A Tap on the Window

by Linwood Barclay

  “I guess it depends what kind. Maybe you should try white-water rafting.”

  “It’s just that my life these days . . . it’s just life, you know? Today’s going to be like yesterday and tomorrow’s going to be exactly like today. But with Bert, even if it’s just for a while, I can have a few days that aren’t like all the others. You have to admit he’s a handsome man. I mean, you can say that and it doesn’t mean you’re gay or anything.”

  “He’s a handsome man,” I said.

  “He’s got the looks to be a lot more than a small-town mayor. He could be a governor or a senator or anything like that if he decided that’s what he wanted.”

  “It’s not what he wants?”

  “He’s not ambitious that way,” Annette said. “He just wants to make a difference wherever he happens to be at the time. He cares about being a good mayor, about doing what’s right. That’s why he’s in this fight with Perry, who, I just want to say, is not that bad a guy. I think he does right by this town, and I’m not just saying that because he’s Donna’s brother, you know? Maybe he goes a little overboard now and then, I’ll grant you that. But Jesus, you don’t really think he has Bert’s house bugged, do you? I mean, that would be—that’d be bad.”

  I shrugged.

  “How’d you get looking for Claire in the first place?”

  I told her, briefly, about the night before.

  “God, kids,” she said. “You can never predict what they’re going to do.” She appeared to be thinking. “This thing with Hanna—that’s just so awful. You think maybe Claire ran off because she knows who did it?”

  “Claire took off before it happened, so no.” I pointed. “We’re almost to my street.”

  “I know.” Half a minute later, she brought the car to a stop at the end of our driveway.

  “How are you and Kent doing?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Annette said.

  “This thing you have going with Sanders—you don’t have to be a genius to figure out it means you and Kent are going through a rough patch.”

  “It doesn’t have to mean that,” she said.

  “So things between you are perfect?” I asked.

  “No couple on this planet has a perfect relationship,” she said. “Do you?”

  When I hesitated, Annette jumped in. “God, I’m sorry. With what you’ve been through, I don’t know how I could have said that.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Listen, sometime I’d like to go up on the roof again.”

  “Oh, Cal.”

  “I just . . . I’m still wrestling with this, Annette. I keep playing it in my head, how it happened.”

  “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll mention it to Kent. If you don’t hear from him, if he doesn’t call you, then you’ll know he’s not okay with it.”

  I was betting I’d never hear from him.

  “Thanks for the ride. Oh, and would you say hi to Roman for me?”

  She cocked her head to one side. “Sure. Why?”

  “We kind of ran into each other earlier tonight. Tell him I’m thinking about him.”

  * * *

  Donna’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I figured she must have put it in the garage, which she didn’t do very often. I let myself into the house as quietly as I could and went to the kitchen, thinking I’d have a glass of water, then realized I’d gone through another evening without any dinner. I opened the cupboard and took out some saltines and peanut butter. Not exactly fine dining, but a few smeared crackers would keep my stomach from growling through the night.

  Stealthily, I put the dirty knife and glass into the dishwasher and crept up the stairs. I tiptoed through the bedroom, but I stepped on something hard and there was a sudden cracking noise. Not all that loud, but loud enough, I feared, to wake Donna. When I didn’t hear her stir, I knelt down and patted the carpet until I found what I’d stepped on. One of her pencils. I’d snapped it in two. I picked up the pieces, noticed that the small can of spray fixative had hit the floor, too, and scooped that up, then slipped into the bathroom.

  I waited until I had the door closed before turning on the light, put the broken pencil pieces in the trash basket, the spray can on the counter, and disrobed. Stripped to my boxers, I brushed my teeth, then killed the light before opening the door.

  It hit me then that Donna usually left the bathroom light on for me.

  My eyes were taking a while to adjust to the dark, so I made my way to the bed by instinct, pulled back the covers on my side, and slipped between the sheets.

  I knew the moment I was in the bed that something was off. I blinked hurriedly until my eyes were accustomed to the absence of light—as though that might somehow help—then sat up and looked at the other side of the bed.

  Donna was not there.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The porch light helps her as she slides the key into the front door and turns the dead bolt. She’s surprised, when she opens the door, to see her son standing there in the front hall, having seen him only a few hours earlier.

  “You scared me half to death,” she says.

  “You’re not usually out this late.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Things are working out,” he says. “I had to tell you. I didn’t want to wait till morning.”

  “You’ve found them?”

  “No, but I may have found a way to find them.”

  She throws her purse on the closest chair. “Please don’t get my hopes up.”

  He tells her what he’s done. He has been, she must admit, a busy boy. “That’s a lot of running around,” she says. While she remains skeptical, he does seem to have thought this through.

  She likes one of his ideas in particular. “That’s a good plan, to use the detective,” she says. “I saw him earlier.”

