Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  “Supposedly.”

  “Some spouses go along because it’s what their partner wants. They tell themselves they’re into it, too. But . . . not so much.”

  “Like you.”

  Felicia shrugged, knocked back some more wine. “You think it’s all out in the open, that that would eliminate the need for an actual affair. Why sneak around behind your spouse’s back when you can fuck someone else right in front of her? But with Adam, it was the secrecy he liked. That was the thrill. So even if he was banging his best friend’s wife right in front of him, the real thrill was to do it someplace else when he wasn’t there.”

  “Is that what Adam did?”

  She smiled sadly. “Oh, yeah. He had to see women outside the playroom. When I learned he was doing that, I’d had enough. I wanted out.”

  “The playroom,” I said.

  Felicia took a moment to size me up, wondering how much I knew. “You found it,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She closed her eyes, as though trying to picture it. “It all seems so silly, when you think about it. And a little bit tacky, I guess. But Adam felt those activities deserved to be relegated to a special room. Like it shouldn’t taint the rest of the house. But it had to be hidden. He didn’t want anyone wandering in there by mistake.”

  “I saw the DVD player. And the camera equipment under the bed.”

  “Adam liked to record sessions,” she said, opening her eyes. “We’d play them back sometimes, with guests. Kind of like reviewing a football game play by play.”

  “So everyone knew they were being videoed. The camera wasn’t hidden.”

  Felicia shook her head.

  “The DVDs are gone,” I said.

  Her eyes widened. “What?”

  “I think that’s what someone was after. Those DVDs.”

  “Christ on a taco,” she said.

  “That worries you?”

  “Not me. Not personally. When we split up, Adam gave me any video he had of me, of us, either alone or with others.”

  “How do you know he didn’t hold something back? Didn’t make copies?”

  “Because I just know. Adam, for all his faults, was a more or less honest guy. At least with me. If he said he gave me everything, he did. And he never put anything online, never did computer files. He knew that kind of stuff always got hacked or sent by mistake. He liked hard copies, no pun intended.”

  “And you destroyed them? The discs he gave you?”

  “I did.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She scowled. “I told you.”

  “Because I’m trying to recover those DVDs, or be assured that they’re no longer in existence.”

  “Who for? No, wait, you already mentioned Lucy.”

  I nodded.

  “She wants them?”

  “She’d be happy knowing that they’ve been destroyed. She doesn’t have to get them back. But we need to know who took them to get that kind of assurance.”

  Felicia softened. “Sure. Look, I’m telling you the truth. Adam gave me any discs from our time together and I smashed them into a million pieces. They went out in the trash years ago.”

  “Who else was on them?”

  I was thinking that if the couples participating in the lifestyle with Adam and Felicia were still taking part with Adam and Miriam, I’d have some likely suspects where the missing DVDs were concerned.

  Felicia shook her head. “I know what you must be thinking, and I don’t think it’s going to help. There were two other couples we saw back then. One moved to Paris around that time—she got transferred—and I don’t think they ever came back. And the other couple, there was kind of a big falling-out because she was the one Adam saw on the side.”

  “On the side.”

  “Yeah. Any discs from back then that featured those people also featured me, so they’d have been the ones Adam gave me.”

  “When you were married to Adam, did he ever trust another couple enough that he’d give them a key to the house?”

  She nodded. “The ones who moved to France. Adam gave him a key. In case we were away, it was someone who could check the house, if he didn’t want to trouble Lucy.”

  “Do you know who Adam and Miriam were involved with more recently?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “Because you and Adam still talked. At least through e-mails.”

  Her eyes widened for half a second. “It’s true, but I don’t think Miriam knew. She’d have been pissed.”

  “I saw your exchange from yesterday. You said someone needed time to think something through. What was that about?”

  “Jesus, you really are a detective. I was talking about Miriam. They were having some ups and downs.”

  “The same kind you were having? Another woman?”

  “He didn’t get too specific, but probably. Maybe that’s why he took her to the movies. Trying to smooth things over. Christ, maybe he took her to the drive-in to rekindle some of what they used to have, and they ended up dead.”

  “You think Adam was interested in starting up a relationship with you again?”

  She nearly choked on the wine. “Hardly. Been there, done that.”

  I looked at the closed bedroom door, held it for two beats. “And you’ve moved on, anyway.”

  Felicia followed my gaze, smiled. “I’ve moved on more times than I can count.” She put the glass to her lips and tipped it back.

  “Had you and Adam always kept in touch since the divorce?”

  She shrugged. “We stayed friends.”

  “Did he give you money?”

  The look she gave me suggested I’d just asked how much she weighed. “Money?”

  “Beyond whatever settlement you had when you divorced.”

  “It was a lump sum. But—” She paused for more wine. “But occasionally, when I needed a little help, he’d be there for me. He just didn’t want Miriam to know.”

  “Did the two of you continue to be intimate?”

  She grinned. “That is so charming. Intimate. You mean, were we still fucking?”

