Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

I picked up the iPad and pressed the button to see what came up. An array of icons, most of them news sites.

“You’ve got no right to look—”

I whipped my head around and snapped, “Enough.”

I tapped on the stamp icon and brought up Claire’s e-mails. I gave recent messages in the in-box, and those that had been sent, a ten-second scan. The thing was, my generation felt so advanced, communicating through e-mails, but most kids texted, having abandoned e-mail long ago. No message jumped out at me.

I looked up, caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. When I was young, we tucked the edges of snapshots under mirror frames, but there were none displayed here. These days, hardly anyone had a picture that was on a piece of paper. Photos were shared online, posted, e-mailed, flicked across smartphone screens. Technology allowed us to share our photos with more people now than ever before, but where would these captured moments in time be in twenty years? On some outdated piece of hardware at the bottom of a landfill site? What happened to memories you couldn’t hold between your thumb and forefinger?

These thoughts running through my head prompted me to tap on the iPad’s photo icon. Up popped the kinds of shots teenagers most often took of each other. Laughing, vamping, sticking out their tongues, standing around at parties, drinks in hand.

“Those pictures are private,” Sanders said.

He was wearing me out. “Like I said, call the cops.”

There were several shots of Claire and Hanna together. Hanna kissing Claire on the cheek. Claire grabbing Hanna’s nose. The two of them in prom dresses, hands on hips.

But there were shots of Claire with boys, too. Some that, by their placement farther down the screen, were probably taken longer ago, and featured an older-looking, round-faced kid. Young man, actually.

I turned the iPad toward Sanders. “Is that Roman Ravelson?”

“Honestly, would you please get—”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“And what about this boy?” In the more recent pictures, Claire was snuggling, kissing, and laughing with a young, clean-shaven black man with closely cropped hair. He stood a good foot taller than Claire.

“Dennis.”

“Dennis who?”

“Dennis Mullavey. Someone she used to go out with.”

“From Griffon?”

“No, I don’t know where from. He had a summer job here. He went back home, wherever that is.”

“Was it serious?”

Sanders shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know. It was a summer romance. You remember those? They’re all the more intense because the time seems so limited. This is a — this is a total invasion of my daughter’s privacy.”

I set the iPad down and surveyed the top of the desk. It was cluttered with what I would have expected. Some makeup, bottles of nail polish, schoolbooks. I rounded the bed to see whether anything was tucked between it and the wall — I was thinking someone could have been hiding there, but no one was — then went to the closet door and opened it.

“For God’s sake,” Sanders said.

I was greeted with a kind of congealed mass of clothing. I doubted it was possible to stuff one more thing in there. I turned, looked at Sanders standing in the doorway, trying to look imposing.

“You should go,” he said.

He moved aside to let me leave the room, but instead of heading back down the stairs, I walked into his office. Nothing much to look at here. The closet was already open, jammed with cardboard filing boxes.

I crossed the hallway and returned to Sanders’ bedroom. There was something in the air, a scent I recognized. I had a feeling I’d smelled something similar not all that long ago.

“I’m not going to tolerate this intrusion any longer,” he said, but he didn’t have an ounce of authority left in his voice.

“How long has it been since you and your wife split up?” I was looking at the mattress as I walked around it.

“What does that have to do with—”

“Hang on.”

When I got to the far side of the bed to see whether anyone was hiding, I noticed there was an en suite bathroom off the bedroom.

Sanders caught me looking at it, and his body tensed.

I moved to the doorway. A sink, a toilet, and a tub. The shower curtain was drawn across the bathtub. The fabric was too heavy to show whether there was anyone hiding behind it, but you get a sense about these things.

“Claire?” I said.

No answer.

I said, “I’m going to count to five and then I’m going to pull back the curtain. One. Two. Three. F—”

“Okay!” Bert Sanders said in defeat. “Okay.” He spoke beyond me. “You might as well come out.”

From behind the curtain, a woman said, “I’m naked.”

For a second there, I was feeling pretty proud of myself. I’d found Claire. But the feeling drifted away pretty quickly at the thought of Sanders out here, naked under his robe, and Claire in there, without a stitch on.

What the hell was going on?

“Hang on,” Sanders said, and ran to the closet, where he grabbed a second robe. I looked discreetly away as he went into the bathroom. I heard curtain rungs sliding back on the rod.

“Here you go,” Sanders said. “Just slip that on...”

“I tried to be quiet,” she said.

“I know, I know.”

He preceded her out. I figured it was now safe to turn around and look at Claire for the first time since I’d seen her run into Iggy’s the night before.

She didn’t look like the Claire I remembered at all. That’s because she wasn’t Claire.

It was Annette Ravelson, wife of Kent — the couple who owned the furniture store where my son had jumped to his death.

“Annette,” I said as she tightened the sash on the robe.

“Cal,” she said, not able to meet my eye.

“You know each other?” Sanders asked.

“Of course I know Cal,” she said, then found the strength to look at me and asked, “You thought I was Claire? You were shouting her name all the way up the stairs.”

“I thought she might be here,” I said.

“Well, I guess it makes more sense that she might have been here than me,” Annette said.

“I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting to find you here, Annette. It’s late. Won’t Kent be creeped out, not finding you at home?”

“I told you, he’s out of town,” Annette said. “On a buying trip. It’s like a furniture wholesalers’ convention. He picks what lines he wants us to sell.” She stuck out her lower lip and managed to blow a lock of hair out of her eyes. She glanced at Bert, then back to me, and said, “I know this kind of looks bad.”

I said nothing, but peeked into the bathroom. Thrown into the dry tub were her clothes, shoes, and a handbag. She’d evidently hurriedly collected, from the bedroom, all evidence of her presence. Her purse landing in the tub was probably the noise I’d heard, and that scent I’d picked up earlier was the perfume she’d been wearing when I’d run into her earlier, before going into the town hall.

Annette said, “Why are you looking for Claire? Bert, is Claire in some kind of trouble?”

Sanders had sat down on the edge of the bed and was rubbing his shoulder where I’d given him a shove down the stairs with my foot. “I don’t know,” he said defeatedly. “I’m not sure I have any idea what’s going on anymore.”

“Annette, vouch for me,” I said. “I’m trying to help Bert here, but he doesn’t trust me.”

“Help him with what?”

“I think Claire is in trouble, but Bert either doesn’t think so or doesn’t want to admit it to me. But there’s more reason now to be concerned.”

“Why?” Annette asked. “What?”