that she was doing it, Madison reached to the phone on the bedside table and dialled the number. It rang and rang, sounding as if it was trying to connect to the other side of the moon. Nobody answered, and she put the phone down.
She forced herself to lie back in bed. To try to listen beyond the rain, to focus on the sound of the waves, behind this temporary storm: to find the reassuring sound of crashing water, drawing its line at the end of the world. She kept her eyes closed, and listened, waiting for the tide to pull her back into the dark. Tomorrow she would wake and everything would feel normal. She was just tired, and half asleep. Everything was okay. Everything was just like always.
And there had been no man.
When Alison O’Donnell woke at 2:37 it was the sound of rain that she first noticed, but she knew this had not been what had woken her. She pulled the covers back and swung her legs out of bed. Grabbed her robe from the end and pulled it on. She was foggy with bad sleep and mechanical dreams but a mother’s feet operate outside her own control. Doesn’t matter how tired you are, how worn, how much your body and brain wants to climb into bed again and stay there for a week, a month, maybe even the rest of your life. There are sounds that speak to the back brain and countermand your own desires.
The discomfort of your young is one of them.
She padded out of her room and into the hallway. Through the window she glimpsed trees pulled back and forth in high winds, white lines of water speeding across the glass. There was a sudden gust and rain hit the window like a handful of stones.
Then she heard the noise again.
She shuffled down to the door at the end of the hall. It was slightly ajar. She gently opened it a little farther and looked inside.
Madison was in bed, but the covers had been thrown down to her waist. Alison’s daughter was moving, slowly, her head turning from side to side. Her eyes were closed but she was making a low, moaning sound.
Alison walked into the room. She knew this sound well. Her daughter started having nightmares a little before the age of three, and for a few years they were pretty bad. It got to the point where Maddy had been afraid to go to bed, convinced that whatever she saw there – she could never remember, when she woke up – would come for her again, that the feeling of constriction and suffocation would descend upon her again. A year or so ago they had just petered out, become a thing of the past. But now, here was that noise again.
Alison wasn’t sure what to do. They’d never found a successful approach. You could wake her, but often it took a long time for her to find sleep again, and sometimes the nightmare would simply return immediately.
Suddenly Madison’s back arched, startling Alison. She’d not seen that before. Her daughter let out a long, rasping sound … and then slowly deflated. Her head turned, quickly, but then she sighed. Her lips moved, a little, but no sound came out. And then she was still. And not moaning any more.
Alison waited a few minutes more, until she was sure her daughter was sleeping soundly. She carefully reached out and pulled the covers back over her. Stood for a moment longer, looking down at her sleeping face.
Make the most of it, kiddo, she found herself thinking. A nightmare is just a nightmare. You don’t know anything about real sadness yet.
As she turned away she noticed something on the floor, lying on the bare wood just the other side of the old rug that went under the bed.
She bent down and discovered that it was a sand dollar. It was small, grey. It had been broken in half.
She picked up one of the pieces. Where had it come from? Had Madison found it that afternoon? If so, why hadn’t she said? There was a reward …
Abruptly Alison realized why her daughter hadn’t said anything, and felt toxically ashamed. The piece Alison held in her hands was firm. Snapping the shell in half must have taken effort, and been deliberate.
She dropped the fragment to the floor and left the room, pulling the door almost closed behind her. Then she went back to her own bed and lay there for a long time, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the rain.
I got to the Hotel Malo just before ten a.m. I’d been awake since before six, but realized I could not call Amy’s office for several hours. So I put myself in movement instead. Seven was the earliest I could arrive at the Zimmermans’ and borrow a car without looking too strange. Inspired by Fisher’s visit the day before, I told them I’d got a call from an old friend and was heading to the city for lunch. Bobbi looked at me a beat longer than was necessary. Ben got straight to explaining how steering wheels worked.
I headed west on 90, joining 5 as the rush hour was starting in earnest, and fought my way off at James Street. Familiar territory so far, the route we’d taken when we came to spend a day in the city a week after we moved up north. Amy had showed me a couple of major draws like the Pike Place Market and the Space Needle, but she was more familiar with the city’s boardrooms than its tourist attractions. The sky was low and an unrelenting grey. It had been that way the previous time too. I eventually spiralled onto 6th Avenue, a wide downtown canyon with tall concrete buildings on either side, lined with small and well-behaved trees bearing little yellow lights.
I pulled up outside the Malo, joining the back of a line of black town cars. The hotel had an awning of red and ochre stripes. A guy in a coat and hat tried to take my car someplace but I convinced him not to. The lobby was done in limestone and rich fabrics, a big fireplace on one side. The luggage trolleys were of distressed brass, and the bellhops were demure. Something unobtrusive and New Age floated discreetly from hidden speakers, like the smell of vanilla cookies almost ready to come out of the oven.
The woman behind the desk was the one I’d spoken to a little after midnight. I was surprised to find she did have an envelope for me, and a receipt for my twenty bucks. Also that she’d had the initiative to get the driver to write down his name – which is more than I’d done – together with the company he worked for. His first name was Georj, the second a collection of crunchy syllables from not-around-here. The company was Red Cabs. She relayed this information in a way that implied guests at her hotel usually employed more upscale or funky means of transport, like native bearers or cold fusion hoverboards. I got her to check a final time for a reservation, implying I was a colleague, believed my assistant had made one and that he was going to catch seven shades of hell if he had not. No record, still.
‘Can you do me another favour?’ I asked, having also planned this on the journey. ‘I’m sure we’ve booked her in here before. Can you check back a few months?’
She tapped and squinted at the screen for a minute, nodded, then tapped again.
‘Okay,’ she said, pressing her finger on the screen. ‘Ms Whalen did stay with us three months ago, two nights. And before that I have a reservation back in January. Three nights that time. You want me to go farther?’
I said no, and went back outside. Walked up to the corner, where I was beyond the influence of the doorman and his familiars, who remained keen that I do the right thing with my car. I still wasn’t sure if I was over-reacting, and I knew from experience that I have a tendency to stomp on the gas pedal when sitting and waiting would be the more considered option. But now I knew Amy had stayed in this hotel before, and that changed things. Not because it confirmed she’d been in Seattle on those occasions – I knew that – but because it meant she was familiar with the