  “Yes.”

  She pursed her lips provocatively, then retracted them, perhaps realizing that whatever hookups she and her ex had had, there would be no more. “There was the occasional itch,” she conceded. “But mostly, he just liked to talk.”

  Her expression turned sorrowful. “He felt I was one of the few people who understood him. Who knew that even if he behaved badly, he wasn’t a bad person.” She sniffed. “He was just a big boy, is what he was. I mean, he had problems. Some people would probably want to label him, say he had some sort of sexual addiction problem. You ask me, he just always wanted to be nineteen. I think he missed his bad-boy biker days.”

  “What’d he do back then?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He ran girls. Prostitution. Made a lot of money out of it, too. He’s always liked the ladies, one way or another.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Despite whatever sorrow she was feeling, she managed a smile.

  “It was how me met,” she said. “Adam wasn’t the only one who reinvented himself.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE lecture hall, which could accommodate more than a hundred students, currently held no more than thirty. This was a summer class, so attendance was a fraction of what it would have been through the school year. When Professor Peter Blackmore entered, the students were getting settled into their seats, opening their laptops on the teardrop-shaped fold-down tables, or putting out their smartphones and setting them to record. Blackmore didn’t see one student getting out a pen and paper.

  There was a time, ten years ago, when he would have walked in with a briefcase jammed with student essays, half a dozen boo
ks, and a copy of his speech. But today he’d arrived with nothing but a digital tablet in his pocket. He’d e-mailed his lecture on Melville and psychological determinism to himself, and once he reached the lectern, he’d open the file and, using his index finger, glide his way through the talk. He might not have the most up-to-date phone, or know how to text, but when it came to delivering a lecture, he was totally twenty-first century.

  “If everyone could take a seat . . . ,” he said.

  A handful of students continued chatting. The odds were none of them was talking about Melville, or psychological determinism, or anything else academic for that matter. It was more likely they were making plans for later. Where they’d meet for a drink. Who wanted to go in on a pizza order. Sharing gossip. Who was sleeping with whom.

  He was thinking he shouldn’t have told the detective about Georgina.

  “Okay, I trust everyone’s well into Moby-Dick,” Blackmore said. “Or at the very least, the CliffsNotes version.”

  Some nervous laughter rippled through the hall.

  He reached into the deep pocket of his jacket, brought out the tablet. Hit the button at the bottom, slid his finger across the screen to unlock it.

  “Just one second here,” Blackmore said.

  He knew Clive Duncomb would be pissed if he knew he’d talked to Angus Carlson. Duncomb liked to handle problems on his own. Not just his problems, but the problems of those close to him.

  Duncomb didn’t like dealing with the local police. He considered them a bunch of hicks. A Promise Falls detective, Duncomb liked to say, couldn’t find his own ass in a snowstorm.

  Blackmore wasn’t sure he took as dim a view of the local force. Not that he’d had many dealings with them, but he wasn’t aware of any examples of gross incompetence. It wasn’t as though a professor of English literature had much reason to interact with the police.

  There’d certainly been plenty of them on campus after Duncomb shot and killed that student who was going around attacking young women.

  Didn’t seem to bother Duncomb at all to blow that kid’s brains out.

  Sure, Blackmore thought, you could argue Duncomb did the right thing, but you’d think he’d feel something afterward. Taking another person’s life? But the guy carried on as though ending a young man’s life was just another day at the office.

  Maybe, Blackmore thought, he shouldn’t be all that surprised, considering Duncomb’s background. Or his wife, Liz’s, for that matter. The details had trickled out over the last few years. How Duncomb had been working vice for the Boston PD when he met Elizabeth Palmer. He’d been gathering evidence on the escort business she ran, hoping to round her up in a sting, but he was the one who ended up being drawn into her net.

  But the Boston cops hadn’t been the only ones looking at Liz. There was the IRS, for one. Duncomb, sabotaging his own department’s investigation, helped Liz destroy evidence. Records were shredded and burned. People were paid off. Duncomb quit, married Liz—motivated not just by love but by the two of them never having to testify against each other—and moved to Promise Falls when he got his security chief gig.

  Was it a stretch to think a man like that might take extreme measures?

  “Professor?”

  “Hmm?”

  It was a girl in the front row. Trish, or Tricia, something like that.

  “Is something wrong?”

  He realized he’d been standing there, saying nothing, off in his own world for the better part of fifteen seconds. Maybe longer. He wasn’t sure.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I really am the absentminded professor, aren’t I?”

  A few chuckles. Most of them, he realized, had probably never heard of the movie. A reference lost to the generations.

  “Okay,” he said, resting the tablet on the lectern. The speech magically appeared. He’d bumped up the font size so he could read without having to wear his glasses.

  Seconds before coming into the lecture hall, he had tried again to reach Georgina. He’d called home and her cell. No answers. He’d put in a call to the law office where she worked, just in case she’d shown up. No luck there, either.

