Kitabı oku: «The Intruders»

How can we be sure we are not impostors?

Jacques Lacan

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part 2

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Part 3

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Bad Things Extract

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By Michael Marshall

About the Publisher

Prologue

Thump, thump, thump. You could hear it halfway up the street. It was bizarre the neighbours didn’t complain. Or do so more often, and more stridently. Gina sure as hell would – especially if the music sucked this bad. She knew she ought to go upstairs as soon as she got indoors, yell at Josh to turn it down. She also knew he’d look at her in that way teenagers have, like they’re wondering who you are and what gives you the right to bother them and what the hell happened in your life to make you so boring and old. He was a good son at heart though, and so he’d roll his eyes and nudge the stereo down a notch, and then over the next half hour the volume would creep up until it was even louder than before.

Usually Bill was around to get into it with him – if he wasn’t hidden in his basement, tinkering – but tonight he was out with a couple of faculty colleagues. That was good, partly so he could get the bowling out of his system without involving Gina, who couldn’t stand the dumb sport, also because he went out very seldom. They usually managed to grab a meal somewhere once every couple weeks, just the two of them, but most evenings this year had seen him disappearing downstairs after dinner, wrench in hand and a pleasurably preoccupied look on his face. For a while he’d generated his own strange noises down there, low booming sounds you felt in the pit of your stomach, but thankfully that had stopped. It was healthy for a guy to get out the house now and then, hang with other guys – even if Pete Chen and Gerry Johnson were two of the geekiest dudes Gina had met in her entire life, and she found it impossible to imagine them cutting loose at bowling or drinking or indeed anything at all that didn’t involve UNIX and/or a soldering iron. It also gave Gina a little time to herself, which – no matter how much you love your husband – is a nice thing once in a while. Her plan was a couple hours in front of the tube with her choice of show – screw the documentary channels. In preparation she’d gone to the big deli on Broadway, picked up groceries for the week and a handful of deluxe nibbles for right now.

As she opened the door to the house and stepped into a zone of even higher volume, she wondered if Josh ever considered that his vanilla mom might have rocked out on her own account, back in the day. That before she’d fallen in love with a young physics lecturer called Bill Anderson and settled down to a life of happy domesticity, she’d done plenty time in the grungier venues of Seattle-Tacoma and its environs, had been no stranger to high volume, cheap beer and waking up with a head that felt like someone had set about it with hammers. That she’d bounced sweatily to Pearl Jam and Ideal Mausoleum and even Nirvana themselves, back when they were local unknowns and sharp and hungry instead of hollow-faced and dying, and most memorably on a summer night when she’d puked while crowd-surfing, been dropped on her head and still got lucky in the soaking and dope-reeking restrooms with some guy she’d never met before, and never saw again.

Probably not. She smiled to herself.

Just went to show kids didn’t know everything, huh.

An hour later, she’d had enough. The thumping was okay while she was just watching with half an eye – and the volume had actually dropped for a while, which maybe suggested he was doing some homework, which was a relief – but it had started ratcheting up again and in ten minutes there was a re-run of a West Wing episode she’d never seen before. You needed a clear head and peace and quiet to follow what the hell was going on with those guys, they talked so fast. Plus, Jesus, it was half past nine and getting beyond a joke.

She tried hollering up at the ceiling (Josh’s bedroom was directly overhead) but received no indication she’d been heard. So she sighed, put her depleted plate of goodies on the coffee table, and hoisted herself off the couch. Tramped upstairs, feeling as if she was pushing against a wall of noise, and banged on his door.

After a fairly short time it was opened by some skinny guy with extraordinary hair. For a split second Gina didn’t even recognize him. She wasn’t looking at a boy any more, nothing like, and Gina realized suddenly that she and Bill were sharing their house with a young man.

‘Honey,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to cramp your style, but do you have anything that’s more like actual music, if you’re going to play it that loud?’

‘Huh?’

‘Turn it down.’

He grinned lopsidedly, and went back into the room to jack the volume down. He actually cut it in half, which emboldened Gina to take a step into his room. It struck her it had been a while since she’d been there when he was also present. In years past she and Bill had spent hours sitting on the floor here together, watching their tot careering around on wobbly legs and bringing them random objects with a triumphant ‘Gah!’, thinking how magical it all was; and later tucking him in and reading a story, or two, or three; then perched on the bed in the early years of homework and puzzling out sums.

At some point in the last year the rules had changed. It was a solo mission now when she came in to fix the bed or sweep up piles of t-shirts. She was in and out quickly, too, remembering her own youth well enough to respect her child’s space.

She saw that, amongst the chaos of clothing and CD cases and pieces of at least one dismembered computer, there was evidence of homework being tackled.

‘How’s it going?’

He shrugged. Shrugging was the lingua franca. She remembered that too. ‘Okay,’ he added.

‘Good. Who’s that you’re listening to, anyway?’

Josh blushed faintly, as if his mom had asked who this Connie Lingus was, that everyone was talking about.

‘Stu Rezni,’ he said, diffidently. ‘He …’

‘Used to hit sticks for Fallow. I know. I saw him at the Astoria. Before they knocked it down. He was so wasted he fell off his stool.’

She was gratified to see her son’s eyebrows shoot up. She tried not to smile.

‘Can you keep the volume sane for a while, honey? There’s a show I want to watch. Plus people are staggering up the street with bleeding ears, and you know how that lowers the tone.’

‘Sure,’ he said, with a genuine smile. ‘Sorry.’

