I read off the number. I heard her fingernails ticking on the keyboard even on the cellular phone. “Tammy J. Foster,” she read back to me like a robot. “Last four numbers of your social security number for security purposes.”
I read them from the bank statement. More plastic ticking. As my partner, Frank King, had said when I was a uniformed rookie in Atlanta, Finding people’s not rocket science, Torvingen. They got a social security number, it’s easy—
“Address please ma’am.”
“Yes, well that’s why I’m calling. I haven’t had a bill since July, so you probably still have my old Atlanta address.”
“No ma’am we have a New York City address.”
“Well, it’s probably the wrong one because, like I said, I haven’t seen a bill since July.”
“Your account is current ma’am.”
“Well, that can’t be right. Like I said, you haven’t sent me a bill for months. What address do you have there?”
“One moment.”
—It’s your illegals that are hard to track. Otherwise, hell, just follow the money. Frank had been right, mostly. The exceptions were dead people, and smart people with no scruples and enough money to pay for both active and passive concealment. Unless Tammy was dead, I could probably do it just from the bits of paper I had here. Dornan could easily have hired a private investigator to do the job for a hundred dollars: all they had to do was run her name through their subscription databases. No doubt he hadn’t gone that route because—
“Your mother’s maiden name please ma’am.”
I read it from the birth certificate. “Acklin.”
“Yes ma’am. We have you listed at Apartment C 95 Seventh Avenue South New York New York 10012.”
Greenwich Village. What was she doing in Greenwich Village? “Well, that’s the right place, all right. But I don’t get it. Why aren’t I getting my bills? It doesn’t make any—Oh, shoot,” I said, doing my best to sound embarrassed. “I think I’m calling about the wrong account here. I was looking at my American Express and my Visa at the same time and I guess I just mixed them up and called the wrong one. It says here I paid the last few bills, so I guess I got them.”
“Yes ma’am. Your account shows your last payment of $354.89 paid September 29th. That was billed to the New York address.”
“God, I’m sorry.”
“Yes ma’am,” she said, still bored. “Have a good day.” She disconnected with a click.
New York. Blaring horns, shrieking sirens, the sour stink of ten million people, all streaming by at a thousand frames per second. New York. And I would have to go there. That’s why Dornan had asked me to find her, not some faceless agency, so that I would go to her on his behalf and ask her to come home.
I put each item back in the box one at a time, carefully squaring envelopes and aligning stamps, concentrating on arranging the bills in chronological order, deliberately not thinking, because if I thought about all the basic groundwork I should do, the phone calls I ought to make, I would walk away, walk into the woods and not come back, and I had promised.
I heard Dornan emerge from the trees just before four, but he didn’t come in. I got two Coronas from the fridge, opened them, and took them outside. He stood at the southern edge, looking down and out over the heath bald. I let the bottles clink as I walked, and held his out when he turned.
He nodded and drank. “Nice woods you’ve got here.”
“About two hundred acres.”
He nodded some more. “So why do you have that strip of AstroTurf in front of the trailer when there’s all this natural stuff?”
“It doesn’t get muddy. Works as a doormat.”
“Ah.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“I didn’t look at the private papers. I didn’t need to.”
Now he looked at me. “You know where she is?”
“Yes.” Her, or someone pretending to be her. “I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow. It might take a few days.” He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. It shook slightly. “I haven’t shown you what I’m doing with the cabin. Bring your beer. Then we’ll cook that steak.”
His smile told me he knew I was doing it to help him, but he followed me to the cabin anyway.
“It faces south and west, and the long side measures thirty-six feet. The logs are oak, hand hewn. They’re a hundred years old and there’s no reason for them not to last another century.” I laid my palm against the solid wood. It was still warm from the sun. New York. “This is a craftsman cabin, built for my great-grandfather by masters, not one of the more usual settler’s shacks made from whatever came to hand and which have long since rotted away, and good riddance.”
His smile was real this time. “You always have been a snob, Torvingen.”
“I like well-made things.” I squatted and patted the corner of the building. Ten million people. “See how the sill and first end log are quarter-notched? If you could rip up the floor you’d see that the sleepers it rests on are all lap-jointed and middle-notched, and then pegged.”
He nodded seriously. He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. It was suddenly necessary that he understand.
“Everything here was done by hand. You couldn’t just drive to Home Depot and load up your truck a hundred years ago. They had to cut the tree—and remember they didn’t have chain saws. Then they had to hew the logs: make the round sides flat. Even the chalk they used in their chalk boxes was made from local stuff, like pokeberry juice and lime.”
“What’s a chalk box?”
“What you use to snap out a line, so you know you’re cutting straight. You make the line, then score the log every two or three inches with a poleaxe. Then you use a broadaxe to slice off the chips.”
“Which you could probably use as kindling, to start a fire.”
“What?” My throat felt very tight.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m doing my best. I only know two things about wood: it grows on trees and you can burn it, and I only learned the second thing two days ago. But go on, I’m listening.”
“This door—”
“There isn’t a door.”
“—doorframe. It’s pine that I split out myself, and it’s pegged with yellow locust.”
“Locust? Strange name for—”
I talked right over him. “Do you know how rare yellow locust is now? Do you know how long it takes to cut it, season it, then slice it into bars, then whittle it? Then you have to auger out the frame holes and get the wood braced properly against the logs. It’s hard to do that on your own, to get it vertical, to get a ninety-degree plane this way, too, and then to hold it there while you hammer in the pegs when you only have two hands and I don’t know how I’m going to hang the door itself, to make it all fit seamlessly so no one can tell I was—You have to never give up, never stop, because then you have to see—”
“Aud…”
“You have to see she’s not there, that there’s this great hole inside instead, nothing there—”
“Aud.”
My fists were balled and the veins on my wrists and the back of my hands thick blue worms.
“Aud!”
I panted. My face felt cold.
“I’ll help you hang the door.”
“The door?”
“I’ll help you hang it.” He put down his beer. “Right now. Where is it?”
“Inside.”
“Then let’s get it.”
My body belonged to someone else. I led him inside, over the wide, heart-of-pine floors that would be refinished once the door and windows were in, past the hearth I had already rebuilt, right through the wall that would be—between the studs I would cover with pine board one day soon—to the oak door. I had to put my own beer down before I could pick up the far end. He picked up the near. We walked it outside and leaned it on its end to the right of the doorway. He followed me to the hogpen, silently accepted hammer and nails and spirit level while I lifted down the massive wrought-iron hinge pieces and candy-cane-shaped drop pintles, then followed me back.