Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

“Hello,” I said.

“You left a message,” Augustus Perry said. He sounded annoyed. “What do you want?”

“What I called about has changed. Something else has moved to the top of the list.”

She looks out the window and sees that their boy is home. Well, not a boy, really. He’s a man now. But isn’t that how mothers always view their sons? As their boys?

“I’m just here for a couple minutes,” he says to her as he comes through the door. “I’ve been running around all night putting out fires and I’m not done yet. But I wanted to see how he is.”

“Wound up,” she says.

“Did you give him something?”

“No, but I may have to. He needs his sleep.”

“I’m doing everything I can,” he says. “This’ll all get sorted out.”

His mother shakes her head doubtfully. “We started off with one big problem and you turned it into two.” She’s about to say something else, but bites her lip. But he knows what it would have been. That if it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t have this problem in the basement to begin with.

“I told you I’m going to deal with this. There’s a couple things I can do before morning.”

“You better, because I feel like this is all ready to blow up in our face. It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but when it does, it’s going to land on a mine.” She sighs. “You’re just one brainstorm after another.”

Wearily, he takes a seat at the kitchen table. “God, I just want things to be normal. Things have never been normal.”

“Some people’s lives are never normal,” she says. “That’s just the way it is.” She surveys the room, but she’s really looking beyond it. More to herself than her son, she says, “It’s like we’re all prisoners. I haven’t had a vacation in years.”

“And I haven’t had a life,” he says. “This overshadows everything. It’s no wonder she broke up with me.”

“She wasn’t right for you.” His mother never thought any of his girlfriends were right for him. “What did she say, exactly?”

“She didn’t really say anything. She just ended it. But I know why. It’s because she could tell something wasn’t right. I mean, I couldn’t even bring her here, to meet you. It had to be at a coffee shop. She had to think it was weird that everything about this house was off limits.”

The woman puts her hand to her forehead. It’s late, and she’s exhausted. “You have more important things to worry about. Finding that girl, and then the boy. Making sure he can’t hurt us.”

“I know. You don’t have to keep telling me.”

“Even after you find them, deal with them, we may have to make some changes around here,” she says, casting her eyes down to the floor, as though she can see right through it.

“I’m going to go down and see him.”

“There’s something going on with his book,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s never where I can see it. He says he writes in it after I’ve gone. That’s not like him. I’m worried what he might be writing in it. I need you to go down and find it.”

He goes downstairs, is gone several minutes. When he returns, he says to his mother, “It’s not there. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

“What’d he say?”

“I asked him what he’d done with it. He said he didn’t remember.”

“Tell me he didn’t...”

“I think he did. I think he gave it to the kid.”

The woman closes her eyes, as though she’s in physical pain.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s all gibberish. It’s meaningless.”

She shakes her head. “Maybe. But there are dates. And it’s all in his handwriting.”

When Scott was twelve, he had an idea for a movie. He spelled it out for Donna and me over dinner.

“It’s about this guy who comes to Earth from another galaxy, or maybe it’s this one, like from Mars or something, it doesn’t really matter, but he comes here wanting to see what Earth people are like, and he has to take human form so nobody can see what he really looks like, which is kind of gross. Like, he has what looks like worms all over his face or something, but they’re probably blood vessels.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, glancing down at my noodles.

“At first I was thinking someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger could play him, but it’s not really a Terminator kind of role, so I have to think about that a bit more. His mission is to make friends with one person, and to study him, and he picks someone totally at random and watches what this person does, and how this Earthling interacts with other Earthlings. But what the alien doesn’t know is, he picked a real nerdy, geeky guy who doesn’t have hardly any friends, so he doesn’t interact much with other Earthlings. So the alien guy goes back to his home planet and reports that all Earthlings are lonely and unhappy and don’t really fit in, because they’re weird and like stuff nobody else likes.”

Donna and I said nothing for a moment. Finally, I asked, “That’s how it ends?”

Scott shook his head. “No, no. It has a happy ending. The alien guy comes back, and takes the person he was, like, shadowing, back to his own planet, because he feels sorry for him, and the Earthling turns out to be really happy there because everyone thinks he’s really cool and interesting and he doesn’t think about killing himself anymore.”

Donna put her hand over her mouth, got up, and left the room.

Scott said, “Was it the worms thing? I could take that out if it’s too gross.”

I’m not sure why that memory popped into my head after I ended my brief conversation with Augustus Perry and made my way back up to the bridge, where Sean Skilling was waiting for me. Of course, I had Scott flashbacks about every five minutes since he’d died. He was always there, just below the surface, regardless of what I was doing.

Maybe it was the notion of happy endings, how elusive they can be, and how they aren’t the same for everyone. For Scott, a geeky kid transplanted to another world, millions of miles from home, finds his happy ending among aliens who appreciate his uniqueness. But was it a happy ending for the parents he left behind?

Scott was on my mind because I was starting to worry there might be no happy ending in my search for Claire Sanders. Not if she ended up the same way her friend Hanna Rodomski had.

When I got to Sean, he was a mess.

“Is it her?” he asked, tears running down his cheeks. “It can’t be her. There’s no way it’s her.”

“I’m pretty sure it is,” I said. “But it’s a bad scene down there.”

I had to grab him as he attempted to get past me to go under the bridge and see what I had seen.

“You can’t go down there.”

“Get the fuck out of my way,” he said, practically spitting the words into my face. He was a strong kid, and I wasn’t sure I was any match for him, but there was no way I wanted him going down there and seeing Hanna. First, he just didn’t need that, and second, I didn’t want him messing with evidence.

Although the dogs had already done a good job of that.

“Sean, listen to me,” I said, blocking his path. “You can’t go near her. I may have already screwed things up, getting as close as I did. Are you hearing me? Whoever did this to Hanna, we want the son of a bitch caught. You go down there now and you run a chance of messing up a crime scene. You hear me?”