The Intruders
‘Me too,’ Oz said, for a moment feeling very alone.
‘We’ll hook up soon. Take care of yourself in the meantime,’ Jones said, and left.
Oz watched the man get back in his car, drive out of the lot and take the turn towards the freeway. Then he slowly finished his beer. He did not hurry, for once. He was feeling almost as if he was just sitting in a bar, rather than hiding there. The people at the counter were talking, laughing. The arguing couple were now chewing face across their table, the woman’s hand hooked meatily around the man’s neck. Oz wished them well.
When he eventually stepped outside it was cold and windy, the streets deserted. People with normal lives were home asleep. Oz was going to join them now. Home for the time being was an anonymous motel on the edge of town, but any kind of home is better than none.
As he walked he considered the man he’d just met, what he represented. There were countless groups interested in the underbelly, in finding the hidden truths. JFK obsessives who met once a month to pore over autopsy shots. Online 9/11 nuts with their trajectory modelling software, Priory of Sion wannabes, Holocaust revisionists, circle jerks for everything that might or might not ever have been true. Jones’ people sounded very different, or Oz would not have agreed to make contact in the first place. A tight, focused group of men and women who studied the facts without previous agenda, who met in secret, who weren’t too close to one particular issue to miss a glimpse of the whole. This was what Oz needed. People with rigour. People with dedication.
Just some fucking people, bottom line.
Maybe, after his time in the wilderness, things were going to start turning around. Oz picked up the pace a little, idly wondering if his motel had a snack machine.
It did not, and the soda machine didn’t work. After establishing these facts and becoming resigned to them, Oz let himself into his room, first noting that the strip of scotch tape he’d laid across the bottom of the door had not been disturbed.
Once inside he stood irresolute. It was late. He should go to bed. Get on the road early. Keep on the move. But he still felt hopped up from the meeting, and knew that if he lay his head down it would get locked in a long spiral that would leave him exhausted and headachy in the morning.
He turned instead to the ancient console television next to the room’s shabby desk. The huge screen warmed slowly, to reveal a re-run of a show so old Oz barely remembered it. Perfect. A little background noise, the kind that creeps inside your head and tells you everything’s all right. Comfort sound.
There was a knock on the door.
Oz turned fast, heart beating hard.
The television wasn’t on loud enough to provoke a complaint. It was hard to imagine why else someone should be outside. The bedside clock said it was 2:33 a.m.
The knock came again, more quietly this time.
Oz knew the flickering of the television screen would be visible around the edges of the curtains. He went and stood behind the door. This was the moment he’d feared, the prospect that kept him awake at night, and he realized suddenly that he’d never really come up with a plan for when it came to pass. So much for the Lone Horseman of the Unknown.
‘Mr Turner? It’s Mr Jones.’
The person outside had spoken very quietly. Oz stared at the door for a moment, put his ear closer. ‘What?’
‘Could you let me in?’
Oz hesitated, undid the lock. Opened the door a crack, to see Jones standing shivering outside.
‘What the hell do you want?’
Jones kept well back from the door, didn’t crowd him. ‘I got a few miles down the road and realized there were a couple things I forgot to say. I turned around, saw you walking through town, followed you back here.’
Oz let the man into the hotel room, annoyed at how careless he’d been to allow someone to spot him on the street.
‘You scared the fucking life out of me, man,’ he said, closing the door and locking it. ‘Jesus.’
‘I know. I’m sorry, really. It’s just I came all this way. And, you know, I think meeting up was kind of a big deal for both of us. The start of something bigger.’
‘You could say that.’
‘Right. So I just wanted to make sure we got everything said.’
Oz relaxed, a little. ‘So what was it?’
The man looked sheepish. ‘First thing, well, it’s embarrassing. It’s just that Jones isn’t my real name.’
‘Okay,’ Oz said, confused. He’d already assumed the other guy might have given a false one. ‘No big deal.’
‘I know. Just, you were going to find out later, and I didn’t want you to think I’d been jerking you around.’
‘That’s okay,’ Oz said, disarmed, wondering if he should offer the guy a drink and realizing he didn’t have anything. The motel didn’t run to coffee-making facilities. It barely ran to changing the towels, and didn’t fudge the issue with cheery crap about saving the environment, either. ‘So – what is it? Your name.’
The man moved slightly, so he was farther from the door.
‘It’s Shepherd,’ he said.
Oz held his gaze, noticing for the first time how dark the man’s eyes were. ‘Well, mine really is Oz Turner. So we’re straight on nomenclature. What was the other thing?’
‘Just this,’ the man said. He pushed Oz in the chest.
