the property. Is Ben home?”
She shook her head, started explaining that their friend had taken a turn for the worse again and that Ben had gone back down to be with him. I tried to listen but found myself distracted. I realized that I recognized some of the people in the other room. Sam, the fat and bearded man who owned the grocery store. A gaunt, gray-haired woman whose name I didn’t know, but whom I believed to be the proprietor of the bookstore. The smooth-looking gent who owned the Cascades Gallery and others also who appeared familiar. I was aware that I should probably feel embarrassed for Bobbi that I’d arrived to witness a gathering we hadn’t been invited to. But that wasn’t what I felt. The people who glanced my way didn’t look like they were preparing to greet another guest. It felt more like being a kid who had wandered into the wrong classroom by mistake, to be confronted with a group of older children, their faces familiar but their gazes flat and closed.
“I’m sure it’s just my imagination,” I said, smiling. “Sorry to have disturbed you. What’s the occasion?”
Bobbi took me by the elbow and led me gently to the door.
“Just a little reading group,” she said. “Give my regards to Amy, won’t you?”
And then I was back outside, the door closed behind me. I stared at it, then turned to go. As I walked down the drive, I saw someone else I recognized.
The sheriff nodded to me as he passed and continued on his way up to the Zimmermans’ house.
He’d never struck me as a man who read a lot.
I stood out on our deck and smoked as I drank a succession of cups of coffee. I tried to find something to eat. I tried to do most things I could think of, but in the end I did what had been brewing all along.
First I called Natalie in Santa Monica. She said Amy had just left, which meant she couldn’t have spent barely an hour there. So then I called the other number, the main switchboard for Kerry, Crane & Hardy in Los Angeles. My heart was thumping hard. Someone perky answered.
“Hey,” I said. “Seattle mailroom here. Got a package needs to get to, uh…Ms. Whalen, I think, for the meeting tomorrow. You know where she’s staying, or can I just ship it direct to your office?”
“Well, sure. Which meeting is that, by the way?”
“No idea,” I said. “It just says ‘the meeting, Thursday A.M.’ Some big thing, I guess.”
There was silence for a moment, and then she came back on. “Actually, I don’t see anything in the diary,” the girl said. “It looks kind of quiet tomorrow, in fact. Can you be more specific?”
“I’ll check and get back to you,” I said.
I sat in the chair that looked out over the forest. I tried to be dispassionate. The absence of Amy’s laptop and PDA now made sense. So did the state of her desk, if she’d had to leave in a hurry. Direct evidence for an intruder had faded. I was left with what I’d found outside—that, and a very strong feeling.
I sat with my elbows on my knees, hands held in a triangle up to my face. Instead of trying to think about things in straight lines, asking them questions in an attempt to force-fit them into a scheme of rationality I didn’t yet possess, I let them float around in my head, following their own shapes and paths and gravities, in the hope that there was some order I didn’t understand because I was looking at them the wrong way.
If there was, I didn’t find it. All I managed to do was find another fact and add it to the pile. When I’d gone out onto the deck after my run on the day Amy came back from Seattle, I’d noticed ash on the wooden floor. I’d made an assumption about its being left there from my own last cigarette. But was that likely, given what I’d just found? Or had someone perhaps been standing in the shadows of our lives back then, too?
In the shadows, but very close?
I went through to the bedroom and put a change of clothes into an overnight bag. Then I walked up the stairs and unlocked the door that led to the garage.
Boxes of possessions, ours and those belonging to the owners of the property, stood in dusty, monolithic piles. Some contained objects that belonged to me, like my family’s photo albums, just about all that remained of my childhood now. It seemed hard to believe that I would ever feel the need to open them again.
I walked past all the crates and leftover pieces of furniture to the far corner, where I moved aside a heavy workbench. Behind it there was a cupboard built into the wall. I used two keys from the house key chain to unlock it.
Inside, wrapped in a cloth, was my gun.
It had been there since the day we moved in, like a memory pushed far back into the shadows of my head. It was something I’d carried every day for years, at work. It was something I’d carried one night. It was something I should have gotten rid of.
I picked it up.
Part III
At night when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.
—Chief Seattle,
excerpt of the 1854 speech,
from the original translation by Dr. Henry Smith
chapter
THIRTY
At LAX, I took a cab to Santa Monica. I got the driver to stop fifty yards short of the house, and I walked the rest. When I arrived, I found a boy in the yard outside, playing in an orderly fashion.
“Hey,” I said.
He looked up, checked me out. Didn’t say anything.
“Uncle Jack,” I added.
He nodded, head to one side, as if conceding the truth of my observation but failing to find that it rocked his world.
I walked past him up the path and knocked on the door. It opened immediately, as I’d expected. This kid’s mother wasn’t going to be letting him mess around in the yard in the early evening without keeping an eye out.
“Well, how about that?” she said, hands theatrically on hips. “You don’t see a Whalen for months, then bang—a full house. Must be some kind of astrological thing, right? Or biorhythmic? Is a comet due?”
I felt tense. Amy’s sister was hard work at the best of times. “How are you, Natalie?”
“Still not a movie star and a bewildering ten pounds heavier than I’d like, but otherwise in an acceptable place for my culture and type. I told you on the phone you missed Amy, right? Like, hours ago?”
“We’re meeting later. Just thought I’d stop by and say hi, since I’m in town.”
She looked at me dubiously. “I’ll alert the media. You want coffee while you’re doing this hi saying?”
I followed her inside. There was a big pot ready and waiting in the kitchen, as always when I’d visited Natalie’s house. It was one of the few points of congruence between the sisters.
She handed me a large cup, filled it. “So. Amy didn’t say you were gracing the area.”
“She doesn’t know. It’s a surprise.”
“Uh-huh. Tangled web you guys weave. Speaking of which, is it just me or has big sis been acting a little wacked recently?”
“In what way?” I said, careful to keep my voice flat.
“She drops by here today with no notice, then asks me if I have tea. Well, of course I have tea. I am the
