“So how long are you down for?”
“Meeting’s tomorrow A.M., stupid early. Been at the office all morning. I’m on my way to Natalie’s for the afternoon now—thought I’d catch up with the brat, be big-sisterly at her. She’s probably feeling under nagged.”
“Right.” I was distracted by a tiny spot of unexpected color, pale and sandy, deep in the undergrowth twenty feet below the deck.
“You still there?”
“Yes,” I said. I was leaning over the rail now. “Was everything okay at the house when you left?”
“Well, sure,” she said. “Why—is there a problem?”
“No. Just feels…kind of cold, that’s all.”
“So check the furnace, caveman. That where big fire spirit lives. Want you nice and toasty while you work.”
She said she would keep me updated and was gone.
I’d barely heard the last few sentences. I went to the end of the deck and ran down the flight of stairs to the path. It wasn’t designed to enable access to the area directly underneath the balcony, which was heavily sloped, but to deliver you to the more landscaped area below. I had to come off it and push my way through bushes to get to where I’d been looking.
It took me a couple of minutes to find the first one. Soon afterward I’d found three more.
I made my way back out to the path and stood with them in the palm of my hand. Four cigarette butts. Each had been stubbed out on something firm, then dropped over the side. The color and condition of the filters said they hadn’t been there long. Yesterday at most, this morning more likely; overnight mist would have made them soggy and dull.
I walked back up to the deck. Found the point above where I’d found the butts and discovered a discolored patch on the upper surface of the rail. I always stubbed mine underneath, precisely to avoid causing this. I didn’t just drop the remains into the bushes either but carried them indoors to put in the trash.
Somebody had been standing right here, smoking.
There were two things I didn’t understand about this. The first was, whoever was out there should have been visible from the house if anyone was inside.
The second was, I knew that Gary Fisher didn’t smoke.
Another question occurred to me. The SUV had been with me in Seattle. So how had Amy gotten to the airport? Birch Crossing didn’t exactly rate a cab ser vice. The only solution I could think of was one I’d taken advantage of myself, a few days before. The Zimmermans. This made me remember something else.
The Zimmermans had keys to our house.
They were, in fact, the only people in the world who did. I couldn’t for a moment see either of them letting themselves in. But they were helpful folks. If someone came to them with a convincing story, I was far from sure they wouldn’t have tried to help. Ben, at least—Bobbi would have been a harder sell. But wouldn’t even Ben have come into the house with them, hovered in the background?
Five minutes’ search failed to turn up their phone number in the house. I decided to walk over there instead. The first question was settled as I walked up their drive. Both Zimmerman vehicles were present.
I went to the front door and rang the bell. The door opened immediately. Bobbi stood there holding a glass of wine. The broad smile on her face faltered but then reattached in a slightly different shape.
“Jack,” she said. “How are you?”
The Zimmermans’ house was arranged all on one level, ranch style. Over Bobbi’s shoulder I could see that some kind of get-together was taking place in their living room, a wide, open space with a view of the creek. There were people standing there, at least fifteen, perhaps twenty. Ben didn’t appear to be among them.
I stepped inside, trying not to be overly aware of the people in the living room or the way some of them seemed to be looking at me.
“Wanted to check something with you,” I said quietly. “You’ve got a set of our keys. Has anyone asked for them? Or asked you to let them into our house?”
Bobbi stared at me. “Of course not,” she said. “And I wouldn’t have let them in if they did.”
“Right,” I said quickly. “I didn’t think so. It just looked a little like someone might have been hanging around the property. Is Ben home?”
She shook her head, started explaining that their friend had taken a turn for the worse again and that Ben had gone back down to be with him. I tried to listen but found myself distracted. I realized that I recognized some of the people in the other room. Sam, the fat and bearded man who owned the grocery store. A gaunt, gray-haired woman whose name I didn’t know, but whom I believed to be the proprietor of the bookstore. The smooth-looking gent who owned the Cascades Gallery and others also who appeared familiar. I was aware that I should probably feel embarrassed for Bobbi that I’d arrived to witness a gathering we hadn’t been invited to. But that wasn’t what I felt. The people who glanced my way didn’t look like they were preparing to greet another guest. It felt more like being a kid who had wandered into the wrong classroom by mistake, to be confronted with a group of older children, their faces familiar but their gazes flat and closed.
“I’m sure it’s just my imagination,” I said, smiling. “Sorry to have disturbed you. What’s the occasion?”
Bobbi took me by the elbow and led me gently to the door.
“Just a little reading group,” she said. “Give my regards to Amy, won’t you?”
And then I was back outside, the door closed behind me. I stared at it, then turned to go. As I walked down the drive, I saw someone else I recognized.
The sheriff nodded to me as he passed and continued on his way up to the Zimmermans’ house.
He’d never struck me as a man who read a lot.
I stood out on our deck and smoked as I drank a succession of cups of coffee. I tried to find something to eat. I tried to do most things I could think of, but in the end I did what had been brewing all along.
First I called Natalie in Santa Monica. She said Amy had just left, which meant she couldn’t have spent barely an hour there. So then I called the other number, the main switchboard for Kerry, Crane & Hardy in Los Angeles. My heart was thumping hard. Someone perky answered.
“Hey,” I said. “Seattle mailroom here. Got a package needs to get to, uh…Ms. Whalen, I think, for the meeting tomorrow. You know where she’s staying, or can I just ship it direct to your office?”
“Well, sure. Which meeting is that, by the way?”
“No idea,” I said. “It just says ‘the meeting, Thursday A.M.’ Some big thing, I guess.”
There was silence for a moment, and then she came back on. “Actually, I don’t see anything in the diary,” the girl said. “It looks kind of quiet tomorrow, in fact. Can you be more specific?”
“I’ll check and get back to you,” I said.
I sat in the chair that looked out over the forest. I tried to be dispassionate. The absence of Amy’s laptop and PDA now made sense. So did the state of her desk, if she’d had to leave in a hurry. Direct evidence for an intruder had faded. I was left with what I’d found outside—that, and a very strong feeling.
I sat with my elbows on my knees, hands held in a triangle up to my face. Instead of trying to think about things in straight lines, asking them questions in an attempt to force-fit them into a scheme of rationality I didn’t yet possess, I let them float around in my head, following their own shapes and paths and gravities, in the hope that there was some order I didn’t understand because I was looking at them the wrong way.
If there was, I didn’t find it. All I managed to do was find another fact and add it to the pile. When I’d gone out onto the deck after my run on the day Amy came back from Seattle, I’d noticed ash on the wooden floor. I’d made an assumption about its being left there from my own last cigarette. But was that likely, given what I’d just found? Or had someone perhaps been standing in the shadows of our lives back then, too?