‘No problem,’ she said, thinking I hope he’s going to be okay. He was a nice boy, polite, a slacker who still got (most of) his chores done eventually. She hoped without a trace of egotism that he’d taken on enough of her, too, along with the big old helping of Bill he’d absorbed. This young man already spent a lot of time alone, and seldom seemed more content than when taking something apart or putting it back together. That was cool, of course, but she hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she saw evidence of his first hangover. Man cannot live by coding skills alone, not even in these strange days.

‘Later,’ she said, hoping it didn’t sound too lame.

The doorbell rang.

As she hurried downstairs she heard the volume drop a little farther, and smiled. She still had this expression on her face when she opened the front door.

It was dark outside, the street lamps at the corner spreading orange light over the fallen leaves on the lawn and sidewalk. A strong breeze rustled those still left on the trees, sending a few to spiral down and around the crossroads where the two residential streets met.

A figure was standing a couple of yards back from the door. It was tall, wearing a long dark coat.

‘Yes?’ Gina said.

She flipped the porch light on. It showed a man in his mid-fifties, with short, dark hair, sallow skin in flat planes around his face. His eyes seemed dark too, almost black. They gave no impression of depth, as if they had been painted on his head from the outside.

‘I’m looking for William Anderson,’ he said.

‘He’s not here right now. Who are you?’

‘Agent Shepherd,’ the man said, and then paused, for a deep cough. ‘Mind if I come inside?’

Gina did mind, but he just stepped up onto the porch and walked right past her and into the house.

‘Hold on a second there, buster,’ she said, leaving the door open and following him. ‘Can I see some ID?’

The man pulled out a wallet and flipped it open at her without bothering to look in her direction. Instead he panned his gaze methodically around the room, then up at the ceiling.

‘What’s this about?’ Gina asked. She’d seen the three big letters clearly enough, but the idea of having a real live Fed in the house didn’t even slightly compute.

‘I need to talk to your husband,’ the man said. His matter-of-factness made the situation seem even more absurd.

Gina put her hands on her hips. This was her house, after all. ‘Well, he’s out, like I said.’

The man turned toward her. His eyes, which had appeared flat and dead before, slowly seemed to be coming alive.

‘You did, and I heard you. I want to know where he is. And I need to take a look around your house.’

‘The hell you do,’ Gina said. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but …’

His hand came up so fast she didn’t even see it. The first she knew was when it was clamped around the bottom of her face, holding her jaw like a claw.

She was too shocked to make a sound as he began to pull her slowly toward him. But then she started to shout, substituting volume for the articulation denied her by being unable to move the lower half of her mouth.

‘Where is it?’ he asked. Matter-of-fact had become almost bored.

Gina had no clue what he was talking about. She tried to pull away, hitting at him with her fists, kicking out, jerking her head back and forth. He put up with this for about one second and then whipped his other hand around to smack her across the side of her head. Her ears rang like a dropped hubcap and she nearly fell, but he held her up, wrenching her jaw to the side in the process, making it feel like it was going to pop out.

‘I’m going to find it anyway,’ he said, and now she knew she could feel something tearing at the side of her head. ‘But you can save us both some time and trouble. Where is it? Where does he work?’

‘I … don’t …’

‘Mom?’

Gina and the man turned together, to see Josh at the bottom of the stairs. Her son blinked, a deep frown spreading across his face.

‘Let go of my mom.’

Gina tried to tell Josh to get back upstairs, to just run, but it came out as desperate, breathless grunts. The man stuck his other hand in the pocket of his coat, started taking something out.

Josh hit the ground running and launched himself across the living room. ‘Let go of my …’

Gina just had time to realize she’d got it wrong before, that her son wasn’t a man after all but just a little boy, stretched taller and thinner but still so young, when the man shot him in the face.

She screamed then, or tried to, and the tall man swore quietly and dragged her with him as he walked over to the front door and pushed it shut.

Then he pulled her back into the room where her son lay on the floor, one arm and one leg moving in twitches. Her head felt like it was full of bright light, stuttering with shock. Then he punched her precisely on the jaw and she didn’t know where she was.

A second or several minutes passed.

Then she was aware again, sprawled on the floor, half-propped against the couch she’d been curled up in ten minutes before. The plate of food lay upside down within arms’ reach. Her jaw was hanging loose, she couldn’t seem to move it. It felt as if someone had pushed long, thick nails into both of her ears.

The man in the coat was squatted down next to Josh, whose right arm was still moving, lazily smearing through the pool of blood seeping from his head.

The smell of gasoline reached Gina’s face. The man finished squirting something from a small metal can over her son, then dropped it on him and stood up.

He looked down at Gina.

‘Last chance,’ he said. His forehead was beaded with sweat, though the house was not warm. In one hand he held a cigarette lighter. In the other he held his gun. ‘Where is it?’

As he sparked the lighter up, holding it over Josh and looking her in the eyes, Gina knew that – whatever this was – it wasn’t a last chance to live.

Part 1

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc – is sure to be noticed.

Søren Kierkegaard

The Sickness Unto Death

Chapter 1

There was this girl I knew back in high school. Her name was Donna and even that was wrong about her, as if she’d been mislabelled at birth. She wasn’t a Donna. Not in real terms. She made you realize there must be an underlying rhythm to the universe, and you knew this purely because she wasn’t hitting it. She walked a little too quickly. She turned her head a little too slow. It was like she was dubbed onto reality a beat out of true. She was one of those kids you saw at a distance, toting a pile of books, standing diffidently with people you didn’t realize were even at the school. She had friends, she did okay in class, she wasn’t a total loser and she wasn’t dumb. She was just kind of hard to see.

