Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“I got a theory,” Derek said, “it could be the fuel filter. Maybe it’s all gummed up with crap.”

Ellen had a choice, listening to this. She could figure that Derek was reaching out to his father, looking for comfort in his company in the wake of tragedy, or he was up to something.

Not being quite the cynic I am, she said, “That sounds great. You two could get a few things done today.” She smiled at me. She’d bought it.

When Derek finished the last of his toast, he got up and went to take his plate to the sink, but his mother stopped him and said, “I’ll look after that. Why don’t you help your father.”

“Okay,” he said, and went out the back door.

“I’ll be right there,” I called out after him. Ellen looked to me and I knew she wanted to hear something about our tour through the Langley house. “He was okay,” I told her. “It was awful over there, but he was okay.”

“Barry never should have-”

“Don’t worry about it. He’s just doing his job. You’d have been proud of Derek, holding it together over there.”

“What was it like-” Ellen started to ask. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

I found Derek in the shed, fiddling about, wielding an oversized electric hedge trimmer. I was not surprised to see that he was not paying the slightest bit of attention to our ailing lawn mower.

“So,” I said. “What did you want to tell me? What was missing?”

“Like I said, it might not be anything. But you remember when we went to Mrs. Stockwell’s house?”

“Agnes? The one with the cat that looks like a pig?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean, when we went there? We go there pretty much every week.”

“This was like, two times ago,” Derek said. “She gave me the computer.”

“Right,” I said, nodding. “Some old piece of crap. From her garage.”

I hardly needed to say “some old piece of crap.” It was all Derek and Adam liked to collect. They loved-well, had loved-tearing them apart, messing around with the hard drives, comparing the guts of old computers to the guts of new ones. Derek hadn’t left with the whole computer, just the tower. The keyboard and the monitor weren’t of much interest to him, although we did take them off Agnes’s hands and dropped them off at the dump on one of our occasional trips up there. I had a soft spot in my heart for Agnes Stockwell, living alone in her bungalow on Ridgeway Drive. She loses a husband, then a year later son Brett, a Thackeray College student, kills himself by jumping off Promise Falls. It’s not the highest waterfall in the world by any means, but when there’s nothing but jagged rocks at the bottom, how high does it have to be?

“So, Adam and me,” Derek said, “we’d been messing around with it. Seeing what kind of processor it had, that kind of shit, but we were also looking at what was on it.”

That, I’d learned, was half the fun. It probably never would have occurred to Agnes that her son’s computer was a repository of information about him. Old e-mails, stories, maybe saved porn images. Agnes, not exactly computer literate, probably figured all that stuff had evaporated by this time. How could all those things survive in a metal and plastic box all these years? But a tower like that was the ultimate shoebox of memories.

“Okay,” I said.

“Anyway, when we were in the house, with Barry? The cop? It wasn’t in Adam’s room.”

“How could you tell?” I asked. The image of Adam’s room hadn’t quite burned itself into my memory like the three enormous bloodstains, but I remembered it was a mess.

“I could tell, Dad. It had been right on top of his desk. I know what it looked like. It was like a beigy color; most of the other ones Adam had in there were black. And it wasn’t there.”

I thought about that for a moment.

“Was it there when you last saw Adam? Before he left with his parents?”

“I didn’t go up to his room. We were hanging out in the kitchen mostly. Last time I’d been up in his room was, like, the day before. Thursday? It was there then.”

“Did anything else in the room look out of place? Did it look like anything else was taken?”

“Not that I could tell, but, like, I only looked in there for a second. But I saw right away that it was gone.”

“Why didn’t you tell Barry?” I asked him. “That’s the kind of thing he wanted to know.”

“It’s just, like I said, it might not mean anything. Adam said to me, one of the last things he said to me, was that his dad was kind of pissed about it.”

“What do you mean? Mr. Langley was pissed because you had an old computer from Agnes Stockwell’s house? Why would he give a shit about that? You two were always collecting old computers and messing around with them.”

“I think Adam must have mentioned to him what we found on it.”

“What the hell did you find on it?” I asked.

Derek let out a long sigh. “Like, all kinds of shit was on the hard drive. Bunch of school essays, some really lame game based on the first Star Trek series. You know, the one with Kirk and Spock and those guys. Really sad graphics, but kind of cool at the same time, you know.”

“Okay,” I said a bit impatiently, trying to move him along.

“And there was a resume, and letters he wrote when he was applying to Thackeray and other schools, you know, and some letters to a teacher he had back in high school, but the main thing is, there was a story.”

“A story? What, a short story? Something Agnes’s son wrote?”

“Not a short story. It’s, like, a novel. A whole bunch of chapters. Twenty of them, at least.”

I was shaking my head, trying to understand. “Okay, so there’s a book or something in that computer. Why didn’t you mention it to Barry?”

“I don’t know. I guess because it was kind of embarrassing.”

“Why?”

Derek showed me the closest thing to a grin that I’d seen from him in a couple of days. “It’s pretty dirty.”

I leaned up against the workbench. “Jesus, Derek. So why would Adam’s dad be pissed that you found a computer with some porno on it? I mean, it’s not your fault what’s on somebody else’s computer, and besides, Albert didn’t strike me as someone who’d have a fit about that kind of thing.”

Derek shrugged. “I don’t know. Adam never said. I mean, it wasn’t even like it had pictures with it or anything. Maybe if it was really obvious porn, he might be upset, but when it’s all written out, it doesn’t seem like it’s that big a deal. The thing is, the book was actually pretty cool. Even though it was dirty, it was pretty well written.”

“So Agnes’s son wrote high-class porno,” I mused, raising an eyebrow. “Maybe he just wanted to write his own stuff to whack off to.”

Derek blushed. He couldn’t have been shocked to learn that his father might know about such things. But I suppose my frankness had taken him by surprise. It must have made it easier for him to say, “I don’t know. It was all about sex and stuff, but it was written like an actual novel, so it really wasn’t high-class jackoff stuff, if, you know, if you get what I mean.”

I smiled at him. “I get what you mean. But really, I can’t imagine that someone would come into the Langleys’ house and kill them all over some porn story that some kid wrote more than ten years ago. That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“That was kind of why I didn’t mention it,” Derek said. “I figured I’d look like some kind of idiot.”

“And something else might have happened to that computer between the time you last saw it,” I said, “and the time the Langleys were killed.”

“I suppose.”

“Well,” I said, coming off the workbench, “since there’s no computer there now, there’s no way to read the story, or guess whether there was anything in it that would make somebody want to kill three people.”