Never Look Away: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

  “Horace tried to take his life,” Gretchen said. “A couple of times.”

  He looked away, embarrassed by that revelation more than the one he’d made himself. When he didn’t say anything further, it was clear this was the end of the story.

  “That child who pushed Jan, her life was ruined that day, too. I know she deserves some pity,” Gretchen said. “But I never had any for her, or her parents. Not surprising, they moved away after that. Sometimes, I think we should have done the same thing.”

  “There’s not a single time I get in the car I don’t think about what I did,” Horace said. “Not a single time, not in all these years.”

  This was the saddest room I’d ever been in.

  I was definitely a mess. Listening to Horace Richler tell how he ran over his own daughter with his car would have been devastating enough. But the implications of his story were overwhelming me.

  He was talking about Jan. The Jan on my wife’s birth certificate.

  But Horace’s Jan had been dead for decades. And my Jan was, at least up until today, alive.

  My wife had Horace and Gretchen Richler’s child’s name. She had her birth certificate.

  But it was glaringly obvious that they could not be the same person.

  I was dumbstruck. I was so numbed by what I’d been told that I didn’t even know what to ask next.

  “Mr. Harwood?” Gretchen said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m sorry. I …”

  “You don’t look well. You’ve got bags under your eyes and don’t look like you’ve had any sleep in a long time.”

  “I don’t … I don’t know what to make of this.”

  “Well,” said Horace, trying to put some bluster back into his voice, “we don’t exactly know what the hell to make of you, either.”

  I tried to focus. I said, “A picture. Could I please see a picture of Jan?”

  Gretchen exchanged glances with her husband before deciding my request was reasonable. She got up and crossed the room to an old-fashioned rolltop desk and chair in the corner. She sat down, opened the door, and reached in.

  She must have stolen a look at the picture every once in a while, because it took her no time at all to put her hands on it. I could understand, from Horace’s point of view, why the picture was not on display. Did you want your daughter, the one you’d killed, looking at you every day?

  It was a black-and-white portrait shot, the kind that might have been taken at Sears, about three by five inches. Slightly faded, one of the corners bent.

  She handed it to me. “This was taken about two months … before,” she said.

  Jan Richler had been a beautiful child. An angelic face, dimples, bright eyes, curly blonde hair.

  I searched the photo for any hints of my wife. Maybe something in the eyes, the way the mouth turned up at the corner. The line of her nose.

  I tried to imagine this picture on a table covered with photos of other children. I looked for anything in the shot that would make me pick it up and say, “That’s her, that’s the girl I married.”

  There was nothing.

  I handed the picture back to Gretchen Richler. “Thank you,” I said quietly.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I know it seems ridiculously obvious to say that’s not my wife,” I said, “but that’s not my wife.”

  Horace made some kind of grunting noise.

  “May I show you a picture?” I said, reaching into my jacket. It was one of the copies I’d printed out of the snapshot I’d emailed to Detective Duckworth, taken in Chicago.

  Horace took the picture first, gave it nothing more than a glance, then handed it to Gretchen.

  She gave the picture the attention I thought it warranted, considering this was a woman with her daughter’s name and all. She studied it at arm’s length at first, then brought it up close, giving it a kind of microscopic examination, before putting it down on the table.

  “Anything?” I said.

  “I was just … noticing how beautiful your wife is,” she said, almost dreamily. “I like to think that if our Jan had lived, she would have been as pretty as your wife here.” She picked it up to hand it to me, then reconsidered. “If this woman, your wife, is using our daughter’s name, maybe she has some ties to this area. In case I saw her, should I hang on to this?”

  I had other printed copies. I supposed it was possible Jan might yet show up here, although I now couldn’t imagine why, and it would be good for her image to be fresh in the Richlers’ minds. “Sure,” I said.

  She took the picture and put it in the drawer with her daughter’s, and stood there with her back to us.

  Horace said, “And that woman, she says we’re her parents?”

  “She’s never talked about you by name,” I said. “I figured it out from her birth certificate.”

  Gretchen turned slowly and said, “Didn’t it seem odd that she’s never taken you to meet her parents?”

  “She’s always said she’s been estranged from her family. That was why I came here. I thought, maybe, she was trying to reestablish contact. Say her piece. Something. Because for the last couple of weeks she’s been very troubled. Depressed. I wondered if she could be, I don’t know, exorcising her demons. Confronting things that have troubled her for years.”

  “Would you excuse me for a minute?” Gretchen asked, her voice shaking slightly.

  Neither of us felt the need to give her permission. After she had climbed the stairs and we heard a door close, Horace said to me, “You think you’re over it, and then something comes along and opens up the wound all over again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” Horace said.

  I nodded my regrets and attempted to stand up. I was a bit shaky on my feet.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of getting behind the wheel of a car,” Horace said.

  “I should be okay,” I said. “I’ll stop for a coffee or something on the way.”

  “You look so tired even coffee may not help,” he said, the first time since I’d come here that he sounded at all conciliatory.

