The Intruders

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 anti-corporate stand she’d resisted getting sucked into BlackBerry hell. I pressed the green button. The ‘outgoing’ list showed a call to my cell at the top – from cab guy late last night – preceded by names and numbers I didn’t recognize, until it showed incoming from me the afternoon before last.

I switched to her Contacts 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 the battery indicator was flashing about two seconds before the cell went dead.

Using my own I rang directory assistance and got a number for KC&H. I called 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 he 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 on stream. I ended the call knowing 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 off. 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 anti-war 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 re-emerged 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 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 news stand. He directed me down a narrow road that went under the main market and swerved sharply and steeply left. A sign confirmed this was Post Alley. It looked more like a locale for loading and unloading fish and/or selling drugs. After a hundred yards, however, it suddenly segued into a section remade in 1990s post-modernist, with hanging baskets, a sushi restaurant and a little deli with a row of people sitting in the window eating identical salads. Soon after 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 LA 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 re-aligned 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 a Todd working in every advertising agency in the country, on a quota basis. 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 keen to spread the joy around.

I asked for Todd and 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 was 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 she was called 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 grey, 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 towards 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 LA 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, practised 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 of me doing 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 trouble-shooter now. As you know, of course. Finger in a lot of pies. A global view. Strategic. But fundamentally she still reports to the LA 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.’

Todd shook his head slowly. ‘Not that I know of. But maybe, you know? Have you tried her hotel? We always book people in the Malo. Or is she staying with her … friends?’

‘I left a message for her there already. Just wanted to get this phone back to her as quick as I can.’

‘Understand that,’ Todd nodded, all smiles again. ‘Lost without them these days, right? Wish I could help you more, Jack. She stops by, I’ll tell her you’re on the hunt. You want to give me your number?’

‘I left it already,’ I said.

‘That’s right, sorry. Hell of a morning. Clients. Can’t live with them, not recommended business practice to shoot them in the head. Or so they say.’

He clapped me on the shoulder and walked me out back along the corridor, filling the journey with praise of Amy and a sustained meditation on how her new position was going to shake things up for the company, and in a good way. It was not difficult to imagine him greeting his wife and kids in a similar manner every morning, a goals and achievements spiel capped with assurances of his best attention at all times, cc-ed to his personal assistant.

He left me at the door and I walked out across reception alone. I turned my head just before stepping back out into the world. It seemed to me that there might be someone standing behind the frosted glass door, watching me leave, but I couldn’t be sure.

I walked down the alley slowly. I hadn’t brought Amy’s organizer but I remembered the contents. Three days full of meetings. Sure, I hadn’t read the details and they could theoretically have been in LA, San Francisco or Portland – the last only a three-hour drive away – but I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d confused the city. Plus I had her phone in my pocket, found here in this city last night. Amy had come here, and until the night before last had been in contact as usual. Now she was nowhere to be found. The hotel was a blank. The people at her job didn’t know where she was, or said they didn’t.

And neither did I.

Post Alley deposited me in a stubby dead-end, over which the beginnings of an elevated street set off towards the bay, before banking sharply left to join the Alaskan Viaduct above. The concrete supports had been covered in graffiti, over what looked like many years. ‘Rev9’, and ‘Later’ and ‘Back Again’ it said, amongst other things. While my eyes were wandering over this I felt a sudden itch in my shoulder blades.

I turned, slowly, as if that was simply what I was doing next. A few people were walking back and forth at the end of the road, going about their business in the shadow of the elevated highway, getting in or out of cars, moving stuff here and there. Beyond that there was a wide road and a couple of piers, and then the flicker of light hitting water out on Elliott Bay.

No one was looking in my direction. Everyone was in motion, walking or driving. Traffic rumbled over the elevated highway above, sending deep vibrations through the buildings and sidewalks around me, until the whole city almost seemed to be singing one long, low note.

Chapter 9

I found a bar downtown. I scored a table by the window and ordered a pot of coffee – employing the last of my charm to get the waitress to let me use a socket behind the bar to plug in a power adapter for Amy’s phone, which I’d bought on the way. While I waited for the coffee I watched people at the other tables. Bars used to be a place where you came to get away from the outside world. That was the point. Now everyone seemed to be sucking free wi-fi or talking on cell phones.