Like all schools we had a pecking order of looks, but Donna somehow wasn’t on the same scale. Her skin was pale and her features fine-boned and evenly spaced, faultless except for a crescent scar to the side of her right eye, legacy of some toddling collision with a table. The eyes themselves were inky-grey and very clear, and on the rare occasions when you got to look into them you received a vivid sense she was real after all – which only made you wonder what you thought she was the rest of the time. She was a little skinny, maybe, but otherwise slightly cute in every way except that she somehow just … wasn’t. It was as if she released no pheromones, or they operated on an inaudible waveband, broadcasting their signal to sexual radios either out of date or not yet invented.

I found her attractive, nonetheless, though I was never really sure why. So I noticed when it looked like she was hanging out with – or in the vicinity of – a guy named Gary Fisher. Fisher was one of the kids who strode the halls as if accompanied by fanfare, the group that makes anyone who’s been through the American school system instantly wary of egalitarian philosophies later in life. He played football with conspicuous success. He was on the starting basketball line-up, played significant tennis too. He was good-looking, naturally: when God confers control of sport’s spheres he tends to give the package a buff too. Fisher wasn’t like the actors you see in teen movies now, impossibly handsome and free of facial blemish, but he looked right, back in the days when the rest of us stared dismally in the mirror every morning and wondered what had gone wrong, and whether it would get better, or even worse.

He was also, oddly, not too much of an asshole. I knew him a little from track, where I had a minor talent for hurling things a long way. I’d gathered from the jock grapevine that a realignment had taken place among the ruling classes, principally that Gary’s girl Nicole was now going with one of his friends instead, in what appeared to be an amicable transfer of chattels. You didn’t have to be too keen an observer of the social scene to perceive a degree of interest in taking her place – but the truly weird thing was that Donna seemed to believe herself amongst the runners. It was as if she had received intelligence from somewhere that the caste system was illusory, and actually you could fit a square peg in a round hole. She couldn’t sit at the same table at lunch, of course, but would wind up on one nearby, close to Gary’s line of sight. She would engineer bumps in the corridor, but manage nothing more than nervous laughs. I even saw her a couple of Fridays out at Radical Bob’s, a burger/pizza place where people tended to start the weekend. She would stop by whatever table Fisher was sitting at and deliver some remark about a class or assignment which would fall to the floor like a brick. Then she would wander off, a little too slowly now, as if hoping to be called back. This never happened. Other than being mildly perplexed I doubt Fisher had the slightest clue what was going on. After a couple weeks a deal was done in some gilded back room – or the back seat of a gilded car, more likely – and one morning Gary was to be found in the company of Courtney Willis, textbook hot blonde. Life went on.

For most of us.

Two days later, Donna was found in the bathtub at her parents’ home. Her wrists had been cut with determination and only one testing slash on the forearm. The adult consensus, which I overheard more than once, was it could not have been a fast way to go – despite a last-ditch attempt to hasten progress by pushing a pair of nail scissors deep into her right eye socket, as if that crescent scar had been some kind of omen. There was a hand-written letter to Gary Fisher on the floor, the words blurred by water which had spilled over the edges of the tub. Lots of people later claimed to have seen the letter, or a photocopy, or overheard someone saying what was in it. But as far as I know, none of this was true.

News spread fast. People went through the motions and there were outbreaks of crying and prayer, but I don’t think anyone was shaken to their core. Personally, I was not surprised or even particularly sorry. That sounds callous but the truth was it felt like it made sense. Donna was a weird chick.

A strange girl, a dumb death. End of story.

Or so it seemed to most of us. Gary Fisher’s reaction was different, and at the time it was the most surprising thing I had ever seen. Everything was new and strange back then, events backlit by the foreshortened perspective of a fledging life. The guy who did something halfway cool one time became our very own Clint Eastwood. A party that happened a year before could take on the status of legend, generating nicknames that would last a lifetime. And when someone went haring out into the farther reaches of left field, it tended to stick in your mind.

On the following Monday we heard Fisher had quit the team. All the teams. He withstood being bawled out, and walked away. Maybe these days you’d get some kind of slacker kudos for that kind of shit. Not in the 1980s, and not in the town where I grew up. It was so out there it was disturbing – the Alpha Teenager Who Resigned. Fisher became the guy you’d see wandering across the campus in transit between the library and class, as if he’d slipped into Donna’s slot. And he worked. Hard. Over the next months he hauled his grade point average up, first a little, and then a lot. He went from being a C student – and some of those had been massaged through sports prowess – to Bs and some regular As. Maybe he was getting parent-funded extra tuition after school, but actually I doubt it. I think he just jumped tracks, decided to be some other guy. By the end you hardly ever saw him except in class. The masses dealt with him warily. No one wanted to get too close, in case the madness was catching.

I did see him this one afternoon, though. I’d been out training for our last ever track meet, and stayed on after the rest of the team left. Theoretically I was practising the javelin but really I just liked being there when no one else was around. I’d spent a lot of hours running that track and it had started to dawn on me that the end was coming and some things were happening for the last time. As I pounded up the approach, back and forth, refining my run-up, I saw a guy walking from the far end. After I while I realized it was Gary Fisher.

He wandered the periphery, not headed anywhere in particular. He’d been one of our star sprinters before he quit, and maybe he was there for the same kind of reason that I was. He wound up a few yards away and watched for a little while. Eventually he spoke.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Not going to win, though.’

‘How’s that?’

I explained that a guy from another school had recently revealed himself not only to be good at throwing, but to care about it also. After easy wins had stopped being a given, my interest had waned. I didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the bottom line.

He shrugged. ‘Never know. Could be Friday’s going to be your day. Be cool to go out on a win.’

For a moment then, I found I did care. Maybe I could do it, this last time. Fisher stood a while longer, looking across the track, as if hearing the beat of feet in races gone by.

