The Intruders Page 4

  “You’ll like it,” he said, as if he had done nothing at all. “I promise. You want it. But first you have to answer my question. Okay?”

  His voice sounded wetter now, and Madison realized dismally just how stupid she’d been, understood why moms and dads said children had to be back at certain times, and to not stray too far, and not talk to strangers, and so many other things. Parents weren’t just being mean or difficult or boring, it turned out. They were trying to prevent what was about to happen.

  She looked up at the man’s face, nodded. She didn’t know what else to do and hoped it might help. The man smiled. He had a spray of small, dark moles across one cheek. His teeth were stained and uneven.

  “Good,” he said. He took another step toward her, and now his hands were out of his coat pockets. His fingers were long and pale.

  Madison heard the word “Three…” in her head, but it was too quiet and she didn’t believe in it. Her arm and legs were no longer like springs. They felt like rubber. She couldn’t even tell if they were still tensed.

  The man was too close now. He smelled damp. There was a strange light in his eyes, as if he’d found something he’d been looking for for a long time.

  He squatted down close to her, and the smell suddenly got worse, an earthy odor on his breath, a smell that spoke of parts of the body normally kept hidden.

  “Can you keep a secret?” he said.

  chapter

  FOUR

  I got home around a quarter after nine in the evening. Apart from picking up milk and coffee, the trip had been make-work: Amy kept the cupboards well stocked. I’d walked into town from the house, which took twenty minutes. It was a pleasant stroll, and I’d have done it that way even if the car hadn’t been unavailable. I sat outside the coffee place and nursed an Americano while leafing through the local paper, learning several things: The trajectories of two cars had intersected a few nights before—nobody was hurt, not even a little bit; some local big shot got reelected to the school board for the twelfth straight year, which seemed borderline obsessional; and the Cascades Gallery needed a mature person to help sell paintings and sculptures of eagles and bears and Indian braves. Experience unnecessary, but candidates were instructed to bring a willingness to follow a dream. That didn’t sound like me, even if the writing project remained stalled. I hoped the gallery did find someone, however, and that the lucky winner was sufficiently mature. I hated to think of limited-edition art prints being sold in a juvenile manner.

  I prowled the aisles of Sam’s Market for longer than necessary, picking items up and putting them back. Found a couple things too outré to have shown up on more enlightened shopping agendas, chiefly beers, and at the checkout I added a paperback Stephen King. I’d read it before, but most of my books were still in storage down in L.A., plus it was right there in front of me, in a rickety rack full of secondhand Dan Brown and triple-named romantic women done up in lurid gilt.

  Back in the lot, I loaded the bag into my backpack and stood irresolute. A pickup truck sat ticking in the silence. I’d seen the owner inside, a local with craggy features and moss in his ears, and he’d ignored me in the way newcomers deserved. I’d made a point of saying hi, just to mess with his head. A couple emerged from Laverne’s Rib across the street, rolling as if on the deck of a ship. Laverne’s prided itself on the magnitude of its portions. The couple looked like they’d known this ahead of time. A tired-looking woman pushed a stroller past the market with the air of someone not engaged in the activity for the sheer fun of it, and her baby fought the night with everything it had, principally sound. The woman saw me looking and muttered, “Ten months,” as if that explained everything. I looked away from her awkwardly.

  Down the road a stoplight blinked.

  I still wasn’t hungry. Didn’t want to go drink a beer somewhere public. I could walk up the street, see if the little bookstore was still open. It wasn’t likely, and I now had a novel to read, which was what ultimately took the wind out of the night’s sails. The expedition was over, run aground on an impulse purchase.

  So now what? Pick your own adventure.

