The Intruders (31 page)
She emerged from the parking lot and walked down toward the square with the totem pole and the drinking fountain. A lot of things were clearer to her now, even parts of the notebook that had originally been inexplicable:
The seven ages of man?
Of course not. As with everything, there are nine.
By 9—we must be rooted, living securely above or below. 18—we may start pulling strings. By 27—there should be sufficient control to be consistent in aim. At 36—adulthood, true Dominance begins. 45—without integration, the crisis point. 54—the age of Power. 63—Wisdom. At 72—the search starts again. 81—time to leave: we do not die as others do, and so the parting of this place must be under our control. Add the numbers which make up these nine ages—3 + 6 or 7 + 2—all in turn resolve to a digital root of 9. So it has been enshrined, hidden in plain sight. A triangle = 180° (1 + 8 + 0 = 9); the square and circle are 360° (3 + 6 + 0 = 9)—all regular geometrical shapes have a digital root of 9. Even 666—do I need to tell you by now to add those three numbers, and then add them again?
This is not an accident. Our mathematics was created to honor the power of 9. To the power of the Nines. But the Nines themselves have become weak in the meantime, spiritualized, have even come to believe in their own cramped version of the lies. To believe that our power must be constrained, that we must enter life as a newborn—must hide in plain sight, just another tree in the forest.
But the forests have all been cut down.
I will not fall with them. Did Aristotle not say “The weak are anxious for justice and equality: the strong pay no heed to either”? What happens to those who do not believe as the Nines do? Those who dare contradict them? Ah—over those souls, the truly free, then they would make themselves gods, sitting in judgment upon us.
St. Thomas Aquinas said: You must know a soul by its acts.
You are free to know me by mine.
And Lichtenberg said: We imagine we are free in our actions, just as in dreaming we deem a place familiar which we then see doubtless for the first time.
I am what you dream
I watch your back, always.
I am what guides your hand.
As she entered the square, she caught sight of her reflection in a plate-glass window and was surprised at how short she was. She looked at herself for a long time, remembering the day when she and Mom bought the coat in Nordstrom’s, at the head of Courthouse Square in Portland. Remembered the two of them seeing it for the first time and knowing they were circling it together, that it was really expensive but they both wanted it in their lives. Madison had said nothing, knowing that this was a decision her mother had to come to under her own steam, that an extravagant spur-of-the-moment gift would appeal to her sense of hip motherhood, where acceding to a demand—however muted or subtle—would not: Madison not understanding how she knew this, but knowing it all the same.
They left the store and walked around others, looking but not really looking, and Maddy had known that if she just kept quiet and was sweet, they would find themselves back in Nordstrom.
They had.
And she realized now how she’d known how to get what she wanted that day, and on other days. She realized that something within her had always known how to dominate, how to quietly get people to do what she wanted. Someone had been at her back then, too.
He had always been inside.
It was nice in the square, but it did not feel as it had at night. Though there were more people around, it somehow felt less crowded. Maybe that was because the people here now were not the same. They were not like the homeless men, but rather were tourists, passing through. People who took pictures of things instead of seeing them, who thought they owned a place because they stood in it, instead of understanding it worked the other way around.
One of them was different, though. When she’d been there about half an hour, sipping her way through an Americano from the Starbucks on the corner, Madison saw an SUV pull up on the other side of the street. A man got out. He walked straight through the traffic and into the square. He didn’t seem to be there for any reason, but sat on a bench for a while. He was quite tall and had broad shoulders and for a moment Madison had an urge to run over to him and tell him her name and ask him to help. She could see that he was different from the man whose car she’d slept in, that if this man knew that there was something he should do, then he would not stop until it was done.
But instead she found herself slipping off the bench and walking quickly out of the square—not looking back until she was sure the man wouldn’t be able to see her. Madison might want the man’s assistance, but the man in the cloud did not. She dimly recalled the attempted phone call in the night—largely through the aftereffects on her hands—but not what it might have been about. Instead she realized that she now wanted to make another call, to the man she’d previously been avoiding. She felt stronger now. She could deal with him.
When she located a phone—this time in the lobby of a hotel a few streets away, a fancy one with an awning with red and gold stripes—she got out the notebook and removed from it the white card with the number on the back.
He answered immediately.
“It’s me,” she said. “I need some information.”
“Where are you?”
“Did you hear what I said, Shepherd?”
“Look,” the man said. His voice was patient and annoying. “I want to help. But I need to know where you are. You’re nine years old. You’re…not safe.”
“Are you done talking?”
“No,” he said. “Madison, nothing’s going to happen until you tell me a place to come and meet you. Do that and we’ll talk. I’ll find out whatever it is you need to know. But you’re making it hard for me to do my job.”
“You’ve done your job,” she said. “And have been paid. Despite the fact that you didn’t do as you were told, did you? Which means I have no reason to trust you.”
“What did I do wrong? I came to you—”
“Too early. You were supposed to wait until I was eighteen, like always, but you wanted your fee now and didn’t care that I wasn’t ready. But I am ready, in fact. I’ve always been ready to take control. Though I guess you remember that. You had better anyway.”
“Look,” the man said. “You had an accident, that’s all. You fell over on the beach. You saw me there and thought I meant you harm. You started to run, you banged your head. Your hurt yourself. That’s why you keep blacking out. That’s why you’re having these strange—”
“Oh, do shut up, Shepherd. I’m going to ask you to find out something. Then I’m putting the phone down. I’m going to call again in fifteen minutes from a different location. If you don’t give me the information—and make me believe in it—I’m going to start doing things that really will make your life difficult. Doing things and telling things. Understand?”
“Madison, you’ve got to trust me.”
