What I’d seen on the PDA had been straightforward. An event bar marked “Seattle”—which is what I remembered. It was one of the reasons I’d been so confident she’d been there. But the bar ended on Saturday morning.
That was not how I remembered it.
When Amy had led me up to the kitchen and pointed at the pencil-and-paper diary on the side of the fridge, it had looked plain wrong. I knew I’d understood her to be there only until Friday. That had been what was in my head, what I believed I’d been told, and I knew I’d felt—when I saw it on her desktop machine—a simple confirmation of what I’d already known. So how come it now said Saturday on the PDA, and presumably also on her computer? There were only two possible explanations: She had been due back yesterday, as I’d believed. Something weird had happened—I had no idea what—but she’d gotten back this morning and decided to bull through with it. Made an quick entry on the fridge diary—she’d certainly been very confident of its being there, and quick to take me to see it. In the meantime she’d already changed the entry in the diary on her main computer, then done a sync to get it reflected on the PDA—just in case her husband required three forms of documentary evidence. A concerted campaign of tampering in order to throw me off, in other words. A risky one, too, because if I was sure of what I’d seen, then her making that kind of change would put up a huge red flag. But I hadn’t been. And maybe…
Maybe I’d just gotten it wrong.
Maybe Saturday had been her return day all along. I’d been freaked out when I checked her machine on Thursday night. I’d already somehow gotten it into my head that she was coming back Friday, and that’s what I’d seen confirmed on the screen. If I tried now to conjure an image of the diary with a bar stopping at Friday, I couldn’t do it. It went to Saturday. Was that just because it was what I’d seen most recently, or wasn’t it far more likely it had always been that way?
That’s not the law’s problem…. It’s just yours.
Without the conflicting diary entry, I had nothing, and that most likely meant there never had been anything. As I pounded along the trail back toward where the national land crossed over into our own lot, I became even more convinced. The feeling spread into my body as a softening across the shoulders. I felt embarrassed, too. The stuff on the phone remained odd, but other people’s ephemera always are, and though it’s hard to remember sometimes, your partner remains other people at heart. Amy’s lack of concern at my access to her phone didn’t jibe with its being an electronic den of iniquity. A running joke with a colleague was more likely, or snippets from an upcoming guerrilla marketing campaign. For a while my head had been full of darkness of an almost tangible kind, as if I’d been able to feel a weight suspended above it.
I recognized the feeling, knew that it had been born from things that had happened to me, and to us, in the last couple of years. I had come to find myself perpetually half braced for chaos and intrusion. For the sound of a window breaking at the back of the house, the scream of tires as a car flipped up the sidewalk and flew toward my back. A phone call to announce that one or the other of us had cancer, though neither of us had taken tests or had any plans or need to.
None of these things had happened. Other things had, but neither had been predictable. I hadn’t received forewarning of the plans of the God of Bad Things. That’s not the way he works, and it didn’t mean something would happen again. I didn’t have to be on my guard, expecting the worst, fabricating possibilities if necessary. Everything was okay.
I found myself repeating this under my breath, using it to keep my rhythm, as I hit the last, long hill hard and pounded up between the trees toward the house.
Everything is o-kay. Everything is o-kay.
It’s a good rhythm to run to.
Amy was back when I reached the house, soaking in the tub and listening satirically to some public-radio conspiracy nut ranting about dark and hidden forces behind the previous year’s bombings in Thornton, Virginia, as if normal terrorists weren’t bad enough. I washed and changed and then did what I always did, somewhat perversely, after a run. I took a beer from the fridge and headed out to the deck to have a cigarette.
The deck lights came on automatically as I stepped out, and I went through my standard process of wishing they didn’t, then remembering that to stop it from happening you had to flip a switch inside, which never occurred to me unless I had just stepped outside, in which case I couldn’t. Amy preferred the lights on, but as she felt the cold more than I did and so didn’t come out here at night, it was my call. I bookmarked the thought as usual, swearing this time I’d remember when I got indoors, and went to lean against the rail. A wind was picking up, moving the tops of the trees and making the tip of my cigarette glow brightly.
When I was done, I stubbed it on the underside of the rail and returned the butt to the pack. On the way back, I noticed a few flecks of ash on the deck, left from the last time I’d smoked out here. It struck me how chance and geometry could dictate that none of the last couple days’ breezes had quite managed to move them on, how there are always particles of yesterday left lying around in the now. As I watched, a gust finally caught the ash and vanished it across the deck and over the edge.
chapter
SIXTEEN
He drove fast but accurately, and he kept under the speed limit. He was careful to appear, as always, like just another man on the road. Though he’d enjoyed many privileges throughout his life, Shepherd understood the costs that came attached. You paid, somewhere down the line. The highest price, the one that could never be recouped, was that of time. You never get a minute back. If he got pulled over by the cops, he would lose half an hour, maybe more. He couldn’t afford that. So he kept driving steadily up Interstate 5, hoping matters could be resolved tonight. It had been a simple plan. He had not suspected that things could go so wrong so quickly.
It was now over twenty-four hours since the girl had disappeared.
He hadn’t expected his first stop to yield anything, but he had lived by doing things methodically, and checking the O’Donnell house first made sense. Before leaving Cannon Beach, he’d been up and down the highway and out onto the sands without expecting anything to come of it. The local cops were making a decent job of the search. If the girl had been there, they would have found her. She was not. So she’d gone somewhere else.
He needed to work out where—and fast.
He was Agent Shepherd again when he parked outside the house in the northwest district of downtown Portland, just a couple blocks from upscale shopping on Twenty-second and Twenty-third avenues. He knocked on the door, waited, and then let himself in. He was inside for six minutes. She wasn’t there.
He went back out and sat in the car. He considered his next step. It was getting dark. There was one obvious location to head for. It had been the most likely destination from the get-go, but it meant committing himself geographically. If he went up there and she was still wandering dazed in Oregon somewhere, it was only a matter of time before she talked to someone, let something slip—bringing untold new variables into play.
Shepherd did not like variables. For over thirty years, his existence had been largely free of uncertainty, and he liked it that way. It was one of the advantages of the life he lived—the freedom to disregard the strictures that bound the lives of others. With freedom comes responsibility, however, the awareness that you have built your own fate and have little recourse to spreading the blame. He remembered sitting in a hotel bar a couple hours north from here, being given a proposition, and knowing that it spelled trouble, meant taking a risk with everything he’d spent his life moving toward. One look at the person on the other side of the table had been enough to let him know he would do it anyway. As marginalized as this person had become, Shepherd understood he wasn’t someone whose wishes you denied. Shepherd had done things other people wouldn’t like to think about, yet he knew who was in charge in that meeting, whose boundaries were the most absent, and whose will would prevail.