Too Close to Home

by Linwood Barclay

  “It’s okay, Penny,” I said. “Just take your time.”

  “But he didn’t do it!” she said.

  “We know that,” Ellen said. “We know Derek couldn’t do that.”

  “The detective, he just thinks I’m covering up for Derek so he won’t get in trouble, and my parents are all like, ‘You better tell the truth or you’ll be in trouble, too.’ But I am telling the truth. Derek called me later, in the middle of the night, from your house, from the kitchen, right here, he was totally freaked out. He told me about hearing the shots and someone walking around and then having to step over Adam to get out and then I came over the next night, remember?”

  “Yes,” I said. When we heard noises in the night, at the back door, and called the police. “You told this to the police?”

  She nodded. “Derek told me he wanted to tell you guys, but he was scared. He was scared about the killer finding out he was there, because he thought that might end up getting in the papers or on the news, you know? And he was worried about what you’d do if you found out about this plan he had, to use the house while the Langleys were away.” She looked away, embarrassed. I could have told her stories about when Ellen and I were dating, to make her feel less mortified, but this didn’t seem like the time. “I didn’t want to have to tell Mr. Duckworth all this, not in front of my parents, but I figured, if he knew the truth, even if it was, like, totally embarrassing for me and Derek, he’d understand why Derek hadn’t come forward, and he’d see that Derek didn’t kill the Langleys.”

  “That’s not how it’s worked out,” I said.

  Penny looked frustrated enough to stomp her foot. “That policeman, he just won’t listen.”

  That nearly brought a smile to my sore and wounded face. “Yeah, well, we know how you feel,” I said.

  “What if I talked to the judge?” Penny said. “What if I told him I was with him after, that the things he told me, I could tell he didn’t do it?”

  “You can’t talk to the judge, but you can talk to Derek’s lawyer,” I said. “She’ll be more interested in hearing what you have to say in Derek’s defense than Barry is. He thinks he has this thing all figured out.”

  “What if my parents won’t let me talk to her?” Penny asked.

  “They can’t do that,” Ellen said, then, looking at me, “Can they?”

  “Why would your parents want to stop you?” I asked.

  “They’ve never really approved of me going out with Derek anyway, you know?” she said.

  “No,” Ellen said, trying to keep her voice even. “We didn’t know. Why would that be?”

  “I guess they thought we were spending too much time together, that I wasn’t paying attention to school, which is totally not true, because my marks are as good as they’ve ever—”

  I held up a hand. “It’s okay,” I said. “I think most boys are viewed with suspicion by the parents of their girlfriends. It’s been that way for a thousand years.”

  “But then, after the detective came to the house, they wouldn’t even let me talk to him. Because he was, you know, a suspect.”

  “Penny,” I said, “you should call your folks, tell them where you are. We can drive you home, or they can come and get you.”

  “I took my mom’s car,” she said. “It’s parked on the side of the road, down a ways.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said, “before you go.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did Derek tell you about the computer he got from Agnes Stockwell, the one with the novel on it? That he and Adam had been reading?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He said it was really weird.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “No. I wasn’t really interested, you know?”

  “Did you tell anyone about the book, that Derek and Adam had found it? Any of your own friends, your parents?”

  She thought a moment. “I’m not sure. I mean, I’ve told them about Derek’s hobby. My dad one time, he even got Derek to restart his computer, when it was all frozen? I thought that would make my dad like him better, but it didn’t really last.”

  “So you’re saying you might have told them?”

  “Well, if I did, I sure didn’t tell them what it was about.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I understand. Okay. Thanks. It was good of you to come by. We’ll tell Derek you were asking about him.”

  Penny nodded, sniffed, wiped a tear from her cheek, and said goodbye. As Ellen walked her to the door my cell phone went off.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Hey,” a man’s voice said. “It’s Drew? Drew Lockus?”

  It took me a moment. The man who’d pulled my tractor off me. “Yeah, Drew, how’s it going?”

  “Look,” he said, “I talked it over with my mom, and she said if I want to earn a few extra bucks cutting grass, it’s okay with her, so yeah, if you still want me.”

  “Sure,” I said. As long as I didn’t have more clients cancel like the Putnams, I thought. “Why don’t I pick you up out front of your place tomorrow morning, eight o’clock?”

  “Okay,” he said. He sounded more resigned than pleased by the prospect. “See you then.”

  I’d barely set the phone down on the counter when it rang again. I flipped it open. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Cutter, Natalie Bondurant, returning your call.”

  I took a second to collect my thoughts. “Thanks for calling. Hey, Derek’s girlfriend, Penny Tucker, was just here. I think she’s got things to say that could help Derek.”

  “She’s already on my list. I’ll set something up. As for your question, the one you left on my voicemail, the answer is yes.”

  My heart sank.

  “Officially, yes, New York State has the death penalty, but in 2004 the courts ruled it unconstitutional, so even if it’s on the books, it’s not being used.”

  “I see.” Ever since Lance had raised the likelihood of my son facing the death penalty, I hadn’t been able to put it out of my mind. But I’d not shared my thoughts with Ellen.