Nobody did anything interesting enough to distract me from the interlocking dialogues in my head. The fact Amy wasn’t in town on Kerry, Crane & Hardy business could be explained. I knew that. I was calm. It was still possible there was nothing strange going on here except inside my own head, and it reminded me of a time a year or so before, when Amy went through a period of talking in her sleep. At first it was just a mumbling and you couldn’t make out anything within it. After a while it got stronger, words and sections of sentences. It would wake me up, night after night. It began to screw with both our sleep patterns. She tried adjusting her diet and caffeine intake and spending even longer in the gym on the way to work, but nothing helped. Then it just stopped, though it was a couple of weeks before I started sleeping soundly again. In the meantime I had plenty of time to lie in the dark and wonder what made the brain do such a thing, how it must be organized so that when all of the conscious functions had apparently checked out, some part was still verbalizing about something. How was it doing that, and why? Who was it talking to?

That’s what it felt like my brain was doing right now. The part under my conscious control was sticking fingers in dykes and providing rational explanations. It was doing good work, suggesting Amy might indeed be here on the quiet in the hope of bringing clients to KC&H as a lock, stock and barrel triumph that couldn’t be group-owned. She lived and breathed office politics. Could even be that was what she had been trying to explain the evening when I didn’t listen properly.

But meanwhile other bits of my head were running scatter-shot in all directions. Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order, and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along. Or perhaps that’s just me.

When Amy’s phone had enough charge I retrieved it from behind the bar. Sitting with it in my hands felt strange. This was the only device through which I could talk to my wife: but it was currently with me, and thus made her feel even farther away. We have evolved now, gained a sixth sense through the invention of email and cell phones – an awareness of the utterances and circumstances of people who are not present. When this sense is taken away, you feel panicked, struck blind. I had a sudden idea and called the phone back at the house, but it rang and rang before switching to the machine. I left a message saying where I was and why, just in case Amy got home ahead of me. It should have felt like a good, sensible thing to do. Instead it was as if another road had just been washed away in the rain.

Amy’s phone was a different brand from mine and the keys were a lot smaller. As a result my first brush with the interface put me in the music player section by mistake. There were eight MP3 tracks listed, which surprised me. Like any other occupant of the twenty-first century who wasn’t Amish, Amy owned an iPod. She wasn’t going to be using her phone for music, but while I could imagine a device might come with a couple of songs preloaded, eight seemed a lot. Seven of the tracks were simply numbered Track 1 to Track 7, the other a long string of digits. I tried Track 1. Tinny music came out of the earpiece, old jazz, one of those crackly 1920s guys. Very much not Amy’s kind of thing – she’d gone on record more than once as hating jazz, or basically anything that pre-dated Blondie. I tried another track, then one more, with similar results. It was like holding the world’s smallest speakeasy.

I took another scroll through the Contacts section, this time not looking for Kerry, Crane & Hardy but for anything else that stuck out. I didn’t see anything to make me linger. I didn’t recognize all the names, but I was never going to. Your partner’s workplace is like another country. You’ll always be a stranger there.

So I headed to the SMS section. Amy had picked up the joy of SMS messaging from the younger blades in the agency, and she and I now exchanged texts regularly – when I knew she would be in a meeting, or she wanted to convey information that didn’t need my attention right away. Usually just to say hi. Sure enough, there were four from me there, going back a few months. A couple from her sister, Natalie, who lived back down in Santa Monica, in the house where she and Amy had been born and grown up.

And eleven from somebody else.

The messages from Natalie and me had our names attached. These others didn’t, just a phone number. It was the same number each time.

I selected the earliest. It was blank. An SMS communication had been sent, and received, but there was no text in it at all. The next was the same, and the next. Why would you keep sending texts without anything in them? Because you were incompetent, maybe, but by the third or fourth you’d think anyone could have gotten the hang of it. I kept scrolling. I’d grown so used to the single line of nothing in each message that when the sixth contained something else it took me by surprise. It didn’t make much sense, either.

yes

No period, even. The next few messages were blank again. Then I got to the final one.

A rose by ny othr name wll sml as sweet … :-D

I put the phone on the table and poured another cup of coffee. Eleven messages was a lot, even if most of them had nothing to say. Besides, Amy wasn’t the type to let her phone be clogged with other people’s Luddite errors. She was not sentimental. I’d already noted she’d only kept the texts from me that contained information of long-term use. A few thinking-of-you ones I’d sent a couple of days before, and which she’d replied to, had already been erased. The couple from Natalie looked like they’d been saved because they were especially annoying, and could be used later as evidence against her.