Oz was caught off-guard. He couldn’t maintain his balance against the calm, firm shove, especially when the man slipped his right foot behind one of Oz’s. His arms pinwheeled but he toppled straight over backward, catching his head hard against the television.
He was stunned, and barely had time to slur a syllable of enquiry before the man quickly bent down over him. He grabbed handfuls of Oz’s coat, careful not to touch flesh, and yanked him halfway back to standing.
‘What?’ Oz managed. His right eye was blinking hard. He felt weak. He realized the man was wearing gloves. ‘What are you …’
The man put his face up close. ‘Just so you know,’ he said, ‘They do exist. They send their regards.’
Then he dropped him, twisting Oz’s shoulder forward just as he let go. Oz’s head hit the side of the television again, at a bad sideways angle this time, and there was a muffled click.
Shepherd sat on the end of the bed and waited for the man’s gasps to subside, watching the television with half an eye. He couldn’t remember the name of the show, but he knew just about everyone on it was long dead. Ghosts of light, playing to a dying man. Almost funny.
When he was satisfied Turner was done, he took a fifth of vodka out of his pocket and tipped most of it into Oz’s mouth. A little over his hands, some on his coat. He left the bottle on the floor, where it might have fallen. A diligent coroner could question either stomach contents or blood alcohol level within the body, but Shepherd doubted it would come to that. Not here in the sticks. Not when Turner looked so much like a man who had this kind of end coming to him sooner or later.
It took Shepherd less than three minutes to find where the man had hidden his laptop and notebook. He replaced these with further empty vodka bottles. He shut the room door quietly behind him as he left, and then took only another minute to find the back-up disk duct-taped under the dashboard of Oz’s car in the lot outside. All three would be destroyed before daybreak.
And that, he believed, was that.
When Shepherd got into his own vehicle he realized his cell phone was ringing. He reached quickly under the seat for it, but he’d missed the call.
He checked the log. He didn’t recognize the number, but he did know the area code, and swore.
A 503 prefix. Oregon. Cannon Beach.
He slammed the door and drove fast out of the lot.
Chapter 7
If you lay still, really still, you could hear the waves. That was one of the best things about the cottage, Madison thought. When you went to bed, assuming the television in the main room wasn’t on – it usually wasn’t, because time at the beach was for reading and thinking, Dad said, instead of watching the same old (rude word) – you could lie there and hear the ocean. You had to tune yourself first. The dune was in the way, and depending on the tides the water could be quite a distance down the beach. You had to let your breathing settle, lie flat and very still on your back with both ears open and just wait … and gradually you would begin to hear the distant rustle and thump that said tonight you were sleeping near the edge of the world. And sleep you would, as the waves seemed to get closer and closer, tugging gently at your feet, pulling you into friendly warmth and darkness and rest.
If you woke up in the night you heard them too. It was even better then, as they were the only sound anywhere. Back in Portland there was always other noise—cars, dogs, people walking by. Not here. Sometimes the waves would be very quiet, barely audible above the ringing of your ears, but if there was heavy weather they could sound very loud. Madison could remember one time being really scared in the night when there had been a storm and it sounded like the waves were crashing right into the next room. They hadn’t been, of course, and Dad said the dune would protect them and they never would, so now when she heard them in the night she enjoyed it, feeling adventurous and safe, knowing there was a vigorous, chaotic universe out there but that it could never harm her.
So when Madison realized she was awake, the first thing she noticed was the waves. Then that it was raining, and beginning to rain harder, drumming onto the roof of the cottage. The storm she’d seen heading down the beach earlier had arrived. Tomorrow the sand would be pocked and grey, and probably strewn with seaweed. It got thrown up onto the beach in bad weather, and felt weird and squishy under foot. Assuming they even went for a walk tomorrow at all, which …
Suddenly she sat up.
She stayed absolutely still for a moment, staring straight ahead. The rain on the roof above her sounded like hail, it was so loud. Madison looked at her bedside table. The clock said 1:12. So why was she awake? Sometimes she had to go to the bathroom. She didn’t now, though, and usually when she woke in the night it was a vague and fuzzy kind of awake. Now she felt like she’d never been asleep. Ever. There was a question going around in her head, urgently.
What was she doing here?
Next to the clock was a small, round shape. She picked it up. A sand dollar, small. She remembered finding it that afternoon, but that felt like it was something that had happened a while ago, like last time they’d come here, or the summer before. She brought it up to her nose and sniffed. It still smelled like the sea.