‘She was provisional,’ I said, suddenly.

It was like he hadn’t heard me. Then he slowly turned his head. ‘What’s that?’

‘Donna,’ I said. ‘She never really … locked in, you know? Like she was just renting space.’

He frowned. I kept going.

‘It was like … like she knew it might just not work out, you know? Like she came into the world aware that happy-ever-after was a long shot. So she put all her chips on one bet to win. Came in red instead of black, so she just walked away from the table.’

I hadn’t rehearsed any of this, but when I’d said it I felt proud. It meant something profound, or sounded like it might – which is plenty good enough when you’re eighteen.

Fisher looked at the ground for a minute, and then seemed to nod faintly. ‘Thanks.’

I nodded back, all out of words, and went thudding down the track to hurl my spear. Maybe I was showing off, hoping to impress the Gary Fisher of eight months before. Either way I pulled my arm over far too fast, reopened an old split on the tip of my middle finger, and wound up not making the last meet after all.

The end of school came and went. Like everyone else I was too busy rushing through celebrated rites of passage to pay much attention to people I didn’t really know. Tests, dances, everything hurried as our childhoods started to run out of gas. Then – bang: out into the real world, which has a way of feeling like that super-test you never got around to studying for. It still feels that way to me sometimes. I don’t think I heard Fisher’s name mentioned once during the summer, and then I left town to go to college. I thought about him every now and then over the next couple years, but eventually he dropped out of my head along with all the other things that had no relevance to my life.

And so I was not really prepared for the experience of meeting him again, nearly twenty years later, when he turned up at the door of my house and started talking as if no time had passed at all.

I was at my desk. I was trying to work, though a time management study would probably have suggested my job consisted of staring out the window, with only occasional and apparently random glances at a computer screen. The house was very quiet, and when the phone rang it jerked me back in my chair.

I reached out, surprised Amy was calling the land line rather than my cell, but not thinking much more about it than that. Being on the phone to my wife meant a break from work. Then I could make more coffee. Go have a cigarette on the deck. Time would pass. Tomorrow would come.

‘Hey, babe,’ I said. ‘How stands the corporate struggle?’

‘Is this Jack? Jack Whalen?’

It was a man’s voice. ‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up and paying more attention. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Hang onto your hat, my friend. It’s Gary Fisher.’

The name sent up a flag straight away, but it took another second to haul it up through the years. Names from the past are like streets you haven’t driven in a while. You have to remember where they go.

‘You still there?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just surprised. Gary Fisher? Really?’

‘It’s my name,’ the guy said, and laughed. ‘I wouldn’t lie about something like that.’

‘I guess not,’ I said. I had question marks right across the dial. ‘How did you get my number?’

‘A contact in LA. I tried calling last night.’

‘Right,’ I said, remembering a couple of blank calls on the machine. ‘You didn’t leave a message.’

‘Thought it might come across kind of weird, getting in touch after nearly twenty years.’

‘A little,’ I admitted. I found it hard to imagine Fisher and I had anything to discuss unless he was running the class reunion, which seemed unlikely in the extreme. ‘So, what can I do for you, Gary?’

‘It’s more what I might be able to do for you,’ he said. ‘Or maybe both of us. Look – where is it you live, exactly? I’m in Seattle for a few days. Thought it might be cool to meet up, talk about old times.’

‘Place called Birch Crossing. Hour and a half inland. Plus my wife’s got the car,’ I added. Amy has claimed that if you could get enough unsociable people together in a room to vote, they’d make me their king. She’s probably right. Since my book came out I’d been contacted by a few other people from the past, though none as far back as Fisher. I hadn’t bothered to reply to their emails, forwarded via the publisher. Okay, so we used to know each other. What’s your point?

‘I’ve got a day to kill,’ Fisher persisted. ‘Had a string of meetings cancelled.’

‘You don’t want to just tell me on the phone?’

‘Would be a long call. Seriously, you’d be doing me a favour, Jack. I’m going nuts in this hotel and if I walk round Pike Place Market one more time I’m going to wind up with a big dead fish I don’t need.’

I thought about it. Curiosity struck a deal with the desire not to work, the terms brokered by a small part of my soul for which – absurdly – Gary Fisher’s name evidently still held something of a charge.

‘Well, okay,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

He arrived a little after two. I’d achieved nothing in the meantime. Even a call to Amy’s cell phone for a hey-how are-you had dead-ended in her answering service. I was becalmed in the kitchen thinking vaguely about lunch when I heard someone pulling around in the drive.

I walked up the polished wood steps and opened the front door to see a black Lexus where our SUV usually sat – a vehicle that was currently in Seattle, with my wife. The car door opened and some late-thirties guy got out. He crunched over the gravel.

‘Jack Whalen,’ he said, breath clouding up around his face. ‘So you grew up. How did that happen?’

‘Beats me,’ I said. ‘Did everything I could to avoid it.’

I made coffee and we took it down into the living room. He looked around for a few moments, checking out the view of the wooded valley through the big plate glass windows, then turned to me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Still got that good throwing arm?’

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Don’t get much occasion to throw stuff these days.’

‘You should. It’s very liberating. I try to throw something at least once a week.’

He grinned, and for a moment he looked pretty much how I remembered him, albeit better dressed. He reached a hand across the coffee table. I shook it.

‘Looking good, Jack.’

‘You too.’

