Too Close to Home

by Linwood Barclay

  But it was nearly ten years ago, and the whole thing was, for the most part, behind us. It was a rough patch, I’m not glossing it over. For a while there, Ellen tried to assuage her guilt with drink. I don’t think she was ever a bona fide alcoholic, but she certainly was in a fog for several months there, and how she managed to do her job during that time, I have no idea. It was as though a small, slow-moving hurricane had settled on our house for several months. The turbulence was always there, but then Ellen, on her own, came to some kind of inner realization that she could not continue on the way she was going, and she stopped drinking. Just like that. That’s one thing I have to say about Ellen. When she decides it’s time to pull herself together, she does it. I remember, when her mother died, she was torn up pretty bad for a couple of weeks there, then one morning got up and said aloud, “Time to move on.”

  But sometimes, while you were waiting for that moment, it could be a rough ride.

  Once the storm had passed, and Ellen and I had found a way to forgive each other, life improved. We were both smart enough to know that what we had together was too good to throw away. We had a son. We weren’t going to ruin Derek’s life by splitting up.

  Ellen still had regular dealings with Conrad Chase after the affair, but those became less of a worry once his book was bought by a big New York publisher, and he started moving in circles very far removed from ours. And then, while out in Hollywood for exploratory meetings about turning A Missing Part into a movie, he met Illeana Tiff, a B-movie actress. She had the big hair and the tits to match, but to dismiss her as an airhead was a mistake. She wasn’t a great actress and was smart enough to know she had a limited future in Hollywood. But hooking up with a famous writer was almost as good, so she came back to Promise Falls with Chase, and about a year later they were married.

  Chase had so wormed his way into the college’s board that when President Kane Mortimer had a heart attack while snorkeling in Fiji, he made a strong push for the job and got it. By this time, Illeana had learned to tone down the hair and lower the winch on the boobs, and she fell comfortably into the role of the college president’s wife.

  It seemed odd to many that Chase took that route. Being a college president had some cachet, no doubt about it, but not nearly as much as a famous writer. Upstate New York college presidents didn’t do talk shows, didn’t get invited to celebrity-filled parties, weren’t written about in The New Yorker.

  But Conrad Chase had no follow-up to A Missing Part. For the first few years, when people asked, he claimed to be working on a new novel—supposedly his deal for A Missing Part included a follow-up book—but if he ever wrote it, it had yet to be published. Eventually, most people stopped asking, and when the rare one did, Conrad replied, “I’ve a college to run.”

  The simple truth was, as far as I could tell, he was done with writing. But unlike me and my art, he’d managed to make a name for himself before packing it in.

  I TOOK THE DISC and the pages Derek had printed out for me and started walking back to the house. I hadn’t said anything to him when he asked me what I’d meant when I said I’d already read the book, and I didn’t say anything when he protested my showing the pages to Ellen, which it was clear, by the direction I was headed, I had every intention of doing.

  Ellen was upstairs, stripping our bed. Even though it was Sunday, it wasn’t the kind of Sunday where you could sit down and relax and read the paper. We were all agitated, and Ellen’s way of dealing with that was to keep busy.

  I extended the printed pages across the bed to her. She dropped the bedsheets she was holding and took them. She glanced at them without reading so much as a word and said, “What’s this?”

  “Just have a read and see if it rings a bell,” I said.

  “Can you just tell me what it’s—”

  “Just read it.”

  So she dropped her eyes to the pages and read. She got as far as the bottom of the first page and stopped.

  “What’s the point of this?” she asked, looking up.

  “You recognize it.”

  “Of course I recognize it.” She was keeping her voice very even. I realized I was already going about this the wrong way. Ellen was going to think this was something personal about Conrad Chase, about what had happened so many years ago. She was going to think I’d chosen, after all this time, to open old wounds. That wasn’t the plan, although sometimes things turn out in ways you did not intend.

  “It’s Chase’s book,” I said. I hardly needed to tell her which one. “Not word for word, I think. More like an unedited version, you know? But the same story, different title.”

  “I already told you I recognize it,” she said. “How many other people have written about a guy who loses his cock and ends up with a pussy?”

  Get to the point, I told myself.

  “That just got printed off. It was on the hard drive of a computer that Agnes Stockwell gave Derek, which he gave to Adam to keep over at his house, and now it’s missing.”

  Ellen stared at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Agnes Stockwell gave Derek a computer? That’s where he got that one he brought home a couple of weeks ago? If somebody told me that, I don’t remember.”

  “We probably didn’t. It wasn’t a big deal, then.”

  “Is it a big deal now?”

  I took a breath. “You remember Brett Stockwell?”

  Ellen nodded.

  “Agnes saved all his stuff after he committed suicide, but it’s been so long, she’s finally clearing it out, at least the stuff that doesn’t hold any sentimental value. She had his old computer in her garage, and when she found out Derek’s into that kind of thing, she gave it to him. The novel, Conrad’s novel, what looks to be Conrad’s novel, is on the computer. And now that computer’s missing from the Langley house.” I paused, then added, “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

  Again with the stare. Then, “Which part? That it was on the kid’s computer, or that the computer is missing?”

