The Intruders Page 15

  Not every cop is concerned with these matters, of course. But some are, just as there are neurosurgeons who scream at the ball game and priests who while away confession planning the evening pizza: Okay, my son, so you harbor lustful thoughts about your neighbor—but the real question is, anchovies, or not? Your job is to find the utterances that provide a structure for each situation, to show a path out of the present moment that does not involve jail or death. Armed with your words, you cleave the night with your judging hand and set the world to rights. In those written reports, at least. The judicial system has a way of blowing the fog right back in. Lawyers have different words and use them to different ends. Their structures are clean and theoretical and do not have to stand the test of working in stairwells, parking lots, and bars.

  And when you leave this circus?

  Leaving the police force is like getting out of jail, though not in a good way. It’s like being fluent in the language, culture, and geography of a country—which overnight slides off the planet, taking all its inhabitants with it. Suddenly all this insight and autistic absorption means squat. You need instead to understand what’s been happening in the real world, how to deal with people now that you’re not wearing a badge, and what all these weird normal folks have been talking and caring about while you and your fellow inmates were blinker-focused on the bad, bad, bad.

  As a readjustment it’s pretty major. Probably only being dead is going to seem like more of a jolt.

  The places I had photographed in L.A. were crime scenes, of a specific type. My book was called The Intruders. The cover showed the house where a woman named Leah Wilson had been found dead: just a standard murder by person or persons unknown, but one that really got under my skin. The pictures inside were also locations where a person or persons had unlawfully gained access to someone else’s place of residence or work. Once there, they had committed a crime, from burglary to rape and murder. Houses, garages, the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant, hotel rooms both cheap and expensive, a coffee shop in Venice Beach. None of the photographs showed victims, nor did I try to capture the aftermath of the disturbance. In the text accompanying the pictures, I merely described what took place—as best I could, as a nonwitness—along with a flavor of the neighborhood. In the photos I was trying to take the places back to where they’d been in the world before something came from without and changed their texture forever. I have some idea why I was doing it. I had spent all my working life dealing with after-the-fact. In effect the photographs themselves were untruths, as they always are.

  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. T
hey 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.

  Maddy had seen Daddy at dinner, too, saying this was the last glass of wine but then seemingly unaware of his hand lifting the bottle to pour just a little more. Mom had it, too, in stores, and maybe in other ways. At times over the last months, Maddy had seen her mother sad and quiet, as if she’d decided something. But that evening or the next day, she would be happy again—and how could that be, unless she had decided against an earlier decision? How could you mean something and then not mean it? And one time Madison had come into the house to find her on the phone, and maybe it was just her imagination, but she thought her mom looked like she’d been caught cookie-handed, too. Madison wondered if maybe everybody’s life was like this. She hoped it wasn’t just her. And she hoped it wasn’t going to keep getting worse.

  At least she wasn’t hungry or thirsty now. The man in the pickup let her have some of his coffee and gave her half his sandwich when he dropped her off. She had known while offering him the money that many people would decide to bash her over the head and see what else she had, but this man hadn’t been one of those. She’d known this before getting the money out. His eyes were pink, and he smiled a lot, and she knew he was a man who just wanted an easy life. Mom had often told her she was good at judging people. Her dad usually added “and getting them to do what you want,” but he’d be smiling, and he meant it as a good thing.

  She spent several hours walking the city streets, going some other way when she heard footsteps or shouting. She tried calling home from a pay phone, using coins she knew she’d taken from her mother’s purse before leaving Cannon Beach, which she now felt very bad about. She was not someone who stole. But the phone had rung and rung at the house in Portland, then gone to the answering machine. It was the middle of the night, okay, but there was a phone right there on their bedside table. Why wasn’t Daddy at home? She tried calling Mommy’s cell, too, but for some reason kept getting the number wrong. She knew it, she knew that she did—she’d gone to a lot of trouble to learn it by heart a couple of months before—but now it seemed to have dropped out of her head. She tried a few numbers that sounded right and woke up a few angry people, but none of them was her mom.

  So she kept walking. She felt sometimes like she was looking for something, and at one point she found herself walking up a long and really steep hill and into an area where there were nice, big houses. She stood opposite one of these for a while, in the darkness, but it just made her feel angry and sad. When it got really cold, she found an alleyway back toward downtown that had a deep doorway some distance along it, and she sat huddled up in her coat. The doorway smelled of old pee. She meant to stay awake, but she couldn’t. She was exhausted with all the walking. With pretending that she wasn’t really, really scared.