  He had a feeling maybe she was home. She was angry with him, he was guessing, and when his name came up on the caller ID of her cell or the landline, she was refusing to answer.

  Making him suffer.

  Well, it was working.

  “Uh, when we talk about psychological determinism, what is it exactly we’re talking about? It’s quite a mouthful, I grant you. But it goes to the heart of . . . the heart of . . .”

  He’d swiped upward a little too hard with his finger, placing him ten paragraphs into his lecture. He tried to move the text back into position.

  “Uh, hang on here, hang on . . .”

  She’s fallen. Good God, she’s been hurt.

  It seemed so obvious. Frighteningly obvious. Up to now, he’d assumed she was trying to teach him some sort of lesson. That she’d run off somewhere. Gone to stay with a friend. Or, if she was home, was giving him the silent treatment. She’d done it before when she’d been angry with him for something he’d done.

  And he had done something. Or rather, he’d said something. Something he shouldn’t have said. Made some terrible accusations.

  She hadn’t taken it well.

  So there’d been every reason to believe she’d gone off somewhere to cool off. But it wasn’t like her to be gone this long. He’d seen her storm off and get in her car and come back in an hour or two.

  Not overnight.

  And she’d never been so pissed with him that she failed to show up for work.

  God, what an idiot I’ve been, he thought. He should have gone home when her office had called. She could have tripped on the stairs. Slipped getting out of the tub. Electrocuted herself somehow.

  He had to get home. Right now.

  Blackmore looked at his class, at the thirty expectant and confused faces. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do this today.”

  He picked up the tablet, shoved it into his pocket, and headed for the exit.

  • • •

  He walked hurriedly to his rusting, twenty-year-old Volvo, sped out of the faculty parking lot in a cloud of exhaust.

  The Blackmores lived in a two-story redbrick Victorian in the old part of Promise Falls. Over the last decade—as long as he and Georgina had been married—they’d worked to restore the home to its original glory. They’d replaced the gingerbread trim and railings on the small front porch. Reshingled the roof. Replaced the furnace.

  Georgina’s car, a four-year-old Prius, was parked at the side of the house. At first, the sight of the car gave him reason for hope. He brought the Volvo to a halt behind it, killed the engine, and got out of the car so quickly he didn’t bother to close the door.

  He was fumbling with his keys as he approached the side entrance. But before he inserted the key, he tried opening it. Half the time, Georgina left the house unlocked when she was home.

  The knob turned in his hand.

  As he pushed it open, he shouted, “Georgie! Georgie?”

  No answer.

  The side door opened onto a landing between two short flights of stairs. Four steps up would take him to the kitchen, four steps down to the basement.

  He decided to go up to the kitchen first. What he saw stopped him dead.

  Drawers pulled out, cupboards opened. Dishes and cups and utensils out of position, dumped onto the countertop.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. Then, shouting, he said, “Georgina!”

  He made his way to the stairs and scaled them two steps at a time to reach the second floor. He headed straight for their bedroom. It was like the kitchen. Dresser drawers pulled out, clothes tossed, suitcases pulled out from under the bed. The closet door was open, and empty shoe boxes had been opened and tossed.

&
nbsp; “Oh my God,” he said.

  The guest bedroom had been similarly tossed. Someone had been searching the house from top to bottom.

  “Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” Blackmore kept repeating.

  “Calm down,” said a voice behind him.

  Blackmore spun around. Standing in the doorway was Clive Duncomb.

  “Jesus Christ!” Blackmore cried. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I came by to look for Georgina,” he said calmly.

  “Where is she? Where’s Georgina?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Her car’s here,” Blackmore said. “If her car’s here, where the hell is she?”

  “I didn’t find a purse.”

  “Her purse?”

  “I didn’t find it.”

  “Georgina probably has half a dozen purses.”

  Duncomb nodded. “Yes, that’s true. But the one she’d currently be using would have her car keys and her wallet and her driver’s license. I didn’t find a purse with those things.”

  Blackmore waved his arms at the disarray. “Look at this. Something happened here. Someone tore this place apart. Maybe Georgina caught someone doing this. Oh God. Maybe someone kidnapped her, or even—”

  “I did this,” Duncomb said.

  Blackmore said, “What?”

  “I’ve been tearing the place apart. I just finished looking through the basement. If she took it, and if it’s here, it’s well hidden.”

  “Clive, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “It occurred to me that it might be Georgina. She was always uncomfortable about that one disc. And she wasn’t wrong to be. Maybe she got into the house before I did. Or maybe she took it a long time ago.”

  “Goddamn it, Clive, all you had to do was ask me. If Georgina’d taken it, she’d have told me.”

  “Would she? Maybe she’d have been afraid to. Maybe she did it on her own.”

  “Even if—even if you’re right, she wouldn’t have hidden it. She’d have destroyed it.”

  Duncomb nodded, thinking. “Probably. It’d be good if she did. But I need to know. I need to know it doesn’t exist anymore.”