Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

She turned around and shouted back, “Man looking for Bert!”

“Tell him to try the town hall!”

“I did that! You think I’m an idiot?” She turned back to me. “He thinks I’m an idiot.”

“I thought Claire might be home and I could just give her a message.”

“Haven’t seen her around today.” She hesitated, licked her lips, like she was weighing whether to tell me something. “You never know where she might be. Thank God our kids are grown and gone; they hardly ever call, but frankly I couldn’t be happier. But it can’t be easy for Bert, raising a girl on his own.”

I recalled what Donna had told me, that the mayor and his wife had split up. “Yeah, they can be a handful,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” the man yelled from inside the house.

“I’ll tell ya in a minute!” she shouted at her husband. “Don’t mind him. He just likes to be included.” She rolled her eyes.

“Does Claire spend all her time here?” I asked. “Or does she spend half of it with her mother?”

“That’d be tricky, spending half her time here and half across the border. Caroline’s living in Toronto with her new husband, what’s-his-name.”

“What is his name?” I asked, like I’d known it myself at one time. Maybe Claire was with her mother. It’d be worth checking.

“Ed,” the woman called back into the house. “Ed!”

“Huh?”

“What was the name of that guy Caroline married? One that runs the jewelry store that has the ads on the Toronto station.”

“Uh... it’ll come to me. It was Minsky.”

“No, that wasn’t it,” she shot back. “That’s your sister-in-law’s name.”

“Oh, right.”

She looked back at me. “I remember. His name’s Jeff Karnofsky. With a ‘k.’ Well, two of them. One at the beginning and one right near the end.”

“When’s the last time you saw Claire around here?”

“Last night. Saw her take off in some pickup truck.”

“What time would that have been?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It was after the news.”

“Which news?” These days, especially with the cable networks, there was never a time when the news wasn’t on.

“Brian Williams,” she said. That would be the NBC Nightly News , on WGRZ, the local NBC affiliate. The show ran from six thirty to seven p.m. “He’s a handsome bugger, that one.”

“So was it soon after the news ended that Claire left?” I felt my questions were starting to get too specific, but this woman seemed happy to talk, and violating confidences didn’t seem to be something that troubled her.

“I don’t know. Seven, eight, eight thirty, I don’t know. Took off in a real hurry, tires squealing and all. Police should give them a ticket for driving like that. God knows they’re here enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Been going on for a while now. There’s often a Griffon cruiser parked along the street, like they’ve always got their eye on the mayor’s house. I was wondering whether he was getting death threats or somethin’, but when I asked him about it, he said it was nothing, not to worry.” She chuckled. “I’d sure hate to have someone come by and shoot out his windows or anything. They might hit our house by mistake.”

Griffon Town Hall dominated the town’s center, situated at the end of the green, its spire drawing the eye skyward. It was an example, I’d been told, of Georgian architecture, with its gabled entrance and melding of red brick and white-painted wood. Like something out of Colonial Williamsburg, even though we were a long way from there. I did know that maintaining and restoring the building was a constant drain on the town’s budget, and that some taxpayers were in favor of building new municipal offices just outside the downtown area, near all those big-box stores and fast-food outlets on Danbury. Sanders, to his credit, had countered that if Griffon’s civic leaders were willing to abandon the downtown, what hope did the remaining merchants have? I could not recall ever meeting the man, but from what I’d read, I liked where he was coming from.

I drove the streets surrounding the town hall a couple of times, looking for a place to park. There seemed to be a lot more cars down here than usual. I was forced to leave my car a couple of blocks away, not something I wanted to do, because it meant I’d have to walk past Ravelson Furniture on my way back.

In my darker moments, I imagined conversations with my son, asking him why, if he had to end his life the way he did, he couldn’t have done it someplace I didn’t see every time I came downtown.

Sometimes I tried pretending it wasn’t even there, which was a challenge, considering that the store was in the largest, and one of the oldest, commercial buildings in Griffon, dating back to the late eighteen hundreds. But even if I never came down here, there was no escaping the Ravelson name. They bought newspaper ads every week, delivered flyers to the door, and ran commercials on the local stations featuring the owner, Kent Ravelson, a man unfamiliar with subtlety. My personal favorite starred Kent, seated in an overstuffed leather chair, smoking a pipe and wearing a pair of professorial glasses, playing a psychiatrist dispensing advice to a blond babe stretched out on a couch.

“Now that I’ve got you on the couch, I’m going to shrink its price!” he says, trying to sound like a famous Austrian psychoanalyst but coming across more as a horny Nazi. A mental health organization in Buffalo lodged a complaint, but it only encouraged him to do more.

Even though I kept fooling myself, thinking I could sidle past Ravelson’s like it wasn’t there, it just wasn’t possible. I’d crane my neck upward and study the corniced edge of the building’s roofline. The place where Scott had stood, for how long I don’t know, thinking God knows what, before deciding on a quicker way to descend four stories than taking the stairs.

He didn’t jump from the front of the store, but the side, which brought him down into the parking lot. Onto a handicapped spot. It was there that the police — Officer Ricky Haines — found him.

Walking past this time was no different. I stopped, and stared. The store wouldn’t close for another half hour, and there were the occasional couple going in and out, cars starting up and leaving the lot.

As I always did, I surveyed the scene. Starting at the handicapped spot, rising past the four rows of windows, stopping at the roofline.

How long would it have taken? Two seconds? Three? I saw his body falling, plummeting, hitting the pavement. Three seconds seemed about right. Certainly no more than that. What was he thinking on the way down? Was he terrified? Did he realize, once he’d gone off the edge, what he’d actually done? In those two or three seconds, had he wondered whether there was anything he could do to save himself?

Or was he happy? Did he hit the ground with a blissful smile on his face? And which would have been better? To realize, in his last second, that he’d made a fatal mistake, or to spend his last moment drugged to the eyeballs, meeting his maker as happy as a lark?

It didn’t do me any good to dwell on these things.

But there were so many to dwell on. Like how he’d gotten up there in the first place. I wanted to blame the good folks at Ravelson Furniture. After all, if they hadn’t given Scott a job for the summer, he wouldn’t have had access to the roof. But I knew that was akin to blaming Starkist for cutting your finger on the lid of the tuna tin. If anything, Kent Ravelson had gone out of his way to give Scott a break. The kid didn’t have much of an employment history, nor the kind of upper-body strength needed to work in a furniture store. But Kent found Scott plenty of tasks, even if they never included lifting a refrigerator. He even gave our boy a taste of sales, letting him work the mattress department one day when one of the regular salesmen was sick.