A Tap on the Window

by Linwood Barclay

  That’s certainly what happened that night, seven years ago.

  Harry was in the grips of the black dog, as Winston Churchill had famously said, and had been that way for the better part of a week. Phyllis and Richard had tried their best to steer clear of him. Phyllis was looking after Patchett’s on her own, insisting that her husband stay home until he was feeling more up to it.

  One Monday night, when the staff were trusted to run Patchett’s so that the Pearces could have a night off, after Harry had recorded in his notebook what Phyllis had served for dinner—pork chops, macaroni and cheese, and canned peas, as it turned out—he announced he wanted ice cream.

  Phyllis said they had no ice cream. Harry wanted to know how this was possible, since he had prepared a shopping list for Phyllis and he knew he had written ice cream on it.

  “I missed it,” she said. “I’ll get some next time.”

  “What is the point,” he wanted to know, “of my writing things on your shopping list, if you’re not going to look at it and read what’s on it? Maybe you got it and forgot.” He rooted around in the freezer atop the refrigerator, knocking frozen steaks and containers of Minute Maid orange juice onto the floor. “Goddamn it.”

  “Harry,” Phyllis said.

  Richard watched this play out, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, arms folded across his chest. A member of the Griffon police department for only a few months but still living at home, he hadn’t yet changed out of his uniform after a day of writing tickets and directing traffic at an accident scene.

  “Is it too fucking much to ask that we always have some ice cream in here?” Harry asked, tossing out more items. An ice cube tray hit the floor, scattering tiny blocks of ice across the linoleum. “What about the downstairs freezer?” he asked. “We have any down there?”

  “No,” Phyllis said.

  He flung open the door to the basement anyway.

  Richard, up till now, hadn’t moved an inch.

  Harry spun around, took a step in her direction, pointed a finger, holding it three inches from her nose. “After all I’ve done, helping you and your boy all these bloody years, do I ask for that much? Do I? I swear to God, if I—”

  It all happened in less than ten seconds.

  “Shut up!” Richard said, storming into the room, grabbing one of the wooden kitchen table chairs, holding it by the back with both hands, swinging it like a bat toward his stepfather.

  He instinctively turned away, and the chair hit him across the back. Hard. Harry Pearce stumbled forward, his foot landing on one of the cubes of ice.

  In a Three Stooges episode it might have been comical.

  Harry’s foot went out from under him and he pitched forward, right through the open doorway to the basement. Made a hell of a noise going down. But when he reached the bottom, there was total silence.

  Phyllis screamed.

  “Dad!” Richard cried, throwing aside the chair.

  The two of them ran down the steps, finding Harry in a twisted heap, eyes closed, not moving.

  “Oh my God, he’s dead,” Phyllis said.

  Richard knelt, laid his head sideways on his father’s chest. “No, he’s not. He’s breathing. His heart’s going.”

  Phyllis dropped to her knees, put her head to his chest as well, needing to confirm it for herself. “Yes, I hear it. I hear it. Harry? Harry, can you hear me?”

  Harry, who had adopted the shape of a pretzel, did not respond.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” Richard said, getting up. He went up the stairs two at a time and as he was disappearing into the kitchen his mother called up to him.

  “Wait,” she said.

  His head reappeared, framed in the doorway, silhouetted against the kitchen lights. “What?”

  “Don’t . . . I mean, just . . . wait.”

  “Mom, every second counts.”

  “He’ll be okay,” Phyllis said. “He just needs a minute. Help me straighten him out.”

  “We shouldn’t move him,” her son said.

  “We’ll be really careful. I’ve got that old rollaway bed in the back room. I’ll bring it out and we can put him down on that.”

  “Mom . . .” Richard came back down the stairs halfway.

  “Richard, listen to me,” she said. “If you call the ambulance, they’re going to call the police, too.”

  “I’m the police,” Richard said.

  “I know. But others will come. And when Harry wakes up, and tells them what you did . . .”

  “I . . . I didn’t mean to do it. He just made me so angry. I thought he was going to hit you.”

  “I know, love, I know. I totally understand. But the police, they won’t. They won’t understand. You’re just starting out. It wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be fair for them to hold this against you.”

  “I . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Get the bed set up. Set it up right here. I’ll straighten him out.”

  Richard brought in the rollaway, the rusty wheels squeaking in protest. He opened it and flattened it, patted the mattress to smooth it out.

  “Help me lift him,” Phyllis said.

  Together, they got him onto the bed. “He’s still breathing,” she said. “He seems to be breathing just fine.”

  “I couldn’t stand what he was doing,” Richard said. “He just wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t let it go, he—”

  “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll look after him. He’ll probably be fine in a few hours. He’ll have a bad headache is all. You wait and see. It doesn’t make any sense to make a bigger deal out of this than it really is.”

  “If that’s what you think, Mom,” Richard said. She always seemed to know the right thing to do.

