Everything was wrong. With everything.
Then the cloud passed. It was gone, just like that. Amy looked up and winked at me through the glass, unquestionably the woman I loved. I smiled back, turned to the mountains to finish my smoke. The forest looked the way I had come to expect. Everything was okay again.
Dinner was good, and I listened while Amy went over the structure of her new job. She’s in advertising. Maybe you’re familiar with it. It’s a profession that seeks to make people spend money so that folks they don’t know can buy an even bigger house. In this way it’s somewhat like organized crime, except the hours are longer. I said this to Amy once, suggesting they should tell clients to dispense with ads and demographics and encourage people to buy their wares through direct threats against their person and/or property. She asked me never to say this in front of her colleagues in case they took it seriously.
The revised basis of her employment was important to us because her new position as roving creative director across her company’s empire—with offices in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and back down in L.A.—was what had enabled us to get out of L.A. It was a big change for her, a California girl born and bred, who’d liked being close to the family who still lived in the city where she was born. She had painted her willingness to move as related to the sizable hike in salary, but she’d never really been obsessed with money. I believed instead that she’d done it mainly for my sake, to let me get out of the city, and over dessert I told her I was grateful.
She rolled her eyes and told me not to be a dork, but she accepted the kiss I offered in thanks. And the ones that came afterward.
When I’d finished my cigarette, I pulled the phone out of my pocket to check the time. It was half past eleven. Amy’s job involved many client dinners, especially now, and it was possible she hadn’t even gotten back to her hotel yet. I knew she’d pick up her messages as soon as she could. But I hadn’t heard from her all day, and at that moment I really wanted to.
I was about to try her number again when the phone chirped into life on its own. The words AMY’S CELL popped up on the screen. I smiled, pleased at the coincidence, and put the phone up to my ear.
“Hey,” I said. “Busy, busy?”
But the person on the other end was not my wife.
chapter
FIVE
“Who is this, please?”
The voice was male, rough, loud. Coming from Amy’s number, it was about as wrong as could be.
“It’s Jack,” I said. It sounded dumb. “Who—”
“Is this home?”
“What? Who are you?”
The voice said something that might have been a name but sounded more like a random collection of syllables.
“What?” I repeated. He said it again. Could have been Polish, Russian, Martian. Could have been a coughing fit. There was a lot of noise in the background. Traffic, presumably.
“Is this home?” he barked again.
“What do you mean? What are you doing with—”
The guy had one question, and he was going to keep asking it. “This is number says ‘Home’?”
A light went on in my head. “Yes,” I said, finally getting what he was driving at. “This is the number listed as ‘Home.’ It’s my wife’s phone. But where’s—”
“Find in cab,” the man said.
“Okay. I understand. When did you find it?”
“Fifteen minutes. I call when I get good signal. Phones here not always so good.”
“It belongs to a woman,” I said, loudly and clearly. “Short blond hair, probably wearing a business suit. Have you just driven someone like that?”
“All day,” he said. “All day women like this.”
“This evening?”
“Maybe. Is she there, please? I speak her?”
“No, I’m not in Seattle,” I said. “She is, and you are, but I am not.”
“Oh, okay. So…I don’t know. What you want me?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Stay on the line.”
I quickly walked downstairs and into Amy’s study. Stuck dead center to the flat screen of her computer was a Post-it note with a hotel name written on it. The Malo, that was it.
All I could hear through the phone was a distant siren. I waited for it to fade.
“The Hotel Malo,” I said. “Do you know it?”
“Of course,” he said. “Downtown.”
“Can you take it there? Can you take the phone to the hotel and hand it in at reception?”
“Is long way,” the man said.
“I’m sure. But take it to reception and get them to call the lady down. Her name is Amy Whalen. You got that?”
He said something that sounded very slightly like Amy’s name. I repeated it another few times and spelled it twice. “Take it there, okay? She’ll pay you. I’ll call her, tell her you’re coming. Yes? Take it to the hotel.”
“Okay,” he said. “Twenty dollar.”
My heart was still thudding after he’d hung up. At least I knew the score. No reply to my last message because Amy hadn’t heard it, which gave me a time before which she had to have lost the phone. When had that been? Around nine, I thought. Or could be she’d lost it earlier in the day and chosen to wait until she got back to the hotel to fill me in. Either way, she needed a heads-up to deal with this guy, assuming he was on the level. When phones are stolen, the thieves will sometimes call a home number, pretending to be a helpful citizen, in the hope of reassuring the owner that the phone isn’t lost. That way the victim will hold off getting the phone killed at the provider, leaving the perpetrator free to use the hell out of it until the agreed handover time, when he just drops it in the trash. If this guy was using that scam, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it—I wasn’t going to cancel Amy’s phone without talking to her first. The hotel’s number wasn’t on the note, unsurprisingly—we always communicated via cell when she was out of the house, which is how come mine was down as “Home” in her contacts list.
Ten seconds on the Internet tracked down the Hotel Malo. I called the number and withstood the receptionist’s mandatory welcoming message, which included highlights of the day’s restaurant specials. When he was done, I asked to be put through to Amy Whalen. A faint background rattle of someone typing. Then: “I can’t do that, sir.”
“She’s not back yet?” I checked the clock. Nearly midnight. Kind of late, however important the client. “Okay. Put me through to voice mail.”
“No, sir, I meant I have no one here under that name.”
I opened my mouth. Shut it again. Had I gotten the dates wrong? “What time did she check out?”
More tapping. When the man spoke again, he sounded circumspect. “I have no record of a reservation being made under that name, sir.”
“For today?”
“For the past week.”
“She’s been in town two days,” I said patiently. “She arrived Tuesday. She’s in town until Friday morning. Tomorrow.”
The guy said nothing.
“Could you try ‘Amy Dyer’?”
I spelled “Dyer” for him. This had been her name before we married, and it was credible that someone in her office might have made a booking for her in that name seven years later. Just about credible.
Tapping. “No, sir. No Dyer.”
“Try Kerry, Crane & Hardy. That’s a company name.”
Tapping. “Nothing for that either, sir.”
“She never checked in?”
“Can I help you with anything else this evening?”