The Intruders (11 page)

I flipped over to the made/received calls log. The number didn’t appear anywhere on it. Communication from this source evidently came only in the form of text, or at least no call had come from it in the last month.

This gave me an idea, and I went back to the first SMS message and found that it had been sent a little over three months previously. There’d been a month gap between the first and the second. Then another two weeks. Then they’d started coming more frequently. The one saying “yes” had been sent six days before. And the one about roses had arrived just yesterday, late in the afternoon. Amy had seen this message—she must have; otherwise it would still have been filed under “Unread.” Then, sometime in the next few hours, she had lost the phone, during the course of an evening her schedule listed as blank.

Then she had, so far as I could tell, lost herself.

I navigated sideways from received messages into the section recording texts that Amy had sent. The list there was very short. A couple of replies to her sister and to me. And one other. It had been sent two minutes after the last message to her and consisted of the following:

Bell 9. Will b waitng, whenever yr redE, 2dy, nxt wk, nxt year xoxox

The waitress swung by at that moment to see if I wanted fresh coffee. I said no. I asked for beer.

One thing my father was always good at was answering questions. He didn’t have infinite patience in other directions, but if you asked him something—how the moon was created, why cats slept all the time, why that man over there had only one arm—he’d always give you a grown-up answer, except for this one occasion. I was about twelve. I’d heard an older kid at school being pretentious and been somewhat impressed and came home and asked my dad what was the meaning of life, thinking it made me sound at least sixteen. He seemed unaccountably annoyed and said it was a dumb question. I didn’t understand. “Say you come back to your house one afternoon,” he said, “and there’s someone at your table, eating your food. You don’t ask him, ‘What the hell are you doing, sitting there, eating my dinner?’—because he could simply say he was hungry. Which is an answer to what you asked him, sure enough. But not to your real question, which is ‘What the hell are you doing in my house?’”

I still didn’t get it, but I found I remembered this from time to time when I was older. It probably made me a slightly better cop, less prone to ask witnesses my questions instead of just letting them tell me what they knew. I remembered it again as I sat there in the bar in Seattle and started my first beer.

My head felt heavy and cold, and I was coming to suspect that the day was not going to end well. I realized that maybe I had to stop asking where Amy was and starting thinking about why.

chapter
TEN

Meanwhile a girl was standing in an airport concourse. A big clock suspended from the ceiling said it was twenty-four minutes to four. As she watched, the last number changed, going from 16:36 to 16:37. She kept watching until it flipped to 16:39. She liked the 9. She didn’t know why it should seem compelling, but it did. A recorded voice kept telling people not to smoke, which Madison suspected must be annoying for them.

Madison was not sure where she was going next. She had not, for a couple of minutes, been sure where she was right at this moment. She recognized it now. It was the Portland airport, of course. She’d been here several times in the past, most recently when they went to visit Mom’s mom down in Florida in the spring. Madison could remember browsing around the little Powell’s bookstore and drinking a juice at the café where you could watch planes landing and taking off. Mom had been nervous about flying, and Dad had joked and made her feel better about it. There had been more joking in those days. A lot more.

But today? Madison remembered early talk of a trip up to the grocery store in Cannon Beach that morning, discussion that hadn’t come to anything. Then a little time on the beach. It had been cold and windy. There had been no walk. A quiet and skimpy lunch, in the cottage. Mom stayed indoors afterward, so Madison went back out to hang on the beach by herself.

After that…there was this gap. Like when she’d woken last night and couldn’t remember the time on the beach. It was like there was a cloud in the way.

Mom wasn’t here at the airport with her, that was clear. Mom wouldn’t have walked off and left her by herself. Madison was wearing her new coat, too, she realized. That was also strange. She wouldn’t have gone out to the beach in her new coat. She would have worn her old coat, because it didn’t matter if that got sand on it. So she must have gone into the cottage after the beach, to change, and snuck back out.