He was. You can tell men in good condition just from how they use a chair. There’s a confidence in their poise, a sense that sitting is not a relief but merely one of the many positions in which their body is at ease. Gary looked trim and fit. His hair was well cut and not-grey, and he had the skin that healthy eating and non-smoking delivers to those with the patience to endure that type of lifestyle. His face had matured into that of a youthful senator from somewhere unimportant, the kind who might have a shot at Vice President some day, and his eyes were clear and blue. The only thing I had over him was that the lines around my mouth and eyes were less pronounced, which surprised me.

He was silent for a few moments, doubtless making a similar assessment. Meeting a contemporary after a long time personifies the passage of time in a serious and irrevocable way.

‘I read your book,’ he said, confirming what I’d suspected.

‘So you’re the one.’

‘Really? Didn’t do so well? I’m surprised.’

‘It did okay,’ I admitted. ‘Better than. Problem is, I’m not sure there’s another.’

He shrugged. ‘Everyone thinks you’ve got to do things over and over. Nail your colours to the mast, make it who you are. Maybe one was all you had.’

‘Could be.’

‘You couldn’t go back to the police force?’ He saw the way I looked at him. ‘You thank the LAPD in the acknowledgements, Jack.’

Slightly against my will, I smiled back. Fisher still had that effect. ‘No. I’m done there. So how do you earn a buck these days?’

‘Corporate law. I’m a partner in a firm back east.’

Him being an attorney figured, but didn’t give me a lot to work with. We knocked sentences back and forth for a little while, mentioning people and places we’d once known, but it didn’t catch alight. It’s one thing if you’ve kept in touch over the years, lit beacons to steer you across the seas of time. Otherwise it seems strange, being confronted with this impostor who happens to have the same name as a kid you once knew. Though Fisher had referred to old times we didn’t really have any, unless pounding around the same sports track counted, or a shared ability to remember the menu at Radical Bob’s. A lot had happened to me since then, probably to him too. It was evident that neither of us counted classmates as friends or retained ties to the town where we’d grown up. The kids we’d once been now seemed imaginary, a genesis myth to explain how we’d used up our first twenty years.

‘So,’ I said, swallowing the rest of my coffee. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’

He smiled. ‘You’re done with the small talk?’

‘Never really been a core skill.’

‘I remember. What makes you think I’ve got something to say?’

‘You said you did. Plus, until you got my new number, you evidently thought I still lived in LA. That’s not a couple hours’ drive from Seattle. So you started looking for me for some other reason.’

He nodded, as if pleased. ‘How’d you find this place, anyway? Birch Crossing? Is it even on maps?’

‘Amy did. We’d talked about getting out of LA. I had, at least. She got this new job. It meant we could basically be anywhere as long as she could get to an airport once in a while. She found this place online or somewhere, came and checked it out. I took her word for it.’

‘Liking it?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Kind of a change from Los Angeles, though.’

‘That was partly the point.’

‘Any kids?’

‘No.’

‘I got a couple. Five and two years old. You should try it. They change your life, dude.’

‘So I hear. Where are you based these days?’

‘Evanston? Though I work downtown Chicago. Which brings me to it, I guess.’

He stared at his hands for a moment, and then started talking in earnest.

Chapter 2

‘Here’s what I know,’ he said. ‘Three weeks ago two people were murdered in Seattle. A woman and her son, killed in their own home. The police were called after a neighbour noticed smoke and came outside to see flames in the house. When the police get in they find Gina Anderson, thirty-seven, lying in the living room. Someone dislocated her jaw and broke her neck. The other side of the room was Joshua Anderson. He’d been shot in the head and then set on fire. According to the fire department it wasn’t this that burned the house, though: the flames had only just got to that part when they arrived. The main blaze had been set in the basement, where the woman’s husband, Bill Anderson, had a workshop. From the debris it looked like someone had trashed the place, emptied out a bunch of filing cabinets full of notes and papers, and put a match to it all. I don’t know how well you know Seattle, but this is up in the Broadway area, overlooking downtown. The houses are close to each other, bungalows, two storey, mainly of wooden construction. If the fire had really gotten going it wouldn’t have taken much to jump to the ones around it and wipe out the whole block.’

‘So where’s the husband?’ I asked.

‘No one knows. In the early part of the evening he was out with two male friends. He’s a lecturer at the Community College, about a half mile away. They have a semi-regular night out, every six weeks. These guys confirm Anderson was with them until a quarter after ten. They split up outside a bar, went their separate ways. Nobody’s seen Anderson since.’

‘How are the police handling it?’

‘Nobody saw anyone come or go from the house during the evening. The prevailing assumption is Anderson is the suspect, and they’re not looking anywhere else. Problem is working out why he’d do this. His colleagues say he seemed distracted, and they and others claim he’d been that way for a few weeks, maybe a month or more. But no one’s got anything on problems he might have had, there’s no talk of another woman or anything along those lines. Lecturers don’t make a whole lot of cash, and Gina Anderson wasn’t earning, but there’s no evidence of a drastic need for money. There’s a life insurance policy on the wife but it’s hardly worth getting out of bed for, never mind killing someone.’

‘The husband did it,’ I said. ‘They always do. Except when it’s the wives.’

Fisher shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. According to the neighbours, everything was fine. Their son liked his music a little loud, but otherwise all was good. No arguments, no atmosphere.’

‘Bad families are like the minds of functioning alcoholics. You have to live inside to have the first clue what’s going on.’

‘So how do you read it?’

