Waxwings

by Unknown

  He gave his name to the receptionist in the Sheriff’s Office, who curtly told him to sit down and wait—Detective Nagel was busy on the phone and taking no calls. The narrow hallway was like a third-world doctor’s waiting room, with harsh fluorescent lighting, plastic chairs in ill-assorted colors, and a battered side-table on which news magazines were stacked. The egg-shaped face of Jeff Bezos stared out from the cover of Time, which had anointed him Person of the Year. For the benefit of the receptionist, Tom made a show of stretching himself out comfortably, putting on his half-moon reading specs and burying himself in the magazine. Jeffrey Preston Bezos, he read, had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him. Looking up, he noticed from the name board on her desk that the severe receptionist had the unusual patronym of Crymes.

  When Paul Nagel eventually showed up, he stopped short of Tom and nodded. Experts on “Antiques Roadshow” wore the same expression when someone brought in an original Sèvres vase or a hitherto unknown painting by John Copley: it was the nod of an appraiser in the unexpected presence of the real thing.

  “Thomas,” he said. “Come on—I’ll take you through.”

  As he led the way along the corridor, the detective said: “You’re a professor at the U?”

  “Yes.”

  “You might say I’m a student of yours. I take a course there in the evenings. An extension course in family law.”

  “Not my field. I’m a writer, really.”

  “Yeah, I’m a writer, too.” He gestured toward the open door of his office, a bare space lit by a single flickering overhead tube, the desk copiously littered with scraps of paper. Following Tom inside, he glanced at his computer monitor and clicked a button on the phone, then said: “It’s been one of those days. Here, you being a professor, I don’t have to read this to you. Just read it through and put your autograph where it says, will you, Thomas?”

  So Tom waived his constitutional rights while Nagel filled in another form that—again—required him to spell out his details.

  Without looking up from his laborious ballpoint penmanship, the detective said, “You saw the little girl that’s gone missing? On TV? Hayley?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But you didn’t see her on your hike?”

  “No.”

  “Look.” Like a card-sharp, Nagel dealt out half a dozen photographs across the front of the metal desk. There was a posed school photo of Hayley, dressed up as if for church, smiling obediently at the camera; birthday-party photos, with Hayley circled in red among her friends; Hayley, laughing, astride the bronze pig in the Pike Place Market. The pictures were heartbreakingly familiar; Tom had nearly identical ones at home.

  “You got kids of your own, Thomas?”

  “Yes, one. A boy. He’s four and three-quarters.”

  “I got two. Boy and a girl. Eight and ten. So we’re speaking here as concerned parents, right? What’s the name of your boy?”

  “Finn.”

  “That an Irish name?”

  “My wife’s family was originally from Ireland.”

  “Okay.” Nagel leaned back in his chair and intertwined his fingers behind his dark-bristled skull. “Let’s try it this way. Leave the pictures there—they just might remind you of something you’ve forgotten. I want to hear about your hike. From the beginning. And take your time. I want to hear the whole goddamn thing.”

  With many prompts and questions from the detective, Tom’s walk took a long time to tell. As a narrative, it was hopelessly lacking in motive, plot, significant events, and dénouement. Its only supporting pillars were the eight cigarettes he’d smoked, which at least provided a flimsy chronological framework for his afternoon. Otherwise, it was a mess of trivial contingencies. Tom finished with the cab ride back to his parked car. “And then I drove home.” As he said it, he thought, This is the silliest story I have ever told.

  “Okay, that’s good. We’re getting somewhere. Now . . .” Nagel checked the pages of his yellow legal pad. “Eleven-forty. You’re in the 7-Eleven on Bothell Way, like you said. Clerk there—an East Indian guy, remember?—says you were kind of antsy and bad-mannered.”

  “You’ve been talking to the clerk in the 7-Eleven?”

  “ ‘Angry man . . . had trouble making correct money . . .’ ” the detective read from his notes. “You tell me why that was, Thomas.”

  “I’d just been having an imaginary row with my wife.”

  “Well, we’ve all been there before. Move on about fifty minutes. It’s around twelve-thirty, and you’re in the Cloverleaf Bar and Grill. The bartender says you asked for a beer but didn’t drink it, ordered a cheeseburger but didn’t hardly eat it, then lit a cigarette but didn’t smoke it. Still arguing with the wife, huh?”

  “No, no, it was over by then. I was . . .” Tom struggled to regain his standing in this humiliating dialogue. “Anyway, that place serves about the worst cheeseburgers in western Washington.”

  “We’ve all been there, too. Now here’s something, Thomas. I hate to sound over-personal, but we have to talk about it. We’ve already talked to a lot of folks who saw you on your hike, and just about all of them agree on one thing. They say you were talking to yourself. You know, mumbling. Is that something you do a lot of, Thomas? Or are we back to bawling out the wife?”

  Appalled, Tom said, “I . . . don’t know. I don’t think so. You see, I was thinking about writing, and—”

  “You mean, you think up a line and say it out loud to see how it sounds?”