  But was this right? It had seemed so at the time. But Harry was not fine in a few hours. He didn’t regain consciousness for two days. When he did, he wasn’t the same. He was simpler, somehow.

  When Richard and Phyllis tried to coax him out of bed, they discovered he could not move his legs.

  “We should call a doctor,” Richard said. “He probably needs an X-ray or something.”

  “We’ll give it a few more days,” Phyllis insisted. “Maybe—maybe whatever broke that keeps his legs from working will fix itself.”

  Neither one of them really believed that, but they were willing to give it a go.

  At Patchett’s, people asked where Harry was.

  “He’s got that nasty flu bug that’s been going around,” Phyllis told them. “Last thing I want is him coming in here and sneezing on the chicken wings.”

  After a week had gone by, Phyllis and Richard knew they had a real problem on their hands.

  They’d waited too long to call for help. How were they going to explain their actions? Letting a man fall down a full flight of stairs and not calling for help? It was a bit late to start claiming self-defense. If what Richard had done had been to save his mother’s life, they could have called the police that night. After all, as a spanking-new police officer, Richard would have a pretty good idea what constituted self-defense.

  But they didn’t.

  And while Harry Pearce was a little groggier than he used to be, every time Richard descended those stairs to see how his father was coming along, the man would raise one arm weakly, point at him, and say, “You. You son of a bitch.”

  Meaning that pretty damn literally.

  Getting him medical attention now posed a considerable risk to Phyllis and her son, but particularly to him.

  And at work, people continued to ask, “How’s Harry? Where the hell is he? When’s he coming back?”

  “What are we going to do?” Richard asked one night as the two of them sat at the kitchen table, listening to Harry snoring downstairs.

  “I don’t know,” his mother
said.

  “People are going to keep asking and asking where Dad is,” he said.

  “We have to stop them from asking,” she said. “This needs to end, somehow.”

  Richard leaned back in his chair. “What are you saying? You’re not thinking we should—”

  “No, no, of course not. But everyone needs to think something has happened, something permanent, so they won’t be asking where he is anymore.”

  “Like, maybe he went to see his cousin,” Richard said. “In Calgary.”

  Phyllis shook her head. “People would keep asking when he was coming back. No, we need to tell a story that will stop people from asking questions once and for all.” Her mouth tightened. “I went to the library today. I found out something interesting. I found that over the years, quite a few people who’ve fallen into the river accidentally and gone over the falls—some of them were never found.”

  “Wait,” Richard said. “I thought you just said you weren’t saying we’d do anything like that. We’re not going to send him over the falls. We can’t . . . I mean, he’s my father. Okay, not my real father, but that’s what he’s been to me for a hell of a long time.”

  She reached out and held his hand. “I know that. But I was thinking, if we could make people think he went over the falls, then we can just keep looking after him. Right here.”

  “For how long?”

  “As long as we have to.”

  “But he might . . . what if he actually gets better? Well enough to, you know, walk up those stairs and out the door?”

  “Richard, he’s not going to get better. His spine is broken. Something’s happened to his head, too. He’s gone a bit simple. He’s not even obsessed with things the way he used to be, other than still writing down what he eats in that stupid book. I’m telling you, he’s not going to get up and walk out of the house one day and tell everybody what happened to him.”

  They came up with the boat idea. That Harry got drunk one night, decided to take his boat out into the river. They’d leave his car and trailer at the river’s edge. Leave the oars in the car so later, when the boat, and its empty tank of gas, was found downstream from the falls, the authorities would be able to put it together. They’d search for his body, maybe for a few days, before they gave up.

  And that’s what they did.

  There was an article in the paper, an item on each of the local stations. CNN even picked up the story. There was a funeral, even though there was no corpse to bury. Phyllis wept. Richard held her and consoled her.

  A lot of attention for ten days or so.

  And then everyone moved on. No more questions about what was up with Harry.

  Richard got his own apartment soon after. He couldn’t bear to be in the house twenty-four/seven. But he returned nearly every day at some point—usually before or after his shift—to check on his stepfather. Brought him meals, helped with his toileting needs, cleaned up after him, found books and magazines for him to read, but mostly magazines, since Harry found it hard to concentrate on books.

  Everything seemed to be going along okay.

  Until one day Phyllis came home late one night after closing down Patchett’s, and there, ten feet from the door, dragging himself across the living room carpet, was Harry.

  Nearly gave her a heart attack.

  Another twenty minutes and he’d have been on the front porch. Another ten after that, and he’d have crawled down to the sidewalk, where anyone might have seen him.

  From that day forward, a lock went on the door of his room in the basement.

  You had to do what you had to do.

  “What happens,” Richard asked once, “when he really does . . . you know, pass away?”

  It was something Phyllis had definitely thought about.