‘Could be one of any number of scenarios. Maybe Bill was laying into Gina that night over something you and I will never understand. Son hears the noise, comes down, yells at dad to stop. Dad won’t. Son’s been seeing this all his life, tonight he’s not taking it any more. He goes to the closet and gets his father’s gun. Comes back and says he means it – stop beating up on Mom. They fight, dad grabs hold of the gun, or it goes off accidentally, whatever. Son gets shot. Wife’s screaming the place down, his son’s lying on the floor, Anderson knows he’s not walking away from this. So he sets a fire in the part of the house that’s known to be his domain to make it look like an intruder, then makes sure there’s no witnesses to tell the story another way. Right now he’s the other side of the country and drunk and practically out of his mind with remorse, or else halfway to convincing himself they brought it on themselves. He’ll either commit suicide within the week or get caught in eighteen months living quietly with a waitress in North Carolina.’

Fisher was silent for a moment. ‘That works, I guess,’ he said. ‘But I don’t believe it. Three reasons. First is Anderson is the nerds’ poster nerd, a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. He doesn’t present as someone who could physically dominate two other people.’

‘Body weight is irrelevant,’ I said. ‘Domination is mental. Always.’

‘Which also doesn’t sound like Anderson, but I’ll let that pass. The second reason is there’s a witness who claims to have seen someone who looked like Anderson entering the street at around twenty to eleven. No one’s paying much attention to this woman because she’s old and seminuts and loaded to her back teeth with lithium, but she claims she saw him get far enough down the road to see his house, then turn and run away.’

‘Not someone you’re going to put on the stand,’ I said. ‘And even if she did see him, it could be Anderson setting up an alibi. What else you got?’

‘Just this. Joshua Anderson died from the burn injuries in the end, but he was already leaving the world care of the gunshot wound to the face. But no bullet was found at the scene. The pathology report suggests it got trapped in the skull, bounced around, never made it out the other side. There’s no exit wound. But there are indications of subsequent trauma from a sharp instrument. So the person who killed him then stuck a knife in the mess and dug out the shell, while the kid’s clothes were on fire. That doesn’t sound to me like something a physics lecturer could do. To his son.’

He sat back in his chair. ‘Especially when he didn’t own a gun in the first place.’

I shrugged.

‘Sure,’ I admitted. ‘There’s loose ends. There always are. But the smart money stays on the husband. What’s your interest in this, anyhow?’

‘It relates to an estate we’re handling back home,’ he said. ‘I can’t get into it more than that right now.’

For just a moment Fisher seemed evasive, but the details of his professional life were not my concern. ‘So why are you telling me about it?’

‘I want your help.’

‘With what?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really.’

‘It would benefit me, benefit us, to find out what actually took place that night.’

‘The police are on it, aren’t they?’

‘The cops are all about proving Anderson murdered his wife and son, and I don’t think that’s what happened.’

I smiled. ‘So I gather. But that doesn’t mean you’re right. And I still don’t get why you’re here.’

‘You’re a cop.’

‘No. I was a cop.’

‘Same thing. You have investigative experience.’

‘For once your research fails you, Gary. I was with Patrol Division all the way. A street grunt.’

‘Not formal experience, no. I know you never made detective. I also know you never even applied.’

I looked hard at him. ‘Gary, if you’re going to tell me you somehow got access to my personnel files, then …’

‘I didn’t need to, Jack. You’re a smart guy. You wanted to make detective, you would have. You didn’t, so I figure you didn’t try.’

‘I’m not very susceptible to flattery,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘I know that too. And I remember you would rather not try than try and fail, and maybe that’s the real reason you spent nearly a decade on the streets.’

It had been a while since someone had spoken to me that way. He saw this in my face.

‘Look,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘This isn’t coming out right. I’m sorry. What happened to the Andersons isn’t actually a huge deal to me. It’s just a little weird and might make my life simpler if I could get it unravelled. I read your book. It seemed to me you might be interested. That’s all.’

‘I appreciate the thought,’ I said. ‘But that feels like another life now. Plus I was on the job in LA, not Seattle. I don’t know the city and I don’t know the people. I couldn’t do much more than you, and I can do a lot less than the cops. If you genuinely think there’s a problem with the way they’re investigating this, it’s them you should be talking to.’

‘I tried,’ he said. ‘They think the same as you.’

‘So probably that’s the way it is. A sad story. The end.’

Fisher nodded slowly, his eyes on the view outside the window. The light was beginning to turn, the sky heading towards a more leaden grey. ‘Looks like heavy weather. I should probably be heading back. I don’t want to be driving over that mountain in the dark.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, standing. ‘After that drive I guess you were hoping for more.’

‘I wanted an opinion, and I got one. Too bad it wasn’t the one I was looking for.’

‘Could have got you this far on the phone,’ I smiled. ‘Like I said.’

‘Yeah, I know. But hey – been good to see you after all this time. To catch up. Let’s keep in touch.’

I said yes it had, and yes we should, and that was that. We small-talked a bit longer and then I walked him to the door and watched as he drove away.

I stayed outside for a few moments after he’d gone, though it was cold. I felt a little as if a bigger kid had come up to me in the playground and asked if I wanted to join his game, and I had said no out of pride. Growing older, it appears, does not mean growing up.

I went back indoors and returned to my desk. There I wasted probably the last straightforward afternoon of my life gazing out of the window, waiting vaguely for time to pass.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d been working harder that morning, let the machine take Fisher’s call. Even if he’d left a message I’d have been unlikely to get around to calling him back. Most of the time I don’t think this would have made any difference. I believe this thing was heading towards me regardless, on the horizon, inevitable. I’d like to claim I had no warning, that it came from nowhere out of a clear blue sky. It wouldn’t be true. The signs and causes were there. At times in the last nine months, perhaps the last few years, I had noticed little differences. I’d tried to ignore them, to keep going, and so when it happened it was like falling off a log, a sturdy trunk that had been floating down the same river for many years, to discover there’d never been any water supporting me after all and I was suddenly flat on my back in a strange land I didn’t recognize: a dusty plain where there were no trees, no mountains, no landmarks of any kind, no way of telling how I might have got there from wherever I had been before.

