Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“Hey,” I said.

Ellen turned over without saying anything, looked into my eyes without so much as a smile, then reached out and pulled me close to her, pressing her body up against mine. I responded as she knew I would, and she rolled me on top of her. We engaged in an act of wordless lovemaking that was born not out of any kind of sexual frenzy, but a need to reassure ourselves that we were still alive, that we had each other, that we could connect in this most intimate of ways, aware that at any moment, without any warning whatsoever, it could all end.

Ellen was putting a plate of French toast in front of me when she looked out the window and said, “Barry’s coming around the side of the house.”

A moment later, Barry Duckworth was on the deck, rapping lightly at the back door. It was nearly eight in the morning by now, and Ellen and I had been up a couple of hours but only just now gotten to breakfast.

I stayed in my seat at the kitchen table while Ellen opened the screen door. “Hi, Barry,” she said.

Barry nodded, almost apologetically. “Sorry to disturb you folks so early,” he said.

“Come on in,” I said.

“Coffee?” Ellen said.

“That’d be nice,” Barry said. “Black.” He stepped into the kitchen, moving tentatively toward the table and me. Only eight in the morning and already his white shirt was starting to stick to his ample stomach. Ellen handed him a mug of black coffee as he glanced at my breakfast, drenched in maple syrup. Ellen noticed, and said, “A slice of French toast, Barry?”

“I really shouldn’t,” he said.

“It’s no trouble.”

“Well, if you insist,” he said. “All I had before I left home was a tiny bowl of bran with some strawberries on it.”

“Sounds healthy,” I said.

“Maureen’s trying to get me to lose some weight,” he said. “So I eat healthy at home, then get something else later.”

I smiled and motioned to the chair across from me. Barry took a load off. I saw Ellen dipping two slices of bread into some eggs, turn the heat back on under the frying pan.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

Barry ran his hand over his nearly bald pate. “Well, we’re following a number of enquiries,” he said. “Isn’t that how the Brits say it?”

“I think so,” I said.

“You can’t have been a lawyer as long as Albert was and not made a few enemies over the years. I’m sure he knew plenty of folks who might be capable of this sort of thing.”

Ellen said, “I can’t imagine anyone being capable of what happened over there.”

“Yeah, well,” Barry said. “I know what you mean. I was gonna say, when you’re in my line of work, you start accepting that people are capable of all sorts of horrible things, but the God’s honest truth is, I’ve never seen anything like this. Not a whole family. Not like that. Not in Promise Falls.”

“This is America,” Ellen said, putting the two slices of bread into the frying plan. “These kinds of things can happen anywhere.”

“We’ve had more than our share the last little while,” he said. I perked up at that. “You have?”

“Well, a couple anyway,” Barry Duckworth said. “There was that one out back of the Trenton, three weeks ago.” A bar on the north side of town. Not an area where I get many calls to cut people’s lawns. “Guy named Edgar Winsome. Forty-two, married, couple of kids, cement worker. Shot in the chest.”

“Jesus,” I said. “A bar fight?”

Barry shook his head. “Maybe. But it didn’t spill out of the bar. No one saw him having it out with anybody. Nobody remembers him getting into an argument or anything. Came in, had half a dozen beers, talked with a few of his buddies, leaves, they find him later, out back. Loud music, no one heard a thing.”

“He must have pissed off somebody,” I said.

Barry nodded at that. “Seems a reasonable assumption. He wasn’t robbed. Still had his wallet, cash, and charge cards.”

“Well,” said Ellen, flipping the toast.

“And we haven’t gotten anywhere with it,” Barry said.

“A couple,” I said.

“Huh?” said Barry, taking a sip of his black coffee.

“You said there were a couple.”

“Yeah. The other one, older guy, fifty, last name of Knight, has a machine shop about five miles west of town, on 29. He was locking up one evening, everyone else had already left, still light out, someone comes along and pops him in the head. This was about a week before the Trenton guy bought it, a Friday night.”

Ellen put the French toast on a plate. “Powdered sugar and syrup?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, please,” Barry said. Ellen dressed his toast and set the plate in front of him. “Good God, this looks magnificent,” he said.

“How come I don’t know about this?” I asked him.

He was about to put the first forkful of toast and egg and syrup into his mouth, and he looked at me. “I can’t help it you’re uninformed.” He savored his mouthful, swallowed, raised the mug to his lips, had some more coffee. “To be fair, the Trenton thing, papers only gave it a couple of inches, guy gets killed behind a bar, how weird is that, really? The Knight guy, at the machine shop, that one got a bit of attention, but not all that much, I suppose.”

Ellen said, “That’s when we were away, remember?”

I thought a moment. We’d driven to Vermont, taken the ferry across to Burlington for a couple of nights, an anniversary getaway, leaving Derek on his own, but not quite. We’d arranged for Ellen’s sister Carol to drop by periodically, make him some dinner, pop by unannounced in the evening. We weren’t going to give him the opportunity to have a party at the house, and it’s fair to say he hated us for it. “Add it to the list,” I’d told him at the time.

“By the time you got back, it was out of the paper,” Barry said. “Honest to God, Ellen, this is delicious. I shouldn’t even be having this. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to skip lunch. This should carry me through the whole day.”

Ellen smiled, but it looked forced. She had to be wondering, as was I, why Barry was here so early on a Sunday morning. It was a given that he was working on the Langley murders, but I didn’t believe he’d dropped in just to be friendly, or score a breakfast out of us. I had the feeling Barry was working up to something.

“So, Barry,” I said, “these various leads you have, how’re they coming?”

He waited to swallow another bite. He was making fast work of Ellen’s French toast. It’s one of the things she does best. He glanced into his mug, saw that it was empty, and said to Ellen, “You got another half a cup there?”

“Oh, sure,” Ellen said, and brought the pot over to the table and poured him another full cup.

“Oh, that’s great.” He used his napkin to dab some syrup from the corner of his mouth. “We have some idea of the order of things, that Albert answered the door, that he was probably shot first, that his wife was shot next, and that Adam, he was shot trying to get away.”

Imagining it, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Right there at the back door,” Barry said. “He almost made it. Maybe, in a weird kind of way, it’s a good thing he didn’t. If he’d made it, he’d probably have run straight here. And then whoever was coming after him would have been led right to your door.”

Ellen gave me a look. This wasn’t the sort of thing she needed to hear.

“Barry,” I said, “you and I, we’re friends, but I’m guessing you didn’t drop by just to shoot the shit. What’s on your mind?”

He shoved the last bite of French toast into his mouth, washed it down with coffee, and said, “It’s about your boy.”