Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  Sam took another look at the clock.

  “I don’t think all of us being under the same roof would work very well,” Sam said, her eyes fixed on Yolanda. “And I don’t know if the owner could find someone else to run this place if I went away.”

  Yolanda made a derisive scan of the premises. “How hard could it be to find someone to do this?”

  Garnet shot his wife a look, then smiled understandingly at Sam. “Well, then, what if we were to come up here? Book a hotel, or maybe a resort around Saratoga. Someplace close to Promise Falls. We could give Carl a little vacation close to home. And we could book a room for you, too. We could make it close enough that you could drive in here every day, make sure everything’s running like clockwork.”

  Sam didn’t get it. Why the change of heart? Were Garnet and Yolanda really on the level?

  “What about all this talk of trying to take Carl away from me?” Sam said. “Would that end?”

  Garnet smiled. “That hasn’t been productive, has it? We think there has to be a better way.”

  “And Brandon would like to see his son,” Yolanda said.

  Garnet gave her a look that suggested that was not on the agenda.

  “Prison is no place for a nine-year-old boy,” Sam said. “One day, when Brandon is released, I’m willing to sit down and work out some kind of visitation arrangement. Despite what you may think of me, I don’t want to turn my son against his father.” Again, she looked at the clock. “I can’t be here another minute. I have to go pick up Carl.”

  Garnet held up a hand. “Just wait. I think what you’re saying is very mature, very honorable,” he said. “I’m pleased to hear you say that. What we’re wondering is—”

  “You’re not hearing me,” Sam said. “Carl will be looking for my car. When—”

  Sam cut herself off. She suddenly understood what they were doing.

  They were stalling her.

  She stood, ran to the office at the back end of the Laundromat to grab her purse.

  “Samantha!” Garnet said, standing. “Please! There’s more we want to say!”

  She grabbed her purse, and as she headed for the alleyway out back where she kept her car, she searched it for her car keys. Once she’d found them, she pointed the remote at her car and hit the button to unlock it. The car was listing to one side. Both tires on the driver’s side were completely flat.

  “No, no,” she said. “This isn’t happening.”

  Behind her, standing framed in the back door of the Laundromat, Garnet and Yolanda Worthington smiled. “Got you good, you bitch,” Yolanda said.

  They’re sending Ed. They’re sending Ed to the school to grab Carl and take him back to Boston.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Cal

  I got back into my car, which I’d parked in a visitors’ spot at Felicia Chalmers’s building, and took out my notebook. I turned to the page where I’d written down the numbers Lucy had read out to me from Adam Chalmers’s phone bill.

  There was one we hadn’t been able to connect to anyone. I figured, what the hell, and dialed it.

  The number rang four times, then went to voice mail.

  “Hi! This is Georgina. I’d love to talk to you, but I can’t take your call right now, so leave me a message!”

  Cheerful. I chose not to leave a message. I called Lucy.

  “Hi,” she said when she picked up. “Did you talk to Felicia?”

  “Yeah. But I wanted to ask, does the name Georgina mean anything to you?”

  “Georgina?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Okay, just thought I would ask. I’ll check in with you later, okay?”

  I pointed the car in the direction of Thackeray, on the outer edges of Promise Falls. Took the better part of twenty minutes.

  It was the first time I’d been on the Thackeray grounds since returning to Promise Falls. I’d spent time out here when I was in my late teens and early twenties, although never as a student. I’d done two years at the state university in Albany before dropping out. If I could have gotten a degree in partying, I’d have done well, but things didn’t work that way. So I switched institutions, taking a six-month course at the New York State Police Academy, still in Albany. After graduation, I managed to get on with the Promise Falls cops.

  Where I stayed until I screwed up, moved my wife, Donna, and son, Scott, to Griffon, a small town north of Buffalo, and went private. We had a few good years there, maybe the best I ever had or ever will, before darkness took them both away from me.

  When I was a kid, we always thought of the Thackeray students as “them.” We were “us.” They were a bunch of stuck-up, elitist know-it-alls, but we were the street-smart locals. Until, of course, many of us locals attended the school. And even before that, we weren’t above heading out to campus pubs to try to pick up Thackeray girls.

  I found one by the name of Donna who was willing to share her life with me. Until that life ended.

  So I had mixed feelings driving out to the campus. I was in no mood for reminiscing. I wondered if my sister, Celeste, was right, that I wasn’t dealing with what had happened to Donna and Scott. I’d felt that I was. By burying it.

  You couldn’t change the past.

  I paid to park in the lot close to the admin building and found my way to the security offices. A young man on the desk took one of my business cards with him as he went into the office of Clive Duncomb.

  I’d done more background reading on him before coming out here. His killing of a student predator, and the fact that he had not, at least so far, been charged with anything.