The fall must have been coming for a while, gathering pace below the threshold of discernible change. At least since the afternoon on the deck of the new house, probably for months or even years before that. But digging up the roots of chaos is like saying it’s not the moment the car hits you that’s important, or the split second when you step off the kerb without looking. You can argue that as soon as you stopped checking when you crossed the street, that’s when the trouble really began. The moment of impact is what you remember, however. That breathless instant of screech and thud, the second when the car hits and all other futures are cancelled.

The beat in time when it suddenly becomes clear that something in your world is badly wrong.

Chapter 3

A beach on the Pacific coast, a seemingly endless stretch of sand: almost white by day but now turning sallow-grey and matt in the fading light. The afternoon’s few footprints have been washed away, in one of nature’s many patient acts of erasure. In summer kids from inland spend the weekends here, gleaming in the sun of uncomplicated youth and pumping default-value music out of baby speakers. They are almost never picked off by sharpshooters, sadly, but go on to have happy and unfulfilled lives making too much noise all over the planet. On a Thursday a long way out of season the beach is left undisturbed except for the busy teams of sandpipers who skitter up and down at the waterline, legs scissoring like those of cheerful mechanical toys. They have concluded the day’s business and flown to bed, leaving the beach quiet and still.

Half a mile up the coast is the small and bespoke seaside town of Cannon Beach, with its short run of discreet hotels, but here most of the buildings are modest vacation homes, none more than two storeys high and each a decent distance from its neighbour. Some are squat white oblongs in need of re-plastering, others more adventurous arrangements of wooden octagonal structures. All have weathered walkways leading over the scrubby dune, down to the sand. It is November now and almost all these buildings are dark, the smell of suntan lotion and candle wax sealed in to await future vacations, to welcome parents who each time glumly spy a little more grey in these unfamiliar mirrors, and children who stand a little taller and a little farther from the adults who were once the centre of their lives.

There has been no precipitation for two days – very rare for Oregon at this time of year – but this evening a thick knot of cloud is coalescing out to sea, like a drop of ink spreading in water. It will take an hour or two to make landfall, where it will turn the shadows rich blue-black and strip the air with relentless rain.

In the meantime a girl is sitting on the sand, down at the tide line.

Her watch said it was twenty-five minutes before six, which was okay. When it was fifteen minutes before six she had to go home, well not home exactly, but the cottage. Dad always called it the beach house but Mom always said the cottage, and as Dad was not here it was obviously the cottage this time. Dad not being here made a number of other differences, one of which Madison was currently considering.

When they came to spend a week at the beach most days were exactly the same. They would drive up to Cannon Beach, have a look around the galleries (once), to get groceries from the market (twice), and see if there was maybe something cool in Geppetto’s Toy Shoppe (as often as Madison would make it happen, three times was the record). Otherwise they just lived on the sands. They got up early and walked along the beach, then back again. The day was spent sitting and swimming and playing – with a break mid-day in the cottage for sandwiches and to cool down – and then around five o’clock a long walk again, in the opposite direction from the one in the morning. The early walk was just for waking up, filling sleepy heads with light. At the end of the afternoon it was all about shells – and sand dollars in particular. Though it was Mom who liked them the most (she had saved all the ones they’d ever found, in a cigar box back at home) the three of them looked together, a family with one ambulatory goal. After the walk everyone showered and there were nachos and bean dip and frosted glasses of Tropical Punch Kool-Aid in the beach house and then they’d drive out for dinner to Pacific Cowgirls in Cannon Beach, which had fishermen’s nets on the walls and breaded shrimp with cocktail sauce and waiters who called you ma’am even if you were small.

But when Madison and her mom had arrived yesterday they had been sailing under different colours. It was the wrong time of year, and cold. They unpacked in silence and dutifully walked up the beach a little way, but though her mother’s eyes appeared to be on the tide line Madison didn’t see her bend down once, even for a quartz pebble that was flushed rose pink at one end and which she’d normally have had like a shot. When they got back Maddy managed to find some Kool-Aid from last time in the cupboard but her mom had not remembered to buy Doritos or anything else. Madison had started to protest but saw how slowly her mom was moving and so she stopped. Cowgirls was closed for winter renovations so they went somewhere else and sat by a window in a big empty room overlooking a dark sea under flat clouds. She had spaghetti, which was okay, but not what you had at the beach.

That morning it had started out freezing and they had barely walked at all. Mom spent the morning near the bottom of the walkway over the dunes, huddled in a blanket, wearing dark glasses and holding a book. Mid-afternoon she went back inside, telling Madison it was all right for her to stay out but she had to remain within forty yards of the cottage.

This was okay for a while, even kind of fun to have the beach to herself. She didn’t go into the sea. Though she had enjoyed this in the past, for the last couple of years she had found herself slightly wary of large bodies of water, even when it wasn’t this cold. She built and refined a castle instead, which was fun. She dug as deep a hole as she was able.

But when it got close to five o’clock her feet started itching. She stood up, sat down. Played a little longer, though the game was getting old. It was bad enough skipping the walk in the morning, but not doing it now was really weird. The walking was important. It must be. Or why else did they always do it?

In the end she walked down to the surf alone and stood irresolute for a few moments. The beach remained deserted in both directions, the sky low and heavy and grey and the air getting cool. She waited as the first strong breeze came running ahead of the storm, worrying at the leg of her shorts and buzzing it against her leg. She waited, looking up at the dunes at the point where it hid the cottage, just over the other side.

