Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

“I’m in the— Don’t worry about that. Caroline, I need to talk to Claire. Is she there? Can you put her on? I’ve got some bad news for her.”

“Claire’s not here. Why would Claire be here?”

“It’s okay, it’s safe to talk,” Sanders said. “There’s no way they could be listening in on this phone.”

“Bert, Claire isn’t here.”

“When will she be back?”

“Bert, you’re not hearing me. She’s not staying with me. She’s not supposed to be coming to see me for another couple of weeks.”

Sanders’ voice went up. “But — but you picked her up last night. Here. In Griffon.”

“Bert, I did no such thing. Where’s Claire?”

Panic was creeping into both their voices.

Sanders said, “Claire set it up. She said you were picking her up. Last night. At Iggy’s. She has to be with you.”

“Listen to me, Bert,” Caroline said, sounding nearly breathless. “Claire is not here. Claire hasn’t been here in weeks. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m going to have to call you back,” Sanders said to his ex-wife. He ended the call and handed the phone back to me. The color had drained from his face.

“She said—”

“I heard.”

I turned off the cold water still streaming down from the showerhead. “Claire told you her mother was going to pick her up?”

“That’s what she said.”

“What kind of car does your ex-wife drive?”

“Um, one of those little convertibles. A Miata.”

“Not a Volvo wagon.”

Sanders shook his head. “No, she doesn’t have one of those. Neither does her husband.” He looked imploringly at me. “Where the hell could she be?”

“Looks like she accomplished exactly what she set out to do,” I said. “She didn’t just give whoever was following her the slip. She gave everybody the slip. You think this war between you and Perry was really enough to make her want to disappear?”

No hesitation. “Absolutely.”

“That’d suggest Claire doesn’t even trust you to keep her whereabouts secret. Does that make sense?”

He raised his hands in frustration. “Christ, I don’t know.”

Annette crossed the hall and came into the bedroom in a pair of killer heels. She was wearing a scoop-necked black dress that showed off her ample cleavage, plus a hint of a lacy push-up black bra that was assisting the process. A sexier getup than when I’d seen her outside the furniture store. “What’s going on? Did you tell Claire? Did you tell her about Hanna?”

“She’s not with her mom.”

“Well, then, where is she?”

Neither Bert Sanders nor I said anything.

“You don’t know?”

“We don’t know,” I said.

“Oh shit,” she said.

Sanders met my eye. “What do I do now?”

I felt like telling him to pray that Claire hadn’t met the same fate as Hanna, but I’m not a particularly religious man. Plus, it would have been a pretty shitty thing to say. So I came up with something else.

“Start calling around. Her other friends, boyfriends. Teachers.”

“I’ll ask Roman,” Annette said. For my benefit, she explained, “My son went out with her for a while. Maybe he has an idea where she might have gone.” She bit her lip. “Although I kind of doubt it. It’s not like they’ve been talking that much.”

“They used to go out,” I said.

“Yeah. But she broke it off. Roman took it hard.”

I didn’t have it in me to feel bad for Roman at the moment. My head was still throbbing from where he’d hit me.

“So, anyone you can think of,” I said to Sanders.

And then I felt like slapping my head. “Try her cell,” I said, and handed him my phone again.

He entered a number and listened. “It’s gone straight to voice mail. Claire? It’s your dad. Where the hell are you? I just got off the phone with your mother. We’re both worried sick. If you get this, call me right away, okay? Just call me. Or call Mr. Weaver. I’m using his phone. Please, okay? I love you.”

Sanders handed the phone back to me.

“If it went straight to message, it means the phone is off, right?” he said.

“Or the battery’s dead,” I said.

“This is terrible. I just don’t know what— No, I’ll do what you said. I’ll start asking around.”

I felt, at that moment, some small sense of relief. I didn’t have to carry all the weight of this on my shoulders. Sanders had a better handle on Claire’s friends than I did. He might have her tracked down before I could do it.

What nagged at me was why Claire had lied to him. She’d told him why she wanted to go, but not who it was going to be with. The surveillance video I’d seen at Iggy’s showed she’d gotten into a car with someone.

“Okay, you do that,” I said. “We’ll talk in the morning, see where we are. That sound like a plan?”

Sanders nodded.

Annette had a concern of her own. “You’re not going to tell anyone about us, are you?”

“Tell you what,” I said. “You can buy my silence with a lift home. I’ve had some car trouble tonight.”

I ran out to the cab, rapped lightly on the window so as not to scare the driver to death, and settled up with her. I scanned the street for cop cars and didn’t see any, although there were a few regular vehicles parked along the curb. I suppose it was possible someone was slunk down behind the wheel of one of those.

Then I walked briskly to the rear of Sanders’ house and mounted the steps to the kitchen door, just in time to see Annette slip out of Bert’s arms. He’d left the outdoor lights off, which meant Annette needed a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness so she could navigate her way across the yard, around the garage, and between the houses that backed onto Sanders’ property.

Luckily, no dogs barked and no motion-sensitive lights flashed on. Annette was, indeed, unsteady on her feet — her heels were three inches at least — going from grass to gravel to sidewalk and taking care to sidestep trash cans, bicycles, and lumber scraps, so I took her hand and led her through the worst of it.

“Why the hell I wore these shoes I’ll never know,” she said. “Well, of course I know. Is there a man alive whose motor doesn’t get a kick start from high heels?”

It struck me as a rhetorical question, so I let it go. Once we’d come out from between the houses and were on the sidewalk of the next street over, I let go of her hand. But she latched onto my elbow and held on until we were almost to her car.

“You’re a nice man, you know,” she said. “I’m sorry for all your troubles.”

We were coming up on a black Beemer sedan. “This one,” she said, taking a remote from her purse and hitting the button. The taillights flashed. “Why were you taking a taxi, anyway?”

“Long story,” I said, and slid in on the passenger side.

There was no need to tell her where I lived. During Scott’s stint at her store, she or Kent had dropped him off several times. Scott wasn’t old enough to drive, so Donna or I usually chauffeured him back and forth. But when we were occasionally unavailable, he got a lift with friends or coworkers.

“I really appreciate you keeping quiet about me and Bert,” she said as she buckled her seat belt. “I mean, this is probably just a passing thing with Bert anyway.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m a realist. I know Bert. I know what he’s like.”

“And what’s he like?”

“Oh, come on,” she said, putting the Beemer into drive and easing her foot down on the gas. “Like you haven’t heard.”

“He likes the ladies,” I said.

“That’s putting it mildly.” She laughed. “I know I’ve only got a limited amount of time with him before someone else catches his eye. It’s why Caroline left him. He was screwing some other professor at Canisius.” I thought about Donna’s comment, about the woman at work Sanders hit on when she was a student and he was still teaching. “For a while there, he was even doing it with someone else at work.”