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.”
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’d to his personal assistant.
He left me at the door, and I walked 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 L.A., 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 toward 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, among other things. While my eyes were wandering over this, I felt a sudden itch in my shoulder blades.
I turned, slowly, as if that were 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
NINE
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 an outlet behind the bar to plug in a power adapter I’d bought on the way for Amy’s phone. 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 that 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 really make out anything. 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 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 as if my brain was doing right now. The part under my conscious control was sticking fingers in dikes and providing rational explanations. It was doing good work, suggesting that 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’d been trying to explain the evening when I didn’t listen properly.
But meanwhile other bits of my head were running scattershot 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 e-mail 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, a dedicated digital music player. She wasn’t going to be using her phone for music, but while I could imagine that a device might come with a couple of songs preloaded, eight seemed like 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 predated 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 looking not 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