  “I need to get back home, see my boy. I can pull over and grab a few winks if I have to,” I said.

  From the top of the stairs, Gretchen said, “How old is your son? He looks about three in that picture with your wife.”

  I watched as she descended, slowly coming into view. She seemed to have pulled herself together in the last couple of minutes. “He’s four,” I said. “His name is Ethan.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Five years.”

  “How’s it going to help your son if you fall asleep at the wheel and go into a ditch?”

  I knew she was right. “I may find a place to stay,” I said.

  Gretchen pointed to the couch, where Horace still sat. “You’d be more than welcome to stay here.”

  The couch, with its bright crocheted pillows, suddenly looked very inviting.

  “I don’t want to put you out,” I said.

  “Please,” she said.

  I nodded gratefully. “I’ll be gone first thing in the morning.”

  Horace, his brow furrowed, had his face screwed up tight. “So if you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “if your wife is going around saying she’s Jan Richler but she’s not, then who the hell is she?”

  The question had already been forming in my mind, but I’d been trying to ignore it.

  Horace wasn’t done. “And how could she do that to our little girl? Take her name from her? Hasn’t she suffered enough?”

  NINETEEN

  Sunday morning, the Duckworths’ clock radio went off at 6:30.

  The detective didn’t move. He didn’t hear the newscaster say that it was going to be a cloudy day, or that it was only going to be in the high 70s, or that it might rain on Monday.

  But Maureen Duckworth heard everything because she was already awake, and had been for some time. A nightmare—another one involving
their nineteen-year-old son, Trevor, who was traveling around Europe with his girlfriend, Trish, and hadn’t phoned or sent them an email or anything in two days, which was typical of him, never giving a thought to how much his mother worried—woke her around four. In this dream, her son had decided to go bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower, except somehow while he was on the way down he was attacked by flying monkeys.

  She knew there were a lot of things that could happen to a kid away from home, but had to admit this particular scenario was unlikely. She persuaded herself that this nightmare held no special meaning, that it wasn’t an omen, that it was nothing more than a stupid, ridiculous dream. Having done that, she might normally have gotten back to sleep, had her husband’s snoring not been almost loud enough to shake the windows.

  She gave Barry a shove so that he’d roll off his back and onto his side, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. It was like sleeping next to a chain saw.

  She twisted in the earplugs she kept next to her bed for just such emergencies, but they were about as effective as heading out naked in a snowstorm with nothing on but lip balm.

  She had, in fact, been staring at the clock radio when it read 6:29, and was counting down the seconds in her head, waiting for it to come on. She was off by only two seconds.

  She’d gotten Barry to try those strips that stick to the top of the nose, supposedly open up the nasal passages, but they didn’t do anything. Then she bought him some anti-snoring capsules he could take just before going to bed, but they struck out as well.

  What she really thought would help would be if he lost a little weight. Which was why she’d been serving him fruits and granola at breakfast, packing him a lunch with plenty of carrot sticks, and cutting back on fried foods and butter at dinner.

  She got out of bed and collected dirty clothes in the room. The clothes she’d taken off the night before, the slacks and shirt Barry had tossed off after coming in late from work. He’d put in an extra-long day, looking for this woman who went missing at the roller-coaster park.

  She looked at the slacks. What was that on them? Was that ice cream? Mixed in with some kind of pie?

  “Barry,” she said. He didn’t move. “Barry,” she said, a little louder so she could be heard over the snoring.

  She walked around to his side of the bed and touched his shoulder.

  He snorted, opened his eyes. He blinked a couple of times, heard the radio.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I didn’t even hear that come on.”

  “I did,” Maureen said. “You sure you have to go in today?”

  He moved his head sideways on the pillow. “I want to see if that release we put out last night turned up anything.”

  “You want to tell me what this is?” she said, holding the stained trousers a few inches from his nose.

  He squinted. “I was working vice undercover. Had to get a hand job in the line of duty.”

  “You wish. That’s ice cream, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Where’d you have ice cream?”

  “The missing woman? I went to see her boss. You’ve seen that Bertram Heating and Cooling truck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Him. His wife got me some pie.”

  “With ice cream.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of pie?”

  “Apple.”

  Maureen Duckworth nodded, as if she suddenly understood. “I’d eat apple pie for breakfast if we had it.”

  “What do we have?”

  “You’re getting fruit and some fiber,” she said.

  “You know torture’s not allowed now, right? New regime and all.”

  The phone rang.

  Maureen didn’t react. The phone could ring anytime, day or night, around here. “I’ll get it,” she said. She picked up the receiver on her side of the bed. “Hello…. Yeah, hi…. No, don’t worry about it, I was already up…. Sure, he’s here…. We’re just bringing in the hoist to get him out of bed.”

  She held out the phone. Barry leaned across the bed to grab it.

  “Duckworth,” he said.

  “Hey, Detective. You got a pen?”

