The Intruders Read online

  Barely aware that she was doing it, Madison reached to the phone on the bedside table and dialed the number. It rang and rang, sounding as if it was trying to connect to the other side of the moon. Nobody answered, and she put the phone down.

  She forced herself to lie back in bed. To try to listen beyond the rain, to focus on the sound of the waves, behind this temporary storm: to find the reassuring sound of crashing water, drawing its line at the end of the world. She kept her eyes closed and listened, waiting for the tide to pull her back into the dark. Tomorrow she would wake and everything would feel normal. She was just tired, and half asleep. Everything was okay. Everything was just like always.

  And there had been no man.

  When Alison O’Donnell woke at 2:37, it was the sound of rain she first noticed, but she knew that this had not been what had woken her. She pulled the covers back and swung her legs out of bed. Grabbed her robe from the end and pulled it on. She was foggy with bad sleep and mechanical dreams, but a mother’s feet operate outside her own control. Doesn’t matter how tired you are, how worn, how much your body and brain want to climb into bed again and stay there for a week, a month, maybe even the rest of your life. There are sounds that speak to the back brain and countermand your own desires.

  The discomfort of your young is one of them.

  She padded out of her room and into the hallway. Through the window she glimpsed trees pulled back and forth in high winds, white lines of water speeding across the glass. There was a sudden gust, and rain hit the window like a handful of stones.

  Then she heard the noise again.

  She shuffled down to the door at the end of the hall. It was slightly ajar. She gently opened it a little farther and looked inside.

  Madison was in bed, but the covers had been thrown down to her waist. Alison’s daughter was moving, slowly, her head turning from side to side. Her eyes were closed, but she was making a low, moaning sound.

  Alison walked into the room. She knew this sound well. Her daughter had started having nightmares a little before the age of three, and for a few years they were pretty bad. It got to the point where Maddy had been afraid to go to bed, convinced that whatever she saw there—she could never remember, when she woke up, what it was—would come for her again, that the feeling of constriction and suffocation would descend upon her again. A year or so ago, they had just petered out, become a thing of the past. But now here was that noise again.

  Alison wasn’t sure what to do. They’d never found a successful approach. You could wake her, but often it took a long time for her to find sleep again, and sometimes the nightmare would simply return immediately.

  Suddenly Madison’s back arched, the movement startling Alison. She’d not seen that before. Her daughter let out a long, rasping sound…and then slowly deflated. Her head turned, quickly, but then she sighed. Her lips moved a little, but no sound came out. And then she was still. And not moaning anymore.

  Alison waited a few minutes more, until she was sure her daughter was sleeping soundly. She carefully reached out and pulled the covers back over her. Stood for an additional moment, looking down at Madison’s sleeping face.

  Make the most of it, kiddo, she found herself thinking. A nightmare is just a nightmare. You don’t know anything about real sadness yet.

  As she turned away, she noticed something on the floor, lying on the bare wood just on the other side of the old rug that went under the bed.

  She bent down and discovered that it was a sand dollar. It was small, gray. It had been broken in half.

  She picked up one of the pieces. Where had it come from? Had Madison found it that afternoon? If so, why hadn’t she said? There was a reward….

  Abruptly Alison realized why her daughter hadn’t said anything, and she felt toxically ashamed. The piece Alison held in her hands was firm. Snapping the shell in half must have taken effort and been deliberate.

  She dropped the fragment to the floor and left the room, pulling the door almost closed behind her. Then she went back to her own bed and lay there for a long time, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the rain.

  chapter

  EIGHT

  I got to the Hotel Malo just before 10:00 A.M. I’d been awake since before 6:00 but realized I could not call Amy’s office for several hours. So I put myself into movement instead. Seven was the earliest I could arrive at the Zimmermans’ and borrow a car without looking too strange. Inspired by Fisher’s visit the day before, I told them I’d gotten a call from an old friend and was heading to the city for lunch. Bobbi looked at me a beat longer than necessary. Ben got straight to explaining how steering wheels worked.

  I headed west on 90, joining 5 as the rush hour was starting in earnest, and fought my way off at James Street. Familiar territory so far, the route we’d taken when we came to spend a day in the city a week after we moved up north. Amy had showed me a couple of major draws like the Pike Place Market and the Space Needle, but she was more familiar with the city’s boardrooms than its tourist attractions. The sky was low and an unrelenting gray. It had been that way the previous time, too. I eventually spiraled onto Sixth Avenue, a wide downtown canyon with tall concrete buildings on either side, lined with small and well-behaved trees bearing little yellow lights.

  I pulled up outside the Malo, joining the back of a line of black town cars. The hotel had an awning of red and ocher stripes. A guy in a coat and hat tried to take my car someplace, but I convinced him not to. The lobby was done in limestone and rich fabrics, a big fireplace on one side. The luggage trolleys were of distressed brass, and the bellhops were demure. Something unobtrusive and New Age floated discreetly from hidden speakers, like the smell of vanilla cookies almost ready to come out of the oven.

