Too Close to Home

by Linwood Barclay

  “Hey, Delia,” I said, flashing back a smile, but not breaking my stride.

  “What’s with the can?” she asked. “Don’t tell me you’re working for Building Services, keeping the office plants from getting thirsty?” She winked. “It’s still a better gig than driving His Worship around, I’ll bet.” I just smiled. “Jesus, Jim, what happened to you? You walk into a mountain?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “If you want to see the mayor, he’s in his office, but he’s kind of busy right now with this lady he’s got helping him map out his campaign for Congress. You’ve heard about that, I guess.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Can you believe it?”

  I just shrugged. “The voters always get who they deserve, Delia,” I said.

  “You want me to let him know you’re here?”

  “No, that’s okay. I just wanted to know if he was in. If he is, I figure that means Lance must be around.”

  “I saw him a few minutes ago. I think he’s down the hall in the coffee room.” Delia was reaching for the phone. “Want me to let him know you’re here?”

  “No no,” I said quickly. “I’m heading down that way anyway.” I held up the can.

  Delia reached out and grabbed my arm as I started to slip away. “I’m sorry about your boy. About Derek.” I nodded, grateful for her concern. “I don’t believe it for a minute,” she said, and let go of me.

  As I strolled down the hallway I practiced my grip on the handle of the galvanized steel can. It was important that I have a good hold on it.

  I pushed open the door to the coffee room. It was big enough for half a dozen tables, with some vending machines along one wall, a coffee machine on a counter next to a sink and refrigerator.

  The room was empty but for one man. Lance was seated at one of the tables, his right hand around a paper cup of coffee, his left turning the pages of the sports section.

  “Hey,” I said.

  As Lance turned to look I brought the watering can back over my shoulder, then swung it full force across his face. There was a loud, hollow bang as it connected. He tumbled back across the table and collapsed in a heap onto the floor.

  “You shouldn’t have spit in my ear,” I said, then turned around and went back out to the truck.

  DREW DIDN’T NEED MUCH INSTRUCTION. Not that yard maintenance is, as they say, rocket surgery. But he knew what to do without being asked. At each of our stops, I took the Deere and Drew fired up one of the push mowers and went into the places I couldn’t reach with the lawn tractor. When he was done with that, he used the edger, then took the blower and cleared the walkways and driveways of grass debris.

  I tossed him a bottle of water after our third house, and he downed it in one gulp. “Why don’t we break for lunch,” I said. There was a park along the river, just down from the falls, where we could find plenty of shade and, with any luck, some breeze. I drove down to it, found a spot along the curb long enough for the truck and the trailer, and invited Drew to follow me to one of the picnic tables.

  “When you came out of city hall,” he said, “you looked kind of, I don’t know, funny. A kind of shit-eatin’ grin. Smug.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Smug sounds right.” I gave my head a scratch, tousled my hair to get rid of some lawn debris. “I’ve been under a bit of stress lately and was looking for an outlet.”

  “Okay,” Drew said, and pursued it no further.

  “So,” I said. “Your mother. You’re looking after her?”

  Drew nodded, took a bite of his peanut butter sandwich.

  “I got the sense she’s not well.”

  He took another couple of bites and nodded. He waited until his mouth wasn’t too gummed up, then said, “She’s old. She’s got cancer.” Then another bite of sandwich.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Drew Lockus had already finished one sandwich, and reached into his bag for a second. “I guess we all have to die of something.” He bit hurriedly into his second sandwich.

  “Take your time,” I said. “We don’t have to rush. It’s good to recharge the batteries a bit, especially in this heat.”

  “Sorry,” Drew said, chewing steadily. “I guess I eat kind of fast.”

  “So what kind of work have you been doing?”

  “Small engine repair, machine shop work, that kind of thing,” Drew said. “But like I said, I haven’t been working all that much lately. When my mom took sick, I came up here to look after her.”

  “Your father, he still alive?”