  “All of it.”

  “What kind of computer? A desktop? Not a laptop?”

  “No, not a laptop,” I said. “The tower part.”

  “And how the hell do you have a printout of it if the computer’s missing?”

  “Derek had made a copy.”

  Ellen sat down on the edge of the bed. “What are you suggesting? I can’t get my head around this. You must be suggesting something.”

  “I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” I said. “I’m trying to get my head around it, too. But I can’t help but wonder, maybe Conrad isn’t the great literary genius everyone thinks he is. Maybe A Missing Part isn’t his.”

  Ellen was speechless for a moment. It was, I had to admit, a somewhat stunning hypothesis, to be all professorial about it.

  “Jesus, what are you saying?” she said. “That some kid wrote it? That’s ridiculous. That book was on the New York Times bestseller list.”

  “I’m just putting it out there,” I said. “I’m just saying, it’s kind of a strange thing for it to be on that computer.”

  “Maybe,” Ellen said, “he had a student who was such a fan, he typed it out, word for word. Or had a copy of it, a Word file or something. Did they offer books back then as e-books? Maybe Brett Stockwell downloaded it. Did you ever think of that?”

  “When did Conrad’s book come out?” I asked. “When was it published?”

  Ellen tried to think. “Was it nine, ten years ago? Hang on.” She got up, walked out of the room, went downstairs. I followed her down to the living room, where she was scanning the wall that’s lined with bookshelves. They’re pretty much overflowing, books tucked in sideways on top of other books, so it took Ellen a moment, cocking her head so that she could read the spines, before she could put her hands on our copy of A Missing Part.

  She flipped it open to the copyright page. “It was in 2000,” she said. “The hardcover. Trade paperback a year later.”

  “Brett Stockwell killed himself ten y
ears ago,” I pointed out. “Two years before the book came out.”

  “There must be a simple explanation,” Ellen said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Maybe so. It’s just funny, is all. And there’s the fact that the computer’s gone missing.”

  “Someone stole it?”

  I shrugged. “It was in the Langley house as recently as Thursday, Derek says, and now it’s gone.”

  “Did Barry say it was stolen when the Langleys were killed?”

  “No. Derek noticed that it was missing when Barry took us through the house.”

  She looked away from me and shook her head. “This is crazy. What did Barry say when Derek noticed that it was gone?”

  “He didn’t tell Barry. He told me afterwards. He wanted to talk to me about it first, because he was too embarrassed to talk to you about a book with that kind of content. He didn’t know it was a published novel. I mean, he was what, nine when it came out? I think maybe he was reading the Hardy Boys then, and Frank and Joe weren’t exactly waking up in the morning with their dicks missing. Derek just thought it was some student’s attempt at porn, although as porn goes, Derek said it kind of missed the mark.”

  Ellen almost smiled, but then it faded away. “What are you going to do about this?”

  “I guess I should tell Barry, don’t you think?” I said. “It may not actually mean anything. And the fact that the computer’s missing doesn’t mean it has to have anything to do with what happened at the Langleys’. It might have disappeared between the last time Derek was in Adam’s room, which was Thursday, when he saw the computer there, and the murders, which were Friday night. Maybe it’s someplace else in the house where Barry didn’t take us.”

  Ellen paced about the room, then said, “You should let Conrad know.”

  “What?”

  “Before going to Barry. Conrad deserves to know, because there really may be a simple explanation. If there is, we’ll be glad we went to him directly instead of involving the police.”

  “We?”

  Ellen looked at me. “Don’t be like that.”

  “I’m not being anything. I’m just saying, you may be interested in sparing Conrad from trouble and embarrassment, but that’s not really a priority for me.” Even as I said it I knew I wasn’t being totally honest. The guy did sign my wife’s paychecks.

  “This isn’t about that,” Ellen said. “This is about fairness. Particularly when this is probably a big fuss about nothing.” She shook her head in frustration. “Maybe it would be better if I talked to him. If you do it, he may think you’ve got some other agenda.” She met my look. “You know that’s true.”

  I nodded very slowly. “I have another idea,” I said. “Why don’t I talk to Agnes. Without telling her everything, maybe I can get an idea why her son might have had that book on his computer.” There was something else I’d be wanting to ask Agnes, too. “And if there’s a simple explanation, I can just tell Barry that Derek noticed the computer was missing, and leave it at that.”

  Ellen nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Do that. Talk to Agnes.”

  Neither of us said anything for a moment. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Something that I’d been thinking about, out in the shed, just before Derek returned with the pages from his printer, was still nagging at me.

  Ellen had turned away and was looking out the window toward the Langley house. “I hadn’t even talked to any of them in days. Hardly even saw them.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “I guess the last time I saw Donna was that day she came to the door,” Ellen said.

  “When was that?” I asked. I had no memory of this.

  “That publisher in New York, they sent me some advance copies of books by writers I was going to ask about coming to the festival.”

  “What was Donna doing bringing them over?”

  “The courier delivered the package to their place instead.”