  She fell asleep, but it was not a good sleep. Things kept coming into her head and going around and around. Some made her happy, like a dream full of glimpses of little girls, pretty and smiling, and another of her sitting in a chair in a nice house with a view over the bay. Some were sad or frightening, like one where she was running along a concrete path down near the water itself, out of breath. She liked dreams, normally. They could be funny and interesting. These were not. They were like she was channel-surfing and found some new batch of channels that hadn’t been there before. Some did seem a little familiar, from years back, from when she’d wake in the night to find that Mom or Dad had run in to see why she was making that noise. Other were dark and noisy and grown-up…not nice. She never quite saw anything that she shouldn’t see, but she believed that if she watched for long enough, she…would.

  For most of the time Madison spent in the doorway, she wasn’t even really sure if she was asleep or awake. But after a while it seemed to her that she was, and that it had started to become light, and she left the alleyway and started walking once more.

  As soon as the stores opened, it got easier. She followed where all the people were going and found herself in an open area in downtown. Across the street was a Barnes & Noble. She went inside and knew she’d be okay for a while. You could spend as much time as you liked in a bookstore, as long as you had a nice coat. She looked at books and then at the magazines. When someone with a name badge came over to ask if she was okay, she said yes and then waved over the man’s shoulder as if to someone on the other side of the store. The man smiled and left her alone after that. He was nice and reminded her of Uncle Brian.

  There were some other girls about her age in the section, but they looked kind of weird to her now, after her dream. She felt that she was looking at them for a little too long. So she went up to the Starbucks and bought a water and a coffee and two things to eat. She did this without planning it, but when she got to the cash register, she realized that it had been clever. What a grown-up girl Maddy was, being allowed to go to the counter on her own, watched over by a mother sitting…just over there! She drank the coffee and ate the carrot cake and put the water and the granola bar in her pockets, which were now getting a bit overstuffed. Good to be prepared, though.

  She had provisions. She was doing okay.

  She went back up to the children’s section and found a seat, then got out the battered notebook and leafed through it, hiding it inside a Richard Scarry.

  The more Madison read from the notebook, the more different she felt. She couldn’t understand why. The notebook was not laid out like a story. It wasn’t as if it started out at the beginning and went from there, and you could follow what was going on, and then it ended—which was the case with all the books she’d encountered so far. Except for the really baby books, which had always driven her father nuts: Molly the Mouse gets out of bed, Molly stands on a hill near some flowers, Molly goes and looks at the sea with her friend Neville the Narwhal…The End. Her dad used to rant and rave about these books, saying there was no actual story and where the hell had Neville suddenly come from anyway? The notebook was like that. Just a bunch of stuff, with no shape, no beginning, no end. The big difference was that the baby books went all out to make things as clear and simple as possible. The hill would be big, the flower would be obvious and super-bright, Neville the from-nowhere Narwhal would fill most of one page. The whole point of them was to teach you how to read, to find out which words meant what.

  The notebook wasn’t like that. A lot of the time, it seemed that whoever had written it had put things in a way that you weren’t supposed to understand, unless you knew what it was talking about in the first place:

  I have always lived here.

  For a long time trees were the only story.

  But then the invaders came: breaking down the door as if it never occurred to them other people already lived
here and called it home. I will be brief, the detail left as an exercise for the not-so-gentle reader.

  In 1792, Vancouver and crew first enter Puget Sound. In 1851, claims are laid by the members of the Denny party. The local Duwamish and Suquamish Indians provided food for the settlers at Alki Point during the hard winter of 1851/2. You might have thought they would have learned their lesson by then, but I guess they just weren’t very smart. Chief Seattle at least had the wisdom of many lives, and encouraged “Doc” Maynard to join the settlement in 1852, knowing his friend was conversant with local lore, and might help preserve the integrity of this special place. Maynard staked the mudflats which are now Pioneer Sq and the International District, a curious choice, one might think. Denny/Bell/Boren took the ridges around Elliott Bay (now Downtown, Denny Triangle, Belltown), and in October 1852 one Henry Yesler arrived with a sawmill, looking for a site. After this the town started to grow. King County was created Dec 22, 1852, and in 1853 came a visit by the Territory’s first governor, Colonel Isaac Stevens—his mission to remove the tribes from their lands. In 1854, Seattle gave the speech which comes as close to telling the truth as anyone ever has out loud. Paleface did not get the message, naturally. Paleface never fucking does.

  In 1889 the town was razed, the blaze allegedly starting from a glue fire in a cabinetmaker’s workshop. Though is it not more likely it was a last attempt to prevent a permanent settlement from covering the site? It was too late. Nobody thought to question why the Lushootseed name for this village had been Djijila’letc, “the crossing-over place”—because surely that referred only to the path across the inlet that could once be found there at low tide. It is still there, that place, the land around it charged now with the blood of the departed hosts.

  I like to think I have done my part.

  It was all like that, a list of things and facts. It looked as if it had been written in a hurry, too, and some words seemed to have lots more of some letters—i, and j, for example—than they should, and she didn’t really understand about apostrophes, but she knew you didn’t have them in the middle of long words.