Free The Intruders by Michael Marshall Page B

back.
    She’d taken a shower to get the sand off, and when she came out, Mom said she didn’t feel like going out to eat tonight and what did Madison think about calling for pizza? Madison thought this was a world-class idea, because Mario’s in Cannon Beach did what her dad called “real serious pies,” and you could only get them here because they weren’t a chain. It was strange that Mom was suggesting it, because her usual position was that Mario’s put too much cheese on and not all the toppings were certified organic or GM-free, but, whatever. “Yes, please” was the answer whichever way you cut it.
    But then Mom couldn’t find the menu, and she was going to call directory assistance, and it grew later and later, and after a while Madison got the idea that pizza wasn’t going to happen after all. She found a box of soup mix in the cupboard and made that instead. Her mother didn’t want any. Madison didn’t either, but she made herself eat about half and then spent a while reading one of her history books. She liked history, enjoyed knowing about how things had been in years gone by.
    Then she’d gone to bed. Got into her jammies and climbed in. Then she must have fallen asleep.
    And now she had woken up.
     
    Madison opened her hand and looked at the sand dollar again. She could remember bending down to pick it up. She could remember sitting with it. So how come she couldn’t remember what had happened right after that? Sand dollars were big news. Surely she would have come running in right away to show her mom, maybe thinking it might cheer her up? Why couldn’t she remember doing that?
    Madison lay back, pulling the covers up under her chin. Her memory was good. She performed well in tests at school and triumphantly took on all comers at Remember, Remember and Snap—Uncle Brian said she could win a Remember, Remember World Series, if there was one. But now it was like the world was a big television, showing two shows at once—or as if the signal had gotten confused and the screen was showing one thing but the sound was from another movie altogether. And even though she’d mainly sorted out the question of what she was doing here, it didn’t seem to answer anything. She was here because it was the beach house, and she was here with her mom, and it was night so she was in bed.
    But was that what she’d actually meant?
    She was breathing a little quickly now, as if expecting bad news or hearing a sound that meant that somewhere something bad was coming toward her. Something felt wrong and crooked and out of kilter.
    And…hadn’t there been a man?
    Hadn’t he given her something she had put in the drawer of the bedside table? A card, like one of Dad’s business cards but very plain and white?

    No. Absolutely not.
    There had been no man. She was sure of that. So there could be no card. She did not need to check.
    But she did, and she found that there was in fact such a card in the drawer. It had a name printed on it and a phone number added in ballpoint. There was a design drawn on the other side. The symbol looked as if someone had drawn a number 9, then rotated the card a little and drawn another 9 and kept doing that until they came back around to where they’d started.
    Barely aware that she was doing it, Madison reached to the phone on the bedside table and dialed 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