  “Well, yes, that sort of thing.”

  “Yeah. I do that too. But not in this building.” Nagel laughed. “I wouldn’t want to blow my pension. Anyhow, let’s move along here. Bar in Redmond. Waldo’s. This is coming up on a quarter to five. Like you said, you had a scotch and water—you made a big deal about not wanting any ice in the water. Customer there says you seemed like you were in a pretty good mood about something, and that you talked to him about the Sonics.”

  “He talked to me about the Sonics.”

  “He says you were quite a fan.”

  “I was just agreeing with him. I don’t know anything about basketball. I don’t understand the rules.”

  “The point is, Thomas, the guy in that bar in Redmond is a happy, outgoing sort of guy. Chats with strangers, shows an interest in sports. Very different, wouldn’t you say, to the guy we heard about in Bothell and Woodinville?”

  “It was just that—I’d had an idea.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “It was an idea for a book. It had nothing to do with . . . It was about British travelers to the United States in Victorian times.”

  Nagel blinked at Tom across the desk, his face gray in the fluorescent light. His skull would have interested a phrenologist; through the thinning, close-cropped fur, you could see strange swellings and contusions of the bone beneath the skin.

  “You see, here’s my problem. I want to eliminate you, Thomas. You just look a little weird. Plus you’re a smoker, and that creates a bad association. I got better ways to spend my time, and so do you. But then I got to deal with this—”

  He passed a clipboard across his desk. “You’ll see quite a few anomalies there, but those little black crosses with circles around ’em are sightings of you.”

  The clipboard held a smudgy, photocopied map of the area, with the Sammamish Slough running top to bottom through the middle. The pecked line of the trail had been touched up in green marker. About two miles of its length was enclosed in a narrow red oblong. Small, circled black crosses with numbers beside them were sprinkled across the entire surface of the map.

  Watching Tom, Nagel said: “You can ignore those. People saw you all over. We had calls from Wenatchee and Spokane. Just look at the ones along the trail.”

  The numbers were confusing. Following the route of his walk, Tom saw 1007, 1218, 1615, 1305, 1150, 1702, 1350, 1
600, 1425 . . . Now that everyone wore digital watches, people remembered time in ridiculously specific terms, but half the reported times were wildly wrong and some were fantastic. Yet there was an underlying pattern in the muddle—a sequence of numbers that chimed reasonably well with his own memory of the afternoon.

  “How many calls have you had?”

  “Last I checked, they were right up around three hundred. But that’s including people like your neighbors and faculty and students at the U.”

  Neighbors? Students? The idea presented itself as a door better left unopened. “What’s this red sausage-shape?”

  “That’s the time period when the victim went missing. Three-ten to three-fifty. I plotted it according to the best times I could get on your hike. Those times look about right to you, Thomas?”

  “Yes, I think they do . . . Yes, that would make it start just after I left the public toilet, which seems about right to me. Give or take ten minutes either way.”

  “You see anybody in that toilet?”

  “I told you before—I didn’t go in. I just sat outside on the bench and smoked a cigarette. The second cigarette.”

  “Now, you see the red cross?”

  It was a few hundred yards north of where the slough was crossed by NE 124th. Tom remembered the bridge. “That’s where Hayley went missing?”

  “Yes. So you get my problem?”

  The red cross was in the exact center of the sausage.

  “What was it that you didn’t see, Thomas?” The detective laid out two more photos on the desk. “Let’s forget Hayley for now. These are the other two kids. Maddie—she’s the teenager—was wearing pink fleece pants and an aqua bomber jacket. Taylor was in blue jeans and a puffy silver down jacket with a hood.”

  “I didn’t see them.”

  “They saw you.”

  “Did they see me—before, or . . . after?”

  “Around three-thirty. Maddie was starting to worry.”

  Tom stared at the map and the photographs. Nothing stirred in his memory except Mrs. Trollope and her great money-making schemes in Cincinnati in 1828. That he remembered clearly, but of Maddie and her brother there was no trace. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t notice them. I was thinking of other—”

  “Okay. Now, one more time. I want you to walk me through this section, from the toilet to south of the bridge.”

  Tom did his best, but there was no more to tell than there had been first time around. He described how he had stopped to watch the red-tailed hawk. He could still see its shivering wings as it hovered overhead, as attached to its position in the air as a kite to the end of a tight string.

  “Yeah, you said. I like to see the birds, too.”

  “You don’t think that perhaps—a bear? or a cougar?”

  “Nope. We’d have found remains.” Nagel stared at the blank Sheetrock wall of his office as if a window there offered him a long view over fields or the sea. “She’s the third kid to disappear in this vicinity in two years. All girls. Last spring, they recovered the body of one of them near Sandpoint, Idaho. The other’s still missing. You’re here, Thomas,” he said, and leaned forward to prod irritably at the map.

