houses, and her yard was neither deep nor wide. It was obviously empty, thank God.
She ran up the path and unlocked the front door with the key already in her hand. Closed it fast behind her.
And started laughing. Jesus. What a shitty night.
She poured herself a big glass of wine right away, swallowing half of it in one gulp. So she’d lost count of the number of blocks. She had more than enough juice to make Lori’s mouth drop open. And maybe even, for once, apologize. She walked into the living room, stood aimlessly for a moment. The shock and spent adrenaline were losing their fizz and going flat. What was she thinking of doing now? Sitting in silence? Turning on the television? Lori wouldn’t be doing either of those things right now.
Rachel took another swig of wine. It refreshed the alcohol still in her system, and she felt a bit drunk. Drunk and bad-tempered. And freaked out. What was going on in the world that little girls were out in the middle of the night attacking innocent single women?
The Intruders Page 28