  “No, he died a long time ago. Heart attack.”

  “That’s too bad. Brothers, sisters?”

  “Just me.”

  “That’s tough, when there’s no one else to share the load.” I drank some water. “Married?”

  “Not anymore,” Drew said. “Long time ago. And we lived together. Not actually married.”

  “Kids?”

  Drew hesitated before answering. “Same deal. Not anymore.”

  “Sorry,” I said again. “I don’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business.”

  “That’s okay,” Drew said. “Fact is, I haven’t had a very happy life. And I don’t see it going in a direction where it’s going to get any better.”

  At first I thought, great, I’ve found the perfect guy to cheer me up. But then I saw it from his point of view. With all the troubles he seemed to have, he had to go and get hired by the one person who might actually have, at least for the moment, even more.

  Maybe my dilemmas would give him something to be thankful for. It could be worse. Or, I could end up bringing him down even further.

  We both enjoyed the breeze for a moment without talking. Then Drew said, “How are things with your son?”

  I took a sip of water. “They could be better,” I said. “I’m just hoping that, once we start gathering some more information, the police will realize they’ve made a mistake, drop the charges.”

  “Prison,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not a good place to be.”

  “No,” I said, weighing the meaning behind his comment. “You sound as though you’re speaking from some experience.”

  “Like I said,” Drew reminded me, “I haven’t had a very happy life. Sometime, maybe I’ll tell you about it, when you feel like being bored.” He paused, then said, “I notice you looking upriver a lot.”

  “I was just looking at Promise Falls,” I said. Watching the water come down, the white foam and mist rising up from the bottom, bordered on hypnotic.

  “Pretty,” Drew said.

  “Yeah,” I said, picturing Brett Stockwell going over the railing that spanned the falls.

  I could see it. The boy falling, his body hitting the rocks below.

  That wasn’t all I saw. Back up there, on the bridge, I imagined Conrad Chase looking down, waving goodbye, a smile on his face, all his problems solved.

  * * *

  DRIVING OUT OF THE DOWNTOWN, we passed by the Clover Restaurant, an upscale place where you could get a nice dinner for two if you had an extra hundred bucks, maybe lunch for half that. What caught my eye as we drove past the parking lot was a Mazda sedan, just like Ellen’s.

  “Looks like my wife’s car,” I said, slowing. I glanced at the license plate, saw that it was indeed her car. “Maybe she’s having a meeting with Derek’s lawyer, maybe I should—”

  I spotted another familiar car just as I was about to turn into the lot. A silver Audi TT, parked half a dozen cars down from Ellen’s.

  I wrenched the wheel back, kept on going.

  “What?” said Drew. “You want to pop in, I don’t mind waiting in the truck.”

  “I was wrong,” I said. “Not her car.”

  A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, standing by the truck, getting ready to unload the Deere, my cell rang. I put it to my ear so quickly I didn’t have a chance to look at the readout and see who it was from.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Jimmy, I hear you were in the buildin
g. You should have dropped by and said hello.”

  Mayor Randall Finley.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Delia said you were in a meeting with your campaign strategist.”

  “Yeah, Maxine Woodrow. She’s a real looker, plus she’s got brains. Not the sort of combination I’m typically attracted to.” He laughed.

  “What can I do for you, Randy?”

  “Listen,” he said, “Lance had to take a sick day because you knocked half his face off. It wasn’t that bad, I’m sure he’ll be back tomorrow, but Jesus, I really wish you wouldn’t do that kind of thing. Fucks things up for me.”

  “I had a score to settle,” I said.

  “I don’t doubt it. There’s days I wouldn’t mind taking a frying pan to his head myself. What did you use, anyway? Delia said you had a watering can with you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Fucking hell. Now the lefties will want everyone to register their watering cans. All I wanted to say is, if you’re in a pissing match with Lance, don’t do it in my sandbox. Understand what I’m saying?”