  “Well, it was about, I suppose, ten minutes after that, say, oh, a quarter of a mile, when I stopped and lit another cigarette. That would be the fourth.” The look in Nagel’s eyes was not encouraging. Tom explained that he had stood and watched the current for several minutes. “You see, that’s when the idea of the book really seemed to gel—I mean, I’m only telling you this so that we can—”

  “Could you see the bridge from where you were?”

  “I don’t know. I was looking at the water. I was thinking. When you live in your head, you sort of blot out the external world, you know?”

  “So you couldn’t really see anything—like you’d gone blind. Is that it?”

  “No, not exactly, but it’s a very partial kind of vision. For instance . . . But, no, sorry, that would be totally irrelevant.”

  “In this job, nothing’s irrelevant. Tell me.”

  So Thomas told him, bringing to the story more verbal energy than he had been able to muster all afternoon.

  Nagel heard him out, unsmiling, and met the tale’s ending with silence punctuated by the irritable drumming of his fingertip on the desktop. “A fish ate your cigarette.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what, Thomas? I think you’re the most goddamn self-absorbed guy I ever met.”

  “You sound a bit like my wife.” Tom’s laugh was snickering, conciliatory, meant to take the heat out of the moment.

  “Tell her I’m on her side.” There was no humor in the detective’s voice. Chin cupped in his hand, he spoke in a weary monotone. “I want you out of this investigation, Thomas. You’re no good as a witness, and you didn’t do it. Trouble is, I don’t see a way of clearing you, not right now.”

  “Perhaps I could give a blood-sample. Or take a polygraph test?”

  “What good would that do?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought it was what you did.”

  Nagel gazed out through his imaginary window. “You don’t remember nothing. And the other folks—all they remember is you. It’s kind of the same deal when you come down to it.” He gathered up his photos and put them in a drawer. “The level of probability is that the task force will be requiring for you to be re-interviewed again.”

  “Well, of course—any time.”

  “You’re not a citizen.”

  “I’m a British citizen.”

  “So you’d have a passport.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have any travel plans?”

  “No.”

  Once they were out in the corridor, Nagel surprised Tom by putting his hand on his shoulder.

  “Sorry if I was a little short with you in there. It’s been a rough day.”

  “I’m sorry to be so useless to you. I wish to hell I’d been more observant.”

  In the lobby, the detective gave Tom his card. “You want to go out of town for any reason, call me. You think of something—any damn thing— call me. You never know, maybe you’ll get your memory back. Start remembering what you saw on that hike of yours and you’ll be doing yourself a big favor, Thomas. It could be a couple days, could be a week, but we’ll be in touch.” He held out his hand. His mouth was bent into a tired minimal smile.

  “I meant to ask,” Tom said. “What is it you write?”

  “Screenplays,” Nagel said, in a gnarly tone that prohibited further questioning.

  Tom arrived back at the house with fifteen minutes to spare before he had to leave for Treetops. An e-mail from Beth was waiting in his Inbox.

  Hi, Tom:

  That PICTURE! How awful for you, but I’m sure you’re getting it all sorted out now and everything will be back to normal in a day or two. Hope so, anyhow! God, it must have given you a shock to see it! Were you really hiking on that trail when it happened? Did you see those kids? I feel for the parents. Horrible. With everybody talking about this, I’m sure it would be a huge embarrassment for you to deal with Treetops right now, so I’ll pick up Finn at five and he can stay at my place tonite. That arrangement will be best all around—hope you agree (?)

  Take care.

  See ya,

  Beth

  See ya? The phrase made him shudder, and Tom found the whole tone of the message suspect. Beth would never normally spell tonight like that, nor did she usually go in for block capitals and exclamations. She was concealing something behind this mask of pert chattiness, and he doubted very much if saving him from embarrassment was her true motive for hijacking Finn.

  Tom had been counting on Finn as his lifeline to sanity. He needed to be boiling pasta for him and to sprawl beside him watching “The Crocodile Hunter” on “Animal Planet,” and hearing his knock-knock jokes; he needed to bathe him, and tell him a story at bedtime, and snuggle with him under the covers.

  He dialled Beth’s number at work and got her vo
ice-mail. He thought of driving to Treetops to forestall her but didn’t have the guts, imagining with horrid clarity the terse marital wrangle conducted in front of Finn’s teachers, classmates, and their parents, all of whom would be rooting for Beth.

  Without Finn, he couldn’t bear to cook pasta, so he cobbled together a sorry Spanish omelette for his supper. The eggy bits were burned and the potatoes tasted raw, like cubes of radish. Forcing himself to eat, he was seized by a new thought. They’d want to search his house. They always did. It was the first thing you read about. The police conducted a search of his apartment . . . If they came to the house, they’d find Chick and the Mexicans. And if they found Chick and the Mexicans, they’d hold him responsible. As Beth said, “Remember Zoë Baird.” He’d be—what was the legal term?—an accessory after the fact. They could probably deport him for harboring illegals—and not just could, but would.