  The woman behind the desk was the one I’d spoken to a little after midnight. I was surprised to find that she did have an envelope for me, and a receipt for my twenty bucks. Also that she’d had the initiative to get the driver to write down his name—which is more than I’d done—together with the company he worked for. His first name was Georj, the second a collection of crunchy syllables from not-around-here. The company was Red Cabs. She relayed this information in a way that implied that guests at her hotel usually employed more upscale or funkier means of transport, like native bearers or cold-fusion hoverboards. I got her to check a final time for a reservation, implying that I was a colleague who believed that my assistant had made one and that he was going to catch seven shades of hell if he had not. No record, still.

  “Can you do me another favor?” I asked, having also planned this on the journey. “I’m sure we’ve booked her in here before. Can you check back a few months?”

  She tapped and squinted at the screen for a minute, nodded, then tapped again.

  “Okay,” she said, pressing her finger on the screen. “Ms. Whalen did stay with us three months ago, two nights. And before that I have a reservation back in January. Three nights that time. You want me to go farther?”

  I said no and went back outside. Walked up to the corner, where I was beyond the influence of the doorman and his familiars, who remained eager that I do the right thing with my car. I still wasn’t sure if I was overreacting, and I knew from experience that I have a tendency to stomp on the gas pedal when sitting and waiting would be the more considered option. But now I knew that Amy had stayed in this hotel before, and that changed things. Not because it confirmed she’d been in Seattle on those occasions—I knew that—but because it meant she was familiar with the Malo and it was unlikely that she’d have turned up and rejected it this time. I knew from their Web site that the hotel had vacancies for this week. So it wasn’t a screwed-up booking either.

  I went over to the doorman, gave him some money, and told him I’d be right back. I zigzagged the few blocks to the Hotel Monaco on Fourth Avenue. Amy would have liked this place, too—God would have liked it—but a quick conversation confirmed that neither of them had stayed there in the recent past.

 
The hotel had always been a dead end. It was time to forget about it. Time to forget about the whole thing, probably. I’d made the decision to come to the city around one o’clock the previous night, telling myself it was to do Amy the favor of retrieving her phone. A hundred-plus miles is not a huge deal in the Pacific Northwest. But it wasn’t just that, of course. Amy had made business trips six, seven times a year ever since I’d known her. We had a standard operating procedure. We didn’t go for whole days without being in contact, however brief. But…bottom line, she hadn’t been staying in the hotel she’d used before. That was all I had, and in the light of day it didn’t amount to a whole lot. I felt embarrassed for being there and was not entirely inclined to dismiss the voice in my head that claimed it was merely an excuse for leaving my desk for the day.

  When I got back to the Malo, I went inside and perched on a chair by the big window. I opened the envelope and got out Amy’s phone. It was easy to recognize, though I noticed she’d changed the picture she used as her background. It was a standard cell phone and no more: In an uncharacteristically anticorporate stand, she’d resisted getting sucked into BlackBerry hell. I pressed the green button. The list of outgoing calls showed one to my cell at the top—from cab guy late last night—preceded by names and numbers I didn’t recognize, until it showed an incoming from me the afternoon before last.

  I switched to her contacts list and scrolled through it, searching for Kerry, Crane & Hardy, Seattle. It wasn’t there, of course. She’d know these people by first name and direct line, rather than hacking her way in through the general switchboard.

  I noticed that the battery indicator was flashing about two seconds before the cell went dead.

  Using my own, I called directory assistance and got a number for KC&H. I punched in the number and heard a perky voice sing out the familiar three letters. I asked to talk with someone who worked with Amy Whalen. I figured I’d find some underling who knew Amy’s schedule, come up with a time and place to meet her. She might even be right there in the office. I could take her to lunch.

  The phone went quiet for a while, and then I was talking to someone’s assistant. She worked for a person named Todd and confirmed he’d be the guy to talk to, but was in a meeting right now. I was told he’d phone me just as soon as he possibly could, if not sooner.

  Then I called Red Cabs and tried to learn how to get in contact with Georj Unpronounceable. He was off duty, and the dispatcher was cagey but claimed he’d tell the guy to get in touch with me when he came back to work. I ended the call knowing that it would never happen.

  So I left the hotel and walked across the street to a Seattle’s Best. I sat at a table outside there with a big, strong coffee, smoking and watching the rain and waiting for someone—anyone—to call me back.

  By half past eleven, I was cold and getting pissed. The ten bucks I’d left with the Malo’s doorman had worn off, and he’d gotten uptight about the car’s continued presence outside the hotel. The Zimmermans’ second-best SUV did not make a great advertisement for the establishment. For any establishment, actually. Retired professors apparently don’t care a great deal about mud and dents, and the faded antiwar stickers in the back window were large and strident. Finally the guy in the hat crossed the street to come give me grief, and I agreed to move along.

  I drove around the block until I found an underground lot. When I reemerged, I spent a couple of minutes with a downtown map I’d scored from the Malo reception. It was optimized toward shopping and eating opportunities, and it took me a while to locate the agency’s street. It wasn’t where I expected either. I’d assumed that the agency would be located a zillion floors up in one of the corporate behemoths that surrounded me. Instead it seemed to be in a narrow street near the marketplace.