  Barry grabbed the pen and paper that were always sitting by the phone. He wrote down a name and a number, made a couple of notes. “Great, thanks,” he said and hung up.

  Maureen looked at him expectantly.

  “We got something,” he said.

  Duckworth waited until he was showered and dressed and had a cup of coffee in his hand before he dialed the number from the phone in the kitchen.

  Someone picked up after two rings. “Ted’s,” a man said.

  “Is this Ted Brehl?” Duckworth asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Did I pronounce that right?”

  “Like the letters for the blind, right.”

  “This is Detective Barry Duckworth, Promise Falls police. You called in about half an hour ago?”

  “Yeah. I saw that thing on the news last night. When I got up this morning, came in to open the store, I thought maybe I should give you a call.”

  “Where’s your store?”

  “Up by Lake George? On 87?”

  “I know the area. Real pretty up there.”

  Maureen put a bowl of granola, topped with bananas and strawberries, in front of her husband.

  “Yeah, so, I saw that woman.”

  “Jan Harwood.”

  “Yeah, she was in here.”

  “When was that?”

  “Friday. Like, must have been around five?”

  “Five in the afternoon?”

  “That’s right. She came in to buy some water and iced tea.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “She came into the store alone, but she was with a man, her husband, I guess. He was out in the car.” Ted Brehl’s description of it matched the vehicle owned by David Harwood.

  “So they just stopped to buy some drinks and then left?”

  “No, they sat out there for quite a while, talking. I looked out a couple of times. I looked out again around five-thirty, and they were gone.”

  “You’re sure it was her?”

  Brehl didn’t hesitate. “Oh yeah. I mean, I might normally have forgotten, but she struck up a conversation with me. And she’s a nice-looking lady, the kind you remember.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  “I’m trying to remember how she put it. She said she’d never been up this way before, first of all, at least not that she could remember. I asked her where she was going, and she said she didn’t exactly know.”

  “She didn’t know?”

  “She said her husband wanted to take her for a drive in the country, up into the woods. She said maybe it was some sort of surprise or something, because he’d told her not to tell anyone they were going.”

  Duckworth thought about that.

  “What else did she say?”

  “That was about it, I guess.”

  “How was her mood?”

  “Mood?”

  “Was she happy? Depressed? Troubled?”

  “She seemed just fine, you know?”

  “Sure,” Duckworth said. “Listen, thanks for calling. I might be in touch again.”

  “Okay. Just wanted to help.”

  Duckworth hung up the phone, then looked down at his cereal. “You got some sugar or whipped cream I can put on this?” he asked.

  Maureen sat down opposite him and said, “It’s been two days.” Barry knew instantly she was talking about their son, Trevor. He reached out and held her hand.

  TWENTY

  I woke early on the Richlers’ couch, but that was okay because they were early risers themselves. I heard Horace Richler banging around the kitchen shortly after six. From my vantage point, I could see him standing at the sink in slippers and robe. He ran some water into a glass and popped a couple of pills into his mouth, then turned and shuffled back toward the stairs.

  Once he was gone, I thre
w off the crocheted blanket that Gretchen had told me she’d made herself. It was so huge I marveled that anyone under two hundred years of age could have stitched it. Even though I’d packed a small bag, I’d opted to sleep in my clothes, taking off only my jacket and shoes before I’d put my head down on an honest-to-God bed pillow, not a crocheted one, that Gretchen had provided.

  “I’m sorry about not having anything better than the couch,” she’d said. “You see, no one sleeps in our son’s room. We’ve left it just the way it was. And the guest bedroom has kind of turned into storage, you know? We don’t get a lot of company.” She’d thought a moment. “I don’t think we’ve ever had any overnight guests, to tell you the truth. You might be our first, ever.”

  I could have used a shower, but I didn’t want to push it. I grabbed my travel kit and went into the first-floor bathroom at the back of the house and shaved, brushed my teeth, and wet my hair enough to get the bumps flattened. When I came back out, I smelled coffee.

  Gretchen was dressed and in the kitchen. “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning.”

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. Even though I’d gone to bed troubled and on overload, my body had been exhausted and I’d conked out right away. “How about you?”

  She smiled, like she didn’t want what she had to say to hurt my feelings. “Not so great. Your news, it was disturbing. And it brought back a lot of bad memories for us. Especially for Horace. I mean, we both took the loss of Jan hard, but when you consider how it happened, he …”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m sorry. I had no way of knowing.”

  “Something like this, it touches so many people. Us, our relatives, the school Jan went to. Her kindergarten teacher, Miss Stephens, had to take a leave for a week, she was so upset. All the kids in her class were devastated. The little girl who pushed her … If it happened today, they’d have probably put her in therapy. Maybe her parents did, who knows. Mr. Andrews, the school principal, he got them to put up a little plaque at the school in Jan’s memory. But I could never go look at it, and Horace, he couldn’t bear to see it. He didn’t want the fuss, except he wished they’d have put him in jail or something, like he said. So a lot of people, they were affected by this.”