Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

Derek thought about that. “Okay.”

I stopped walking and put my hand on my son’s arm. “Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked, looking him in the eye.

“No.” He looked down at the gravel.

“Look at me,” I said. “I understand what a shock this has been to you, losing your best friend, what something like that must do to your head. So I get it, you acting funny. It’d be weird if you weren’t acting this way. But sometimes I think there’s something more going on. That there’s something you’re holding back, something you should be telling us. If not Barry, certainly me and your mother. We can’t help you if you don’t level with us. This is serious shit here, Derek.”

“I know. You don’t have to tell me that. I’m not stupid.”

“So, is there something you want to tell me? About when you got home?”

He paused. “It was sort of around when I said. I don’t know the exact time. I think you guys were asleep is all. I know how you are on a Friday night. You’re beat, so I came in real quiet because I figured you and Mom would have gone to bed early. Maybe not nine-thirty, maybe a little later.”

I waited.

“So that’s all.”

“What about what Barry asked you?” I said. “What were you up to between eight and when you got home?”

“Nothing,” he said defensively. “Nothing really.”

“Where were you?”

“Jesus, what the fuck is this, anyway? You think I killed our fucking neighbors?”

I didn’t flinch or back down. “No,” I said evenly. “Of course not. But I am starting to wonder whether you know something about what happened there. Answer my question. Where were you between the time you left the Langleys and the time you came home? I’m figuring you weren’t with Penny, that she wasn’t allowed to leave the house.”

“I went for a walk,” he said.

“To Penny’s house? She’s all the way into town. That’d take you thirty, forty minutes.”

“No. Just around. Is that a crime? That I took a walk?”

“Where?”

“Huh?”

“Where did you walk?”

“Around. Down the highway, to the creek. I sat down there, called Penny on my cell, we talked for a while, I guess for an hour or something, and then I walked back home. I guess I was feeling kind of down. We’re kind of going through a rough patch right now.”

That was either the truth or bullshit designed to garner sympathy, get me to back off. I was inclined to believe the latter.

“Things looked okay between you two in the middle of the night.”

“Yeah. It’s mostly her parents, you know. They don’t like me.”

“What do you mean? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have some idea.”

“Well, it might have something to do with her dad kind of finding us, you know, making out. In her room.”

“You think?” I said.

“He’s a real tight-ass,” Derek said.

“You don’t have to be much of a tight-ass to get upset finding some guy making out with your daughter in her bedroom. Under your roof.”

“Yeah, well, that was sort of why she had to sneak out here to see me.”

“For Christ sake, Derek, you’re just going to make things even worse with her dad, you start letting her do things like that.”

“Jesus,” he said, adopting a tone I didn’t much care for, “you gonna start getting all tight-ass on me too?”

I squeezed his arm and shook him. “Don’t you ever speak to me like that. I don’t care how much shit you might be in, you talk to me like that and I’ll knock your fucking block off.”

If I’d actually struck him he couldn’t have looked any more stunned. I kept my grip on him for another second, then let go.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“We clear?”

“Yeah.”

“So you were saying.”

“Uh. .” Derek had lost the thread of his story. Then, “Okay, what I was trying to say is, please don’t say anything about her being here, because she snuck out of the house after her dad fell asleep. One of her friends picked her up and dropped her off on the highway and she came in. She got right past that cop parked up at the end of the drive.”

That was a comforting thought, but hardly surprising. There was so much tree cover out here, it would take a team of cops to keep watch in all directions at all times.

“Whatever’s going on between us didn’t really matter when she found out what happened to Adam. She came over to see how I was doing.”

I thought there were enough things to worry about having a seventeen-year-old son. I couldn’t imagine being Penny’s parents and finding out she’d slipped away in the night to visit her boyfriend where three people had been murdered only a few hours earlier.

“You shouldn’t have even let her come out here,” I said. “It’s not safe, a girl going out in the middle of the night. Anywhere. Let alone out here, after what happened to the Langleys.”

“So now I’m in shit for what she does, too?”

This was invariably what happened in parent-teen discussions. You started off getting mad about one thing, and before you knew it you were getting mad about something else. Focus, I told myself.

“You’re leveling with me?” I said.

Derek nodded slowly.

“Honestly?”

He nodded again, but then looked ready to say something.

“What is it?”

“It’s just. .” he said. “It’s just, well, I mean, it might not be anything. Because Adam said something, I think, before he left, before he got in the car with his parents, but the thing is, it might not mean anything at all.”

“What are you talking about?” I felt my pulse quicken.

“I think I noticed something missing in the house. Something that was there the other day, but wasn’t there just now.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “What did you-”

“Hello!” It was Ellen, standing at the front door. “You coming inside, or what?”

Back in the kitchen, Derek was finally persuaded to have some breakfast. For a boy who half an hour ago claimed to have no appetite, he downed four slices of French toast drowning in butter and syrup like he’d just been released from prison.

“You want some coffee with that?” Ellen asked. Derek’s mouth was so full all he could do was nod.

When Ellen had called out to us from the house, Derek had whispered quickly, “I’ll tell you later.”

And I had said, “Okay.”

It wasn’t that I wanted to keep secrets from Ellen. But if there was a chance Derek was willing to tell me something I needed to know, then I was willing not to make a fuss about his not being open with both of his parents until I knew what it was.

Ellen threw her arms around him when he came into the house, fearing he might have been somehow traumatized by having to tour the Langley house with Barry Duckworth.

“It was fine,” he said. “No big deal.”

Ellen looked at me, trying to read in my face whether Derek was really okay, or putting up a front. I shook my head, unable to give her a definitive answer. Then she talked him into downing an enormous breakfast.

I could tell Ellen wanted to ask him about his experience in the Langley home, not to find out what he’d seen-she could find that out from me later-but to determine what kind of effect it had had on him. But I think she concluded that if he was able to eat like this, perhaps there was no permanent damage to his psyche. I was less sure. If there was one thing I knew about teenage boys, it was that you could turn off the outside world long enough to stuff yourself.

“I was thinking,” Derek said, looking at me, his mouth still full, “that we should try to fix that one mower today. Since we’ve got the time.”

“Sure,” I said. “I think it might be as simple as a gummed-up spark plug.”