I faded back into the aisles of imported produce, but he walked straight past, eyes cast down and hands pushed deep into his coat pockets.
I slipped out of the deli and followed.
He walked quickly, heading for where the alley opened out into the underpass beneath the off-ramp. I would prefer privacy in which to ask this man if he’d been the person in the photographs Gary had taken, the man with his arm around my wife. I picked up my pace.
My phone rang. It was loud enough that I couldn’t just let it go on. I pulled it out of my pocket, still walking, suddenly convinced it would be Amy. The screen did not say AMY, however. It said ROSE.
I don’t know anyone named Rose. I put the phone up to my ear. “Who the hell—”
“Don’t do this,” said a woman’s voice, talking very fast and loud, and then the connection was cut.
I thumbed the green key twice to call the number back, but it rang and rang and was not answered. I stared around as it continued to ring, looking back along the alley and up at the windows of the buildings, but could not see anyone.
By the time I gave up and ran down to the end of the alley, Todd Crane had disappeared.
chapter
TWENTY-THREE
I was at the bar a while before the time I’d arranged to meet Fisher. I needed somewhere to think. And I needed to call home. I had to let Amy know I wouldn’t be home tonight. The thought of her made me defensive and angry, though I didn’t really know what about. The building in Belltown was Fisher’s obsession, not mine: Amy’s name on the papers didn’t necessarily have any bearing on my life. We hadn’t even known each other when she was involved. A business formality, a company name on a company deal. I hated having these questions to consider, however, just as I hated my inability to stop wondering who the man in the photographs was. In the end I gave up trying to prepare myself and just pressed her number.
“Hey,” she said. She picked up quickly, as if she had already been holding her phone. Had she? Did it mean anything if she had? “What’s the news in the bright lights? Thought you’d be home by now.”
Her voice sounded as it always did. The telephone, though a remarkable device, is not designed for real communication, for the heavy lifting of personal interaction. For the big stuff, you have to be in the same physical space. Questions are asked and answered on a chemical leveclass="underline" Our species lived and loved and dealt with each other for millions of years before we developed language. It’s still only ever background music.
“Been talking to a few people, took longer than I thought. Chance I may be able to grab a beer with a couple of crime reporters later on.”
“That could work. You thinking of staying overnight?”
“Maybe. Okay with mission control?”
“Of course. I’ll inform the kitchen. So it’s looking like it might pan out, huh? The book idea?”
“Could be.” I felt bad about lying to her. I realized I had a handful of text messages, mainly blank, a couple of photographs that didn’t show much—and not a lot else.
“Well, that’s good. And honey, sorry if I was down on the idea last night. I was in kind of a funny mood.”
“Yeah, I got that.” I took a deep breath and stepped closer to the precipice. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. I couldn’t tell whether she said it too quickly, too slowly, or in an entirely normal way. I was listening too hard. “Just work, you know, the usual work crap. Blah-blah-blah in the head.”
“I thought moving out of L.A. was going to stop all that.”
“It will. Give it time.”
She said something else then, but I didn’t hear it, as there was a surge of noise in the background.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s the TV—got a Sex and the City marathon about to start, and the microwave’s set to ping any second now.”
“So you’re in a happy place.”
“I am. You’ll be home tomorrow, though, right?”
“Around lunchtime.”
“Good. I miss you, trooper.”
When she said those words, she sounded so like Amy, so like the person I’d known, and married, and stood beside on many days both short and sweet and long and hard, that I couldn’t believe that anything was wrong, or that it ever could be.
It still took me a beat too long to say.
“I miss you, too.”
Fisher had claimed Anderson as his smoking gun. I wasn’t confident he merited this status, but I wasn’t sure I had one either. Maybe I should just have asked Amy about the building up in Belltown—which presumably had to be the place the cabdriver had dropped her on the evening she went missing. But how could I bring it up? I’d actually be asking something else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to open that box. Even if it turned out to be empty, it would never be properly reclosed. Utterance is a one-way street. Questions can never be unasked.
My phone buzzed. I had a text message. It was from Amy, and it said:
Hav fun. Dn’t drnk 2 much!:-D x
And it was a nice message, and it made me smile, but the smile didn’t stick for long. Two instances—this and the message that morning—were enough to make me notice that a woman who had always written a smiley as:-) had recently begun using:-D instead and started employing shorthand. Previously she’d always pecked out every letter of every word. Why change, unless she was picking it up from someone else? Or was this just another piece of dust that meant nothing unless you piled it up with others, almost as if you were trying to make a heap big enough to cast a shadow?
I rubbed my face in my hands, hard, and shook my head, dismissing this for the moment. It was time to go back to what I’d been doing since losing Crane.
Trying to work out who the hell Rose was and what she was doing on my phone.
I’d already realized that the name coming up on the screen meant there must be an entry for it in my contacts. I’d checked and found that yes, I had such an entry. A phone number, and a name. ROSE. But I hadn’t put it there. I’d owned the phone only about a month, having changed networks when we moved to Birch Crossing and discovered that my old provider’s coverage sucked. I had fewer than twenty numbers stored, could place every one except this. I didn’t even know anyone named Rose. Never had.
I selected the number and dialed it, as I had four previous times since whoever called herself by that name had derailed me—deliberately, I assumed—from having a private conversation with Todd Crane. As before, the number rang and rang, without being diverted to an answering ser vice. I could have gotten access to a reverse directory, tried to find some information about it that way. But something told me it would be a dead end in any case.
So I kept returning to how the number could have made its way onto the phone. I could think of only one time it could have taken place. After the fight with the guys Georj had denied knowledge of, I’d found myself in the bar near Pioneer Place. There had been a long blank spot between my sitting on a stool there and waking up in the park. I’d evidently been very drunk. Could I have stored the number on the phone then, the number of some person I’d been talking to? I would have called this a possibility were it not for one thing. The name was all in caps. ROSE. I use upper and lower, always, and when I text, I spell out every word—just as Amy used to. You might think if I was drunk enough to enter a woman’s name without remembering, then I’d have forgone typographical niceties, too, but that shows how little you know me. Being that drunk meant I would have been even more tight-assed about getting it right.