Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

“You’re worried too much about that damn book.”

“No, I’m not. You need to take this seriously.”

“Are you kidding? You think I’m not taking this seriously? Really? Look at the shit I’ve had to deal with. I’ve been thinkin’ on my feet. Like with the other girl, how I made it look like something it wasn’t. How about a little credit for that?”

“I’m going to bed. I can’t deal with this one more minute.”

“It’s your fault, anyway, you know,” he says.

That stops her on her way to the stairs. “What did you say?”

“Leaving the house while the dryer was running, not being here when the lint caught on fire. If there’d never been any smoke, none of this would have—”

Her hand moves so quickly he doesn’t have a chance to stop her from slapping him across the face.

“I will not have you speak to me that way. Who do you think all this has been for? Huh? Who’s it all been for?”

He puts a hand to his hot, red cheek. “It’s been for Dad,” he says.

“No,” she says. “It’s always been for you. All of it. I did it all for you, and so help me, God, it looks like I’m going to have to do more before we’re done.”

I threw back the covers and stood up so quickly I made myself light-headed. I turned the bedside table lamp on. Donna’s side of the bed did not look slept in. It didn’t make sense that if she hadn’t been able to get to sleep, she’d have made the bed when she got up. You don’t do that when it’s eleven or twelve at night. You get up, wander around, have a glass of water, figuring that in a few minutes you’re going to get back under the covers and try again to get to sleep.

So Donna had not yet gone to bed.

I made my way down the hall, going to Scott’s room first. It never surprised me to find her under the covers there these days. But when I opened the door, allowing light to spill in from the hall, I could see the bed was empty.

Turning on lights as I went, I descended the stairs. If she had been sitting in the living room, quietly, it was possible I could have walked in and gone right past her without noticing. But she wasn’t there.

She wasn’t in the basement or the laundry room.

“Donna!” I shouted.

I unlocked the sliding glass doors that led out onto the deck and hit the floods, which were powerful enough to illuminate the entire backyard. It was way too frosty for her to be sitting outside, gazing heavenward, wondering how our boy was doing up there. Like I say, if you believed in that sort of thing.

I went back in, relocked the sliding doors, and opened the one at the end of the kitchen that connected with the garage.

Donna’s car was gone.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

I went to the phone on the kitchen counter and hit the button that automatically connected me to her cell phone.

It rang once.

“Come on,” I said.

It rang a second time.

“Pick up.”

It rang a third time. Then, “Hey.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Driving around.”

“I came home, couldn’t find you. I was starting to get frantic.”

“I should have left a note,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“What’s wrong?” The stupid question to end all stupid questions, I knew. What I was trying to ask was, what made tonight worse than all the other nights of the last few months?

“I have a lot on my mind,” Donna said.

We were both silent for a few seconds. I could hear the hum of the car in the background. Finally, I said, “What’d you have for dinner?”

“I didn’t have dinner,” she said.

“Me neither,” I said. Another pause. “I’m kind of starving.”

“I guess I am, too.”

“The Denny’s would be open,” I said. “We could get a midnight breakfast. I feel like some eggs and sausage.”

“I’m not far from there,” Donna said. Long pause. “I’ll meet you.”

“I need you to swing by and pick me up. I haven’t got a car.”

“You haven’t got a car?”

“I’ll tell you about it over eggs.”

Before I could fill her in about the car, I had to explain the bruise on the side of my face. She noticed it as soon as I got into the passenger seat.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Not as much as my pride.”

There were two other couples and one man sitting by himself at Denny’s. Donna and I took a table by the window and ordered decafs to start from the waitress, who was there before our butts had hit the seats. We clung to the hope that once we got home, we’d actually be able to get to sleep, so regular coffee seemed an unwise choice.

“The police seized the car,” I said.

Donna spooned some sugar into her mug. “Tell me.”

I told her. Starting with my visit to the Rodomskis’, followed by my visit to the Skillings’, taking Sean with me to where I’d dropped Hanna off, then finding her body under the bridge.

“And Annette Ravelson is sleeping with the mayor,” I said, “but that seems kind of anticlimactic to everything else.”

“How awful,” she said. “Finding that girl’s body.” I thought I saw her shiver. It wasn’t possible to think about any body without imagining Scott’s in the parking lot at Ravelson Furniture.

“Yeah,” I said. “The Skilling kid took it bad.”

“You don’t think he did it,” Donna said.

“I don’t,” I said. “But I’ve been wrong before.”

The waitress returned and we ordered eggs and all the greasy, wonderful things that generally come with them. An awkward silence ensued for several minutes until the food came.

“I can’t believe my brother would have the car seized,” Donna said.

I sipped my coffee, imagined the jolt it would give me if it weren’t decaf. “Yeah, I was surprised, too.”

“You two are like a dog and a cat in the same sack, but I think, at some level, he respects you,” she said. “Maybe he seized the car to make a point, that he’s not showing favoritism, even though he knows he won’t find anything.”

“Unless he does,” I said.

Her forkful of egg stopped halfway to her mouth. “Cal, Augie’s not going to frame you. That’s absolutely ridiculous. You think he’s going to plant evidence against you?”

I said nothing.

“For God’s sake, why would he do that? What possible reason could he have?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I know you don’t like him — half the time I don’t even like him — but he’s not capable of that.”

“He’s feeding the mayor a line of bullshit, saying his people never overstep their bounds.”

She gave me a look that suggested I should know better. “You think there’s a police force anywhere that doesn’t? Like, say, the Promise Falls police? I believe you used to work there.”

“Donna.”

“Augie looks out for his people. The way your chief looked out for you.”

“I lost my job,” I said.

“You could have lost more,” she said.

My time in Promise Falls was not something I liked to talk about. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Augie’s making a point. Maybe he just wants to inconvenience me. I’ll have to rent something in the morning.”

“Use my car,” Donna said. “Drop me off. If you can’t pick me up, I’ll find my way home.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

A couple of minutes of silence followed. I had a feeling we were done talking about my evening, at least for now. We were moving to something else.

Finally, Donna said, “I was afraid he’d stop loving me.”

I looked at her and waited.

“I was afraid, that if I— if we— got really tough with him, grounded him, cut off his money, forced him into counseling, just went to war with him about what he was doing, I was afraid he wouldn’t love me anymore.”