The Intruders

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.