Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  “I haven’t read that one, so I can’t tell you if it’s one of his good ones,” Naman said.

  “Someone recommended it to me this morning,” I said. “The woman who runs the Laundromat up the street.”

  The sound of that racing engine was getting closer. Then the sudden screeching of brakes.

  We both looked out the store’s front window at the same moment. A black pickup truck had appeared, passenger side facing us. The window was down, and a young white man, probably in his early twenties, was shouting.

  He yelled, loud enough for us to hear through the glass, “Fucking terrorist!”

  I saw an arm come up. There was something in the man’s hand. A bottle, maybe, and what looked like flame.

  “Get down!” I said to Naman.

  As he threw himself to the floor, the Molotov cocktail sailed through the air, hit the window of the bookshop. The glass and the bottle shattered simultaneously, and the burning rag soaked in, presumably, gasoline landed on a pile of books.

  Flames erupted instantly.

  The truck’s back tires squealed. The man who’d tossed the bottle let out a large whoop of victory as the vehicle sped off.

  “Naman!” I shouted. “We have to get out!”

  “My books!” he cried, stumbling to his feet. “My books!”

  “Have you got an extinguisher?”

  He looked at me with horror and panic. “No!”

  “Get out!” I said again.

  I dropped my copy of The Human Stain and pushed Naman toward the door, followed him out onto the sidewalk. I dug into my pocket for my phone to get the fire department.

  I hated talk radio.

  FORTY-TWO

  “I keep hoping somehow I skipped over her,” Clive Duncomb said to Peter Blackmore. Duncomb had the remote in his hand, his thumb on the fast-forward button, bodies gyrating and tangling and untangling at high speed on the TV screen.

  “You’re going so fast, it’s starting to make me sick to my stomach,” Peter said. “I can’t look at it anymore.”

  “She’s not on that one,” Duncomb said, ejecting the disc. He picked up another one, glanced at what had been scribbled on it in marker. Georgina-Miriam-Liz flying high. “I don’t think it could be this one. This is one where the girls had the stewardess costumes. That was after the Fisher girl died.”

  “You better check it just the same,” Peter said. “I can’t think about this. Why did that man answer Georgina’s phone?”

  “One crisis at a time,” Duncomb said. But then his own phone rang. He looked at it, said to Peter, “It’s Liz.”

  He put the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”

  “You find her yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We may have another problem,” Liz said.

  “What?”

  “Lucy called here.”

  “Lucy?”

  “Lucy Brighton, Adam’s—”

  “I know who she is. What’d she want?”

  “She said she knows you have it. That she wants it back.”

  “It?”

  “She says she doesn’t want any trouble if you return it.”

  “That private detective,” Duncomb said. “He must have told her he suspects I’ve got the discs. What did you tell her?”

  “I told her you weren’t here. What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. I’ll try to sort her out later. Set up a private meeting, show her the discs, destroy them in front of her, maybe. I don’t know. I can’t deal with this now.”

  He ended the call.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Turn that off,” Duncomb said to Blackmore. “Put those discs away.” Once there were no longer naked bodies on the television, the Thackeray security chief opened the door.

  “Well, whaddya know, it’s Detective Duckworth. Won’t you come on in?”

  As Duckworth stepped into the living room, Blackmore was gathering together the discs and putting them into a cabinet under the television. He approached and extended a hand. “Hello. I—I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Peter Blackmore.”

  Blackmore looked nervously at Duncomb, as though seeking permission to say anything more. Duncomb stepped in. “The detective here’s been out to the campus a couple of times.” He grinned. “Thinks we don’t know how to do our job.”

  Blackmore said, “I don’t work with Clive. I’m a professor.” A pause, then, “English literature.”

  “So it’s Professor Blackmore?” Duckworth asked.

  “Yes.” He looked at the security chief. “We should tell him.”

  “Peter, please.”

  “About Georgina’s phone. About that man who answered. He—”

  “Peter,” Clive Duncomb said, struggling to remain patient, “let’s see why the detective has decided to drop by.”

  Duckworth said, “Professor, I understand you were talking to someone else from the Promise Falls police today.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Detective Carlson had interviewed Mr. Duncomb here, and you followed him out afterwards. About your wife. That she was missing.”

  “I didn’t file an official report,” the professor said, glancing at Duncomb. “I just had some basic questions for him.”

  “Did your wife finally turn up?”

  Blackmore swallowed. “No, not yet. But . . . the last time I tried to call her—”

  Duckworth reached into the plastic shopping bag and took out the purse. “Do you recognize this, Professor?”

  “That . . . that looks like Georgina’s.”

  “It has her wallet and ID in it as well,” Duckworth said. “And her cell phone.”

  “Dear God, where did you find that?”

  “It was in Adam Chalmers’s Jaguar. The one that was crushed at the drive-in last night.”

  “Why would my wife leave her purse in Adam’s car?” he asked.

  Duncomb said, “Oh shit.”

  “I don’t understand,” Blackmore persisted.

  “It wasn’t Miriam in the car,” Duncomb said to his friend. “It was Georgina.”