  “I hear ya,” I said.

  “You ever think maybe you have a bit of a problem? You keep things all bottled up, you talk in monosyllables, then every once in a while you just explode.” A chortling noise. “Nobody knows better than me.”

  “I’ll join a group.”

  “There’s the spirit.” Then, adopting a softer tone, “Hey, Cutter, about your kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a damn shame. I see you got Bondurant. Good lawyer, and a pretty nice piece of ass, too, from what I hear, not that that’s particularly relevant to you.”

  “Not really.”

  “Listen, you hang in there. There’s no way a kid of yours could have done that.”

  Randall caught me off guard in a way he never had before. It took me a moment to find the words, but I managed to say “Thank you.”

  “Okay. Later.” And the mayor hung up.

  “Who was that?” asked Drew, who’d been adding gas from a red plastic container to one of the lawn mowers, and had been in earshot the whole time.

  “The mayor,” I said.

  “We supposed to cut his grass, too?” Drew asked.

  Before I could answer, the cell phone, still in my hand, went off again. This time I glanced at the tiny screen and saw that it was Ellen.

  “We can see Derek,” she said. “Half an hour, three-thirty.”

  “Have you talked to Natalie? Does she know any more about the earring?”

  “I saw her briefly, but I don’t have any news. She’s going to meet us when we go in to see Derek.”

  “Anything else?” I asked. I was wondering whether she’d mention her lunch at the Clover.

  “No, except that there’s going to be about eight hundred and fifty bucks left in our retirement fund.”

  I glanced at my watch. “I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes,” I said, and closed the phone.

  Drew said he could look after this property while I left with the truck for the Promise Falls jail. I looked a fright, but no one seemed to mind when I got there. Ellen and Natalie Bondurant were already waiting for me. We were taken to a small meeting room and told to wait while a guard went and fetched Derek.

  It was all I could do not to weep when he walked in. He was pale, there were circles under his eyes, his shoulders sagged, and he had a bandage on his chin.

  Ellen threw her arms around him first, and then I got a hug in before we were both reprimanded by a jail official standing over by the door. No personal contact allowed, he told us.

  “What happened to you?” Ellen asked, reaching out to his bandage without actually touching it.

  “Some guy shoved me into a wall,” he said.

  “A guard?” Natalie asked.

  “No,” Derek said. “One of the prisoners. I didn’t move out of his way fast enough.”

  To Natalie, I said, “What can we do about that? Can’t we get him into some sort of protective—”

  She put up her hand to stop me. “I’ll look into it. I want to get started. We’ve got a lot to cover. Derek,” she said, leaning over the narrow table toward our son, “there are a few things we need to work out here.”

  “Like what?”

  “The police found an earring. A peace sign. They’re testing it for DNA, but tell me now. Is it yours?”

  He nodded. “Probably.”

  “When did you lose it?”

  He seemed a bit bewildered. “I don’t know. Two, three weeks ago or so, I think.”

  “Not the night you were hiding in the basement? When the Langleys were killed?”

  He shook his head. Of this he seemed sure. “No, before then. Where’d they find it?”

  Natalie, Ellen, and I exchanged glances before Natalie said, “In the Langleys’ bedroom. Caught down in the dust ruffle.”

  Derek’s eyes darted back and forth.

  “Plus,” Natalie Bondurant said, “they found your prints on the dresser.”

  “Okay, wait a minute. I might have touched the dresser the night they got killed.”

  I broke in. “You didn’t tell Barry you were in there.”

  Derek sighed, looked briefly up to the ceiling tiles. “Shit, I just went in there for a second. I just walked around, and I think I touched it.”

  “You sure you didn’t lose the earring then?” Ellen asked.

  He was silent a moment. “No, not then.”

  “Then how do you think it got into that room?” Natalie asked.

  Derek’s eyes began to well up with tears. He looked at his mother and said, “Do we really have to get into this?”