  “We put him to work for us, except he doesn’t even know it,” he says.

  “It could work.”

  “I feel like it’s coming together.”

  “Don’t get carried away,” she snaps. “We’re a long way from being able to put this behind us. If the boy took the book, when you find him, you have to get it back. I should have cottoned to the fact that he’d given it away sooner. Usually when he fills a notebook, he asks for a new one, and I get him one. But he didn’t ask this time because it was too soon. He’d probably only filled half of it. He figured I’d get suspicious.”

  “You’re worried too much about that damn book.”

  “No, I’m not. You need to take this seriously.”

  “Are you kidding? You think I’m not taking this seriously? Really? Look at the shit I’ve had to deal with. I’ve been thinkin’ on my feet. Like with the other girl, how I made it look like something it wasn’t. How about a little credit for that?”

  “I’m going to bed. I can’t deal with this one more minute.”

  “It’s your fault, anyway, you know,” he says.

  That stops her on her way to the stairs. “What did you say?”

  “Leaving the house while the dryer was running, not being here when the lint caught on fire. If there’d never been any smoke, none of this would have—”

  Her hand moves so quickly he doesn’t have a chance to stop her from slapping him across the face.

  “I will not have you speak to me that way. Who do you think all this has been for? Huh? Who’s it all been for?”

  He puts a hand to his hot, red cheek. “It’s been for Dad,” he says.

  “No,” she says. “It’s always been for you. All of it. I did it all for you, and so help me, God, it looks like I’m going to have to do more before we’re done.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  I threw back the covers and stood up so quickly I made myself light-headed. I turned the bedside table lamp on. Donna’s side of the bed did not look s
lept in. It didn’t make sense that if she hadn’t been able to get to sleep, she’d have made the bed when she got up. You don’t do that when it’s eleven or twelve at night. You get up, wander around, have a glass of water, figuring that in a few minutes you’re going to get back under the covers and try again to get to sleep.

  So Donna had not yet gone to bed.

  I made my way down the hall, going to Scott’s room first. It never surprised me to find her under the covers there these days. But when I opened the door, allowing light to spill in from the hall, I could see the bed was empty.

  Turning on lights as I went, I descended the stairs. If she had been sitting in the living room, quietly, it was possible I could have walked in and gone right past her without noticing. But she wasn’t there.

  She wasn’t in the basement or the laundry room.

  “Donna!” I shouted.

  I unlocked the sliding glass doors that led out onto the deck and hit the floods, which were powerful enough to illuminate the entire backyard. It was way too frosty for her to be sitting outside, gazing heavenward, wondering how our boy was doing up there. Like I say, if you believed in that sort of thing.

  I went back in, relocked the sliding doors, and opened the one at the end of the kitchen that connected with the garage.

  Donna’s car was gone.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said.

  I went to the phone on the kitchen counter and hit the button that automatically connected me to her cell phone.

  It rang once.

  “Come on,” I said.

  It rang a second time.

  “Pick up.”

  It rang a third time. Then, “Hey.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Driving around.”

  “I came home, couldn’t find you. I was starting to get frantic.”

  “I should have left a note,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “What’s wrong?” The stupid question to end all stupid questions, I knew. What I was trying to ask was, what made tonight worse than all the other nights of the last few months?

  “I have a lot on my mind,” Donna said.

  We were both silent for a few seconds. I could hear the hum of the car in the background. Finally, I said, “What’d you have for dinner?”

  “I didn’t have dinner,” she said.

  “Me neither,” I said. Another pause. “I’m kind of starving.”

  “I guess I am, too.”

  “The Denny’s would be open,” I said. “We could get a midnight breakfast. I feel like some eggs and sausage.”

  “I’m not far from there,” Donna said. Long pause. “I’ll meet you.”

  “I need you to swing by and pick me up. I haven’t got a car.”

  “You haven’t got a car?”

  “I’ll tell you about it over eggs.”

  * * *

  Before I could fill her in about the car, I had to explain the bruise on the side of my face. She noticed it as soon as I got into the passenger seat.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “Not as much as my pride.”

  There were two other couples and one man sitting by himself at Denny’s. Donna and I took a table by the window and ordered decafs to start from the waitress, who was there before our butts had hit the seats. We clung to the hope that once we got home, we’d actually be able to get to sleep, so regular coffee seemed an unwise choice.

  “The police seized the car,” I said.

  Donna spooned some sugar into her mug. “Tell me.”

  I told her. Starting with my visit to the Rodomskis’, followed by my visit to the Skillings’, taking Sean with me to where I’d dropped Hanna off, then finding her body under the bridge.

  “And Annette Ravelson is sleeping with the mayor,” I said, “but that seems kind of anticlimactic to everything else.”

