Too Close to Home

by Linwood Barclay

  But then, it was easier for him. He wasn’t the cuckold. (Jesus, there was a word you didn’t hear every day.)

  “I’m inclined to give the chief a call,” Conrad said, referring to the Promise Falls chief of police, no doubt a close personal friend. Conrad was well connected. “I’ll remind him he needs to put all available resources into solving this. And if that means calling in the state police or the FBI or whoever to give Barry a helping hand, then that’s what he’ll have to do. This is no time for false pride. If Barry needs assistance from someone with a little more experience, then he should be goddamn smart enough to accept it. Wouldn’t you say, love?”

  He was looking at Illeana. “Absolutely, Conrad,” she said softly, and touched him on the arm. “You should make a call. At least they’ll know you’re watching their progress with interest.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Randy will be doing the same,” I said.

  “Randy, yes,” said Conrad. “I’m sure he will. When he’s not tossing his cookies in a home for unwed mothers!” He slapped his own knee and cackled. “I tell you, he never ceases to amaze.”

  “For sure,” I said. As much as I hated chitchat, I couldn’t keep myself from asking, “Have you heard what he’s up to?”

  Conrad eyed me warily. “The Congress thing.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, he’s had an exploratory committee working on this for a while. I think the bastard might actually have a shot at it. You don’t have to be an angel to get elected, you know.”

  “That should be good news for Randy,” I said. “I think he intends to announce in the next few days.”

  “Where did you hear about this?” Conrad asked. I guess he was surprised that I’d be up to speed on the comings and goings of the town’s socially prominent, given my current status.

  “He told me,” I said.

  Conrad blinked. Then, “Well, anyway, we don’t want to take up your whole afternoon here. Ellen, if anything should come up, if you need a day or two off to deal with what’s happened next door, don’t hesitate to call.”

  “Sure, Conrad,” Ellen said, finishing off the last of the wine in her glass. “That’s very thoughtful.”

  “So we’ll just be on our—”

  “Conrad,” I said, “there’s something I’d like to talk to you about before you go.”

  Ellen looked at me. I could see in her face that she didn’t want me to do this, that she wanted to handle it herself.

  Fuck that.

  “Sure,” Conrad said. “What’s up?”

  I stood up. “Take a walk with me.”

  Conrad got to his feet and came in step beside me as I wandered over toward the shed. The double-wide garage door was open.

  “Ellen,” he said to me, “is she holding up okay?”

  I hated it when he said her name. “We’re all a little on edge,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said. “I just noticed she knocked back that wine pretty fast.”

  “Like I said, we’re all a bit stressed out. Three people getting shot next door, it can have that kind of an effect on you.”

  Conrad Chase walked straight into the shed, started looking around, checking out the lawn mowers, picked up a hedge trimmer, felt the heft of it in his hand. Then he spotted, in the far corner, my stack of canvases—there were about a dozen of them gathering dust—leaned up against the wall. He walked over to them, pulled the first one forward, then the second, and so on.

  “This is no way to treat your paintings,” he said. “Out here, subject to all the changes in temperature, the dust.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “These are not bad, you know,” he said, managing to be flattering and patronizing at the same time. He flipped back to the first one, an Adirondacks landscape. “I like this. I think, the farther back you get, the better it is. Very impressionistic. Lots of paint, heavy, you get too close and all you see are these globs, but you stand back”—he took three steps back—“and it really comes together. You had a show a few years ago, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He went back to the stack, found the third one, lifted it out. “This is . . . let me guess. That’s Promise Falls.”

  “Yes,” I said again.

  “You have an interesting way with color. Very muted, almost as though every color is filtered through gray. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who can bring sadness to a landscape the way you can.” He shook his head in a way that almost seemed to be admiring. “You’re a complex guy, Cutter,” he said.

  I couldn’t help myself. “How?” I asked.

  “Well, you’re not particularly talkative, you drive around in a truck these days cutting people’s grass, you used to spend your days driving Randy around, but there’s a lot more going on inside there,” and he pointed at my head, “than anyone would give you credit for.”

  “Really.”

  “You’re a very insightful guy. I’m betting you were a serious kid. You don’t talk much about growing up.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “Interesting thing about the brain, though. People like you, there’s a large part of it that can be tapped for creativity. But you’ve decided not to tap into it anymore.”

  “I need to make a living,” I said.

  Conrad nodded, as though he understood. “I feel I’ve done that a bit myself. Running Thackeray, all this administrative shit, when I should be tapping into that creative side. That’s the kind of thing that fulfills us, that nurtures us.”

  Or maybe tapping into someone else’s creativity, I thought.

  “Anyway, what’s on your mind?” he asked, putting the Promise Falls painting at the front of the pile.

  “I had something I think should be passed on to Barry Duckworth,” I said, “but Ellen felt you were entitled to know about it first.”

  “Really?” His eyebrows rose a notch. “And what might this be about?”

  “You remember a student you had, about ten years ago, by the name of Brett Stockwell?”

