Inconsequential, too, had become many of the things she’d thought were wrong with Simon, with their relationship. It wasn’t that they didn’t exist or had just blown away. But if everything in the world seemed wrong and broken, maybe that actually proved the opposite. Not everything could be wrong about the universe. Simon (for once) had the tact not to say this out loud. He didn’t need to. She got there by herself, somewhere during those hours of talk, or perhaps during the few hours of sleep that followed. It didn’t solve anything, didn’t make everything all right—but it turned things around, tilted them so they reflected the light differently, and for the moment that was enough.
Simon meanwhile had admitted that he sometimes behaved as if Alison’s moods swings were deliberate, and this wasn’t fair. Also—and this was only to himself—that his accidental one-night stand with a colleague three years ago actually did count, and the price he might have to pay for this event’s having remained secret could be cutting his wife some slack, not least because his own drunken error had caused him more confusion and discomfort than anything Alison had ever done. The behavior of others can be withstood. Less so the occasions when we stab ourselves in the back. A brief hatred of someone else can be refreshing to the soul. Not so a hatred of one’s other self, which is never brief.
Both of them knew, but did not admit, that they said or thought these things as offerings, to whichever power held their daughter in his hands. No matter how long they talked, however, the absence stretched with every additional minute the phone failed to ring.
In the end it became too wide to speak across, and they were left in silence, staring out windows into the dark.
Finally they’d lain down on the bed together, closer than for some time. At 3:02, Alison had woken to the sound of her cell phone. She scrambled across the bed, fell off the other side, and sent the phone clattering to the floor. Got it open and to her ear just in time to hear someone talking loud and fast. It was barely two sentences, but the voice cut through Alison’s head like a knife. Then the line went dead.
Alison turned, eyes wide, to see Simon levering himself up onto one elbow.
“Who’s that?” he slurred. “Police?”
“No,” she’d said, trying not to start running in all directions at once. “It was Madison. I think she just told us where she is.”
chapter
TWENTY-NINE
When the door to the house didn’t open, I was confused, until I realized that Amy must have gone out. I unlocked the bolt and let myself into a space that was supremely quiet, suffused with the distinctive emptiness caused by the absence of the person with whom you share your life.
I headed down into the living area, sneakily glad of time to myself, a period to decide how to broach the subject of the photographs I’d seen and the fact of her name being on the paperwork Fisher had shown me. The living room was tidy. The current work frenzy was over, or in abeyance, and presumably she’d walked up into the village. In which case maybe I should call her, go meet up. Grab lunch. Talk to her long enough to overlay the dark aftermath of the morning and decide what to do about everything else. We’d always been able to talk the world away. I hoped this was still the case.
I’d traveled a couple more steps before I stopped, however, looking through the door into Amy’s study.
What I saw would not have struck anyone else the way it did me. You’d have to know Amy, to have been married to her, and to understand how important her work spaces were. Her office was where she lived and who she was. And what I saw was not the way it should be.
The computer was on, the screen a mass of open windows. Amy closed computer windows the way old men keep a single bulb burning in their house, turning lights on and off as they move from room to room. The surface of her real desktop was covered in papers, notepads. Box files had been removed from the shelves and left open. Whoever had been here had hardly trashed the place—many people’s studies probably never looked this neat—but they had been thorough. Her laptop was gone. So was her personal organizer.
I pulled out my phone to raise Amy right away but stopped as two more things struck me. First that she would have called me if she’d known that someone had broken in. She had not. So this must have happened very recently.
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.”