  I walked down a couple of vertiginous blocks until I found the big Public Market Center sign, then asked directions from a guy running a newsstand. He directed me down a side street that went under the main market and swerved sharply and steeply left. A sign confirmed that this was Post Alley. It looked more like a locale for loading and unloading fish and/or selling drugs. After a hundred yards, it suddenly segued into a section remade in 1990s postmodernist, with hanging baskets with a sushi restaurant and a little deli with a row of people sitting in the window eating identical salads. Soon I saw a restrained sign hanging from a picturesque wooden beam and knew I was in the right place.

  I walked in, deciding how to play this. Our working lives had always been very separate. I’d gotten to know Amy’s assistant in L.A. a little from crisis phone calls and occasional flying visits to the house, but she’d left to have a baby a couple of months before Amy realigned her working conditions. I’d heard colleagues’ names mentioned, some enough to vaguely remember. I was pretty sure a Todd was among them. Could be this one, could be some other. There was probably some law that said a Todd had to be working in every advertising agency in the country. The whole deal would have been easier to handle on the phone—I could pretend I was still back out in the sticks and trying to casually get in touch with her—but I was tired of waiting for a return call.

  Reception was an existential statement, and they’d spent a lot of money on it, mainly in an attempt to make it look like they hadn’t, which is presumably the kind of thing that impresses the hell out of other advertising folk. Each chair cost far more than the woman behind the desk earned in a month, but she didn’t seem put out by this. She was all in black and willowy and big-eyed—yet also possessed of a fierce intelligence, you could just tell—and came across like a girl who inhabited the best of all possible worlds and was anxious to spread the joy around.

  I asked for Todd and in return was asked if I was expected.

  “Oh no,” I said, shrugging in what I hoped was a charming way. I didn’t have much practice. “Just here on the off chance.”

  She beamed, as if this were simply the best possible way of stopping by, and got on the phone. She nodded vigorously at the end of her conversation, so I assumed that either I was good to go or she had mildly lost her mind.

  Five minutes later someone eerily identical appeared from behind a frosted-glass door at the end of the room. She beckoned, and I got up and followed her into the offices beyond. This woman evidently inhabited only the third-or fourth-best of all worlds and was not disposed to mirth or unnecessary chatter, though I did learn that her name was Bianca. We took an elevator up two floors and then marched along a corridor with glass walls, past funky little rooms in which pairs of short-haired people were working so hard and creatively it made me want to set off a fire alarm, preferably by starting an actual fire.

  At the end she opened a door and ushered me through.

  “Todd Crane,” she announced.

  Ah, I thought, only at that moment realizing I was about to talk to a third of the people who made up the company name.

  I found myself in an austere space with big windows on two sides, giving a wide view of Elliott Bay and the piers. The remaining walls were covered with framed certificates and awards and huge and celebratory product shots, including a few campaigns I knew Amy had been involved with. In the middle of the room, there was a desk big enough to play basketball on. A trim man in his early fifties was coming out from behind it. Chinos, well-pressed lilac shirt. Hair once black now streaked with flecks of gray, bone structure so blandly handsome he could have been cast in a television spot for just about anything good and wholesome and reasonably expensive.

  “Hey,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Todd Crane.”

  I’ll just bet you are, I thought, as I shook it. And I don’t like you.

  He was smooth, though. I guess half his job was making strangers feel at home. There was a framed photograph on one corner of his desk, a studio portrait showing Crane with his arm around a glossy woman, flanked by three daughters of widely spaced ages. Curiously, it was angled not toward his chair but out into the room, as if it were another credential, like the certificates on the walls. There
was a retro radio on the floor in the corner of the room, too, 1970s era, presumably another character statement.

  “So, Jack,” he said, leaning back. “Great to finally put a face to the name after all this time. I’m amazed it never happened before.”

  “Didn’t get out of L.A. often,” I said. “Until we moved.”

  “So what brings you to the city today? You’re in books now, right?”

  “I have a meeting. Plus, Amy managed to leave her cell phone in a cab yesterday. So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, get the phone to her right away. She must be in withdrawal by now.”

  Todd laughed. Ha, ha, ha. The beats were separate, as if the sequence had been composed, practiced, and perfected in private many, many years before.

  Then he paused, as if waiting for me to say something else. I thought that was weird. I had been expecting him to be the one to start volunteering information.

  “So,” I said eventually. “What’s the best way for me to do that?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Crane said. He looked confused.

  “I assumed someone here would have her diary.”

  “Well, not really,” he said, folding his arms and pursing his lips. “Amy’s our roving troubleshooter now. As you know, of course. Finger in a lot of pies. A global view. Strategic. But fundamentally she still reports to the L.A. office. They’d be the people who’d—”

  He stopped, as if he’d just put things together in his head. Looked at me carefully.

  “Uh, Amy’s not in Seattle this week, Jack,” he said. “At least not with us.”

  I was as fast as I could be, but my mouth must still have been hanging open for a second. Maybe two.

  “I know that,” I said, smiling broadly. “She’s visiting friends. I just wondered whether she was expected to touch base at any point. As she’s here anyway.”