  “So, on that score,” Natalie said, “you can rest easy.”

  “What do you mean, ‘on that score’? Is there something else?”

  “The police found an earring. Very small, a peace sign.”

  “Go on.”

  “Did Derek lose one recently?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  Ellen was mouthing, “What?” I held up my hand to her.

  “The police found one in the Langley house.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying not to panic. “He’s already admitted he was there. How does a found earring make things any worse?”

  “First of all, it’s not yet confirmed that it’s his. They’re doing DNA analysis on it.”

  “They can get that?” I asked. “Off an earring?”

  “They’re working on it.”

  “But I still don’t understand. So what if they prove it’s his? He’s admitted he was in the house.”

  Natalie Bondurant paused. “It’s where they found it in the house.”

  I felt my heart skip a beat. “Go on.”

  “In Donna and Albert Langley’s bedroom. In the folds of the bed skirt. And Derek’s fingerprints are on the bedroom dresser.”

  I felt numb.

  Natalie said, “If the DNA test comes back and says that’s Derek’s earring, the prosecutor’s going to wonder just how it got there. And before you know it, they’re going to have a whole lot more interesting motive than what they’ve got now.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  WHAT THE HELL does it mean?” Ellen asked when I’d filled her in on what Natalie Bondurant had said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. The earring probably isn’t even his.”

  “It looked like his,” I said.

  “But what would it be doing in Albert and Donna’s bedroom?” she asked. “Maybe Derek lost it someplace in the house, Donna found it and took it into her room, dropped it or mis
placed it.”

  “It was right in with the sheets or something, the bed skirt,” I said.

  “The bed skirt?” Ellen said. “How’s that possible? Someone must have put it there.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I could hear the sense of defeat in my voice. What I kept wanting to do, instinctively, was go to the bottom of the stairs and call Derek down to offer up some sort of explanation. But we’d have to wait until we were next able to visit Derek and ask him questions, or his lawyer had more information for us.

  “What if this DNA test proves it’s Derek’s?” Ellen asked. “What then?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said.

  “You know what they’ll say?” Ellen said. “Barry? And that prosecutor? They’ll probably say Mrs. Langley dragged our son into bed or something crazy like that. That that was what Derek got in a fight with the Langleys about, not his hiding in their house.”

  I felt despair overtaking me. But I was supposed to be the rock.

  Ellen said, “They wouldn’t think that, would they? No one would seriously think Donna would have gone to bed with our son?”

  I recalled what Barry had told me, what Donna had supposedly confessed to her sister. That she’d slept with the neighbor.

  Maybe she hadn’t been exaggerating after all.

  Ellen opened the fridge, took out two bottles of white wine, set them on the counter. She got the corkscrew out of the drawer and opened both of them. Christ almighty, I thought, how much is she planning to drink?

  She unwound the corks from the corkscrew, tossed them across the counter, then turned both bottles upside down over the sink and drained them. “I need my mind clear to get myself through this,” she said.

  If she wanted to be the rock from here on, that was okay by me.

  She stood the empty bottles back on the counter, turned to me, and said, “I think we’re being punished.”

  “What?”

  “For things we’ve done, or not done, in the past. What’s happened to us now, it’s some kind of retribution. We’re being made to pay.”

  I asked, “I don’t get you. For things we’ve done in this life, or past ones?”

  She walked out of the kitchen without answering.

  * * *

  IT WAS ANOTHER SLEEPLESS NIGHT, at least for me. For most of it, I stared at the ceiling, unable to see anything but my son in a cell. This was his third night behind bars, away from us, and it still didn’t seem possible that all of this was happening to our family.

  I was only able to stop worrying about one thing when I moved on to worry about another. I couldn’t seem to focus on any one aspect of our troubles because there seemed to be so many of them.

  Derek, of course, was my primary concern. But because I remained convinced he was not responsible for the Langleys’ deaths, my thoughts kept returning to what might have actually happened there that night, and who pulled the trigger.

  One thought that kept coming back to me was whether the murder of the Langleys was a mistake. Not in the obvious sense. Of course it was a mistake; a tragedy, a horrific event.

  I was thinking a different kind of mistake.

  And about our mailbox. With our name on it. And no mailbox with the name “Langley” on it.

  What if the Langleys’ killer, or killers, had gone to the wrong door? Was it possible our house had been the target? And if so, why?

  That computer. I always kept coming back to that computer. It had been given to Derek, and now it was missing. Maybe, whoever killed the Langleys assumed they’d found the right house, because what they were looking for was there.

  And maybe it was all bullshit. I wished I were confident that if I went to Barry and laid this all out for him, he’d at least consider it. But the chances of that happening now were somewhere between nil and zilch.

  After we turned out the lights, Ellen put her head on her pillow, and moments later, I could hear her taking tissues out of the box on her bedside table. She cried herself to sleep, and I held her until she stopped. I rolled over and pushed my face into the pillow. I figured if I could muffle my own crying, I would not wake her.

