Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

“Things between me and Dennis were pretty serious. I mean, we really liked each other, even talking about whether he’d go back home after the end of the summer or what, and then one day he’s just gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“One day he just disappears. Sends me a message that it’s not working out between us, that whole thing about it not being me but him, right?” She sniffs, looks in the glove box for tissues, but the Subaru is clean. The glove box, the ashtrays, the console, everything is empty.

“I grabbed some napkins. Look in the bag.”

Claire finds them, blows her nose and wipes away tears.

“That must have hurt, him breaking it off with you all of a sudden, no apparent reason,” I said.

“Yeah. I thought, what’d I do? I thought everything was great. I was kinda destroyed by it, bummed out, everything. And then, a couple of weeks go by, and I hear from him.”

“He texted you,” I said.

“Yeah. He said he had to explain, that he had to leave Griffon because of the cops, that something happened. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I really wanted to see him, at least to find out why he dumped me all of a sudden. This was during all that stuff between my dad and your brother-in-law. We had cop cars watching our house a lot, and Dad figured it was Chief Perry trying to screw with us, you know? Scare us, let us know he and his people were watching us all the time. I figured that’s what it was about, too, until Dennis said in his texts that the cops were probably just watching me.”

“Because they thought, since you two had been an item, you might lead them to him.”

“Item?” she said.

“A thing. A couple.”

“Oh yeah, exactly.” She paused a moment. “So he said if we were going to get together, I had to be sure the cops weren’t watching me. That was when I got the idea to do the switch with Hanna.”

“Sean was supposed to pick you up, and when he couldn’t come, you hitched a ride with me.”

Claire nodded. “I didn’t mean to pick on you, honestly. I’d have gotten a lift with anyone. But when I saw it was you, that you were Scott’s dad, that you’d be a safe person to go with...” She paused. “Even if you have been going around scaring the shit out of everybody.”

“That’s over,” I said.

“So, you found out who gave Scott drugs?” she asked.

“No. Go on with your story.”

“There’s not much more about that night. I mean, the switch worked, at least from my point of view.” She looked out the window, not wanting me to see her face. “Hanna... went out and got in your car, I slipped out the back and went off with Dennis. We drove straight to the cottage.”

“So who was following you in the pickup that night? Ricky?”

Claire nodded. “I got a look at him a couple of times. Once, when he was in a Griffon cruiser, watching our house, I went right up to the car and looked in the window and said, like, ‘Fuck off and leave my father alone.’ Because then, I figured that was why we were being watched, that it was about my dad, and the chief had probably told everyone on the force to give us a hard time. And then, another time, instead of being in a cruiser, he was in a pickup, and it was Ricky again. But even that time, I just figured he was doing off-duty stuff for the chief. It was him that night you gave me a ride. For a cop, he’s not the greatest at not being seen.”

He got smarter with me. But Claire didn’t have a car.

So it’s Ricky who gets played when Hanna gets into my car. Ricky who stays on my tail.

Ricky who sees Hanna jump out of my car.

Ricky who sees Hanna tear the wig off her head and toss it.

Ricky realizes he’s been tricked, that Claire has gotten away, most likely with Dennis.

Ricky goes after Hanna to find out where Claire has gone.

More tumblers falling into position.

I had an immediate question for Claire. “Did Hanna have any idea where you were going with Dennis?”

“No,” Claire said. “He said it was better that nobody knew.”

Ricky grabs Hanna, tries to get her to tell, but Hanna hasn’t a clue. Ricky gets angry, frustrated. Ends up choking the life out of her. But he has the presence of mind to strip her from the waist down, plant the notion of sexual assault, put the clothes in Sean Skilling’s car.

Claire continued. “It wasn’t till Dennis filled me in that I realized that Haines was just watching me, not me and my dad. In fact, I never noticed any other Griffon cop watching me.”

“Tell me about Dennis.”“

She nodded. “Okay, Dennis, he just didn’t know what to do. He’d been hiding out ever since he’d left Griffon, at the cottage. He saw his dad once, just popped in. He lives up around Rochester.”

“We’ve met,” I said. “He seems like a good man.”

Claire’s eyes widened. “Wow, like, you’ve really talked to everybody. But, yeah, Mr. Mullavey is really nice.” Again she looked away. “It’s going to kill him when he finds out about Dennis.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

“He told his dad he was in trouble, but that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and that when the police came around looking for him, he had to remember that. He said he needed time to figure out what to do, and he wanted to talk to me about it.”

“What happened, Claire?”

“So, one day, Dennis is cutting grass at the Pearce place.”

“Phyllis Pearce.”

“That’s right. The lady that owns and runs Patchett’s.”

“Right.”

“So Hooper usually sends out a crew, right? Like, there’ll be two of them, but this day, the guy who usually went out with Dennis was sick, so Dennis said he could handle it on his own. And he gets to the Pearce house, and he can tell no one is home because there are no cars there. He’s cutting the grass when he notices what looks like smoke coming out around one of the basement windows.”

She opened one of the water bottles and took a long drink, kept the bottle in her hand.

“So Dennis runs up and goes banging on the door, even though he knows no one is there, right? But just in case, because he doesn’t want to barge in, you know? But when no one comes, he figures he better do something, so he kicks in the door, and he can see that the smoke is coming up from the basement. He runs down, and there’s this fire coming from around the dryer.”

“Go on.”

“There’s actually a fire extinguisher on the wall, so Dennis, he grabs it, and pulls that little pin or whatever they have on them.”

“Okay.”

“And he squirts out all this foamy stuff and he puts out the fire pretty fast.”

“Smart thinking,” I said. “Although it might have been smarter for him to stay out and just call the fire department.”

“Yeah, well, he sure wishes he’d done that.” Claire realized she’d spoken of him in the present tense, and bit her lip. Tears welled up in her eyes almost instantly. I wanted to keep her focused on the story, so I asked her what happened next.

“That was when Dennis heard someone coughing.”

I turned and looked at her. “So someone was home?”

“Yeah.”

“Phyllis Pearce?”

“No,” Claire said. “It was a guy. An old man. I mean, Dennis didn’t know he was an old man at first. All Dennis heard was the coughing. It was coming from the basement, just down this hall from the laundry room.”

She took another sip of her water.

“So Dennis goes to this door, but it’s got a lock on it. Like, with a key? Kind of like what you have on your locker at school, but not a combination. There’s someone behind the door, locked in. He’s coughing and shouting, ‘Fire,’ but he can’t shout very loud because it’s all smoky and the man is really old and sick.”