The Intruders (14 page)
I felt a hand grab me on the right shoulder and dropped low again as I turned hard left, the opposite to what most people would do. By the time I’d twisted quickly around, the guy was pulled off balance, and I planted my fist hard into his side. Our faces were close enough for his coughed exhale to spatter over my face.
I slammed my kneecap into the side of his thigh just above the knee, trapping the nerve, and felt him drop again as the other assailant stopped hitting Georj and grabbed me around the throat with both hands.
He was stronger and more focused than the other guy and slung me back against the hood of the car. I bounced off it awkwardly and slid to crash onto the cobbles—but he stepped in toward me too fast.
I kicked my leg in a wide, low arc, catching him around the back of the calf. He stumbled, dropping enough that I could meet his face with my shoulder as I came back up. He went over on his side, and I lowered my foot hard onto the fingers of his right hand.
The other guy was reaching into his coat now, and I turned toward him, wanting him to put himself in a position where it had to play out. I don’t think I even remembered I didn’t have a weapon of my own. I don’t believe I was thinking at all. I had just become the man who was doing this thing, powered by anger, fueled by the need to hurt someone for the sudden and inexplicable hole in the center of my life.
“No,” the guy I’d taken down said, but not to me.
The other man hesitated. Took his hand back out of his coat. Then the two of them ran quickly and quietly up the street.
Georj was crouched by the side of his cab, hands over his face. I squatted in front of him, panting hard, and pried his hands away. There was a lot of blood under his nose, down his chin, over his jacket. Before he could stop me, I felt on either side of his nose. He swore hard, tried to shove my hand away.
“You’re okay,” I said. “It’s not broken.”
I stood up. Looked back up the street. The two men had disappeared. “Who were they?”
“What?” The driver was standing now, sorting through his keys with trembling hands. He was looking at me like I was something that had just crawled in out of the bay, some animal with dripping teeth.
“You heard. Who were they?”
He shook his head, as if in disbelief.
“What the fuck is your problem?” I said, grabbing the door as he climbed into the car. “I just saved your ass. Who were those men?”
“How you think I know?”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “They didn’t get you this time, but they’re going to come back. You play dumb and—”
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “I am not criminal. Not here, not there. I have degree in biochemistry.”
“But—”
“You right, wise guy. I do spend time talk to police. My sister was journalist in St. Petersburg. Was murdered three year ago. That’s how I talk them.” He stabbed a finger up at my face. “What about you, huh? What you do?”
He spit at my feet, slammed the door, and drove away.
I was left standing in the middle of the alley. It suddenly seemed very quiet, the city silent but for the distant honks and sirens of life going on elsewhere. I did not feel like myself, and my fists hurt.
I turned and looked back up the street.
Alison was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, supported on both hands. The light outside the window was gray-blue, an unwelcome dawn. She knew she had to turn, to look at her husband. She knew they had to say more things to each other, although she’d said everything she could think of, and she believed Simon knew that. Even though her head felt like it was about to split down the middle, she knew she had to turn around. How do you look anyone in the eye on a day like this?
It doesn’t matter. You have to do it anyway.
She turned. Her husband was sitting at the table. He was exhausted and horror-struck but bright and alert and can-do. She recognized the look. It was how he appeared when he knew something had to be done but had no idea what it was. It was a signal of readiness. A way of saying, “I know I’m not doing anything, but look—I’m ready to.” He glanced up, a question on his face.
“No,” she said. “Nothing else.” Her voice was hoarse. That would be the talking, and yesterday’s screaming. The screaming when she’d gone out onto the beach, then back and all through the house, and out the front into the yard between the cottage and the highway, and over to the other side of the road, and then straight through the house again and out over the dune to the windy beach. When she’d gotten to the beach again, she realized they hadn’t walked in the morning and hoped maybe her daughter had taken it upon herself to do the walk alone. Alison had run a long, long way up the sand, far past the point the family had ever been before. Then she’d returned, past the cottage and at least as far in the opposite direction. Nothing, nobody, no sign.
She came back into the house, tried to regain a little calm, to think positive. Waited what felt like an hour but had barely been fifteen minutes. Then went out onto the beach once more, up and down, trying to search properly, to stop herself from panicking again.
Finally she went to ask the neighbors if they’d noticed a little girl. On one side was an ancient couple who’d been there since the Jurassic period but whom the O’Donnells barely knew. Neither looked as if they’d be guaranteed to notice a tactical missile strike on their house. The other side was a small four-unit condo, empty for the winter. The caretakers had seen nothing and didn’t hesitate to suggest that Alison should have been keeping a better eye herself. Alison knew that. Suddenly she knew that. The fog she’d been in for the last few days, for months, had instantly dissipated. She knew what she should have been paying attention to, and she knew she had not been, and she knew now what the cost could be.
She had gone into the house and waited in the kitchen, walking back and forth between the window that looked toward the beach and the one that looked over the front yard. Then she went out, jumped into the car, and drove the half mile to Cannon Beach. She looked in all the stores and cafés, in the toy store, asking if anyone had seen a little girl. She drove home and went onto the beach a final time, running and calling and screaming her daughter’s name. Madison was a strong swimmer. Alison didn’t believe she’d have just walked into the sea and been carried away. It was something she probably could believe if she put her mind to it, but she wasn’t going to do that, not yet. By now the light had almost gone, and she knew that running and screaming were going to solve nothing.
So then the talking. The phone call to the police.
And then to Simon.
“You last saw her—”
“Simon, I told you this.”