Her mother did not appear.

She started slowly. She walked forty yards to the right, using the length of a big stride as a rough guide. It felt strange. She immediately turned around and walked back to where she’d started, and then another forty yards. This double length almost felt like walking, nearly reached the point where you forgot you were supposed to be going anywhere – because you weren’t – and instead it became just the wet rustle of waves in your ears and the blur of your feet swishing in and out of view as your eyes picked over shapes and colours between the curling water and the hard, wet sand.

And so she did it again, and again. Kept doing it until the two turning points were just like odd, curved steps. Trying to make the waves sound like they always had. Trying not to imagine where they would eat tonight, and how little they would talk. Trying not to …

Then she stopped. Slowly she bent down, hand outstretched. She picked something out of the collage of seaweed, driftwood fragments, battered homes of dead sea-dwellers. Held it up to her face, scarcely believing.

She had found an almost complete sand dollar.

It was small, admittedly, not much bigger than a quarter. It had a couple of dinks around the edges. It was a grottier grey than most, and stained green on one side. But it would count. Would have counted, that is, if things were counting as normal. Things were not.

What should have been a moment of jubilation felt heavy and dull. She realized the thing she held in her hand might as well be as big as a dinner plate and have no chips in it at all. It could be dry, sandy-golden and perfect like the ones you saw for sale in stores. It wouldn’t matter.

Madison sat down suddenly and stared at the flat shell in her hand. She made a gentle fist around it, then looked out at the sea.

She was still sitting there ten minutes later when she heard a noise. A whapping sound, as if a large bird was flying up the tide line towards her, long black wings slowly beating. Madison turned her head.

A man was standing on the beach.

He was about thirty feet away. He was tall and the noise was the sound of his black coat flapping in cold winds from a storm now boiling across the sky like a purple-black second sea. The man was motionless, hands pushed deep in the pockets of his coat. What low light made its way through the cloud was behind him, and you could not see his face. Madison knew immediately the man was looking at her, however. Why else would he be standing there, like a scarecrow made of shadows, dressed not for the beach but for church or the cemetery?

She glanced casually back over her shoulder, logging her position in relation to the cottage’s walkway. It was not directly behind, but it was close enough. She could get there quickly. Maybe that would be a good idea, especially as the big hand was at quarter to.

But instead she turned back, and once more looked out at the dark and choppy ocean. It was a bad decision, and partly caused by something as simple as the lack of a congratulatory clap on the shoulder when she’d found what she held in her hand; but she made the call and in the end no one else was to blame.

The man waited a moment, and then headed towards her. He walked in a straight line, seemingly unbothered by the water that hissed around his shoes, up and back. He crunched as he came. He was not looking for shells and did not care what happened to them.

Madison realized she’d been dumb. She should have moved straight away, when she had a bigger advantage. Just got up, walked home. Now she’d have to rely on surprise, on the fact the man was probably assuming that if she hadn’t run before then she wouldn’t now. Madison decided she would wait until the man got a little closer and then suddenly bolt: moving as fast as she could and shouting loud. Mom would have the door open. She might even be on her way out right now, come to see why she was not yet back. She should be – she was officially late. But Madison knew in her heart that her mother might just be sitting in her chair instead, shoulders rounded and bent, looking down at her hands the way she had after they came back from the restaurant the night before.

And so she got ready, making sure her heels were well-planted in the hard sand, that her legs were tensed like springs, ready to push off with everything she had.

The man stopped.

Madison had intended to keep looking out at the waves until the last second, as if she wasn’t even aware of the man’s presence, but instead found herself turning her head a little to check what was going on.

The man had come to a halt earlier than Madison expected, still about twenty feet away. Now she could see his face she could tell he was way older than her dad, maybe even past Uncle Brian’s age, which was fifty. Uncle Brian was always smiling, though, as if he was trying to remember a joke he’d heard at the office and was sure you were going to enjoy. This man did not look like that.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. His voice was dry and quiet, but carried.

Madison hurriedly looked away, heart thumping. Unthinkingly protecting the flat shell still in her left hand, she braced her right palm into the sand too now, ready to push off against it, hard.

‘But first I need to know something,’ he said.

Madison realized she had to reach maximum speed immediately. Uncle Brian was fat and looked like he couldn’t run at all. This man was different that way too. She took a deep breath. Decided to do it on three. One …

‘Look at me, girl.’

Two …

Then suddenly the man was between Madison and the dunes. He moved so quickly Madison barely saw it happen.

‘You’ll like it,’ he said, as if he had done nothing at all. ‘I promise. You want it. But first you have to answer my question. Okay?’

His voice sounded wetter now and Madison realized dismally just how stupid she had been, understood why moms and dads said children had to be back at certain times, and not to stray too far, and not talk to strangers, and so many other things. Parents were not just being mean or difficult or boring, it turned out. They were trying to prevent what was about to happen.

She looked up at the man’s face, nodded. She didn’t know what else to do, and hoped it might help. The man smiled. He had a spray of small, dark moles across one cheek. His teeth were stained and uneven.

‘Good,’ he said. He took another step towards her, and now his hands were out of his coat pockets. His fingers were long, and pale.

Madison heard the word ‘Three …’ in her head, but it was too quiet and she did not believe in it. Her arms and legs were no longer like springs. They felt like rubber. She couldn’t even tell if they were still tensed.

The man was too close now. He smelt damp. There was a strange light in his eyes, as if he had found something he’d been looking for a long time.

He squatted down close to her, and the smell suddenly got worse, an earthy odour on his breath, a smell that spoke of parts of the body normally kept hidden.

‘Can you keep a secret?’ he said.