She could remember being on the beach as the storm headed south towards her. Sitting there knowing she’d have to go in the cottage soon. Then … she just couldn’t quite … It was like sometimes when you were in the car on a long drive and suddenly you realized a chunk of time had passed. One minute you were twenty minutes from home and then suddenly you were pulling into the driveway. It wasn’t like you’d been asleep, more like you hadn’t been paying attention, day-dreaming, and the world had gone on regardless. The world, including your own body. You must have been awake, because you’d done stuff, but it had happened without you thinking or noticing. Like putting a car on cruise, as Daddy did on the freeway. Then, boom – you reached an interchange and there you were, noticing things again, taking back control.
Though … now she could remember being in the cottage afterwards. When she’d come in from the beach Mom had been sitting in her chair without a book and without the TV on. Doing that looking-at-her-hands thing. She said hi when Madison came in, but nothing else – which was weird, because Maddy was late. At least a half hour. In fact … now she even remembered looking at the clock in the kitchen and realizing it was seven o’clock – which was a whole hour later than she was supposed to come back.
She’d taken a shower to get the sand off, and when she came out Mom said she didn’t feel like going out to eat tonight and what did Madison think about calling for pizza? Madison thought this was a world class idea, because Mario’s in Cannon Beach did what her Dad called ‘real serious pies’ and you could only get them here because they weren’t a chain. It was strange that Mom was suggesting it because her usual position was Mario’s put too much cheese on and not all the toppings were certified organic or GM-free, but, whatever: ‘Yes, please’ was the answer whichever way you cut it.
But then Mom couldn’t find the menu and she was going to call directory assistance but it grew later and later, and after a while Madison got the idea that pizza wasn’t going to happen after all. She found a packet of soup in the cupboard and made that instead. Her mother didn’t want any. Madison didn’t either, but made herself eat about half, and then spent a while reading one of her history books. She liked history, enjoyed knowing about how things had been in years gone by.
Then she’d gone to bed. Got into her jim-jams and climbed in. Then she must have fallen asleep.
And now she had woken up.
Madison opened her hand and looked at the sand dollar again. She could remember bending down to pick it up. She could remember sitting with it. So how come she couldn’t remember what had happened right after that? Sand dollars were big news. Surely she would have come running in right away to show her mom, maybe thinking it might cheer her up? Why couldn’t she remember doing that?
Madison lay back, pulling the covers up under her chin. Her memory was good. She performed well in tests at school, and triumphantly took on all comers at Remember, Remember and Snap – Uncle Brian said she could win a Remember, Remember World Series, if there was one. But now it was like the world was a big television, showing two shows at once – or as if the signal had got confused and the screen was showing one thing but the sound was from another movie altogether. And even though she’d mainly sorted out the question of what she was doing here, it didn’t seem to answer anything. She was here because it was the beach house, and she was here with her mom, and it was night so she was in bed.
But was that what she’d actually meant?
She was breathing a little quickly now, as if expecting bad news or hearing a sound that meant that somewhere, something bad was coming towards her. Something felt wrong and crooked and out of kilter.
And … hadn’t there been a man?
Hadn’t he given her something which she had put in the drawer of the bedside table? A card, like one of Dad’s business cards but very plain and white?
No. Absolutely not.
There had been no man. She was sure of that. So there could be no card. She did not need to check.
But she did, and found that there was in fact such a card in the drawer. It had a name printed on it, and a phone number added in ballpoint. There was a design drawn on the other side. The symbol looked as if someone had drawn a number ‘9’, then rotated the card a little and drawn another 9, and kept doing that until they came back around to where they’d started.
Barely aware that she was doing it, Madison reached to the phone on the bedside table and dialled 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 that she first noticed, but she knew 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 wants 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 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 – 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, 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 any more.
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 a moment longer, looking down at her 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 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, grey. 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 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 8
I got to the Hotel Malo just before ten a.m. I’d been awake since before six, but realized I could not call Amy’s office for several hours. So I put myself in 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 got a call from an old friend and was heading to the city for lunch. Bobbi looked at me a beat longer than was 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 grey. It had been that way the previous time too. I eventually spiralled onto 6th 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 ochre 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 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 guests at her hotel usually employed more upscale or funky means of transport, like native bearers or cold fusion hoverboards. I got her to check a final time for a reservation, implying I was a colleague, believed 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 favour?’ 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 keen that I do the right thing with my car. I still wasn’t sure if I was over-reacting, 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 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 unlikely to have turned up and rejected it this time. I knew from an enquiry via their website 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 4th Avenue. Amy would have liked this place too – God would have liked it – but a quick conversation confirmed neither 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 favour 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 which claimed it was merely an excuse for leaving my desk for the day.