So why keep someone else’s blanks? And under what circumstances would you receive this many messages from someone and yet not have their name in your list of contacts? The others came up as ‘Home’ – my phone – and ‘Natalie’. These just listed the number. If you’re that regularly in contact, why not go to the minuscule trouble of entering the person’s name into your phone book? Unless it’s something you don’t want found?

I flipped over to the made/received calls log. The number didn’t appear anywhere on it. Communication from this source evidently only came in the form of text, or at least no call had come from it in the last month.

This gave me an idea, and I went back to the first SMS message and found it had been sent a little over three months previously. There had been a month gap between the first and the second. Then another two weeks. Then they had started coming more frequently. The one saying ‘yes’ had been sent six days before. And the one about roses had arrived just yesterday, late in the afternoon. Amy had seen this message – she must have, otherwise it would still have been filed under UNREAD. Then some time in the next few hours she had lost the phone, during the course of an evening which her schedule listed as blank.

Then she had, so far as I could tell, lost herself.

I navigated sideways from Received Messages into the section recording texts that Amy had sent. The list there was very short. A couple of replies her sister, and to me. And one other. It had been sent two minutes after the last message to her, and consisted of the following:

Bell 9. Will b waitng, whenever yr redE, 2dy, nxt wk, nxt year xoxox

The waitress swung by at that moment to see if I wanted fresh coffee. I said no. I asked for beer.

One thing my father was always good at was answering questions. He didn’t have infinite patience in other directions, but if you asked him something – how the moon was created, why cats slept all the time, why that man over there had only one arm – he’d always give you a grown-up answer, except for this one occasion. I was about twelve. I’d heard an older kid at school being pretentious and been somewhat impressed and came home and asked my dad what was the meaning of life, thinking it made me sound at least sixteen. He seemed unaccountably annoyed, and said it was a dumb question. I didn’t understand. ‘Say you come back to your house one afternoon,’ he said, ‘and there’s someone at your table, eating your food. You don’t ask him “What the hell are you doing, sitting there, eating my dinner?” – because he could simply say he was hungry. Which is an answer to what you asked him, sure enough. But not to your real question, which is what the hell are you doing in my house?’

I still didn’t get it, but I found I remembered this from time to time when I was older. It probably made me a slightly better cop, less prone to ask witnesses my questions instead of just letting them tell me what they knew. I remembered it again as I sat there in the bar in Seattle and started my first beer.

My head felt heavy, and cold, and I was coming to suspect the day was not going to end well. I realized that maybe I had to stop asking where Amy was, and start thinking about why.

Chapter 10

Meanwhile a girl was standing in an airport concourse. A big clock suspended from the ceiling said it was twenty-four minutes to four. As she watched, the last number changed, going from 16:36 to 16:37. She kept watching until it flipped to 16:39. She liked the ‘9’. She didn’t know why it should seem compelling, but it did. A recorded voice kept telling people not to smoke, which Madison suspected must be annoying for them.

Madison was not sure where she was going next. She had not, for a couple of minutes, been sure where she was right at this moment. She recognized it now. It was Portland airport, of course. She’d been here several times in the past, most recently when they went to visit Mom’s mom down in Florida in the spring. Madison could remember browsing around the little Powell’s bookstore, and drinking a juice at the café where you could watch planes landing and taking off. Mom had been nervous about flying and Dad had joked and made her feel better about it. There had been more joking in those days. A lot more.

But today? Madison remembered early talk of a trip up to the grocery store in Cannon Beach that morning, discussion that hadn’t come to anything. Then a little time on the beach. It had been cold and windy. There had been no walk. A quiet and threadbare lunch, in the cottage. Mom stayed indoors afterwards, so Madison went back out to hang on the beach by herself.

After that … there was this gap. Like when she’d woke last night and couldn’t remember the time on the beach. It was like there was a cloud in the way.

Mom wasn’t here at the airport with her, that was clear. Mom wouldn’t have walked off and left her by herself. Madison was wearing her new coat too, she realized. That was also strange. She wouldn’t have gone out to the beach in her new coat. She would have worn her old coat, because it didn’t matter if that got sand on it. So she must have gone into the cottage after the beach, to change, and snuck back out.

Then what? How had she gotten from there to Portland? Maddy knew the word her Uncle Brian would use for this: perplexing. In every other way she felt fine. Just like normal. So what was the deal with the blank spot? And what was she supposed to do now?