  “We’ll take him out into the woods,” she said, “and dig a nice hole for him and cover him up, and we’ll have our own little private funeral for him. That’s what we’ll do.”

  But today, after seven years, Phyllis has determined that process may have to be sped up a bit.

  Because it’s only a matter of time before someone starts putting things together, comes to the house armed with a search warrant, finds Harry down in that room.

  Now, it’s all about getting rid of the evidence.

  Harry is the evidence.

  If the police show up, claiming to have been told some cockamamie story about keeping Harry in the basement, she can say, “What are you talking about? Go down there, have a look. That’s just crazy talk.”

  The only one who’s seen him down there is Dennis. And Dennis will have told Claire. The good news is, Richard has taken care of both of them. The only things left to worry about now are that detective, and the book.

  Phyllis is betting he has the book. If she can take care of both those matters at once, she might find a way to get out from under all this. For herself, and for her son.

  Soon, she’ll put in a call to Cal Weaver. But not just yet. There are more immediate concerns.

  “What are all these boxes?” Harry asks when she wheels him out of his room and past the washer and dryer.

  “I’m moving you upstairs,” she says. “With you out of the basement, I can store some more stuff in there.”

  “Where? What are you talking about?”

  “I thought I’d give you Richard’s room. It’s been empty a long time. You’ll have a window and a view and a fresh breeze when you want it.”

  “I don’t know what to say— Really?”

  “You wait here for a few minutes while I deal with your old room.”

  “I won’t be going back in there?”

  “I can promise you, Harry, you won’t be sleeping another night in there.”

  She feels something catch in her throat. She goes into the room with a garbage bag, stuffs it with anything that says “Harry.” Clothes, adult diapers, scraps of food, a bag of cookies, used tissues, bedding.

  She forces the rollaway back together, pushes it into a corner of the room, piles some boxes in front of it. Brings in a few more boxes that she’s been storing in other rooms. Sprays some air freshener, takes a sniff, concludes that it’s not that bad. Working feverishly it takes her the better part of twenty minutes to do it all, but she is a strong woman. Attributes it to years of lugging cases of beer.

  “Okay, we’re good to go,” she says, closing the door and locking it, more out of habit than anything else.

  “I’m going to need help on the stairs,” he says.

  He wheels the chair up to the bottom step. Phyllis gets her hands under his arms, lifts. He grabs onto the railing with his right hand, and with Phyllis on his left, he manages to get to the kitchen. He crawls onto the floor and stays there while Phyllis runs back down, folds up the wheelchair, and brings it up one flight.

  “That’s a new fridge,” Harry says, scanning the kitchen.

  Had to grind up sleeping pills and put them in his food the day they replaced the old refrigerator when it conked out. At least that was upstairs. That time the furnace went out in the basement, she not only drugged Harry, she tied him down to the bed and taped his mouth, just in case he woke up, which, thank the Lord, he didn’t. When the washing machine broke down, she got Richard to research it on the Internet and fix it himself. Still leaked a bit, but it did the job.

  Phyllis gets him back into his chair, steers him toward the back door. “Aren’t we going out the front?” he asks.

  “It’s easier to get you into the car this way,” she says.

  She realizes, as she grips the handles of the wheelchair, that her hands are shaking. She gets ahead of the wheelchair, opens the door, then gets around behind him again and pushes the chair outside. Phyllis tips the chair back slightly to ease it down the two steps.

  The car is there, backed right up to the bottom step. The trunk is open.
<
br />   Harry says, “Why you got all that plastic lining the trunk, Phyllis?”

  It has a low lip, this trunk. Phyllis tips Harry forward, like she’s emptying a wheelbarrow. The top half of his body falls in. He throws his hands forward, trying to brace himself.

  “The hell are you doing, Phyllis? Damn, I hit my head.”

  “Sorry, honey,” she says. “Can’t have anyone seeing you on the way to Baskin-Robbins.”

  “For Christ’s sake, I can scrunch down in the seat!”

  She tips the lower half of his body into the car, pulls the chair away, folds it, and puts it into the backseat of the sedan.

  “Phyllis! Get me the hell out of here!”

  “One second,” she says, and runs back into the house, opens the kitchen drawer where she keeps her knives.

  “I’ve been good to him,” she tells herself, her eyes starting to fill with tears. “I’ve done the best I can.”

  Phyllis grabs the knife she always uses to carve the Christmas turkey and runs back outside.

  SIXTY-THREE

  “Phyllis must have moved him,” I said to Augie. “She had to know we were coming, so she got him out of here.”

  “This is insane,” Augie said.

  I shifted some boxes around. “I think this stuff was just moved in here. There’s no dust on the floor around the boxes. And—hang on. There’s half a sandwich down there, and the bread’s not moldy. Would you come eat a sandwich in this room if you didn’t have to?”

  “I can barely breathe,” my brother-in-law said. “Wait a second.” He left the room.