Linwood Barclay: A Tap on the Window

Fritz nodded knowingly. “He came to see me.”

“He did?”

“Came in, maybe the day after you saw him. Said you were going to come talk to me, that you were going to make me give him his job back.”

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t the deal.”

“I figured, and told him so. And then he took out a gun and started waving it around and called me a bunch of names and for a second there I thought he was going to shoot me.”

I felt my heart sinking. “No.”

“After he left, I called the police. He’s been arrested. Tony’s in jail right now.”

You don’t think you can feel any sadder. But you can.

Fritz moved on, and a few more people stopped and shook hands, but I couldn’t tell you who they were or what they said. I believed Tony Fisk had some good in him, but not enough to keep him from being a hothead.

Then Sean stopped, along with his parents. They all shook hands with me, said the things people are supposed to say at a time like that, and moved on. But then Sean held back.

“Could I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“I mean, private like?”

I put my hand on his shoulder and steered him back into the church, which was now empty.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“Well, first, I just want say thanks again,” he said. “For getting me out of jail.”

“It wasn’t really me,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I guess, but it was you, finding Claire and everything, that made it happen.”

I waited to hear what it was he really wanted to tell me. He was looking at his shoes, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit pants. The jacket was tight around his shoulders. The suit probably fit him six months ago, but he was at that age where he was having his final growth spurts.

“There’s something I gotta say,” he said.

“Something you don’t want to tell me in front of your parents.”

“Yeah, I guess. But maybe you’re going to tell them anyway, and if you do, I guess I have to live with that. But you’ve been good to me, and I think I owe you the truth.”

“What is it, Sean?”

He licked his lips, then lifted up his head to look me in the eye. “It was me. I did it.”

I leaned my head in closer to him and put a hand on each shoulder, as much to steady myself as anything. What the hell was he talking about? There was no doubt Haines had killed Hanna, that he’d planted Hanna’s clothes in Sean’s truck. Phyllis Pearce had confirmed those details since her arrest.

So what was Sean talking about?

“Sean, what are you saying? You killed Hanna?”

He shook his head violently and his eyes went wide. “God, no, I didn’t do that. No way. I loved Hanna. I just wish I’d gotten there in time, picked her up before...” He shook his head sadly and looked down again.

“Then what are you—”

And then it hit me.

“Scott,” I said, dropping my hands from his shoulders.

He lifted his head slowly and nodded. Tears were welling up in his eyes. “A couple of days before he, you know, I had some X. Sometimes, when Hanna and I would go around delivering beer and collecting money for it, you’d get the odd asshole who didn’t have the cash. This one guy, he wanted to pay Hanna with a couple of tabs, and she let him, and got back in the car with the X, and I told her she was an idiot, that Roman wasn’t going to take anything except cash and we were going to have to make up the difference, and I thought of Scott, because I knew it was his thing, and I got hold of him and he said, yeah, he’d take them off my hands.”

Sean looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I was too numbed by the day to offer one.

So he continued, “I don’t even know if he was on the stuff I sold him when he jumped. I wasn’t the only guy he got it from. But I know it’s possible it was me.” A tear ran down each of his cheeks. “I’m so sorry. If you want to hit me or something, like, I’m okay with that. I’ll tell my parents why you had to do it. I’ve got it coming. But I’m sorry, Mr. Weaver. God, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not going to hit you,” I said.

“I just— I just, I don’t know why I did it.” He sobbed quietly. “I could have just made up the difference with my own money, you know? And thrown the shit out. I should have flushed it or something. But I was thinking... I don’t know what I was thinking.”

His shoulders began to shake. I raised my arms tentatively, then put them around him and pulled the boy to me. I held him close, tightened my arms around him as he wept into my chest.

I felt Donna watching me as I did. Felt it was what she would want me to do.

“Everyone’s done some pretty dumb things lately,” I said.

I felt him slip his arms around my back. “I hate myself,” Scott said. “I hate myself so much.”

We all hated ourselves these days.

Holding Sean, this boy about the same age and size as Scott, I could almost imagine he was my own. I remembered the feeling of taking him into my arms, of the father-son hugs we once shared.

If I forgave Sean, would I be forgiving Scott, too, for what he’d put us through? And wasn’t there less to forgive Scott for, anyway, than what I’d once believed?

“It’s okay,” I whispered again. “It’s okay.”

Because I no longer believed Scott jumped. I knew, in my heart, he was pushed.

Thrown.

And there was one person I was now ready to talk to, in hopes that she might be able to shed some light on what happened that night.

Her name was Rhonda McIntyre.

I’d first heard it when I got a ride home with Annette Ravelson the night I’d found her in Bert Sanders’ bedroom. Annette said she’d been one of the mayor’s other flings, and she’d also been seeing a Griffon cop who didn’t know she had a thing going on with Bert. I remembered Annette saying Rhonda had broken it off with the cop, that she’d found him kind of “freaky.”

That cop had turned out to be Ricky Haines. Her name had come up as the Griffon police did a full investigation into his background. They’d found her e-mail address on his home computer, and in his phone.

When she broke things off with Haines, which was around the time she’d also stopped seeing the mayor, she quit her job at Ravelson and moved back in with her family in Erie.

I wanted to talk to her.

So I drove to Erie. I did the trip in just under an hour and a half. I’d gone back to Cayuga Lake one day, turned in my rented Subaru, and gotten my Honda back from the cottage where Dennis and Claire had been hiding out.

Rhonda McIntyre was living with her parents in a beautiful lakeside house on Saybrook Place, just west of the industrial city’s downtown. I didn’t call first. I had no idea whether she would want to talk to me, and I didn’t want to give her a chance to disappear.

I knew it was a long shot, but I was hoping Haines might have told her something, if not actually confided in her, some of the details surrounding Scott’s plunge off the roof of Ravelson Furniture.

Maybe, I thought, if she had some idea of what he’d done, it was the reason she’d broken things off with him and gone back to the safety of her family.

I found the house behind a tall, well-manicured hedge that shielded the McIntyres from the prying eyes of passersby. I drove up the long, paved drive and parked within steps of the front door.

A handsome woman in her fifties answered. “Mrs. McIntyre?” I said. When she nodded, I told her who I was, and that I was here to speak with Rhonda.

“About all this sordid mess,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.

“It might be easier talking to me than the police,” I said. An implied threat that sometimes worked.