  Blackmore started to go weak in the knees. The detective put his hand on the professor’s elbow and led him over to one side of the room. “I’m very sorry, Professor, but I think Mr. Duncomb is right.”

  Duckworth guided him to the couch, where the man collapsed. “Oh, Jesus, no. Oh dear God. I thought—I thought she was just mad at me. That she’d gone off for a few days. Georgina was very high-strung. Clive thought she was angry with me.”

  “Angry why?” Duckworth said.

  “Just some disagreements, that’s all.”

  “Professor, I’ll need you to make an official identification of the body. We already know it’s not Miriam. She contacted her brother a short while ago. She was out of town. She’s alive.”

  “Jesus,” Duncomb said.

  “I have a picture,” Duckworth said gently. “On my phone. It shows three tiny moles on the lower abdomen, making a kind of triangle.”

  Blackmore began to moan.

  “May I show it to you?”

  Blackmore nodded. Duckworth got out his phone, opened the photos app, held it in front of the professor.

  “Oh, God, yes, that’s her.”

  Duncomb’s phone rang. As he looked to see who it was, both men turned their heads.

  Duncomb was staring at the word Miriam on the screen. “It’s my wife,” he told them. “I’ll be right back.”

  He slipped out the front door, put the phone to his ear, and said, “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Adam is dead,” Miriam said.

  “I just found out you weren’t with him. You couldn’t have called? You couldn’t have let anyone know it wasn’t you?”

  “I didn’t know! I get home. I
find some man in my house poking around. He tells me my husband got fucking crushed to death!”

  “Who told you? The police?”

  “Weaver. A private detective.”

  “Him,” Duncomb said.

  “Lucy hired him! Why does she have some private eye searching my house?”

  “Miriam, listen to me. Everyone thought you were dead. I thought you were dead. You and Adam.”

  “The son of a bitch. I think he was with Georgina. They thought Georgina was me.”

  “It just got confirmed. I’m at Peter’s. The police are here. He just found out. He’s devastated.” He paused. “A little more so than you are.”

  “I’ll grieve in my own way, on my own time, Clive. I’ve got too much else to think about right now, like who was in my house this morning when Lucy came over here.”

  “Weaver told you.”

  “Yeah. Was it you? Was it you who broke into the house? And got into the room downstairs? Someone took the discs. Please, God, tell me it was you.”

  “It was me,” Duncomb said.

  “Oh, thank God!”

  “Soon as I realized Adam—and you, I thought—had been killed at the drive-in, I knew I had to get in there and get those discs. Adam had given me a key long ago, and the code, when you guys took that trip to Switzerland and wanted me to check in on the place. I knew that sooner or later, Lucy, or someone else going through the house, would discover that room and find the discs. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “I guess, given the circumstances, it was a smart thing to do.”

  “I called Peter right away, told him we had a problem. He’d been sitting by the phone, waiting for Georgina to call. God, what a turn of events. I didn’t even know she and Adam were seeing each other outside of . . . you know.”

  “The sex?” Miriam said.

  “Yeah, outside of the sex. I’d been worried about Georgina. She’s been acting funny lately, having second thoughts. I even thought at one point that she’d gotten in and taken the discs.”

  “I think what was going on,” Miriam said, “was that she wanted Adam to herself and didn’t want the rest of us to know.”

  “Maybe. Maybe that was it.”

  “What have you done with the discs?” Miriam asked. “Tell me you’ve destroyed them.”

  “Not yet. Peter and I have been watching them.”

  “I don’t believe you two. You think Adam and I are dead and you’re sitting around getting off on what we did together?”

  “No!” Duncomb said. “Listen to me. I needed to go through them, make sure we had them all.”

  Miriam went quiet.

  “You there?”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “There’s at least one missing.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “One of the sessions where we brought in those other girls, put the roofies in their wine. Lorraine, and—”

  “I remember. Just get to it.”

  “I can’t find the one where we had the Fisher girl. The one who was killed in the park and—”

  “Mr. Duncomb!”

  Clive Duncomb spun around. Barry Duckworth was standing on the front step of Blackmore’s house.

  “Get off the phone,” Duckworth said. “You’re needed in here. Your friend’s going to pieces.”

  FORTY-THREE

  “I want that Harwood bastard,” Ed Noble said, examining himself in the bathroom mirror. Garnet and Yolanda Worthington had rented a room for him at the Walcott. He tentatively touched the bandages on his nose. “I knew it was him soon as I saw him. Recognized him from the pictures I took. He was the one who was slippin’ it to Sam in the kitchen.”

  “Whore,” Yolanda said to no one in particular as she sat on the bed.

  “Ed,” Garnet Worthington said gently, standing in the doorway to the bathroom. “I understand how you feel, but you’re in enough trouble as it is without going after that guy.”

  “All thanks to you,” he said, turning and looking at Garnet and his wife. “I need to see a doctor. I need to go to a hospital.”

  “Brilliant idea,” said Yolanda, who had gone to a Rite Aid to pick up some first-aid supplies after Ed showed up at the rendezvous point.

  Without Carl.