Then what? How had she gotten from there to Portland? Maddy knew the word her Uncle Brian would use for this: perplexing. In every other way, she felt fine. Just like normal. So what was the deal with the blank spot? And what was she supposed to do now?

She realized that the hand in her pocket was holding something. She pulled it out. A notebook. It was small, bound in stained brown leather, and looked old. She opened it. The pages were covered in handwriting. The first line said:

In the beginning there was Death.

It was written in a pen that smudged occasionally, in an ink that was a kind of red-brown. There were drawings in the book, too, maps and diagrams, lists of names. One of the diagrams looked exactly like the drawing on the back of the business card she also had in her possession, the interlinked nines. Even the handwriting looked the same. Slipped in the front of the notebook was a long piece of paper. It was a United Airlines ticket.

Wow—how had she bought that?

These questions didn’t make her feel scared. Not quite. For the time being, there was something dreamlike about her situation. Maybe all that mattered was going where she needed to go, and she could worry about everything else later. Yes. That sounded good. Easier.

Madison blinked, and by the time her eyelids had flipped back up, she had largely stopped worrying about trivia like how she’d traveled the fifty miles from Cannon Beach to the Portland airport, or how she’d purchased an airline ticket costing over a hundred dollars, or why she was alone.

Instead she turned to look at the departures information, to find out where it was she needed to go.

As far as Jim Morgan was concerned, there was a simple secret to life, and it was something he’d learned from his uncle Clive. His father’s cadaverous brother spent his entire working days in security at the Ready Ship dispatch warehouse over in Tigard. Checked trucks as they came in, checked them as they went out. He’d done this five days a week for over thirty years. Jim’s dad never hid the fact that as a (junior) executive in a bank, he considered himself many steps up the ladder compared with his older sibling—but the curious thing was that while his father spent his life moaning and feeling put-upon, Uncle Clive seemed utterly content with his lot.

One evening when Jim was thirteen, his uncle had spent an entire Sunday dinner talking about his job. This was not the first time—and Jim’s father and mother weren’t subtle about rolling their eyes—but on this occasion their son listened. He listened to information about schedules and shipping targets. He listened to discussion of procedures. He came to understand that every day, between the hours of eight and four, getting in and out of the Ready Ship warehouse was like shoving a fat camel through the eye of a needle. Uncle Clive was that needle. Didn’t matter who you were or what you were carrying, how late or urgent your shipment or how many times he’d seen your face before. You showed your badge or pass or letter. You were polite. You dealt with Uncle Clive in the proper manner. Otherwise you didn’t get past—or at least not without a protracted exchange involving two-way radios and head shaking, from which you would limp away feeling like an ass. Which you were. The rules were simple. You showed your pass. It was the law. You couldn’t get this through your head, it wasn’t Uncle Clive’s fault.

Fifteen years later Jim had taken this to heart. You could do things the hard way or the right way, and it was always someone’s god-or government-given job to make sure you did like you’d been told. There was something else to be learned from this, a way of living your life. You took your pleasures where you could, and you made sure you were king of your own domain. Amen.

Jim’s domain was the Portland airport security line. He ran a tight ship. People stood where and how they were supposed to stand, or they faced Jim’s wrath—he had no problem with stopping the checking process and walking slowly down the line of fretful travelers to tell the assholes at the back to keep the line straight. Jim had a system at the front, too. The person he was dealing with was allowed to approach. All others (including that person’s spouse, business partner, mother, or spirit guide) stood the hell back at the yellow line and waited their turn. Failure to comply would cause Jim to again stop what he was doing and step forward to explain it at uncomfortable length. He actually did have all day to spend on the matter, or at least a set of three two-hour shifts. The people in line weren’t on the side of the troublemaker at the front. They wanted to get on with their journey, buy a magazine, take a dump. Anyone obstructing these goals became an enemy of the people. Jim’s philosophy was “divide and rule,” or it would have been if he’d ever thought to articulate it. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t his job to explain things. His way was just the way it was.