  Seconds later, a man whose picture I recognized from the Internet came out of the office, hand extended.

  “Mr. Weaver?” he said, holding my card by the edges between thumb and forefinger.

  “Mr. Duncomb?”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Mind if we talk in your office?”

  He hesitated. “You want to tell me what this is about?”

  “Could we talk in your office?” I said again.

  With some reluctance, he led me in and pointed to a chair. “I don’t think we’ve met before,” Duncomb said.

  “No,” I said. “I only recently came back to Promise Falls.”

  “But you’re from here originally.”

  “Yes. I grew up here.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Griffon. North of Buffalo.”

  “No more jealous wives in Griffon wanting their husbands spied on?”

  I forced a smile. “How about yourself? I’m picking up a bit of an accent.”

  “When you’re from Boston, there’s no hiding it,” he said. “Let me guess why you’re here. It’s about the shooting.”

  “Mason Helt?”

  “Yeah. You working for the kid’s family? Insurance company? Which is it? Doesn’t matter—my answer’s the same. It was justified. That son of a bitch had one of my people on the ground, with a gun, and if I hadn’t done what I did, God knows what would have happened to Joyce.”

  “Joyce?”

  “Pilgrim. Joyce Pilgrim. I’ll tell you this. I’ve taken some heat for putting her out there in the first place to lure this guy out, but if I hadn’t done it, he’d still be out there, and who the hell knows what he might have done by now? Killed some poor girl, maybe.”

  “That’s not why I’m here,” I said.

  “Oh,” Duncomb said, almost looking disappointed. “What’s this about, then?”

  “Adam Chalmers,” I said.

  “Chalmers? The writer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you want to know about him?”

  “I don’t know if you’re aware, but Mr. Chalmers and his wife were killed last night when that screen came down a
t the drive-in.”

  His mouth dropped. “Jesus Christ, you’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  Duncomb’s head went side to side. “I can’t believe that. Son of a bitch. When I heard about that, first thing I wondered was whether any Thackeray students were hurt or killed. Far as I know, none were. I heard a couple of kids were, but they weren’t students here. Not that that makes it any less tragic. But Christ Almighty, I never realized Adam . . . and Miriam . . . Good people. Nice people.” Another incredulous head shake. “Do you know anything about a service? Which funeral home they went to, anything like that?”

  “I don’t. His daughter’s looking after that today. At least where Mr. Chalmers is concerned. I think Miriam Chalmers has a brother driving in from Rhode Island.”

  “Goddamn,” Duncomb said. Then, recovering from the shock, he asked, “What’s your involvement? Why are you here talking to me?”

  “I gather you and Adam—Mr. Chalmers—were friends.”

  Duncomb didn’t speak right away. I sensed that he was sizing me up.

  “On occasion,” he said.

  “You were friends, then?”

  “We knew each other a little, yeah.”

  “Well enough that you know his wife’s name,” I said.

  Another hesitation. “I knew the two of them. That’s right. Like I said, they were good people.”

  “Did you and your wife socialize with Adam and Miriam?” I asked.

  “Did I say I was married?”

  “I just assumed,” I said. “Saw the band on your finger there.”

  Duncomb glanced down at his own left hand. “Yeah, Liz and I were friends with them. Let me ask you something, Mr. Weaver.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You a cop once?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I used to be with the Boston PD.”

  “Well.”

  “So I’ve been around long enough to know you’re working up to something, so why not just get the fuck to it?”

  “I’m looking into circumstances possibly related to the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers.”

  “Oh, well, circumstances. That’s clear enough. Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

  I moved my tongue around my teeth for a second or two. I’d allowed this to get away from me. “I thought you might be able to help because Mr. Chalmers was in contact with you quite often.” I paused. “That’s what his cell phone records show.”

  Duncomb leaned back in his chair, his head up, like he was sniffing the air.

  “Like I said, we were friends.” Another shake of the head. “God, I still can’t believe what’s happened.”

  “How’d you know him?”

  Duncomb cleared his throat. “He came out here to talk to some creative writing students. We got talking, and when he found out I had a law enforcement background, he asked if he could call me when he had questions about police work. And we got to be friends. Simple as that.”

  “What was it he wanted help with lately?”

  “Hmm?”

  “When he last called you. What was he writing that he needed your expertise for?”

  “Fingerprints,” Duncomb said without hesitation. “Whether you can get fingerprints off fabric. Different surfaces. That’s what we were talking about.”

  “So he was working on a book.”

  “Sure.”

  “Because he had an e-mail from his—I guess it was his literary agent—saying that if he could get a publisher interested, he’d try to write another book, but it didn’t sound like he was currently working on anything.”

  Duncomb moved his lips in and out. “Maybe he hadn’t told his agent he was running something around in his head.”

