8
PETER PICKED UP David's bag and laid it on the bed. Instinctively he knew what it meant, even before his mind had come to the obvious conclusion. He sorted through it carefully, tilting the open bag toward the window to catch the sunlight. There were two pairs of swimming trunks on top. Underneath were comic books, a pair of zorries, a T-shirt wrapped around a Sony Walkman, headphones, and the little packet of postcard stamps.
Peter dropped the bag and went out, up the hall and into Amanda’s bedroom. Her luggage was spread out over the bed, opened up, only half-packed. Bathing suits, beach towels, sandals—all the vacation stuff was there. It was clean and neatly stacked and organized, by a person systematic about packing, someone going away, not someone returning. A few pieces of folded clothing were piled on the bed and chair. There was nothing on the floor—no dirty clothes, no souvenirs.
Peter ran out into the living room, looking for something to explain what was obvious. He found the week’s mail scattered on the floor under the mail slot. Frantically he sorted through it, checking return addresses, searching for anything at all. Nothing. Just bills, junk, magazines, some of it addressed to him. He let it lie and headed back into the kitchen.
Leaning with both hands against the edge of the counter, he closed his eyes and forced himself to think. Amanda and David hadn’t been home for a week. That much was clear. And wherever they’d gone—if in fact they’d gone anywhere—they hadn’t taken anything with them.
Possible answers to the riddle filtered into his mind, and the atmosphere of the house was suddenly threatening. He found that he was listening hard, like someone awakened by a noise in the night.
But aside from the mail strewn on the floor, there was no sign of anything out of place in the kitchen or living room, no evidence of trouble, of an intruder. Carefully, not knowing what to expect, Peter pushed open the door of the den, letting it swing wide before looking in, half expecting something that he couldn’t picture or put into words.
It was just another empty room. Both bathrooms were clean except for the windblown dust on the countertops and windowsills.
The fourth bedroom, Amanda’s study, was as tidy as the rest of the house. For a moment he hoped he would find an explanatory note there, but the only thing on the desktop was a check register and last month’s canceled checks, sorted and stacked.
Seeing them there propelled him back into Amanda’s bedroom. He pulled open her carry-on bag and hauled out a sweater, a paperback novel, a hairbrush, and a crossword puzzle magazine. He unzipped the inside pocket. Three stacks of traveler’s checks lay inside, tucked into plastic cases along with three hundred dollars in twenties. Two sets of airline tickets were slid in alongside, enclosed in a heavy paper envelope advertising Slotsy Tours and Travel. His hands shook as he set the tickets down on the dresser.
Move, he told himself, and he sprinted to the back door, pulled it open, and ran to the garage, going in through the side door. He flipped on the light switch, half expecting to see Amanda and David slumped in the parked car. But the Honda Accord sat there as ever, empty, bad brakes and all.
He shut the light off and went back out into the sunlight, knowing that he wouldn’t find any answers in the house. Amanda and David hadn’t come home since their trip out to the canyon to visit him last Sunday afternoon. There was no use quizzing the neighbors. He would make one phone call and then go to the police. He found Amanda’s telephone book in the kitchen, scanned a couple of pages, then punched a number into the phone.
It rang once, twice, three times; he closed his eyes, listening to the fourth and fifth rings. “Answer it!” he said out loud, straight into the mouthpiece, and a voice on the other end, sounding puzzled, said, “What?”
“Peggy!”
“Peter?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s Peter.”
“I nearly hung up on you. What were you yelling about?”
“I thought you weren’t going to answer.”
“Oh,” she said. “How’s it going? What’s up? Hear from Mandy?”
“No,” Peter said. “Not yet. I’m over at the house, though. I came over to work on her car.” He watched through the window as he talked. The wind was tearing across the backyard now, blowing the limbs of the willow tree nearly horizontal. Leaves whirled away up the driveway. He forced himself to sound calm and reasonable.
“She told me you were going to fix the brakes. I think she thought it was a little funny. Don’t be too nice, Peter.”
“I’ve never been accused of that before, actually, but thanks. What I want to know,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “is how upset she seemed a week ago when you drove her home from my place.”
“You mean when I drove her up there. I didn’t drive her home.”
Peter sat down hard on a kitchen chair. “That’s what I meant,” he said.
That was it. He could hang up now. He knew what he had to know.
“Well, she was kind of upset,” Peggy said, “because I didn’t have time to stop at the store so she could get the stuff you wanted. Frankly, she said you’d be a pain in the ass about it.”
“I was,” Peter said. “That’s just what I was.”
“It was my fault, really. I left something at home and then had to go back for it. It was a real mess. I was late for work, so she said to pass on the groceries. Did you yell at her?”
“No,” Peter said. But actually he had. Both of them had done some yelling—very quietly so that David wouldn’t know about it. Over the years they had got used to yelling quietly. Peter had wanted to make an early dinner for Amanda and David that afternoon, in celebration of their leaving for Hawaii. He had asked Amanda for a bottle of olive oil and a bunch of garlic and some slipper lobster tails along with a few other odds and ends—stuff that he couldn’t buy at local stores. She was going to be passing a gourmet sort of market on the way out with Peggy, so he had left it up to her. She hadn’t brought any of it.
After all the yelling, Peter had gone after it himself, driving all the way out to east Orange when he would have saved time just driving down into El Toro or across the canyon into Coto de Caza. He could have made spaghetti, for God’s sake, hamburgers. Somehow, though, he had wanted to show her. He didn’t know exactly what that meant now.
When he had gotten back, something like an hour and a half later, Amanda and David were gone. Amanda had threatened that before he left. She had told him that Peggy would gladly give them a ride home. Peggy was only working a four-hour shift at the Trabuco Oaks Steak House. Amanda and David could walk across the ridge and down into the Oaks in about forty minutes, not much longer than the time that it took to drive there on the dirt road. Peter had taken off for the more distant market anyway, despite Amanda’s warning. Because of Amanda’s warning. When he got back they were gone.
“So why did you call?” Peggy asked.
“What?”
“Why did you call? Just to talk?”
“No real reason,” Peter said. “I’m just trying to keep on top of it all. You know. I can’t give it up just like that.”
“It isn’t easy, is it?”
“Not much, no,” Peter said.
“It’s not easy on Amanda, either, you know. I’m sorry about screwing up your dinner, though.”
“I screwed it up,” Peter said. “Just another mistake.”
“Keep in touch,” she said.
“Sure.” He hung up and sat for a moment thinking, his throat and stomach hollow. He had no real way of knowing that Amanda and David had ever left the canyon on that windy Sunday afternoon a week ago. He had taken it for granted that they had, and the next day he had driven cheerfully off to Santa Barbara. If he set out right now to make a list of the things he had taken for granted in his life, he’d go broke buying paper.