Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“Nothing,” Derek said.

“Okay, that’s okay,” Barry said. “If you don’t see something, that probably means that there’s nothing much to see. So we’ve got just one thing left to check out.”

“What?” Derek said, surprised.

“The basement.”

“Oh,” he said. “You think anyone was in the basement?”

“Well, we need to check out everything,” he said.

And so we went back down the stairs, over the puddle of Donna Langley’s blood, then down the hall, and down the half flight of stairs to the landing at the back door, where Adam Langley had died. Barry maneuvered himself around the bloodstains and went down the last few steps into the basement, but Derek, who had been behind him, stood breathless on the last step before the landing.

“You okay?” I asked him. Maybe Ellen had been right. This was too much to put our son through. Barry shouldn’t have made him do this. And so far, dragging our boy through this hadn’t provided any new insights.

“I can just. . I can just picture him there,” Derek said.

“I know,” I said.

“If he could have just gotten out the door. If only he’d run a little faster,” Derek said.

Barry poked his head around the wall. “What do you mean, Derek?”

“Just that, if he’d been quicker, he might have gotten away.”

“He was shot in the back of the head,” Barry said, “so he was probably already running, trying to get out, but it’s hard to outrun a bullet.”

Derek’s breathing was quick and shallow. “If he could have made it out the door, he could have hidden in the woods.”

“I think Derek’s had enough,” I told Barry.

“We’re almost done,” he said. “Just try to get around without stepping in anything and come downstairs.”

“You need a drink of water or anything?” I asked my son.

“We’ll be out of here in no time,” Barry said. “And I don’t want us using any glasses from the Langleys’ cupboard, you know?”

We got around the blood and walked down into the rec room. The lights were already on. It looked like a million other basements. Wood paneling on the walls. A couch that had seen better days, had probably belonged upstairs at one point. A TV, about a thirty-six-inch screen, I figured, but not a flat screen that hangs on a wall.

To my eye, the room looked pretty undisturbed.

“What do you think?” Barry asked. “You and Adam must have hung out down here a lot.”

“Yeah, we did,” he said quietly.

“Anything look out of place?”

Derek shook his head slowly.

“You’re sure?”

A slow nod.

“What about over here?” Barry said, pointing to the far end of the room.

“What?” I said. I didn’t know what he was getting at.

Barry walked across the room and pointed to a panel, about three feet wide, that ran from the floor up to a chair rail molding that ran around the perimeter of the room. The panel was open about an inch or so.

“What do you make of this?” he asked Derek.

“What do you mean?”

“This panel, to the crawlspace. It’s open an inch or two. You see that?”

“Sure,” Derek said.

“You think that means anything? I mean, you look around this house, and there’s not a thing out of place, except for maybe in Adam’s room. Donna Langley, she kept this place like a home out of House Beautiful or something. A place for everything and everything in its place. I just thought this panel, partly open like this, looked a bit odd.”

“I don’t know,” Derek said.

“Maybe,” I offered, “since they were going away for a few days, maybe Albert got some stuff out of there, like a cooler or something. The kind of stuff you only take out when you’re going for a trip.”

“That might be,” Barry said. “I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s just, when I looked at it, I thought, what a perfect place for someone to hide.”

“When we were little,” Derek offered, “Adam and I used to play in there all the time. Like it was a cave. We’d pretend we were explorers or something, or Indiana Jones, you know? But now, I don’t think I could even fit in there.”

“Too big now?” Barry said. “You know what? Why don’t you try it on for size?”

“Huh?”

Barry slid the panel back. The space was filled with boxes, most with Magic-Markered labels like “Xmas bulbs” and “Yearbooks.” He said, “Someone must have been in here. The dust is pretty thick on the cement floor in here, except just inside the opening, where it’s kind of been rubbed away. Come on in, have a look.”

“I don’t really want to,” Derek said. “I just want to get out of here.”

“I’ll do it then,” Barry said, taking his hands out of his pockets, getting down on his hands and knees, and back-crawling into the space. “Now, I’m a big fat fucker compared to either one of you guys, but I can squeeze in here, so I guess just about anybody could.”

“But, Barry,” I said, “you already figured the killer, or killers, came in through the front door. So what’s this prove, that someone could fit in the crawlspace?”

He crawled back out, huffing and puffing when he got back on his feet. I hoped he wasn’t going to have a heart attack. “Damned if I really know,” he said. “You just want to keep your mind open to everything.”

“Are we done?” I asked Barry.

“I guess we are.” He let out a long sigh, still recovering from his crawlspace adventure. “So, Derek.”

“Yeah?”

“You said you left here around eight, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So what did you do then?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d hook up with Penny.”

I spoke without thinking. “I thought you said she was grounded or something. She hit her dad’s car or something like that?”

“Well, yeah, she was. What I meant was, I was going to see her, but then we couldn’t get together, so I just kind of hung out a bit, and then I went home.”

“Hung out where?” Barry asked.

Derek sniffed, took a hand out of his pocket and rubbed his nose, then slipped it back in. It almost seemed like he was buying time.

“Just walked around, was in town a bit, went by the video-game place. Just stuff.”

Barry didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “What time did you get home?”

“I guess, I don’t know. Nine or nine-thirty, I think.”

I tried to recall whether I’d heard Derek come in that night. Ellen and I had gone to bed pretty early. By half past nine, I thought. I didn’t remember hearing him come in. We certainly hadn’t spoken to him.

“That sound right to you?” Barry asked me.

I opened my mouth, thought for half a second, and said, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“You heard him come in?” Barry asked, wanting to be sure.

“Yeah,” I lied.

After Barry gave me one of his cards and got in his unmarked car to drive back into Promise Falls, and as Derek and I were walking slowly back down the lane toward our house, he said to me, “Why’d you do that?”

“Why’d I do what?”

“Tell that cop you heard me come in?”

“Was I wrong about that? Didn’t I hear you come in around nine-thirty?”

Derek hesitated.

“You saying that if I thought I heard you come in then, I’d be wrong?”

He still didn’t know how to respond. “I don’t think you heard me come in, is all I’m saying.”

“Is that because you didn’t come in, or you snuck in so quietly you don’t think we could have heard you?”

Derek shook his head in frustration. “Either way, I just don’t understand why you lied to him.”

It was my turn to figure out how to respond. “I was just trying to help. Like, I don’t know, if you really were with Penny or something, if she’d snuck out even though she was supposed to be grounded, and you don’t want to have to drag her into this. It’s just easier for me to say I heard you come in.”