The bedroom was unoccupied; a man’s black leather wallet was on the bedside table. She checked the closet and under the bed.
Who hides under the bed? Monsters. Monsters hide under the bed, her six-year-old self answered instantly. But not in this bedroom, not tonight.
Perhaps they didn’t wait for me, she thought, but something had definitely come into the house. The bed was made, she noticed. How long ago, she couldn’t say.
A quick look into the bathroom and a second bedroom confirmed to Madison that she was alone.
Jerry Wallace had high-blood-pressure pills on the counter and an herbal solution for insomnia; he was not a guy who went off on a whim and left upturned furniture and tumblers and his wallet by the bed.
Where was the telephone, she wondered next. She returned downstairs, looked around in the living room, and found it on a small table by the sofa. The handset sat on a gray box with a red LED light that told the world that seven messages awaited Jerry Wallace.
Even though she was unexpectedly investigating a possible crime scene, Madison hesitated to play the messages. She was, after all, inside a stranger’s house. She would look around a bit more first.
From the stale warmth of the house she emerged into the clean, early-evening chill and stood on the back steps. The line of trees that circled the small yard was almost completely indistinct. Had someone hidden there and watched while Wallace went about his life inside the house? Was someone watching now?
Madison’s gaze followed the low branches that almost reached the ground, the curve of a root jutting out of the earth, and she saw something that was neither tree nor ground.
She crossed the yard in long, running steps, and there it was, caught by a twisting root—a navy woolen slipper. She didn’t touch it. It was sitting on the damp earth, on the edge of the impenetrable darkness. Madison, her piece in her hand, stood stock-still and searched the shadows for movement or sound. It was a wall of black, and the rustle of the top branches, shifting and swaying, was all there was and, she suspected, all there ever would be. She paused there, one hand against the rough bark of a tree and the other holding the Glock.
Then the telephone was ringing inside the house, and Madison, startled and swearing under her breath, ran back and managed to grab the handset.
“Hello,” she said.
“Who . . . who is this?” a woman’s voice replied.
“Detective Madison, Seattle PD. Who is this?”
“Katy Wallace. I think I have the wrong number.”
“No, you don’t. This is Mr. Wallace’s home number—”
“Is my father there? I’ve been trying to reach him for the last two days.”
Madison looked around the room, at the muted television and the eggs on the plate. She passed the receiver to the other hand.
“Ma’am . . .” she began.
Officers from the Pierce County sheriff’s department arrived in their whites with full lights and sirens thirteen minutes after Madison’s call and took over the scene. Jerry Wallace’s daughter, Katy, was on her way from Portland with her boyfriend. She had said “yes” a lot during their conversation, as dread became reality and panic took hold.
Madison and two deputies swept the woods behind the house with the beams of their heavy-duty flashlights, but, as one officer said, it was blacker than a bag of crows out there, and all they were achieving was trampling a possible crime scene.
He turned to Madison. “There’s a trail five, ten minutes that way.” He pointed ahead of them. “Someone doesn’t want to be seen approaching the house could park there and walk through, no problem, even in daylight.”
Madison nodded. Jerry Wallace was gone. Jerry Wallace, who knew everything and everyone, had been lifted clear out of his own life.
Madison drove back to Seattle, her thoughts chasing one another in circles, and by the time she got home, she was bone-tired. She dug out some leftover roast chicken in a Tupperware container and didn’t even bother with a plate. She ate it thinking about two-day-old eggs and bacon on white china.
At 4:00 a.m. Madison woke up with a start. Her heart was drumming fast, and she was covered in perspiration in spite of the chill in the room. She wrapped herself in her blanket and waited for her breathing to return to normal. She had been due a bad dream for the last few days, and there it was. You have occasional nightmares, possibly an exact memory of the event but more likely your own perception of the event and whatever troubles you about the nature of your own actions in it.
Dr. Robinson had been right, of course, and yet Madison knew that he had been wrong about the most important part of the dream. Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms such as her sensitivity to chloroform were born out of fear: often the fear a victim felt in the moment of an attack, the acute recollection of which was then triggered by any of a list of sensory perceptions. But Madison’s dream—the long run in the pitch-black forest, the smell of blood in the clearing—was not about being attacked, it was not about being a victim, and it was not about being defenseless.