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.
I got home around quarter after nine in the evening. Apart from milk and coffee the trip had been make-work: Amy kept the cupboards well stocked. I’d walked into town from the house, which took twenty minutes. It was a pleasant stroll and I’d have done it that way even if the car hadn’t been unavailable. I sat outside the coffee place and stretched an Americano while leafing through the local paper, learning several things: the trajectories of two cars had intersected a few nights before – nobody was hurt, not even a little bit; some worthy got re-elected to the schools board for the twelfth straight year, which seemed borderline obsessional; and the Cascades Gallery needed a mature person to help sell paintings and sculptures of eagles and bears and Indian braves. Experience was judged unnecessary but candidates were instructed to bring a willingness to follow a dream. That didn’t sound like me, even if the writing project remained stalled. I hoped the gallery did find someone, however, and that they were sufficiently mature. I hated to think of limited edition art prints being sold in a juvenile manner.
I prowled the aisles of Sam’s Market for longer than necessary, picking items up and putting them back. Found a couple things too outré to have featured on more enlightened shopping agendas, chiefly beers, and at the checkout added a paperback Stephen King. I’d read it before but most of my books were still in storage down in LA, plus it was right there in front of me, in a rickety spinner full of second-hand Dan Brown and triple-named romantic women done out in lurid gilt.
Back in the lot I loaded the bag into my backpack and stood irresolute. A pickup truck sat ticking in the silence. I’d seen the owner inside, a local with craggy features and moss in his ears, and he’d ignored me in the way incomers deserved. I’d made a point of saying hi, just to mess with his head. A couple emerged from Laverne’s Rib across the street, rolling as if on the deck of a ship. Laverne’s prided itself on the magnitude of its portions. The couple looked like they’d known this ahead of time. A tired-looking woman pushed a stroller past the market with the air of someone not engaged in the activity for the sheer fun of it. Within, her baby fought the night with everything it had, principally sound. The woman saw me looking and muttered ‘Ten months’, as if that explained everything. I looked away from her awkwardly.
Down the road, a stop light blinked.
I still wasn’t hungry. Didn’t want to go drink a beer somewhere public. I could walk up the street, see if the little bookstore was still open. It wasn’t likely and I now had a novel to read, which was what ultimately took the wind out of the night’s sails. The expedition was over, run aground on an impulse purchase.
So now what? Pick your own adventure.
In the end I walked back the way I’d come, past the hundred yards of stores which constituted Birch Crossing. Most were single storey and wood-fronted, a dentist, hair salon and drug store interspersing places of more transitory appeal, including the Cascades Gallery itself, from which Amy had already acquired two aimlessly competent paintings of the generic West. The blocks were rooted by stolid brick structures built when the town’s frock-coated boosters believed it would amount to more than it had. One of these held Laverne’s, another was a bank no longer locally-owned, and the last offered the opportunity to buy decoratively battered bits of furniture. Amy had availed herself of these wares, too, an example of which currently served as my desk. The street petered out into a small gas station that had been tricked out long ago to look like a mountain chalet, and finally the local sheriff’s office, set back from the road. I had to fight an impulse to look at this as I passed, and wondered how long it would take before some part of me got the message.
I crossed the empty two-lane highway before taking the last left in town. This led into the woods, the fences sparsely punctuated with heavy-duty mailboxes and gates leading to houses down long driveways. After ten minutes I reached the box labelled Jack and Amy Whalen. Rather than open the gate I vaulted over it, as I had on the way out. I forgot to compensate for the weight in the backpack, and almost reached the other side face-first. I’d started exercising again recently, taking runs through the National Forest land that started at the boundary of our property. Now the initial aches had worn off I felt better than in a while, but my body wasn’t ready to forget it was a year since I’d been truly fit. Though there was no one to see I still felt like an ass, and swore briskly at the gate for fucking me around. My father used to claim inanimate objects hate us, and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.
I walked up the rutted track towards the place a rental agreement said was now home. It was colder again and I wondered if tonight was going to be when the snows finally dropped. I wondered also – not for the first time – how we were going to get in and out when that happened. The locals referred to snow without starry-eyed romanticism. They talked about it like death or taxes. The realtor had breezily said something about a snowmobile being advisable in the deepest months. We didn’t have a snowmobile. Weren’t going to be getting one either. Nowhere in my life-plans did ownership of a snowmobile feature. Instead I was laying in reserves of fuse wire, canned chilli and sauerkraut. Always been a bear for sauerkraut, not sure why.
The drive curved down into a hollow before climbing back up along the ridge. About a half mile from the road it widened into the parking area. From this side the house wasn’t much to look at, a single-storey band of weathered cedar shingles largely obscured in summer by trees. It had been that way in the photo I’d seen on the internet, and looked rustic and cute. In winter and real life it looked like a nuclear bunker caught between the legs of dead spiders. It was only when you got inside that you realized you’d entered at the top of two-and-a-half levels, and there was double height glass along most of the north face of the building, where the hillside dropped away sharply. In daylight this gave a view across a forest valley that climbed up to the Wenatchee Mountains, segueing into the Cascades and from there to Canada by and by. As Gary Fisher had found, you tended to just look at it for a while. From the deck you could also see a pond, about a hundred and fifty yards in diameter, which lay within the property’s four acre boundary. In the afternoons birds of prey floated across the valley like distant leaves.
I unloaded the backpack’s contents into their pre-determined slots in the kitchen. The answering machine was on the far end of the counter. The light was flashing.
‘About time,’ I said, the first words the house had heard since Fisher left.
But it wasn’t. Two people had called, or one person twice, but left no message. I sent beats of ill-will to the perpetrator/s and another to myself for not getting Caller ID working yet. The box claimed it was possible but the manual had been translated from Japanese by a halfwit prairie dog. Just changing the outgoing message had required technical support from NASA. I knew the caller/s couldn’t have been Amy, who knew how much non-messages piss me off, and would at least have intoned ‘No message, master’ in a gravely tone.
I got out my cell and pressed her speed dial number, hooking it under my ear while I got a beer from the fridge. After five rings I was diverted to the answering service, yet again. Her business voice warmly thanked whomever for calling and promised she’d get back to them. I left a message asking her to do just that. Again.
‘Soon would be nice,’ I muttered, when the phone had been replaced in my pocket.
I took the drink through to my study. As the person earning actual money Amy had a grander lair on the floor below. Mine had nothing in it but a file box of reference material, the expensively distressed table from the store in town and a cheaply distressed chair I’d found in the garage. The only thing on the table was my laptop. It was not dusty because