  In the end I walked back the way I’d come, past the hundred yards of stores that constituted Birch Crossing. Most were single-story and wood-fronted, a dentist, hair salon, and drugstore interspersing places of more transitory appeal, including the Cascades Gallery itself, from which Amy had already acquired two aimlessly competent paintings of the generic West. The blocks were rooted by stolid brick structures built when the town’s frock-coated boosters believed it would amount to more than it had. One of these held Laverne’s, another was a bank no longer locally owned, and the last offered the opportunity to buy decoratively battered bits of furniture. Amy had availed herself of these wares, too, an example of which currently served as my desk. The street trailed off into a small gas station that had been tricked out long ago to look like a mountain chalet, and finally the local sheriff’s office, set back from the road. I had to fight an impulse to look at this as I passed, and I wondered how long it would take before some part of me got the message.

  I crossed the empty two-lane highway before taking the last left in town. This led into the woods, the fences sparsely punctuated with heavy-duty mailboxes and gates leading to houses down long driveways. After ten minutes I reached the box labeled JACK AND AMY WHALEN. Rather than open the gate, I vaulted over it, as I had on the way out. I forgot to compensate for the weight in the backpack and almost reached the other side face-first. I’d started exercising again recently, taking runs through the National Forest land that started at the boundary of our property. Now that the initial aches had worn off, I felt better than in awhile, but my body wasn’t ready to forget that it was a year since I’d been truly fit. Though there was no one to see, I still felt like an ass and swore briskly at the gate for fucking me around. My father used to claim that inanimate objects hate us and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.

  I walked up the rutted path toward the place a rental agreement said was now home. It was colder again, and I wondered if tonight was going to be when the snows finally dropped. I wondered also—not for the first time—how we were going to get in and out when that happened. The locals referred to snow without starry-eyed romanticism. They talked about it like death or taxes. The Realtor had breezily said something about a snowmobile being advisable in the deepest months. We didn’t have a snowmobile. Weren’t going to be getting one either. Nowhere in my life plans was there a slot for ownership of a snowmobile. Instead I was laying in reserves of cigarettes, canned chili, and sauerkraut. Always have had a thing for sauerkraut, not sure why.

  The drive curved down into a hollow before climbing back up along the ridge. About a half mile from the road, it widened into the parking area. From this side the house wasn’t much to look at, a single-story band of weathered cedar shingles largely obscured in summer by trees. It had been that way in the photo I’d seen on the Internet, and it looked rustic and cute. In winter and real life, it looked like a nuclear bunker caught between the legs of dead spiders. It was only when you got inside that you realized you’d entered at the top of two and a half levels, and there was double-height glass along most of the north face of the building, where the hillside dropped away sharply. In daylight this gave a view across a forest valley that climbed up to the Wenatchee Mountains, segueing into the Cascades and from there eventually to Canada. As Gary Fisher had found, you tended to just look at it for a while. From the deck you could also see a pond, about 150 yards in diameter, which lay within the property’s four-acre boundary. In the afternoons birds of prey floated across the valley like distant leaves.

  I unloaded the backpack’s contents into their predetermined spots in the kitchen. The answering machine was on the far end of the counter. The light was flashing.

  “About time,” I said, the first words the house had heard since Fisher left.

  But it wasn’t. Two people had called, or one person twice, but left
no message. I sent beats of ill-will to the perpetrator/s and another to myself for not getting caller ID working yet. The box claimed it was possible, but the manual had been translated from Japanese by a halfwit prairie dog. Just changing the outgoing message had required technical support from NASA. I knew the caller/s couldn’t have been Amy, who knew how much nonmessages piss me off and would at least have intoned “No message, master” in a gravelly tone.

  I got out my cell and pressed her speed-dial number, hooking it under my ear while I got a beer from the fridge. After five rings I was diverted to the answering ser vice yet again. Her business voice warmly thanked whomever for calling and promised she’d get back to them. I left a message asking her to do just that. Again.

  “Soon would be nice,” I muttered when the phone had been replaced in my pocket.