A wheedling note had entered the man’s voice, but Madison knew that this was fake—him trying to appear weak, caught off guard, in the hope she’d fail to take him as seriously as he deserved. This man didn’t wheedle. “I’ve done everything you want….”
“No,” she said coldly. “You haven’t. But you’re going to. You really are. You and everyone else.”
She told him what she needed and put the phone down without waiting for a reply. Checked the time and headed toward the elevators. This was a pretty big hotel. She could lose herself in the corridors for fifteen minutes without people bugging her, she thought, and it would be a change from pounding the streets.
As she got into the elevator, she passed a slim young woman in a smart suit and blouse, eyes bright and hair sleek. She caught the faint scents of coffee and breath mints and knew that the woman had been sitting alone in her hotel room until moments before, muttering self-confidence mantras, reapplying her corporate mask before some drab meeting, trying to convince herself she was a grown-up now, no longer a little girl.
“Nice tits,” Madison said.
The doors closed on the woman’s astonished face.
As the elevator climbed, a car was rapidly approaching the outskirts of the city. Simon O’Donnell was driving. Alison was in the passenger seat with two maps and her cell phone. She had just gotten off a call which had succeeded in getting her put through to someone in the Missing Persons Bureau of the Seattle Police Department, a man named Blanchard, who had appeared to take her seriously. He said he would meet them, at least.
“This exit?” Simon asked.
“Next one,” she said. “I think. I should remember, but…”
“I know,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
It had been a little over ten years, in fact, a figure that was easy to remember because they’d moved out of the city soon after Alison learned she was pregnant, soon after they had decided to name their baby after the street in the city where they had first met. Simon started to pull through the lanes of traffic, doing so with his usual judicious care. There’d been times when this had irritated Alison. Right now it did not.
They’d spent the last twenty-four hours waiting with a desperation that would prevent the passage of time from ever seeming the same again. The police said there had been a possible sighting of a girl trying to get on a plane in Portland, but that she’d been prevented from doing so, and so they should just stay put and wait. And so they had. But they had also talked. The absence at the center of their life was so vast it seemed pointless not to open all the drawers and pull everything out, to make the void universal. Alison admitted the friendship she’d maintained with a man her husband had never met, swearing—truthfully—that it had never been more than that. As she did this, a bubble burst in her head, revealing that nothing had ever been inside.
Inconsequential, too, had become many of the things she’d thought were wrong with Simon, with their relationship. It wasn’t that they didn’t exist or had just blown away. But if everything in the world seemed wrong and broken, maybe that actually proved the opposite. Not everything could be wrong about the universe. Simon (for once) had the tact not to say this out loud. He didn’t need to. She got there by herself, somewhere during those hours of talk, or perhaps during the few hours of sleep that followed. It didn’t solve anything, didn’t make everything all right—but it turned things around, tilted them so they reflected the light differently, and for the moment that was enough.
Simon meanwhile had admitted that he sometimes behaved as if Alison’s moods swings were deliberate, and this wasn’t fair. Also—and this was only to himself—that his accidental one-night stand with a colleague three years ago actually did count, and the price he might have to pay for this event’s having remained secret could be cutting his wife some slack, not least because his own drunken error had caused him more confusion and discomfort than anything Alison had ever done. The behavior of others can be withstood. Less so the occasions when we stab ourselves in the back. A brief hatred of someone else can be refreshing to the soul. Not so a hatred of one’s other self, which is never brief.
Both of them knew, but did not admit, that they said or thought these things as offerings, to whichever power held their daughter in his hands. No matter how long they talked, however, the absence stretched with every additional minute the phone failed to ring.
In the end it became too wide to speak across, and they were left in silence, staring out windows into the dark.
Finally they’d lain down on the bed together, closer than for some time. At 3:02, Alison had woken to the sound of her cell phone. She scrambled across the bed, fell off the other side, and sent the phone clattering to the floor. Got it open and to her ear just in time to hear someone talking loud and fast. It was barely two sentences, but the voice cut through Alison’s head like a knife. Then the line went dead.
Alison turned, eyes wide, to see Simon levering himself up onto one elbow.
“Who’s that?” he slurred. “Police?”
“No,” she’d said, trying not to start running in all directions at once. “It was Madison. I think she just told us where she is.”
When the door to the house didn’t open, I was confused, until I realized that Amy must have gone out. I unlocked the bolt and let myself into a space that was supremely quiet, suffused with the distinctive emptiness caused by the absence of the person with whom you share your life.
I headed down into the living area, sneakily glad of time to myself, a period to decide how to broach the subject of the photographs I’d seen and the fact of her name being on the paperwork Fisher had shown me. The living room was tidy. The current work frenzy was over, or in abeyance, and presumably she’d walked up into the village. In which case maybe I should call her, go meet up. Grab lunch. Talk to her long enough to overlay the dark aftermath of the morning and decide what to do about everything else. We’d always been able to talk the world away. I hoped this was still the case.
I’d traveled a couple more steps before I stopped, however, looking through the door into Amy’s study.
What I saw would not have struck anyone else the way it did me. You’d have to know Amy, to have been married to her, and to understand how important her work spaces were. Her office was where she lived and who she was. And what I saw was not the way it should be.
The computer was on, the screen a mass of open windows. Amy closed computer windows the way old men keep a single bulb burning in their house, turning lights on and off as they move from room to room. The surface of her real desktop was covered in papers, notepads. Box files had been removed from the shelves and left open. Whoever had been here had hardly trashed the place—many people’s studies probably never looked this neat—but they had been thorough. Her laptop was gone. So was her personal organizer.
I pulled out my phone to raise Amy right away but stopped as two more things struck me. First that she would have called me if she’d known that someone had broken in. She had not. So this must have happened very recently.
