anything if she had? “What’s the news in the bright lights? Thought you’d be home by now.”
Her voice sounded as it always did. The telephone, though a remarkable device, is not designed for real communication, for the heavy lifting of personal interaction. For the big stuff, you have to be in the same physical space. Questions are asked and answered on a chemical level: Our species lived and loved and dealt with each other for millions of years before we developed language. It’s still only ever background music.
“Been talking to a few people, took longer than I thought. Chance I may be able to grab a beer with a couple of crime reporters later on.”
“That could work. You thinking of staying overnight?”
“Maybe. Okay with mission control?”
“Of course. I’ll inform the kitchen. So it’s looking like it might pan out, huh? The book idea?”
“Could be.” I felt bad about lying to her. I realized I had a handful of text messages, mainly blank, a couple of photographs that didn’t show much—and not a lot else.
“Well, that’s good. And honey, sorry if I was down on the idea last night. I was in kind of a funny mood.”
“Yeah, I got that.” I took a deep breath and stepped closer to the precipice. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. I couldn’t tell whether she said it too quickly, too slowly, or in an entirely normal way. I was listening too hard. “Just work, you know, the usual work crap. Blah-blah-blah in the head.”
“I thought moving out of L.A. was going to stop all that.”
“It will. Give it time.”
She said something else then, but I didn’t hear it, as there was a surge of noise in the background.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s the TV—got a Sex and the City marathon about to start, and the microwave’s set to ping any second now.”
“So you’re in a happy place.”
“I am. You’ll be home tomorrow, though, right?”
“Around lunchtime.”
“Good. I miss you, trooper.”
When she said those words, she sounded so like Amy, so like the person I’d known, and married, and stood beside on many days both short and sweet and long and hard, that I couldn’t believe that anything was wrong, or that it ever could be.
It still took me a beat too long to say.
“I miss you, too.”
Fisher had claimed Anderson as his smoking gun. I wasn’t confident he merited this status, but I wasn’t sure I had one either. Maybe I should just have asked Amy about the building up in Belltown—which presumably had to be the place the cabdriver had dropped her on the evening she went missing. But how could I bring it up? I’d actually be asking something else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to open that box. Even if it turned out to be empty, it would never be properly reclosed. Utterance is a one-way street. Questions can never be unasked.
My phone buzzed. I had a text message. It was from Amy, and it said:
Hav fun. Dn’t drnk 2 much!:-D x
And it was a nice message, and it made me smile, but the smile didn’t stick for long. Two instances—this and the message that morning—were enough to make me notice that a woman who had always written a smiley as:-) had recently begun using:-D instead and started employing shorthand. Previously she’d always pecked out every letter of every word. Why change, unless she was picking it up from someone else? Or was this just another piece of dust that meant nothing unless you piled it up with others, almost as if you were trying to make a heap big enough to cast a shadow?
I rubbed my face in my hands, hard, and shook my head, dismissing this for the moment. It was time to go back to what I’d been doing since losing Crane.
Trying to work out who the hell Rose was and what she was doing on my phone.
I’d already realized that the name coming up on the screen meant there must be an entry for it in my contacts. I’d checked and found that yes, I had such an entry. A phone number, and a name. ROSE. But I hadn’t put it there. I’d owned the phone only about a month, having changed networks when we moved to Birch Crossing and discovered that my old provider’s coverage sucked. I had fewer than twenty numbers stored, could place every one except this. I didn’t even know anyone named Rose. Never had.
I selected the number and dialed it, as I had four previous times since whoever called herself by that name had derailed me—deliberately, I assumed—from having a private conversation with Todd Crane. As before, the number rang and rang, without being diverted to an answering ser vice. I could have gotten access to a reverse directory, tried to find some information about it that way. But something told me it would be a dead end in any case.
So I kept returning to how the number could have made its way onto the phone. I could think of only one time it could have taken place. After the fight with the guys Georj had denied knowledge of, I’d found myself in the bar near Pioneer Place. There had been a long blank spot between my sitting on a stool there and waking up in the park. I’d evidently been very drunk. Could I have stored the number on the phone then, the number of some person I’d been talking to? I would have called this a possibility were it not for one thing. The name was all in caps. ROSE. I use upper and lower, always, and when I text, I spell out every word—just as Amy used to. You might think if I was drunk enough to enter a woman’s name without remembering, then I’d have forgone typographical niceties, too, but that shows how little you know me. Being that drunk meant I would have been even more tight-assed about getting it right.
To prove to myself that I wasn’t drunk, see?
So I was back to someone else putting it there. And that left me in the middle of my own question, a question I appeared unable to solve and had no one to ask about.
Just after seven, Fisher walked into the bar. He was with someone. They came to where I was sitting in the corner.
“Who’s this?”
“Peter Chen,” Fisher said. “A friend of Bill Anderson’s. They were out together on the night that…you know.”
Chen was one of those slender, round-shouldered guys whose body knows that its sole function is to chauffeur the brain around. I put out my hand, and he shook it. It was like briefly holding the hand of a child.
He looked at Fisher with mild accusation. “You said he wasn’t a cop.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Listen, Peter, just sit down.”
He did, diffidently. Looked dubiously at a small bowl of nuts the waitress had brought against my will.
“Why did you want reassurance you weren’t being brought to talk to a policeman?” I asked. “You don’t present like someone with problems with the law.”
“Of course not,” Chen said. “It’s just that they’re so wrong about Bill, and I’m tired of listening to them bad- mouth him.”
“We’re aware that Bill didn’t kill Gina or Josh.”
“You are?”
“I’ve heard enough to believe he wasn’t that kind of man. And I’ve seen what happened to Bill’s basement. He didn’t do that himself.”
Fisher interrupted me. “You’ve been in the house?”
I ignored him, kept Chen’s attention. “So what do you think happened?”
“I don’t know.” He seemed a little more comfortable now. “Like I told the cops, Bill was on edge for a few weeks, maybe a couple months. I told them that, and they ran away with the idea that it was something in his personal life. But Bill didn’t have one. A personal life. I mean, he had Gina, and Josh. He didn’t want anything else.”
“So what was bugging him? Any idea?”
“Not really. But I think maybe it was a work thing.”
“Something to do with his job? At the college?”
Chen shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably not, he would have said. We got hassles there, we all talk about it.”
“Chew on it around the coffee machine.”
