“But, so…anyway,” Gary said. “How well do you remember Donna?”
“A little. I knew her some. She wasn’t unattractive. Plus, you know, she died.”
He nodded. “All the time I was in therapy at college, I was barely able to recall what she looked like at all. But after I started having the dreams, I could remember her in every detail.”
“That’s because—”
“Just shut up, Jack, and let me speak. So one Saturday afternoon I’m in the park with Bethany. My daughter. Just turned two. I’m pushing her around on one of those trike things, you know, a handle up out the back so they don’t have to pedal. And I’m very tired because of work and not sleeping, and it’s gotten real cloudy and is clearly going to rain, and I’ve basically had enough. I tell her it’s time to go home. She turns and looks up at me, and that’s when I see it.”
“Saw what?”
“I don’t know how to describe it. She was mighty pissed, because she wanted to keep going around the park, but that wasn’t it. Not just that. There was something else coming out of them at me. Out of her eyes.”
“I don’t get what you mean.”
He shrugged. “Over the next few days…Well, kids change week to week, even day by day. You know that. She’s at that age. But…”
“But what, Gary?”
“A few weeks later, we’re all having breakfast, the standard chaos, and my wife leans forward and peers at Bethany’s face. ‘How did she get that?’ she says. I have no clue what she’s talking about. She points to the side of Bethany’s eye. And there’s this little ding there. Like a little curve, a scar. I say I have no idea, didn’t happen on my watch. Megan says it certainly didn’t happen on hers. It escalates. And all the time while we’re ‘discussing’ this, Bethany is watching me. I see this…look in her eyes again, and suddenly I know I’ve seen that mark somewhere before. I had to just leave the table. Immediately. I got up and left the house with Megan still glaring at me, pissed as hell. And as I’m driving to work, I finally get it.”
His voice was dry now. “I think about these dreams I’ve been having for months, and how I know there must be some point to them. How they’ve got to be trying to tell me something. And bang—this thought hits me. It hit me so hard I have to stop the car. Where I’d seen that scar before. On whose face, in my dreams. Donna.”
I was staring at him now. “Please tell me you’re not serious.”
“Of course I’m not. But you must have had times like this when you were a cop, when you thought, Yes, that’s what happened, or Yes, he’s the guy, and you’re only saying what some part of you has already known for days or weeks. Then, when you finally get it, it’s like everything drops into place, and you know you’re right.”
“Yeah, I know that feeling. But sometimes it just means you’ve got it so wrong that you’ve stopped making sense to anyone other than yourself.”
Fisher wasn’t listening to me, though. “For a second I actually wondered if she’d come back,” he said quietly. “Donna. To get a lot closer to me this time.”
I just sat there staring at him.
“I know how stupid it sounds,” he said. “Worse than stupid. But why the dreams, Jack?”
“Because…Look. Did you ever sleep with Donna?”
“Jack, I really didn’t notice that she existed. That was the point. That was what I felt so bad about, that there was someone who had thought so much about me and I barely registered she took up space on Planet Earth.”
“Here’s what I think,” I said. “Donna is dead and gone everywhere except in your head. You still think what happened is your fault. But the truth is, you can’t do anything about other people. Everybody’s a pod person in the end. There’s the person you know and the person you don’t—the one who was around before you met them, who does stuff when you’re not there, who will persist and do further things after you’re gone. The person you do know becomes almost an extension of your own mind, your own self. So it’s the one you don’t know that’s truly them.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I guess that’s right.”
I nodded, pursing my lips like a sage eighteen-year-old, and for a moment it was as if the walls had shaded away and the two of us sat in chairs by the side of a deserted running track, as if all our friends had gone on to other things and left us far behind, and we would be left sitting there for all time.
I think we talked some more, but not much, and at some stage I fell asleep. I woke to the sound of ringing. I jerked my head up to see Fisher crashed out in the other chair, the red lights of the bedside clock saying 3:18.
The ringing sound was my phone. I fumbled it out.
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
“Is this Jack Whalen?”
“Who is this?”
There was a pause. “My name is Bill Anderson.”
chapter
TWENTY-FIVE
Finally Shepherd called Rose back. He had more freedom than most, but there was such a thing as pushing it too far. He hoped she’d get it over with on the phone, but she insisted on meeting him face-to-face. She had wanted to do it in the old town, near the Square, but he said no. He’d never liked it there. The air was too rich. It felt crowded even when no one was around.
He arrived early. Victor Steinbrueck Park, past the northern end of the fish market, on the edge of what had once been a high bluff overlooking the bay. The grassed section was dotted with sprawled or sleeping homeless people, and a couple of the picnic tables also held small groups of the alcoholic and/or stoned. He could tell that these were not the only people present. The feeling was nowhere near as acute as it would have been at the Square, but it was stronger at night wherever you were. He felt it more and more now, everywhere. He took a table at the paved area near the front of the park, where he could look down across Alaskan Way and the traffic viaduct below to the wide open coldness of Elliott Bay. On a clear day, you could see right from the mouth of Puget Sound down to Mount Rainier in the south. Now it was all dark, and cloudy, and dead.
It was the first time he’d been motionless since reaching the city, having spent the whole day on foot. He had been to a residential street up in the Queen Anne District. He had been to a plush hotel bar in downtown. He had worked the streets, up and down, walking the central area, the international district, and also Broadway, in a grid pattern.
He had not found her.
Rose arrived an hour late. She came by herself, but Shepherd noted that none of the derelicts did more than glance at a woman, not so tall, walking alone across a park at night. Far more than those at the center of society, people on the edge have a fine sense of whom to avoid. There is evolution among the dispossessed, too, natural selection at work through violence and bad drugs: They sense things that others do not.
She sat the other side of the concrete table and did not smile or say hello.
“Evidently I misunderstood,” she said. “I believed that the idea was you returned calls right away. Not ignore them for three fucking weeks.”
“I’ve been busy,” he said. “Doing things you told me to do.”
“And?”
Shepherd realized that lone figures, male and female, now sat at some of the other tables in the park, in nondescript clothing, could-be-anybody style. Another stood thirty yards away, a guy with short red hair. None was looking at him, and none looked familiar. He knew who they were, however. Others like him, people who carried their lives in a suitcase. He was intrigued that Rose had felt the desire to have protection tonight.
Assuming that was what it was.
He refolded his arms, allowing his right hand to slip inside his coat toward the gun there.
“The last one is done,” he said. “Which was a waste of time. No one was going to listen to Oz Turner. But whatever. Anyone who ever communicated with Anderson over his thing is now dead. His notes were destroyed.