  “Doesn’t that seem odd? That he’d be telling you before he’d tell his own agent?”

  He forced a laugh. “How the hell would I know? The thing is, the fingerprints call might have been a while ago. Sometimes Adam just called to shoot the shit. We were friends. Did I mention that part?”

  “When’s the last time you were out to see Adam and Miriam?”

  A big shrug. “I don’t know. There was a dinner a while ago.”

  “It’s quite a house,” I said.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Did you ever look after the place when the Chalmerses were away? You being in security and all, if I were going away, I’d be glad to know someone like you. Who could check the house, make sure everything was okay.”

  Duncomb eyed me curiously.

  “What are you asking?”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “There’s nothing simple about it. Just put it out there, Weaver. What do you want to know?”

  I stood. “I have a message. From Adam’s daughter. She wants to know she doesn’t have anything to worry about. She wants to know that what was taken from the house isn’t going to be used to tarnish her father’s memory. She either wants it back or some assurance that it has been destroyed.”

  Duncomb’s face didn’t move.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, thanks for dropping by,” he said.

  I was about to make the observation that since he didn’t want to know what was taken from the house, he already knew, but I was interrupted with a phone call.

  I took out my cell, glanced at the number. It wasn’t one I recognized.

  “Hello?”

  “He’s going after Carl! I know it! This whole thing, acting nice, it was a trick! They’re going to get him!”

  It was a woman, and she was beyond frantic. I couldn’t place the voice, and I had no idea who Carl was.

  “Who’s this?” I said.

  “Jesus, it’s Sam! You gave me your card! They slashed my tires! The one you got in the eyes? With soap? Ed? He’s going to grab Carl! I know it.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “HOW was your lunch?” David Harwood asked Randall Finley when he found him walking through his water-bottling plant.

  “Good, good lunch,” Finley said.

  “Who were you meeting again? Frank Mancini?”

  “Yup. Good guy. Good businessman. So did you get the thing set up at the bank?”

  “I did. You can now make a donation to the Constellation Drive-in disaster fund to help people and their families affected by the tragedy.”

  “And you called it the Randall Finley Relief Fund?”

  Harwood thought that he’d like nothing more than to be relieved of Randall Finley. “No, I did not call it that. I called it the May 17 Fund. Pegged it to the day it happened. People around here will remember that date for a long time. It’ll resonate.”

  Finley couldn’t hide the disappointment on his face. “I suppose that’s okay.”

  “It would have looked self-serving to put your name on it. But people will know. You can remind them when you give talks. Tell people to throw a few bucks at the account you set up.”

  “Sure, I hear what you’re saying.”

  “You look like I took away your favorite toy.”

  “No, you’re right.” He smiled and clapped a hand on Harwood’s shoulder. “That’s why I picked you, David. You’ve got smarts. You know how to rein me in. You know how to keep me from making an even bigger asshole of myself.”

  “That’s why you pay me the big bucks,” David said.

  Finley laughed. “We need to talk about when I should officially announce. I have to tell you, I feel ready. The election’s still more than five months off, but you need time to build momentum. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m thinking, maybe there’s no point in holding off. We just do it. You know what I mean? We call a news conference, today or tomorrow, and we tie it in to the disaster fund. Shows my heart
’s in the right place. That I care about this town. At first, I was thinking, we go slow. Do an announcement to announce that I’m going to announce.” He laughed. “Kind of like foreplay.”

  “I get it.”

  “But now I’m thinking more of taking a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach. Let’s just get it the fuck out there.”

  “You’re the boss,” David said. “I’m just not sure who’ll come out to a news conference. We’re kind of dependent on the Albany media now, more than ever, with the Standard gone.”

  “You’ll figure something out,” he said. He frowned, kept that hand on David’s shoulder. “Everything okay?”

  “Yup.”

  “I feel like I’m picking up a vibe that you’re less than enthusiastic about working for me.” He grinned. “Am I on to something there?”

  “I do my job. That’s what you pay me for. You don’t pay me to like you.”

  “I certainly don’t. I’m sure there’s not enough money in the world to make that happen. You don’t have to like me, David. You just have to get me elected.”

  David moved a step back, forcing Finley to release his grip on his shoulder. “Then we need to talk about your platform. If you’re going to announce, the people have to know what you stand for.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Like a five-point plan for the town. Five reasons why the people of Promise Falls should give you another chance.”

  Finley nodded. “I like that.” He laughed. “You think we can come up with five?”

  “Why don’t we turn it around? Instead of five reasons why people should vote for you, give me five reasons why you want to be mayor again.”

  “Okay, okay. Why don’t we go outside?”

  They exited the building through the loading docks, when Finley spotted a young man loading flats of bottled water into the back of a van.