  “Of course,” he said without hesitation. I guess I was hoping he’d briefly pretend to forget, say the boy’s name a couple of times like he was struggling to remember. “Brilliant student, absolutely brilliant,” he offered. “A terrible tragedy. He committed suicide, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “I was stunned. Although, at the same time, I wasn’t totally shocked.”

  “Really? Why was that?”

  “Sometimes, very creative people are very troubled as well. Creativity’s more than a gift, Jim. It can be a curse. I don’t have to tell you.” He gestured again at my paintings. “You’ve had your downslopes, am I right? Times with the black dog? You have all these thoughts you want to get out, but if there’s not an avenue, no outlet, that can be terribly damaging.”

  “So you’re saying you saw signs. With Brett.”

  Conrad shrugged. “Well, Brett was moody. I remember that. Hard on himself. Like whatever he did, it wasn’t good enough. That line, that idea in your head, it never seems quite as good when you get it down on paper.” He paused. “So what makes you bring up Brett Stockwell?”

  “Did you ever know his mother, Agnes?”

  “I met her at the funeral, of course. I went to the service for Brett, and I can still see her there, standing over his coffin, crying. And so alone. Her husband was already dead.”

  “She’s one of our customers,” I said. “Derek and I look after her yard.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” Conrad said.

  God, I just wanted to kill him right then and there. Get my lawn tractor out and run right over the smug fuck.

  “She says you were very kind to her after her son died. Sent her flowers, even some concert tickets.”

  He nodded, remembering, but there was something in his look that told me he was unnerved that I knew this.

  “Agnes, she’s hung on to a lot of Brett’s things over the years,” I continued, “couldn’t b
ear to part with them, but a few weeks ago, she gave his old computer to Derek. Derek and Adam, the Langley boy, they liked to mess around with old computers.”

  “Is that so,” Conrad said. He was running his hand again over the hedge trimmer, looping his finger over the trigger, squeezing, nothing happening because it wasn’t plugged in.

  “Brett, he was evidently quite the writer, as you already know, having taught him. And on this computer, there’s an entire book.”

  Slowly, Conrad said, “That’s not too surprising. I’d be surprised if there weren’t a book, or two or three, on his computer. He had ambitions to become a novelist.”

  “All the boys found was the one, as far as I know. It’s about a man named Nicholas who wakes up one day to find his plumbing a bit rearranged.”

  Conrad’s eyebrows floated upward. “No shit? Seriously?”

  “He wakes up with a pussy instead of a dick.”

  “I’m familiar with the story,” Conrad said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “The computer that this was on, it was in the Langley house as recently as a couple of days ago. But it’s not there now.”

  Conrad remained stone-faced. “I still don’t understand.”

  “Frankly, neither do I. How does your book end up on a dead kid’s computer? How does it end up there a couple of years before your book even comes out? So I was thinking, it would make sense to bring this to Barry’s attention. Let him figure it out. But Ellen said I should talk to you about it first. That there might be a very simple explanation.” I paused. “As a courtesy.”

  Conrad’s cheeks looked flushed, but his voice remained very even. “I don’t want to seem incredibly thick here, Jim, but I’m still having a little trouble understanding this. If this so-called computer you say your son was given is missing, how can you be so informed about what’s on it?”

  I swallowed. “Because my son made a—” And then I stopped myself. I was overplaying my hand.

  “Made a copy?” Conrad said.

  I didn’t say anything. But I didn’t have to. I had a lousy poker face. Conrad understood correctly what I had been about to say.

  Conrad said, “You know what I think, Jim? I think this is complete and total horseshit, that’s what I think. And I’m surprised at you. I thought you’d moved on. I thought you were enough of a man to leave the past in the past. Ellen, she’s a wonderful woman, but she means nothing to me now and she hasn’t for years. It was a fleeting relationship, a triviality. We have a completely professional relationship now. She’s a valuable member of the Thackeray staff. She puts together an annual literary event that makes this town proud. But I am not having an affair with her. I have a wife. A beautiful wife.”

  Funny, how you could hate a guy for screwing your wife, but at the same time be enraged by his insinuation that she wasn’t as desirable as the woman he had now.

  “Jim, I’ve tried with you, I’ve really tried, to let bygones be bygones, to be a friend to you, to consider you a friend—”

  “Don’t put yourself out,” I said.

  “As I was saying, I’ve tried to make things civil between us, not just for the sake of my working relationship with Ellen, but for all of us, as reasonable human beings. So why you’d choose, at this time, years later, to concoct some scheme to discredit me, well, it’s completely beyond me. I am astonished. I’m flabbergasted. And let me make something perfectly clear to you. If you attempt some feeble scheme to try to damage my reputation, I will come back at you with everything I have. I will crush you. I will destroy you. It’ll be fucking shock and awe, my friend. And although I’ll feel terrible about this, there’s no way Ellen won’t be dragged down with you when it happens. And that’ll be a terrible shame. But at least now you know where things stand. I will not be ruined by some petty, lawn-cutting cuckold.”

  There it was again. Was it because it almost sounded like “cock” that the word packed such a punch?

  I held his gaze through the entire speech. When he was done, I said, “Why’d you only write the one book, Conrad? Your ghostwriter take a fall?”

