“No,” I said. “We haven’t dealt with it.”
“I have,” she said. “It’s history. Leave it there.”
It was only for an instant, but I saw her chin tremble, two tiny little twitches. I realized that it had been a long time since I’d seen her cry. Too long, for what had happened.
“We don’t talk about it,” I said. “Ever.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“There must be.”
She shook her head, and now her face was firm. “I was pregnant. It died at five months, and I had a dead thing inside me for a while. It came out. It was cremated. We spread the ashes over the sea. My womb is broken, and I’m never going to have a child. There’s nothing else to say, Jack. It happened, and I’m done with it now.”
“So how come you changed the picture background on your phone?”
“You know why. Because I was pregnant in the photograph. I’m moving on. You should be, too. Not thinking about it. Not letting that or things that happened fifteen years ago rule my life. Sometimes people die. Children, fathers. You have to move on. Your dumb God of Bad Things is only in your head, Jack. There’s no one to catch, no perp. Nothing to be done.”
“You can’t pretend things never happened.”
“I’m not. I’m just not wallowing in it. I don’t want that crap anymore. I want to be someone else.”
“Congratulations, it’s already happened.”
“That’s an asshole thing to say.”
“Well, you’re being an asshole.”
And then we were at each other like vicious children, two people shouting at the end of a pier, and passersby watched us curiously and either changed their course to avoid the embarrassing couple or slowed a little to catch a sentence or two, neither knowing nor caring that they were witnessing a universe as it split in half.
For this to be happening, and happening here, made me so sad that my words started to catch in my throat. I could barely hear what Amy was saying.
“Amy, just look me in the eyes and tell me this isn’t about some other guy.”
Asking the question out loud made me furious, and sad, and exposed: There’s little difference between it and saying, “Mommy, why don’t you love me anymore?” It made me feel fourteen years old. This only worsened when she didn’t answer me.
“Jack, this is stupid.”
“Is it Todd Crane?”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t laugh at me, Amy. I’m asking you an adult question. Are you having an affair with Crane?”
“I…Look, a long, long time ago, years before you and I even met, Crane and I were an item. Briefly. Not since. There’s nothing inside that guy’s head, Jack.”
“So who is it? This guy Shepherd?”
She stared at me. I hadn’t scored a hit—at least, not of the right kind—but I’d clearly unbalanced her in some way I didn’t understand.
“What…how do you know about him?”
“Yes or no, Amy?”
She looked away, eyes clouded. “Of course not.”
“This relationship with Crane—would that have been around the time the company bought the building in Belltown?” Amy had started to look very unsettled now, and I realized that Gary Fisher had been right about at least one thing: The building was important after all.
“Jack, you really…you shouldn’t be getting into this. It’s got nothing to do with you, and it’s not something you’re going to understand. Believe me.”
I was unable to stop pushing now that I’d started, and I tried the remaining name I’d heard in the last few days, the name that appeared on the building’s papers, along with Amy’s and Crane’s.
“What about Marcus Fox?”
Amy’s face dropped. She actually looked pale. I nodded, suddenly disbelieving anything she had to say. Disbelieving Amy, period. All that had happened to us in the last few years no longer seemed like events we’d weathered together. Instead, the time had coalesced between us, like ice: transparent at first, stealthily growing harder and more opaque with every day that passed.
“Last chance to do this right,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, her hands shaking a little. She took the last one, lit it, and threw the empty pack over the rail. A woman who, when I first met her, took part in volunteer walks to pick litter off the beach.
“I don’t respond well to threats,” she said.
Her gaze was level and flat and cool. The fingers curled around the cigarette ended in splashes of pink. I realized I did not know this woman. Someone, some person who for now existed only in the shadows, had pushed his way into my life. He’d found his way in and was destroying the things that mattered most to me, either stealing or changing them so they were no longer mine. I’d thought I kept my house empty, protecting myself from the outside. But I had not. Amy had been inside all along, and it was she that he had come in to find.
And somehow he was taking her away from me.
I felt something very bad and dark rising in my head, a shaking I knew I might not be able to control.
“You’re not you anymore,” I said, thickly.
“Yes, Jack, I am. I’m sorry. But this is me.”
“I really hope not. Because I don’t even know this person. And she’s very hard to like.”
I walked away.
I left her standing there and stormed to the bottom section of the pier, walking stiff-legged around the final bend to where I could not see her. I was blinking fast and mechanically, my hands in fists by my sides, my arms and shoulders feeling as if they were under someone else’s control.
When I reached the very end, I forced myself to stop, to take a series of long, deep breaths. The pier felt as if it were rocking under my feet, but I knew it was not. It was the whole world, and I understood now that this was what had been in my head when I’d stood out on the deck of the house in Birch Crossing and been unable to remember where I was.
An intuition that for many years I’d been living inside a dream, and that I was now about to wake up.
When I got back, she’d gone.
I headed quickly along the pier toward land, no longer angry. I had to dodge in and out to get through the packs and couples of contented, random people, and it felt like being a ghost. I started to run.
When I got to the beginning of the pier and gazed up the ramp, I could see someone who looked like Amy, sixty yards away, almost at Ocean Avenue. I shouted her name.
If she heard me, she didn’t turn around. She walked straight to a car that was waiting on the corner, opened the back door, and got inside. The car pulled out quickly. There was no way I could catch it.
I grabbed my phone and dialed. It went to voice mail. She wasn’t taking calls from me now.
“Amy,” I said. “Call me. Please.”
Then I dialed another number and asked someone if he would find something out. While I waited for him to call me back, I hiked up the slope to the avenue and sat heavily down on one of the benches in the park. My phone rang five minutes later.
“What do you know about this guy?” Blanchard asked.
“Just the name. Why?”
“Fox was a businessman. A pretty big deal in the city for a while, apparently.”
“Was?”
“He disappeared nine, ten years ago.”
“Owing money?”
“No. But it sounds like Homicide was beginning to pay him a little attention. A witness maybe put him in the area when a young girl disappeared, up in the Queen Anne District, four, five blocks from his house. There’d been other missing girls in the city over the previous few years. More than a few. Detectives got access to Fox’s property and found a very clean basement.”
