The idea I now had was simple. It’d occurred to me before but I’d dismissed it, because I’d seen The Intruders as a one-shot. Maybe Fisher’s visit had given me a push, though I still believed that the cops were correct in assuming Bill Anderson to be the best suspect in the murder of his wife and child, and so that crime did not revolve around an intruder.
I realized I could do the same thing again, for somewhere other than L.A. Seattle, say.
I wouldn’t have access to information about crimes or long-term knowledge of the neighborhoods, but I could work around the former, and some research and talking to locals could cure the latter. A phone conversation with the crime desks of the major newspapers would be enough to put me on their radar. I could even try talking to Blanchard again, if I could face it. Missing-persons cases do sometimes start with an intruder, after all. The more I sat and stared out the window, the more the idea made sense. I guess I’d always seen myself as a one-shot kind of guy. But how had Gary put it? Something about nailing your colors to the mast. Enough time had passed.
Maybe I had to accept that an ex-cop was what I was.
When I surfaced from these thoughts, I realized I could hear music from the living room. Amy had something playing, which meant she couldn’t be working too hard—and wouldn’t mind my testing the idea out on her.
I was halfway to the door when I slowed, as the music registered as more than generic sound. I listened for a moment, assuming that what I was hearing would change. It did not, however, and so I walked into the living room. Amy was sitting on the couch. She had a sheaf of documents on her lap but wasn’t looking at them. Instead she was staring into the distance, slightly hunched, as if she’d been in the same position for a while.
“Hey,” I said. I felt tense. There had been a time, a year and half ago, when I’d seen her this way occasionally.
She blinked and turned to look at me. “Miles away.”
“What are you listening to? Not your usual kind of thing.”
“We all grow, babe,” she said. “You want some tea?”
“You mean coffee?”
She frowned vaguely. “No. I’d like some tea.”
I shrugged, not even having realized we possessed such a thing, and walked over to the glass doors as she went to the kitchen. While I waited for her to come back, I looked out at fir trees and dogwood and a sky that had lost the morning’s blue clarity and was turning to cool gray. Many types of music go with such a view.
Old-time jazz is not one of them.
An hour later I was running through the trees and finding it hard going. I didn’t usually go out two days straight, and my body didn’t get what I was trying to prove. I wasn’t sure I did either. I’d just felt like I wanted to be out of the house for a while.
I tried to return to what I’d been thinking about in the study, but my mind wasn’t interested anymore. It wanted to worry on the idea of the music Amy had been playing instead. So I tried to empty my head, concentrated on the slap of my shoes on the ground, on the smell of the trees, the cold air as it sucked and pushed in and out of my lungs.
As I pulled back around toward the big pond at the bottom of our land, I realized I could hear my cell phone ringing. I slowed, trying to fumble it out of my sweatpants pocket, then stopped. I didn’t recognize the number on the screen. I walked toward the pond as I put the phone to my ear, looking up at the house, wondering if it was Amy calling.
“Jack,” said a voice. It was male.
Hearing his voice was no less surprising the second time. “Gary, hi. You caught me out running.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Look, we need to talk.”
“I haven’t changed my mind,” I said. I was only half listening. Now that I could see the house, about a hundred and fifty yards up the hill, it looked as though someone was standing out on the deck.
“I’m not really calling about that,” he said, and hesitated. “You were in Seattle a couple days ago.”
“How do you know that?” I said. “And, in fact, how do you even know my cell-phone number?”
“I’d like you to come back here. As soon as you can.”
“Gary, I’m kind of concerned by the idea that you might have been following me. Maybe you’d better come here, explain what’s on your mind. Because—”
“I can’t come to your house,” he said quickly.
“This is starting to sound strange,” I said, keeping my voice steady. I could see now that it was Amy standing out on the deck. Of course—who else? “Round about now you’re going to need to give me a good reason not to end this call and block your number. And call the cops.”
There was silence on the line. Amy was looking out over the forest, unaware that I could see her. Since she wasn’t wearing a coat, she wouldn’t be out there for long. She really doesn’t like the cold, and it was sharp enough now to be sending a thick little cloud of condensation up around her face.
“It’s about Amy,” Gary said. “I’m sorry, Jack, but there’s stuff you need to know.”
chapter
EIGHTEEN
You kept moving. You kept moving. You kept moving. That was what you did. If you were moving, then you were going somewhere. If you had somewhere to go, then you were a proper person and nobody bothered you—and so you kept moving even when your feet hurt and you could no longer tell the difference between where you were and where you’d been. If you stopped for a moment, they looked at you. They asked if you were lost. They asked if you were hungry or thirsty and where your mommy was. They didn’t seem to realize that these questions hurt.
Madison was very glad she had her coat, and not just because Seattle’s streets were cold. She was glad because it had been expensive, and other people seemed to know that. This meant that some did not bother her, people who she sensed would have been only too happy to bother her otherwise. It helped, too, that she was tall, like Mom.
She was also glad it was now day. The night had been very long. After she arrived in the city, dropped off near downtown by a man in a pickup who’d stopped to use the restroom at Scatter Creek and been glad to give a girl a lift when presented with one thousand dollars in cash, she had realized she still had no clue where to go. So she was in Seattle now—so what? The sense of purpose that had driven her since she left Cannon Beach was flagging. While it had been present, everything had seemed easier. It was like doing what a bigger girl said because you wanted to be her friend. It was like when you were in the kitchen and you’d had a couple of cookies and weren’t supposed to have any more—but then suddenly you looked down to see that there was another one in your hand, half eaten. Whoops. As if there were another arm inside your arm, lifting it, doing things, but when Mom came in and found you there, caught cookie-handed, suddenly it was just you, alone.