The Intruders by Michael Marshall Read Free Book Online Page A

“research” I’d halfheartedly accumulated. But I also knew if I hit the clippings and nothing shook out of it, then walking back into town and buying some good, long nails would move up to Plan A. The laptop had done me little deliberate harm. I wasn’t ready to kill it yet.
    I took an unearned work’s-done cigarette from the pack on the table and headed out to the deck. I stopped smoking indoors the year Amy and I got married. She’d tolerated it at first because she’d done a little tobacco herself, back in the day and long before I’d known her, but had taken to using air-freshening devices and raising an eyebrow whenever I lit up. Subtly, and sweetly, and for my own good. I didn’t especially mind the new regime. I could smoke all I wanted at work, and now houseguests couldn’t accuse me of attempted manslaughter by secondhand smoke, and it just made life easier all around.
    I leaned against the rail. The world was silent but for the confidential whispering of trees. The sky was clear and cold above, and midnight blue. I could smell firs and faint wood smoke from a distant hearth fire—likely our neighbors, the Zimmermans. It was good here, I knew that. We had a fancy house. The landscape was rugged, and not much had changed for it in a long time. Birch Crossing was real without being an ass about it: Pickups and SUVs were equally represented, and you could buy a very fancy spatula if you wanted. The Zimmermans were a five-minute drive away, but we’d already had dinner at their house twice. They were a couple of retired history professors from Berkeley, and conversation had not exactly flowed the first time, but the gift of a single-malt on our second visit had oiled the wheels. Both were sprightly for people in their early seventies—Bobbi filled the CD player with everything from Mozart to Sparklehorse, and Ben’s black hair was barely flecked with gray. He and I now chatted affably enough on the street when we met, though I suspected that his wife had the measure of me.
    And yet a week ago, I’d been standing right there on the deck when something had happened.
    I was watching Amy through the glass doors as she chopped vegetables and supervised a saucepan on the stove. I could smell simmering plum tomatoes and capers and oregano. It was only midafternoon, and there was enough light to appreciate both the view and the house’s good side. Instead of being in the office until after nine, my wife was at her kitchen counter happily making mud pies, and she remained appealing from both left and right and front and back, too. I’d even gotten an idea down that morning, and halfway believed I might produce another book about something or other. The spheres were in alignment, and nine-tenths of the world’s population would have traded places with me in a heartbeat.
    Yet for a moment it was as if a cloud drifted across the world. At first I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Then I realized I had no idea where I was. Not just the name of the town—I couldn’t even remember what state I was in. I couldn’t recall what had happened to me, or when, had no idea of how I’d gotten to this place and time. The house looked unfamiliar, the trees as if they’d been slipped into position when I wasn’t looking. The woman on the other side of the big window was a stranger to me, her movements foreign and unexpected.
    Who was she? Why was she standing in there holding a knife? And why was she looking at it as if she couldn’t remember what it was for? The feeling was too pervasive to be described as panic, but I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I blinked, looking around, trying to lock into something tangible. It wasn’t a reaction to the newness of the environment. I’ve traveled a lot, and I’d been sick to death of L.A. I was tired because I hadn’t been sleeping well, but it wasn’t that either, or the usual shadows that came to haunt me. It was not about regrets or guilt. It wasn’t