  I thought he’d get angry, but he grinned. “Is that what you think? Oh, Jim, I’d have thought you were above all this. The fact is, I’m just completing a book, something I’ve been working on for years. My New York agent’s up at her place on Saratoga Lake and she’s dropping by this week to fill me in on all the publishers who are fighting to see who gets to read it first. Want me to find out, while she’s up here, if she represents failed artists who get by doing people’s lawns?”

  “What’s going on?” It was Illeana, standing just outside the garage door. “What are you two fighting about?”

  SIXTEEN

  WHAT THE HELL did you say to him?” Ellen asked me as Conrad and Illeana sped up the lane in his shiny new Audi. “He looked like thunder after you were done talking to him.”

  “Maybe I should have found a more polite way to suggest that he ripped off some dead kid’s novel,” I said.

  “This is terrific,” Ellen said, shaking her head. “Just fucking terrific. I guess I can start looking for a new job tomorrow.”

  “Hey, I was only doing what you suggested,” I said. “I talked to him before going to Barry.”

  “You should have let me do it.”

  “You already tried, didn’t you? While I was out this morning. You called but didn’t get him.”

  “All right, so I wanted to talk to him before you did. Without all the added baggage that you’d bring to things. And if he hadn’t shown up with Illeana, I’d probably have done it before you got back.”

  “I gave him a chance to explain,” I said. “I’d call that doing him a favor.”

  “And?” Ellen asked. “What’d he say?”

  “A lot of things. But none of them included any kind of explanation.”

  “What do you mean, a lot of things? If he didn’t explain, what did he say?”

  “He thinks this is personal. He thinks I’m going after him because of what happened between you two.”

  Ellen started to say something and then stopped.

  “I know that’s what you’re thinking, too,” I said. “But what do you think I did? That somehow I came up with this elaborate plan? That I arranged for Agnes Stockwell to have this computer that she could give to Derek, and then somehow I managed to get a copy of Conrad’s novel onto it, knowing Derek and Adam would eventually find it and Derek would show it to me, and then I could use it to start asking questions that would end up destroying Conrad’s reputation? Is that what you think I did? And I did it all because I was still bent out of shape because you fell into bed with that fucking great literary genius years ago? All these years, I’ve been putting this plan together? And if I planned all that, just how did the Langleys figure into it? Did I know they were going to be murdered, so I timed it just right to make the computer disappear when it happened, so somehow Conrad would be implicated? Because I’ll tell you, if I was able to pull all that off, I should be running the fucking CIA.”

  “Enough!” Ellen screamed at me, grabbing her empty wineglass and shattering it against the side of the house. “Enough!”

  I stopped.

  We stood there on the back deck, a foot apart, facing each other but unable to look each other in the eye, the gulf between us as big as a football field.

  “Look,” I said, “maybe it’s true that—”

  But then there was the sound of a car racing down the driveway. We both turned our heads to see Derek driving Ellen’s Mazda up to the house. He hit the brakes a bit too hard and the car did a short slide in the gravel. Before he was out from behind the wheel, I could see his face was flushed with anger. He looked as red as Conrad had when he’d left.

  “Those bastards!” he said.

  He got out of the car and slammed the door and stormed toward the house. He tried to get past us as he crossed the deck, but I got in front of him and gently put my hand on his chest. His lips were held tightly together and
I could hear the air whistling through his nostrils.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Slow down, pardner. What’s going on?”

  “Penny’s parents,” he said. “Fucking assholes.”

  “What happened?” Ellen said. “The Tuckers? What did they say? What happened?”

  Derek shook his head angrily. “I couldn’t believe them.”

  “Just tell us what happened,” I said. I hoped to God there hadn’t been some kind of fight, that Derek hadn’t slugged Penny’s father or something. That was all we needed right about now.

  “They wouldn’t let me see her,” he said. “I couldn’t get her on the phone, she wouldn’t answer her cell, and when I called the house her parents wouldn’t put her on, so I drove over there.”

  “Why?” Ellen asked. “Why wouldn’t they let you see her?”

  “They think—fuck, I don’t know what they think. It’s, like, I don’t know, I guess it’s not safe to know me because I live next door to a house where everybody got offed.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, tell them.”

  “So you got there,” Ellen said. “Then what happened?”

  “I knocked on the door and Mrs. Tucker opened it and I asked for Penny and she said Penny couldn’t see me.”

  “She say why?” I asked.

  “I asked her. I said, ‘Why can’t Penny talk to me?’ And all she’d say is, ‘This isn’t a good time.’”

  “I don’t get it,” Ellen said. “Because of what happened next door? They think she shouldn’t see you?”

  I thought about that, tried to see it from the point of view of Penny’s parents. “If it were our daughter,” I said to Ellen, “maybe we’d be scared for her to come over here, to be this close to a place where something that bad happened.”

  “What?” Ellen said. “You’re taking their side? They don’t want our son to see their daughter and you think that’s fine?”

  I couldn’t win with Ellen today. “I’m not taking sides. I’m just trying to figure it out.”