  “We really have to get into this,” Natalie said.

  “It’s just . . . really hard to talk about.”

  Ellen did her best to give him a reassuring smile. “Ms. Bondurant can’t help you if you aren’t completely honest with her. I know it may be hard to tell her some things with us here, and if you need us to leave—”

  “No,” he said. “I guess not. I mean, shit, you’ll find out sooner or later anyway, the way things have been going lately.”

  Fasten your seatbelts, I thought.

  “I kind of, I guess I kind of had sex with Mrs. Langley,” Derek said.

  If it had been left to me and Ellen, there might have been a long, stunned silence, but Natalie dove right in with her questions. “When was this, Derek?”

  “Like, three weeks ago or so.”

  “One occasion, or several?”

  “Just once.”

  “Tell us how this happened.”

  Derek took a long breath. “I’d gone over there to see Adam, but it turned out he was out with his dad, they’d gone to a movie or something. But Mrs. Langley invited me in anyway. She did that a lot, like she wanted to have someone to talk to, you know? She was always kind of nice to me. So I came in, and she made me a sandwich and opened a bag of chips, and she sat down at the table with me, just talking about all kinds of stuff, and then she was asking me about my girlfriend, you know, Penny?”

  We nodded.

  “And Mrs. Langley started talking about how kids nowadays, how, you know, they’re more sexually active, and she started asking me whether I was careful, about getting a girl pregnant, and about diseases and stuff, and I told her that, technically speaking, I really hadn’t, you know, hadn’t actually done it yet.” He flashed me a look, like maybe I’d be disappointed, I don’t know. “I said I’d just done some stuff, you know, but not the actual thing.”

  “Okay,” said Natalie.

  “She asked me if I was nervous about that, about what it would be like the first time, and I guess I said maybe a little, and she said that she might be able to help me out with that nervousness.” He paused, working up to it. “She said, like, if I never told anyone, she could give me kind of a lesson, that it would be our secret.”

  We’d been living next door to Mrs. Robinson.

  “So you went up to her bedroom,” Natalie Bondura
nt said.

  Derek nodded. “She . . . showed me.”

  Ellen said, “She raped you.”

  Derek screwed up his face. “Not . . . really, Mom.”

  Natalie again: “Derek, did you ever tell anyone about this? Before now? Before this very moment?”

  “No. Not anybody. Nobody.”

  “Do you think Mrs. Langley told anyone? Do you think it’s possible that Mr. Langley could have found out about this somehow?”

  He shook his head. “I kind of think he might have said something to me.”

  “But it’s not something we can prove,” Natalie said. “And now we know how the DNA test is going to come back on that earring. We might have been able to come up with some sort of story of how it got there, but with your fingerprints on the dresser, you’re placed in that room. The prosecution’s probably already working up a theory, that somehow Albert Langley found out you’d slept with his wife, that there was some kind of confrontation that night, one that ended with all of them dead.” She paused. “The good news is—”

  “There’s good news?” I said.

  “It’s still circumstantial, and a whole lot of conjecture. But it gives the prosecution a much better motive than we thought they had.”

  “I’m screwed,” Derek said.

  “No,” Natalie Bondurant said. “We just have our work cut out for us.”

  Derek looked at his mother, his eyes red. “I’m sorry.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Ellen said.

  Ditto, I thought.

  “I’m never going to get out of here,” he said.

  “You can’t think that way,” I said. “Ms. Bondurant, she knows what she’s doing. We’re all doing everything we can. I need you out of here. I can’t cut all those yards without you.” I hoped I could make him smile, but it wasn’t to be.

  “I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup.”

  “You’re not a fuckup,” I told him.

  He shook his head slowly, looked off into space. “I’ve always been a fuckup. I got myself into this by being a fuckup. Even if, somehow, you and Mom manage to get me out of here, I’ll just end up doing something else, because that’s just what I always do. I always fuck up. It’s like the only thing I’m good at.”