  * * *

  THE PRIORITY, as we both saw it the next morning, was seeing Derek and his lawyer and finding out what the hell was going on. But setting that as a goal, and actually being able to do anything about it, were two entirely different things. We divvied up duties in the morning. Ellen was on the phone first thing, trying to set up a visit to the jail, checking in with Natalie Bondurant.

  She couldn’t reach anyone at the jail with the authority to set up a visit, and Natalie wasn’t available to take her call.

  So we could spin our wheels all day, or try to get some other things done.

  I decided to go to work. Ellen could reach me on my cell if something happened. She’d make a trip to the bank and start going through the process of cashing in some, or possibly all, of our retirement savings. It wasn’t as though we had hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside. Like most people, we often found ourselves struggling with our week-to-week obligations, and figured we’d deal with the financial needs of our golden years by purchasing a winning lottery ticket.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said to her as I prepared to go outside.

  Before I got in my truck, I checked that I had everything I needed. The gas cans were full, the mowers and weed trimmers were in the back, my cell was turned on. I had my cooler with a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and several bottles of water. Not fancy, store-bought, bottled water, but tap water in bottles that once held the fancy stuff. Finally, I threw a metal watering can into the pickup bed, not something I usually brought along with me, but I thought it might come in handy today.

  I’d promised my new employee to pick him up by eight, so one other stop I wanted to make that morning, one I hadn’t mentioned to Ellen, would have to come after. But I wanted to make it before I got sweaty and had tiny bits of grass stuck to my neck.

  Drew Lockus was right where I expected him to be, standing on the corner out front of his mother’s house, paper bag in hand. Had he been a hitchhiker, I might not have been inclined to pick him up. Short and solid, those thick arms straining at his shirtsleeves, eyes set deep under a heavy brow, he had a bit of a Cro-Magnon thing going on.

  I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake here. It was an impulsive decision, asking him whether he wanted some work. But what were the odds he’d turn out to be a worse employee than Stuart Yost, Heat Rash Boy?

  Drew had been in the right place at the right time, as far as I was concerned. I don’t subscribe much to the belief that things happen for a reason, that there’s some higher power at the controls, directing all of us like we’re in some cosmic summer-stock production. Shit just happens is more or less my philosophy. I’m more a cause-and-effect guy. I believe one thing leads to another.

  I didn’t believe in destiny, but I was grateful that the gods, who’d been so angry with me lately, had decided to cut me some slack and place Drew in my vicinity when the tractor had landed on my leg. I certainly wouldn’t have been rescued by that dipshit idiot of a reporter, or his driver.

  Ellen, when I told her the night before how I’d met Drew, suggested fate had played a hand. Maybe we’d been drawn together so that he could save me from losing a leg when the tractor came down on me. Or maybe, she speculated, our paths had crossed so he could save us from a greater peril.

  This time, I told her, you’re the one talking out of your ass.

  I was feeling pretty sore this morning. My leg had throbbed all night, and my face and gut were still sore from Lance’s pounding. But there wasn’t much I could do about that. I couldn’t phone in to myself and say I was sick. I had to make a living. I had to help my son.

  Drew opened the passenger door and got in. “Hey,” he said.

  “Morning,” I said. “I see you brought a lunch. If you want, you can tuck it in my cooler, behind the seat there.” Drew, who didn’t yet have his seatbelt on,
looked around, found the cooler, opened it up, and dropped his lunch in. “You’re welcome to share my water, too,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Drew said. “I guess I should have thought of that.”

  “Not a problem. Most houses have a hose hooked up to the side anyway, if we need a drink. And some people, at least the ones who aren’t miserable pricks, if they’re home, they offer you a drink, especially on a hot day like this.”

  “That’s good,” Drew said. He studied me. “What happened to your face?”

  “Oh,” I said, reaching up to it without actually touching it. “I had a little run-in with a former associate.” I hung a right, aimed the truck toward the downtown.

  “That’s some shiner you got there,” he said.

  “I kind of wasn’t ready.”

  I thought Drew might ask for details, but instead he said, “Where’s our first place?”

  “Up on Culver. But I’ve got one stop before that. Down at city hall.”

  “Forget to pay your property taxes?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  Promise Falls is too large to be called quaint, but it’s a pretty city, lots of historic architecture, a river running down from the falls it’s named for through the center of town, and the closer you get to that center, the better it looks, with old-fashioned-looking streetlamps and signs, brick sidewalks, most of the shops having a colonial look about them. City hall is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s fronted by several sets of doors and three-story columns that have a Faneuil Hall kind of look, but with modern additions flanking them.

  I parked out front and said to Drew, “I’ll only be a couple of minutes. If someone wants the truck moved, just circle the block.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  I went around to the back of the truck, grabbed the watering can, and walked briskly to the front doors and through the rotunda and up the long flight of marble stairs to the second floor. I knew where I was going.

  The mayor’s office is actually several rooms. There’s the reception area, with the main desk, and the deputy mayor’s office to the left, several smaller offices for administrative aides to the right. But the door to Mayor Finley’s office was straight ahead, and when the woman behind the main desk saw me heading for it, a smile broke out across her face and she said, “Christ on a cracker as I live and breathe, Jim Cutter.”