The Intruders (32 page)
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.”
There was silence for a moment, and then she came back on. “Actually, I don’t see anything in the diary,” the girl said. “It looks kind of quiet tomorrow, in fact. Can you be more specific?”
“I’ll check and get back to you,” I said.
I sat in the chair that looked out over the forest. I tried to be dispassionate. The absence of Amy’s laptop and PDA now made sense. So did the state of her desk, if she’d had to leave in a hurry. Direct evidence for an intruder had faded. I was left with what I’d found outside—that, and a very strong feeling.
I sat with my elbows on my knees, hands held in a triangle up to my face. Instead of trying to think about things in straight lines, asking them questions in an attempt to force-fit them into a scheme of rationality I didn’t yet possess, I let them float around in my head, following their own shapes and paths and gravities, in the hope that there was some order I didn’t understand because I was looking at them the wrong way.
If there was, I didn’t find it. All I managed to do was find another fact and add it to the pile. When I’d gone out onto the deck after my run on the day Amy came back from Seattle, I’d noticed ash on the wooden floor. I’d made an assumption about its being left there from my own last cigarette. But was that likely, given what I’d just found? Or had someone perhaps been standing in the shadows of our lives back then, too?
In the shadows, but very close?
I went through to the bedroom and put a change of clothes into an overnight bag. Then I walked up the stairs and unlocked the door that led to the garage.
Boxes of possessions, ours and those belonging to the owners of the property, stood in dusty, monolithic piles. Some contained objects that belonged to me, like my family’s photo albums, just about all that remained of my childhood now. It seemed hard to believe that I would ever feel the need to open them again.
I walked past all the crates and leftover pieces of furniture to the far corner, where I moved aside a heavy workbench. Behind it there was a cupboard built into the wall. I used two keys from the house key chain to unlock it.
Inside, wrapped in a cloth, was my gun.
It had been there since the day we moved in, like a memory pushed far back into the shadows of my head. It was something I’d carried every day for years, at work. It was something I’d carried one night. It was something I should have gotten rid of.
I picked it up.
At night when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.
—Chief Seattle,
excerpt of the 1854 speech,
from the original translation by Dr. Henry Smith
At LAX, I took a cab to Santa Monica. I got the driver to stop fifty yards short of the house, and I walked the rest. When I arrived, I found a boy in the yard outside, playing in an orderly fashion.
“Hey,” I said.
He looked up, checked me out. Didn’t say anything.
“Uncle Jack,” I added.
He nodded, head to one side, as if conceding the truth of my observation but failing to find that it rocked his world.
I walked past him up the path and knocked on the door. It opened immediately, as I’d expected. This kid’s mother wasn’t going to be letting him mess around in the yard in the early evening without keeping an eye out.
“Well, how about that?” she said, hands theatrically on hips. “You don’t see a Whalen for months, then bang—a full house. Must be some kind of astrological thing, right? Or biorhythmic? Is a comet due?”
I felt tense. Amy’s sister was hard work at the best of times. “How are you, Natalie?”
“Still not a movie star and a bewildering ten pounds heavier than I’d like, but otherwise in an acceptable place for my culture and type. I told you on the phone you missed Amy, right? Like, hours ago?”
“We’re meeting later. Just thought I’d stop by and say hi, since I’m in town.”
She looked at me dubiously. “I’ll alert the media. You want coffee while you’re doing this hi saying?”
I followed her inside. There was a big pot ready and waiting in the kitchen, as always when I’d visited Natalie’s house. It was one of the few points of congruence between the sisters.