  She stood for another moment, looking out the window, then turned, and it seemed as though a bit of the color had drained from her face.

  “Donna said he got the house wrong—he saw the mailbox, with our name on it, and he just assumed their house was ours.”

  TWELVE

  DEREK AND I HADN’T quite finished up at Agnes Stockwell’s house the day before. That was when Ellen had phoned my cell to tell me that something was up at the Langley house.

  So I had an excuse to go back. I didn’t need to hook up the trailer to the pickup. Her yard was cut and there was no need for the lawn tractor. I put the weed trimmer in the bed of the truck. All I had to do was a bit of tidying.

  “Where are you going?” asked Derek, who’d remained outside when I went into the house to talk to Ellen, and had been passing the time trying to jump from one side of the driveway to the other without touching gravel.

  “Look after your mom,” I said. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I drove slowly up the lane, nodded to the cop still babysitting the Langley house, turned onto the highway, and pointed the truck in the direction of Promise Falls. I parked at the curb out front of Agnes Stockwell’s house, stepped up onto the wide, old-fashioned porch, and rapped lightly on the door. It was still Sunday morning, although it was nearly noon.

  When she pushed on the screen door, she smiled. “What are you doing here today?” she asked, her cat slinking around her leg to see who’d come to call. It was, without a doubt, one of the ugliest cats I’d ever seen, looking as though it’d be more at home in a pigpen, wallowing in the mud, than curled up on a couch.

  Agnes had no doubt been an attractive woman at one time, but a lingering sadness had worn away at her over the years. She’d lost a husband—to a heart attack, if I remembered correctly—and then a year later her son, for no apparent reason, had taken his own life. I didn’t know how someone ever recovered from something like that. Perhaps you never did. She’d continued to live on in this house, making it, as far as I knew, her only project. Working on her garden when the weather allowed, keeping pretty much to herself.

  “We had to take off early yesterday,” I told her. “I didn’t finish up the trimming.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t even noticed,” she said, although she probably had been too polite to mention it. “Isn’t your boy with you today?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s just a bit to do, so I thought I’d look after it myself. Give him the day off.” I was about to say, You know how teenagers are, how they like to sleep in, but caught myself before doing it.

  “When you’re done, I’ll have some lemonade for you,” she said.

  That was what I’d hoped she’d say.

  It took barely fifteen minutes to do what had to be done. I put on safety goggles, got out the weed whacker, and ran the filament line along the edges of the sidewalk and driveway and by her flower beds, making sure there was no stray piece of long grass sticking up anyplace. I liked this kind of work. I got a sense of satisfaction from it that I got from little else, except perhaps when I used to paint.

  As I was putting the trimmer back into the truck, I heard the front door open and there was Agnes with a tall glass of lemonade, beads of moisture dripping down the side. I walked up the drive and took the glass from her.

  “Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked her.

  She had a couple of garden-type chairs flanking the front door. “Of course not, Mr. Cutter,” she said. I was going to invite her to sit down, too, but she was in the other chair before I had a chance. I suppose, when you lived alone, it was nice to have someone to talk to once in a while, even if it was just the guy who cut the grass.

  “Call me Jim,” I said.

  “Jim,” she said quietly.

  “This lemonade really hits the spot,” I said, and that was the truth. Her cat brushed up against my leg. “What’s his—her?—name?”

  “That’s Boots,” Agnes Stockwell said.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a cat like her,” I said.

  “She’s pretty hideous,”
Agnes said, “but I love her.”

  I took another drink of lemonade, nearly polished off the glass. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. If I looked like a sweaty mess to her, she didn’t seem to mind.

  “Did you hear about that lawyer?” Agnes asked me. “The one who was killed? Along with his wife and his son?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s sort of out where you live, isn’t it?”

  “It is out our way,” I admitted. “A terrible thing.”

  Agnes was shaking her head. “Oh yes, just awful. It makes you think. You know, things like that just don’t happen around here.”

  I nodded. “Pretty rare event. Like you say, makes you think.” We both took a moment to do just that. And then I said, “My son wanted me to pass on his thanks again for the computer.”

  “Oh, that was my pleasure,” Agnes said. “I’m just glad to see someone else get some use out of it. I wasn’t sure it would be good to anyone, being so old and all. I was surprised he’d even want it.”

  “The older the better,” I said. “He’s a tinkerer with that kind of stuff. He’s lucky you hadn’t already given it to anybody else. You’ll have all the boys in the neighborhood coming here to see if you’ve got any other computers to give away.”

  “I don’t really know that many. I’m just glad I found someone who could take it.”

  “You didn’t happen to mention to anyone that you gave Derek that computer, did you?”

  Agnes appeared puzzled by the question. “Why no, I don’t think I did. Why?”

  Had to think fast. “I was just thinking, if you had, you might get others coming by, seeing what else you had to give away.”

  She nodded. That made sense to her. “Oh no, no troubles like that. Maybe, someday, I’ll have a little garage sale. Every summer, I think about doing that but never get around to it. What did you say your boy’s name is again?”

  “Derek.”

  “He seems like a good boy.”