  I took the drink through to my study. As the person earning actual money, Amy had a grander lair on the floor below. Mine had nothing in it but a file box of reference material, the expensively distressed table from the store in town, and a cheaply distressed chair I’d found in the garage. The only thing on the table was my laptop. It was not dusty because I made a point of wiping it with my sleeve every morning. It was not nailed shut because we didn’t have any nails. I dimmed the lights and sat. When I opened the lid, the machine sprang to life, not learning from experience. It presented me with a word-processing document in which not many words had yet been processed. This was partly because of the panoramic view of bitterbrush and Douglas firs from the window, which I’d found myself able to stare at for hours. When the snows did come, I knew I might just as well leave the computer shut. It was harder to be distracted in the room at night, however, because aside from a few branches picked out by the light from the window, you couldn’t see anything at all. So maybe now my fingers and mind would unlock and start working together. Maybe I’d think of something to say and fall into it for a while.

  Maybe I’d be able to ignore the fact that after only a month I was bored out of my tiny mind.

  I was sitting at the table because two years ago I wrote a book about certain places in L.A. I say “wrote,” but mainly it was photographs, and even that word stretches the truth. I took the pictures with the camera in my cell phone: One day I happened to be somewhere with my phone in my hand, and I clicked a picture. When I transferred it to the computer later, I saw that it was actually okay. The technical quality was so low that you could see through the image to the place, caught in a moment, blurred and ephemeral. After that it became a habit, and when I had enough, I threw them into a document, jotting a comment about each. Over time these annotations grew until there was a page or two of text accompanying each photograph, sometimes more. Amy came in one evening when I was doing this, asked to read it. I let her. I felt no anxiety while it was in her hands, knowing she would be kind, and had only mild interest in what she’d say. A couple days later, she handed me the name and phone number of someone who worked at an art-house publisher. I laughed hard, but she said try it, and so I mailed the file to this guy without thinking much more about it.

  Three weeks after that, he called me one afternoon and offered me twenty thousand dollars. Mainly out of bafflement, I said sure, knock yourself out. Amy squealed when she heard, and she took me out to dinner.

  It was published eight months later, a square hardcover with a grainy photograph of a nondescript Santa Monica house on the front. It looked to me like the kind of book you had to be out of your mind to even pick up, let alone buy, but the L.A. Times noticed it, and it got a couple other good reviews, and, weirdly, it became something that sold a little, for a while.

  The world rolled on, and so did we. Stuff happened. I quit my job, we moved. If I was anything now, I was the guy who’d written that book. Which meant, presumably, I now needed to become a guy who’d written some other book. Nothing had come to mind. It kept continuing to fail to come to mind, with a steady resolve that suggested not coming to mind was what it was all about, that failing to come to mind was its chief skill and purpose in life.

  A couple hours later I was in the living room. I’d drunk more beer, but this hadn’t seemed to help. I was adrift in the middle of the couch, mired in the restless fugue state characteristic of those who’ve failed to conjure something out of thin air. I knew I should unpack the box of Web “research” I’d halfheartedly accumulated. But I also knew if I hit the clippings and nothing shook out of it, then walking back into town and buying some good, long nails would move up to Plan A. The laptop had done me little deliberate harm. I wasn’t ready to kill it yet.

  I took an unearned work’s-done cigarette from the pack on the table and headed out to the deck. I stopped smoking indoors the year Amy and I got married. She’d tolerated it at first because she’d done a little tobacco herself, back in the day and long before I’d known her, but had taken to using air-freshening devices and raising an eyebrow whenever I lit up. Subtly, and sweetly, and for my own good. I didn’t especially mind the new regime. I could smoke all I wanted at work, and now houseguests couldn’t accuse me of attempted manslaughter by secondhand smoke, and it just made life easier all around.