  They knew the police would be called, that everyone would be looking for Ed’s pickup truck, checking the local hospital to see if he’d shown up in the ER. Out of the dozens of people who’d seen what had happened out front of the school, someone must have taken down the license plate. And even if not, by now Samantha would have told the police about Garnet and Yolanda coming to see her at her work, about Ed’s visit in the morning. Once she gave them Ed’s name, all the police would have to do was tap a few keys on a computer to find the truck registered to him.

  “What a clusterfuck,” Yolanda said.

  Garnet knew the police would likely be looking for him and his wife, too. Samantha would have told them she believed her former in-laws had put Ed Noble up to trying to grab Carl. “They’ll be looking for all three of us,” Garnet told Yolanda.

  The best option seemed to be to lie low. Hide out in Promise Falls for a while until things cooled down. Maybe, in the interim, find a way to reach out to Samantha, tell her they were sorry, that it was all a terrible misunderstanding. They couldn’t make another run at the kid, not now. It was too risky. All they could do now was hope to avoid arrest.

  Once Ed’s truck had been left in a Walmart lot, Garnet got them a room at the Walcott, a Holiday Inn–like hotel on the road that came into Promise Falls. He went to the counter, ready with his story, which was that he had lost his wallet and had no credit cards or ID, but fortunately did have cash. The young man wasn’t crazy about the idea, but Garnet Worthington, in his nice suit and tie, looked like a respectable individual.

  He needed a fake name for the registration, and his mind went to people he admired, most notably Donald Trump, whom Garnet believed was just the man who should be running the country. But that was a rather obvious alias, so he wrote down “Daniel Trump,” and in the place where he was asked for type of car and license plate, he glanced out the door of the lobby for inspiration, saw a Buick Regal, wrote that in, and copied down the plate. Had any hotel clerk in history confirmed vehicle information on a hotel registration?

  Once they had the room, they ushered Ed in through a side door, and Yolanda went to work tending his broken nose. She shoveled some Tylenols down his throat while Garnet went for ice to make into a compress, although it was a little late to try to bring down the swelling.

  “I’ll kill him,” Ed kept saying. “I will.”

  “Just shut up,” Yolanda said.

  “We all need to calm down and think about how we’re going to handle this,” Garnet said. “The simplest way out is money.”

  “Money?” Yolanda said.

  “Yeah,” Ed agreed. “I deserve more. I got hurt.”

  Garnet sighed. “Money for Samantha. And Carl.”

  “Not a chance,” Yolanda said. “Not a dime for that slut.”

  Garnet perched his butt on the dresser, glared at his wife. “The situation has changed.”

  “We can spend money on Carl when he’s with us. We’ll get him anything he wants.”

  “You need to listen to me,” her husband said. “Today was a mistake. It’s going to take a lot to make it right. To save our own necks.”

  “He made the mistake,” she said, leaning her head toward Ed.

  “Yes,” Garnet acknowledged. “He botched it. And now the police are looking for all of us. I’ll call the lawyers, have them contact Samantha with an offer. A good enough one that persuades her to tell the police it was a misunderstanding. That, in fact, she’d intended for us to take Carl back to Boston to spend some time with us, that she’d given Ed the okay to pick up him at school, that
the whole reason this became an incident is that Harwood misinterpreted everything.”

  “How will you get her to agree to that?” Ed asked.

  Before Garnet could answer, Yolanda asked, “Can’t the police go ahead with charges anyway, even if Samantha says not to?”

  Garnet shook his head. “What would be the point? They’d know that once it got to court, it would all be dismissed. We’d make sure that Samantha wouldn’t testify. Carl, too.”

  “How much money you think it’ll take to buy that kind of silence?”

  Garnet thought. “A hundred.”

  Yolanda screamed as though someone had stabbed her in the heart. “Thousand?”

  Ed was equally outraged. “You only gave me five hundred bucks.”

  “And we overpaid,” Garnet said.

  “A hundred thousand is out of the question,” Yolanda said. “You disappoint me, Garnet.”

  Her husband sighed. “Yolanda, you and I will go to jail. The only upside to that is they’ll put us in different prisons.”

  “Then why the hell did we try to grab him in the first place?” she shouted.

  The slap was enough to send her sprawling across the bed. She put her hand to her left cheek, where Garnet had struck her.

  “Because,” he said, “you wouldn’t fucking let up. That’s why. I tried to please you. I’ve tried to do what you wanted. But this is the road you’ve led us down. You’ve put us in this position, Yolanda, and you’re going to have to suck it up and listen to me. We’re going to pay her off. I’m not even sure a hundred thousand is enough. We may have to go higher. And believe me, given the lies we’ve already told her, she’ll want to see that money in her bank account before she agrees to let this go.”

  Yolanda had propped herself up on one elbow. She still had a palm pressed to her cheek, and she was struggling to hold back tears.

  “We could make him love us,” she said. “Once Carl was with us, he wouldn’t want to go back. And when his father got out, he’d be so happy.”

  Garnet shook his head. “How could Carl love you more than his own mother?” He paused. “How could anyone love you at all, Yolanda?”

  Ed Noble, watching all this, said, “Maybe there’s a way.”