Linwood Barclay: A Tap on the Window

This time, it did the trick.

She led me through the house to a sunroom at the back that looked out over Lake Erie. The sky was overcast, and there was a north wind raising whitecaps. I could feel cold drafts of air sneaking their way around the windows.

“I’ll get Rhonda,” she said.

Moments later, a small, wispy woman of twenty-five entered the room anxiously, her mother right behind her.

“Yes?”

“Hi, Rhonda,” I said. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot your name,” the mother said.

“Weaver,” I said. “Cal Weaver.”

Rhonda blinked. Her anxiety level appeared to have taken a jump. I thought it would be easier for her to talk to me without her mother present.

“Mrs. McIntyre, would you mind if your daughter and I spoke privately?”

“Well, I think I need to be here if—”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Rhonda said. “I’ll be okay.”

The woman withdrew reluctantly. Rhonda and I sat in white wicker chairs with puffy yellow-flowered cushions.

“You should have called ahead,” she said.

“Rhonda, we know an awful lot now about Ricky, and his mother, and what they’d been up to for more than a decade. But there are still a few gaps in what we know — in what I would like to know — and I know that for a while there you were going out with Ricky.”

She became defensive. “We went out a few times, but I could never... I was never really all that serious. There were things not right with him.”

I waited.

“First of all, this relationship with his mom, it was kind of sick, you know? He was always trying to please her, always rushing over to the house. Of course, I sort of get now why he was always there, because he was helping his mom look after his stepdad, in the basement there. I mean, that kind of explained a lot.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d never take me to his mother’s house. I mean, he wanted me to meet his mother once, but we did it at a coffee shop. We never went out to her place. One time, I was going by there and saw Ricky’s pickup in the driveway, so I turned in and knocked on the door, just figuring I’d say hello, and he came out on the porch and went crazy on me.”

“They couldn’t take a chance of anyone going inside,” I said.

“No kidding. But there was more. He was like two people. He could pretend to be all nice when it suited him, but underneath, he didn’t really feel anything. Except maybe anger. Sometimes you could tell it was just simmering under the surface. I don’t think he ever understood what it meant to be someone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, to be in someone else’s shoes. He had no, you know, empathy. Everything was about how it felt to him. He didn’t care if he hurt you — like, your feelings, mostly — because he didn’t feel the hurt himself. Except where his crazy mother was concerned. She could hurt him. Like I said, he was always worried about pleasing her.”

Rhonda looked out over Lake Erie.

“I really don’t see how I can help you,” she said. “That’s really all I have to say.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not really here about any of that. I’m here about a more personal matter.”

Her head moved ever so slightly in my direction. “What sort of personal matter?”

“My son. I had a son named Scott. A couple of months ago, he died. Maybe you heard about that.”

Rhonda nodded. “Of course. I was still working at Ravelson Furniture then. Everybody felt just awful about it. He was a nice boy.”

Her voice started to get shaky. I leaned in closer to her.

“I drove down here today, hoping you might know something about what happened on the roof that night. For the longest time, I’ve believed Scott went off that roof because he was high on drugs. That’s not what I believe anymore.”

Her face looked as though it might shatter.

“Why would I know anything?” she asked.

“Because of the man you were seeing at the time,” I said.

Rhonda put her hands over her face. “Oh God, oh God,” she said. “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d figure it out eventually.”

I reached out and gently pulled her hands away from her face. “Tell me about it, Rhonda.”

“It was never supposed to happen,” she said. “Never.”

“Did he do it because Scott had threatened him?”

She nodded, and I let go of her arms so that she could wipe her eyes. “Your son, Scott, said he was going to tell. He was all, ‘Hey, wait till everyone finds this out!’ You know?”

Rhonda was describing the incident at Patchett’s. Could she have been there? It seemed unlikely Ricky would tell her the story about his patdown of Claire.

“You saw that happen?” I said.

She nodded, reached for a tissue on a nearby table, dabbed her eyes and wiped her nose.

“You were at Patchett’s?”

That startled her. “What?”

Now I was startled.

“What’s Patchett’s have to do with this?” she asked.

My mind was struggling. “Wait,” I said. I had a theory. “Not Patchett’s. You were on the roof.”

Her head went up and down. She grabbed another tissue.

“You were there when Scott got pushed off the roof?”

She dropped her head. In sorrow, or shame, I wasn’t sure.

I pressed on. “You saw Ricky do it?”

Her head shot up and her mouth opened. She looked as startled as if I’d slapped her.

“Ricky?” she said. “You thought it was Ricky?”

It was dark. Half past ten. From atop Ravelson Furniture, I could see the Skylon Tower in the distance. It was quiet up here, the sounds from cars passing through downtown Griffon barely audible. I was standing with one foot on the ledge, one on the roof, in the very spot where Scott had to have gone off.

I’d called Kent, and he’d let me come up here. And he left a couple of doors unlocked so someone could join me.

I was expecting company any second now. Rhonda McIntyre had agreed to make a phone call for me to set up this meeting. I turned away from the view and looked at the door that led out onto the roof when I heard someone coming up the steps. I walked away from the edge so I could be closer to the door when it opened.

Seconds later, it did.

“Hello, Bert,” I said.

Bert Sanders stepped out onto the roof, his shoes crunching the gravel secured with tar.

“What— Cal, what are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you,” I said. “But I guess you were expecting someone else.”

He started to turn for the door, but I got around him and blocked his path.

“You were expecting Rhonda McIntyre,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bert said.

“Bert, please. I went to see her, in Erie. We talked. I asked her to set this up.”

His eyes darted about, looking for an escape.

“Why don’t you tell me your version of what happened?” I said.

“Whatever Rhonda told you,” he said, “you have to understand where she’s coming from. She’s got an ax to grind. You’ve got to take what she says with a grain of salt. I was” — he looked around, to see whether anyone could possibly be listening — “seeing Annette, and this thing with Rhonda just wasn’t going anywhere. I mean, yes, there was the sex—”

“Which you had up here.”

Sanders nodded sheepishly. “It’s true. We met up here a few times. You know that kind of furtive, frantic sex you can have, where it seems all the more exciting because the location is so... different.” He tried an old boy’s smile on me, like, hey, you know what it’s like.

“So you came up here, the two of you, well after hours, and were getting into it,” I said. “Rhonda had keys, just like Scott did. Was he already up here, or did he come up after?”