“I know. But I’ve had no sleep, and I got here at three o’clock in the morning, and I’m really not—”
“About midday,” Alison said. It came out as a croak. “She’d been out on the beach. She came back in and said she was going to read awhile. She went into her room. I was sitting in the chair. I…I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, I went to see if she wanted to go for a walk, but…”
Simon nodded. He put his hands together on the table and looked at the wall again. He knew that his wife had opinions on the way he sat sometimes, that she seemed to feel she could read things into it. Things that reflected badly on him, naturally. In actuality he was sitting in this way, and holding his hands together, to make sure he didn’t get up and hit the woman he’d been married to for twelve years. This had never happened in the past. He’d never come even remotely close—not even after he started to think…Whatever, that wasn’t the issue now. But if she was responsible for his baby being lost, then…Of course it would still never happen. It did not help. It was not his way. He was not that kind of man.
He grasped his hands together more tightly.
This was the first time they’d been alone together since he arrived. She’d called him after the police. He had absolutely no problem with that. He wished she’d called them before running helter-skelter all over the place yesterday afternoon, that she’d called them the instant she’d discovered that Madison was neither in her room nor visible on the beach, but nothing could be done about that now. He’d gotten into the car immediately, broken every speed limit on the journey along 26 from Portland, and arrived to find four cops from the local sheriff’s department already present. They’d asked Alison a lot of questions. They asked Simon some, too, even though it was the middle of the night and he’d obviously just arrived. They wanted to know if “everything was all right at home”—as if Maddy could possibly have just run away by herself. Then most of them had gone to join the others who were out searching. There are words that you don’t want to have any bearing on your life. “Searching” is one of them. Especially in conjunction with your only child.
Since then, as night finally crawled toward dawn, the cops had been in and out and back and forth. In the yard. On the beach. They came and asked more questions, usually a couple at a time. There was generally at least one around. But for the moment it was just the two of them. Simon and his ever-loving wife.
A wife who had turned away again now, to the window that looked out across the yard to the road. Maybe she thought that keeping watch was going to make everything better, that she’d suddenly glimpse Maddy strolling up the highway carrying groceries (Simon had already noticed that food and drink were notable by their absence). That this would instantly make everything okay. That she—
“Someone’s coming,” she said.
There were footsteps up the front stairs, then a knock at the door. Simon answered it. A man was standing outside. He was tall and wore a dark coat. His face was serious, the planes of it flat, the skin sallow.
“Yes?” Simon said. His heart was thudding badly.
“May I come in?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Shepherd,” the man said.
Alison had come to stand behind Simon. “Are you with the police?”
“No, ma’am. I’m Federal Agent Shepherd, from the Portland office.”
He flashed his card, and they stepped aside. The man walked into the center of the kitchen, looked around. “Your daughter is missing,” he said flatly.
Alison started to say yes but suddenly began crying. None of the cops had put it this bluntly. She kept trying to speak but couldn’t get anything out beyond whispers. Simon took her hand, which only made her feel worse. Meanwhile the man waited. He made no attempt to make her feel better, or at ease. If anything, he gave the impression he found her tiresome.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Early afternoon yesterday,” Simon said.
The man looked at him. “You were here?”
“No, but—”
“Then please let Mrs. O’Donnell answer.”
This was enough to stop the tears. “My husband knows what I know,” Alison said.
The man nodded. “Which is not a great deal. She just walked out of here? Disappeared?”
“I was asleep….”
“You have no idea where she might have gone? No friends in the area, no relatives nearby, no particular place she liked to go to be alone?”
“We always spent all our time here together. As a family.”
She glanced at Simon and was glad to see he looked taken aback, too. It wasn’t just her imagination. The agent’s tone seemed odd, angry for nonobvious reasons.
“She’s right,” Simon said. “We don’t really know anyone else here. We just come and—”
“Has Madison ever met Nick Golson?”
Alison froze.
Simon frowned. The name meant nothing. “Who?”
“The man your wife nearly had an affair with.”
Simon’s face drained of color. He turned and walked out of the cottage. Alison heard his steps thudding down the stairs to the yard.
Finally, unbelievably, things had gotten even worse.
“I never…How do you know about that?” she managed to ask. “How long have you…why have you…?”
The man kept looking at her until she stopped. “Has he? Ever met him?”
Alison shook her head vehemently.
“Does Golson know you have a daughter? Did he ever show any interest in her?”
“Of course not. I mean, he knew she exists, but…What does this have to do with anything?”
“Hopefully nothing, and I have no interest in your life except as it pertains to Madison’s safety,” the man said. He pulled out a business card. It was pure white and had nothing on it except the name Richard Shepherd. A phone number had been written on the back. “If she returns, call me from your cell phone. If you think of anywhere she might have gone, call me—on your cell phone. Do it immediately. Understand?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He just left.
Alison stood adrift in the middle of a room in which she had cooked, laughed, even made love, back in the day. It needed redecorating. Funny what it took to make you realize that. She watched as the tall man walked quickly down the path and got into an anonymous sedan parked on the road. He drove off fast.
Then she pulled her gaze back to look at her husband, sitting on the grass to one side of the yard, his head in his hands. And she wondered, idly, whether it might not be simpler just to kill herself.
Twenty minutes later two of the local cops came into the house. It was obvious before they spoke that they had found nothing. Alison told them about the FBI agent. The policemen seemed confused. The Bureau had been alerted, of course, but no one was expected until eight or nine at the earliest. They questioned her closely on the man who had come into her kitchen, finally establishing that he had shown no formal identification. The cops said this was very unusual. Alison showed them the card the man had left. They tried calling the number. There was no reply.
The cops started moving quickly then, getting a description of the car she’d seen, and of the man himself, and began jabbering to people on their radios.
Alison left them to it and walked down the stairs to talk to her husband. When she got out to the yard, she found he was no longer there. She hurried over to the road and saw a figure about a hundred yards along it, walking toward Cannon Beach. She started to walk more quickly.