  “How awful,” she said. “Finding that girl’s body.” I thought I saw her shiver. It wasn’t possible to think about any body without imagining Scott’s in the parking lot at Ravelson Furniture.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The Skilling kid took it bad.”

  “You don’t think he did it,” Donna said.

  “I don’t,” I said. “But I’ve been wrong before.”

  The waitress returned and we ordered eggs and all the greasy, wonderful things that generally come with them. An awkward silence ensued for several minutes until the food came.

  “I can’t believe my brother would have the car seized,” Donna said.

  I sipped my coffee, imagined the jolt it would give me if it weren’t decaf. “Yeah, I was surprised, too.”

  “You two are like a dog and a cat in the same sack, but I think, at some level, he respects you,” she said. “Maybe he seized the car to make a point, that he’s not showing favoritism, even though he knows he won’t find anything.”

  “Unless he does,” I said.

  Her forkful of egg stopped halfway to her mouth. “Cal, Augie’s not going to frame you. That’s absolutely ridiculous. You think he’s going to plant evidence against you?”

  I said nothing.

  “For God’s sake, why would he do that? What possible reason could he have?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I know you don’t like him—half the time I don’t even like him—but he’s not capable of that.”

  “He’s feeding the mayor a line of bullshit, saying his people never overstep their bounds.”

  She gave me a look that suggested I should know better. “You think there’s a police force anywhere that doesn’t? Like, say, the Promise Falls police? I believe you used to work there.”

  “Donna.”

  “Augie looks out for his people. The way your chief looked out for you.”

  “I lost my job,” I said.

  “You could have lost more,” she said.

  My time in Promise Falls was not something I liked to talk about. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Augie’s making a point. Maybe he just wants to inconvenience me. I’ll have to rent something in the morning.”

  “Use my car,” Donna said. “Drop me off. If you can’t pick me up, I’ll find my way home.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  A couple of minutes of silence followed. I had a feeling we were done talking about my evening, at least for now. We were moving to something else.

  Finally, Donna said, “I was afraid he’d stop loving me.”

  I looked at her and waited.

  “I was afraid, that if I—if we—got really tough with him, grounded him, cut off his money, forced him into counseling, just went to war with him about what he was doing, I was afraid he wouldn’t love me anymore.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I even thought about turning him in,” Donna said. “Calling Augie. Have him arrested, put the cuffs on him, throw him in jail, the whole thing. Like that Scared Straight movie. Remember that? But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t think I’d be able to forgive myself. I thought about what might happen to him when he was in jail, even if it was only for a little while, about the other people he might meet in there, what they might do to him. But now that I didn’t do it, I can’t forgive myself for that, either.”

  I put my fork down. I wanted to say something, but it was hard for me.

  “What?” Donna said.

  “I’m angry all the time,” I said. “I do my best to hide it. But it’s always there. It’s like I’ve got snakes slithering around under my skin. Millions of bugs, crawling inside me.”

  “Are you angry with me?” Donna asked.

  I didn’t answer right away. I was debating how honest to be, because I was angry with her. But it was nothing compared to the anger I felt toward myself. It was nothing compared to the anger I felt toward whoev
er sold Scott that final dose.

  And it was nothing compared to the anger I felt toward Scott himself.

  “I don’t know if there’s anyone I’m not mad at,” I said, and watched her face fall ever so slightly. “But you’re far from the top of the list.” I paused. “That’s where I am.” I made two fists, trying to work out my tension, and then relaxed my hands.

  “You want to punish yourself, that’s one thing,” she said. “I get that. I want to do it to myself. But you have to stop punishing me.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I haven’t said a thing.”

  “Exactly. You have to talk to me. I’ve never needed you more in my life than I do now, but you’re shutting me out. Withdrawing into yourself. When we lost him, what we had, part of that died, too. Are you willing to let it die completely?” Her eyes were red and moist.

  I closed my own briefly.

  “No,” I said.

  I struggled to find words. “I’m afraid . . . I feel like it’s wrong to be happy. That if we’re ever good, if we’re ever happy again, it’s some kind of betrayal.”

  A tear ran down Donna’s cheek. “Oh, babe, we’re never going to be happy. But we could be happier. Happier than we are now.”

  As hungry as I’d been, I didn’t have enough appetite to finish what was on my plate. I pushed some eggs around with my fork, then set it down.

  “I never should have let her out of the car,” I said.

  “What else could you have done?”

  “Something. At the very least, stayed with her until she got hold of someone else to give her a ride. She was calling the Skilling kid when she got interrupted.”

  “You said she ran away. How would that have looked, you chasing a teenage girl down some empty street late at night?”

  Donna wasn’t wrong. But I didn’t feel any better.

  “It’s not my only regret,” I said. “I’ve done some things.”

  Donna eyed me warily. “Go on.”

  “Things I’m not proud of.”