The Intruders - Michael Marshall

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what circumstances would you receive this many messages from someone and yet not have their name in your list of contacts? The others came up as ‘Home’ – my phone – and ‘Natalie’. These just listed the number. If you’re that regularly in contact, why not go to the minuscule trouble of entering the person’s name into your phone book? Unless it’s something you don’t want found?

      I flipped over to the made/received calls log. The number didn’t appear anywhere on it. Communication from this source evidently only came in the form of text, or at least no call had come from it in the last month.

      This gave me an idea, and I went back to the first SMS message and found it had been sent a little over three months previously. There had been a month gap between the first and the second. Then another two weeks. Then they had started coming more frequently. The one saying ‘yes’ had been sent six days before. And the one about roses had arrived just yesterday, late in the afternoon. Amy had seen this message – she must have, otherwise it would still have been filed under UNREAD. Then some time in the next few hours she had lost the phone, during the course of an evening which her schedule listed as blank.

      Then she had, so far as I could tell, lost herself.

      I navigated sideways from Received Messages into the section recording texts that Amy had sent. The list there was very short. A couple of replies her sister, and to me. And one other. It had been sent two minutes after the last message to her, and consisted of the following:

      Bell 9. Will b waitng, whenever yr redE, 2dy, nxt wk, nxt year xoxox

      The waitress swung by at that moment to see if I wanted fresh coffee. I said no. I asked for beer.

      One thing my father was always good at was answering questions. He didn’t have infinite patience in other directions, but if you asked him something – how the moon was created, why cats slept all the time, why that man over there had only one arm – he’d always give you a grown-up answer, except for this one occasion. I was about twelve. I’d heard an older kid at school being pretentious and been somewhat impressed and came home and asked my dad what was the meaning of life, thinking it made me sound at least sixteen. He seemed unaccountably annoyed, and said it was a dumb question. I didn’t understand. ‘Say you come back to your house one afternoon,’ he said, ‘and there’s someone at your table, eating your food. You don’t ask him “What the hell are you doing, sitting there, eating my dinner?” – because he could simply say he was hungry. Which is an answer to what you asked him, sure enough. But not to your real question, which is what the hell are you doing in my house?’

      I still didn’t get it, but I found I remembered this from time to time when I was older. It probably made me a slightly better cop, less prone to ask witnesses my questions instead of just letting them tell me what they knew. I remembered it again as I sat there in the bar in Seattle and started my first beer.

      My head felt heavy, and cold, and I was coming to suspect the day was not going to end well. I realized that maybe I had to stop asking where Amy was, and start thinking about why.

      Meanwhile a girl was standing in an airport concourse. A big clock suspended from the ceiling said it was twenty-four minutes to four. As she watched, the last number changed, going from 16:36 to 16:37. She kept watching until it flipped to 16:39. She liked the ‘9’. She didn’t know why it should seem compelling, but it did. A recorded voice kept telling people not to smoke, which Madison suspected must be annoying for them.

      Madison was not sure where she was going next. She had not, for a couple of minutes, been sure where she was right at this moment. She recognized it now. It was Portland airport, of course. She’d been here several times in the past, most recently when they went to visit Mom’s mom down in Florida in the spring. Madison could remember browsing around the little Powell’s bookstore, and drinking a juice at the café where you could watch planes landing and taking off. Mom had been nervous about flying and Dad had joked and made her feel better about it. There had been more joking in those days. A lot more.

      But today? Madison remembered early talk of a trip up to the grocery store in Cannon Beach that morning, discussion that hadn’t come to anything. Then a little time on the beach. It had been cold and windy. There had been no walk. A quiet and threadbare lunch, in the cottage. Mom stayed indoors afterwards, so Madison went back out to hang on the beach by herself.

      After that … there was this gap. Like when she’d woke last night and couldn’t remember the time on the beach. It was like there was a cloud in the way.

      Mom wasn’t here at the airport with her, that was clear. Mom wouldn’t have walked off and left her by herself. Madison was wearing her new coat too, she realized. That was also strange. She wouldn’t have gone out to the beach in her new coat. She would have worn her old coat, because it didn’t matter if that got sand on it. So she must have gone into the cottage after the beach, to change, and snuck back out.

      Then what? How had she gotten from there to Portland? Maddy knew the word her Uncle Brian would use for this: perplexing. In every other way she felt fine. Just like normal. So what was the deal with the blank spot? And what was she supposed to do now?

      She realized the hand in her pocket was holding something. She pulled it out. A notebook. It was small, bound in stained brown leather, and looked old. She opened it. The pages were covered in handwriting. The first line said:

       In the beginning there was Death.

      It was written in a pen that smudged occasionally, in an ink that was a kind of red-brown. There were drawings in the book, too, maps and diagrams, lists of names. One of the diagrams looked exactly like the drawing on the back of the business card she also had in her possession, the interlinked nines. Even the handwriting looked the same. Slipped in the front of the notebook was a long piece of paper. It was a United Airlines ticket.

      Wow – how had she bought that?

      These questions didn’t make her feel scared. Not quite. For the time being there was something dreamlike about her situation. Maybe all that mattered was going where she needed to go, and she could worry about everything else later. Yes. That sounded good. Easier.

      Madison blinked, and by the time her eyelids had flipped back up she had largely stopped worrying about trivia like how she had travelled the fifty miles from Cannon Beach to Portland airport, or purchased an airline ticket costing over a hundred dollars, or why she was alone.

      Instead she turned to look at the departures information, to find out where it was she needed to go.

      As far as Jim Morgan was concerned there was a simple secret to life, and it was something he’d learned from his Uncle Clive. His father’s cadaverous brother spent his entire working days in security at the Ready Ship despatch warehouse over in Tigart. Checked trucks as they came in, checked them as they went out. He’d done this five days a week for over thirty years. Jim’s dad never hid the fact that as a (junior) executive in a bank he considered himself many steps up the ladder compared with his older sibling – but the curious thing was that while his father spent his life moaning and feeling put-upon, Uncle Clive seemed utterly content with his lot.

      One evening when Jim was thirteen his uncle had spent an entire Sunday dinner talking about his job. This was not the first time – and Jim’s father and mother were not subtle about rolling their eyes – but on this occasion their son listened. He listened to information about schedules and shipping targets. He listened to discussion of procedures. He came to understand that every day, between the hours of eight and four, getting in and out of the Ready Ship warehouse was like shoving a fat camel through the eye of a needle. Uncle Clive was that needle. Didn’t matter who you were or what you were carrying, how late or urgent your shipment or how many times he’d seen your face before. You showed your badge or pass or letter. You were polite. You dealt with Uncle Clive in the proper manner. Otherwise you didn’t get past – or at least not without a protracted exchange involving two-way radios

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