  I leaned against the rail. The world was silent but for the confidential whispering of trees. The sky was clear and cold above, and midnight blue. I could smell firs and faint wood smoke from a distant hearth fire—likely our neighbors, the Zimmermans. It was good here, I knew that. We had a fancy house. The landscape was rugged, and not much had changed for it in a long time. Birch Crossing was real without being an ass about it: Pickups and SUVs were equally represented, and you could buy a very fancy spatula if you wanted. The Zimmermans were a five-minute drive away, but we’d already had dinner at their house twice. They were a couple of retired history professors from Berkeley, and conversation had not exactly flowed the first time, but the gift of a single-malt on our second visit had oiled the wheels. Both were sprightly for people in their early seventies—Bobbi filled the CD player with everything from Mozart to Sparklehorse, and Ben’s black hair was barely flecked with gray. He and I now chatted affably enough on the street when we met, though I suspected that his wife had the measure of me.

  And yet a week ago, I’d been standing right there on the deck when something had happened.

  I was watching Amy through the glass doors as she chopped vegetables and supervised a saucepan on the stove. I could smell simmering plum tomatoes and capers and oregano. It was only midafternoon, and there was enough light to appreciate both the view and the house’s good side. Instead of being in the office until after nine, my wife was at her kitchen counter happily making mud pies, and she remained appealing from both left and right and front and back, too. I’d even gotten an idea down that morning, and halfway believed I might produce another book about something or other. The spheres were in alignment, and nine-tenths of the world’s population would have traded places with me in a heartbeat.

  Yet for a moment it was as if a cloud drifted across the world. At first I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Then I realized I had no idea where I was. Not just the name of the town—I couldn’t even remember what state I was in. I couldn’t recall what had happened to me, or when, had no idea of how I’d gotten to this place and time. The house looked unfamiliar, the trees as if they’d been slipped into position when I wasn’t looking. The woman on the other side of the big window was a stranger to me, her movements foreign and unexpected.

  Who was she? Why was she standing in there holding a knife? And why was she looking at it as if she couldn’t remember what it was for? The feeling was too pervasive to be described as panic, but I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I blinked, looking around, trying to lock into something tangible. It wasn’t a reaction to the newness of the environment. I’ve traveled a lot, and I’d been sick to death of L.A. I was tired because I hadn’t been sleeping well, but it wasn’t that either, or the usual shadows that came to haunt me. It was not about regrets or guilt. It wasn’t specific.

&nbs
p; Everything was wrong. With everything.

  Then the cloud passed. It was gone, just like that. Amy looked up and winked at me through the glass, unquestionably the woman I loved. I smiled back, turned to the mountains to finish my smoke. The forest looked the way I had come to expect. Everything was okay again.

  Dinner was good, and I listened while Amy went over the structure of her new job. She’s in advertising. Maybe you’re familiar with it. It’s a profession that seeks to make people spend money so that folks they don’t know can buy an even bigger house. In this way it’s somewhat like organized crime, except the hours are longer. I said this to Amy once, suggesting they should tell clients to dispense with ads and demographics and encourage people to buy their wares through direct threats against their person and/or property. She asked me never to say this in front of her colleagues in case they took it seriously.

  The revised basis of her employment was important to us because her new position as roving creative director across her company’s empire—with offices in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and back down in L.A.—was what had enabled us to get out of L.A. It was a big change for her, a California girl born and bred, who’d liked being close to the family who still lived in the city where she was born. She had painted her willingness to move as related to the sizable hike in salary, but she’d never really been obsessed with money. I believed instead that she’d done it mainly for my sake, to let me get out of the city, and over dessert I told her I was grateful.

  She rolled her eyes and told me not to be a dork, but she accepted the kiss I offered in thanks. And the ones that came afterward.

  When I’d finished my cigarette, I pulled the phone out of my pocket to check the time. It was half past eleven. Amy’s job involved many client dinners, especially now, and it was possible she hadn’t even gotten back to her hotel yet. I knew she’d pick up her messages as soon as she could. But I hadn’t heard from her all day, and at that moment I really wanted to.