At 16:48 all was well in Jim’s world. He had his line moving in a well-ordered manner. It was neither too long (making Jim look inefficient) nor too short (suggesting he was insufficiently thorough, which would be far worse), and it was very straight. Jim nodded curtly at an octogenarian from Nebraska who—he was now confident—was unlikely to be carrying a cigarette lighter, handgun, or atomic weapon, and waved her on to the X-ray machine. Then he took his own good time about turning back to the line.

A little girl was standing there. About nine, ten maybe, long hair. She seemed to be alone.

Jim cupped his hand, indicated she should come forward. She did so. He raised his head, the signal for “turn over your documentation and make sure it’s in the right (though unspecified) order, or I’m going to make you feel like a dork in front of everyone.”

“Hello,” she said, smiling up at him. It was a nice smile, the kind that guaranteed second or third visits to toy shops, the smile of a little girl who had always been pretty good at getting people to do what she wanted.

Jim did not return it. Security was not a smiling matter. “Ticket.”

She handed it to him promptly. He looked it over for his standard period, three times longer than was necessary. With his eyes firmly on the self-explanatory piece of paper, he demanded, “Accompanying adult?”

“Excuse me?”

He looked up slowly. “Where is she? Or he?”

“What?” she said. She looked confused.

Jim prepared to deliver one of the stock phrases to deal with diversions from set procedure. His versions were famously brisk. But this was just a kid. The two guys behind her in line were now taking a mild interest in the proceedings. Jim couldn’t just chew her out.

He smiled inexpertly. “You need an accompanying adult to get you to departure,” he said. “It’s the law.”

“Really?” she said. “Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh. ‘Unaccompanied minors must be brought to the gate by a parent or responsible adult,’” he added, quoting, “‘who must remain at the airport until the child boards and the airplane departs the gate.’ You need all this arranged and booked ahead of time, too. You can’t just turn up at the gate and fly, kid.”

“But…I’m going to visit my aunt,” the girl said, sounding slightly panicky. “She’s waiting for me. She’s going to be worried.”

“Well, maybe your momma should have made sure you—”

“Please? I do have someone with me. They…had to go outside to smoke. They’ll be here in a minute, really.”

Jim shook his head. “Even if I let you through here, which I ain’t gonna, they’ll check again at the gate. You’re not getting near that plane without an adult.”

The girl’s smile slowly faded.

“Sorry, kid,” Jim said, making what was for him quite an effort to hide the fact that he was not.

She looked up at him for a moment. “Watch your back,” she said softly. Then she ducked under the rope and walked away across the concourse, where she was quickly lost among the other evening travelers.

Openmouthed, Jim watched her go. When it came to kids, he was phoning it in from the land of Who Gives a Shit, from a really bad connection. But…shouldn’t he maybe go after her? Check that she really was here with someone?

On the other hand, the line was getting long, and some of the people in it looked bad-tempered, and, if the truth be told, Jim just didn’t really care. All he wanted was to close out his shift, get home, and drink a series of beers while watching the tube, then get on the Net and find some porn. There was that, plus…

Of course it was absurd, just a little a girl using a phrase picked up from a movie. But there’d been something in her tone that made him think if she’d been a couple feet taller, he would have taken the threat seriously. Even from a woman. He didn’t want to have to explain this to anyone. So he went to the next person in line, who turned out to be French, so, while he had identification, it wasn’t American identification, which mandated Jim to stare even longer and harder than usual at his documents and to look up at the guy’s face in a suspicious and “Don’t think we’ve forgotten about you punking out over Iraq” kind of way. By the end of this, he was King of the Line again.

He didn’t think about the little girl until the detectives turned up the next day, and it wasn’t until he realized he’d missed the opportunity to prevent a nine-year-old girl from vanishing into thin air that he understood there were smaller holes than he’d ever realized, and he was about to spend a while being pulled back and forth through one of them.

Meanwhile Madison had made her way back outside the airport building and was standing forlornly on the sidewalk.