Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

It didn’t last long. I don’t even know whether you could call it an out-and-out affair. A misstep, perhaps, on Ellen’s part. Getting caught up in the moment. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, and it doesn’t mean I didn’t think about responding in ways that would only have made the situation worse.

But it was nearly ten years ago, and the whole thing was, for the most part, behind us. It was a rough patch, I’m not glossing it over. For a while there, Ellen tried to assuage her guilt with drink. I don’t think she was ever a bona fide alcoholic, but she certainly was in a fog for several months there, and how she managed to do her job during that time, I have no idea. It was as though a small, slow-moving hurricane had settled on our house for several months. The turbulence was always there, but then Ellen, on her own, came to some kind of inner realization that she could not continue on the way she was going, and she stopped drinking. Just like that. That’s one thing I have to say about Ellen. When she decides it’s time to pull herself together, she does it. I remember, when her mother died, she was torn up pretty bad for a couple of weeks there, then one morning got up and said aloud, “Time to move on.”

But sometimes, while you were waiting for that moment, it could be a rough ride.

Once the storm had passed, and Ellen and I had found a way to forgive each other, life improved. We were both smart enough to know that what we had together was too good to throw away. We had a son. We weren’t going to ruin Derek’s life by splitting up.

Ellen still had regular dealings with Conrad Chase after the affair, but those became less of a worry once his book was bought by a big New York publisher, and he started moving in circles very far removed from ours. And then, while out in Hollywood for exploratory meetings about turning A Missing Part into a movie, he met Illeana Tiff, a B-movie actress. She had the big hair and the tits to match, but to dismiss her as an airhead was a mistake. She wasn’t a great actress and was smart enough to know she had a limited future in Hollywood. But hooking up with a famous writer was almost as good, so she came back to Promise Falls with Chase, and about a year later they were married.

Chase had so wormed his way into the college’s board that when President Kane Mortimer had a heart attack while snorkeling in Fiji, he made a strong push for the job and got it. By this time, Illeana had learned to tone down the hair and lower the winch on the boobs, and she fell comfortably into the role of the college president’s wife.

It seemed odd to many that Chase took that route. Being a college president had some cachet, no doubt about it, but not nearly as much as a famous writer. Upstate New York college presidents didn’t do talk shows, didn’t get invited to celebrity-filled parties, weren’t written about in The New Yorker.

But Conrad Chase had no follow-up to A Missing Part . For the first few years, when people asked, he claimed to be working on a new novel-supposedly his deal for A Missing Part included a follow-up book-but if he ever wrote it, it had yet to be published. Eventually, most people stopped asking, and when the rare one did, Conrad replied, “I’ve a college to run.”

The simple truth was, as far as I could tell, he was done with writing. But unlike me and my art, he’d managed to make a name for himself before packing it in.

I took the disc and the pages Derek had printed out for me and started walking back to the house. I hadn’t said anything to him when he asked me what I’d meant when I said I’d already read the book, and I didn’t say anything when he protested my showing the pages to Ellen, which it was clear, by the direction I was headed, I had every intention of doing.

Ellen was upstairs, stripping our bed. Even though it was Sunday, it wasn’t the kind of Sunday where you could sit down and relax and read the paper. We were all agitated, and Ellen’s way of dealing with that was to keep busy.

I extended the printed pages across the bed to her. She dropped the bedsheets she was holding and took them. She glanced at them without reading so much as a word and said, “What’s this?”

“Just have a read and see if it rings a bell,” I said.

“Can you just tell me what it’s-”

“Just read it.”

So she dropped her eyes to the pages and read. She got as far as the bottom of the first page and stopped.

“What’s the point of this?” she asked, looking up.

“You recognize it.”

“Of course I recognize it.” She was keeping her voice very even. I realized I was already going about this the wrong way. Ellen was going to think this was something personal about Conrad Chase, about what had happened so many years ago. She was going to think I’d chosen, after all this time, to open old wounds. That wasn’t the plan, although sometimes things turn out in ways you did not intend.

“It’s Chase’s book,” I said. I hardly needed to tell her which one. “Not word for word, I think. More like an unedited version, you know? But the same story, different title.”

“I already told you I recognize it,” she said. “How many other people have written about a guy who loses his cock and ends up with a pussy?”

Get to the point, I told myself.

“That just got printed off. It was on the hard drive of a computer that Agnes Stockwell gave Derek, which he gave to Adam to keep over at his house, and now it’s missing.”

Ellen stared at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Agnes Stockwell gave Derek a computer? That’s where he got that one he brought home a couple of weeks ago? If somebody told me that, I don’t remember.”

“We probably didn’t. It wasn’t a big deal, then.”

“Is it a big deal now?”

I took a breath. “You remember Brett Stockwell?”

Ellen nodded.

“Agnes saved all his stuff after he committed suicide, but it’s been so long, she’s finally clearing it out, at least the stuff that doesn’t hold any sentimental value. She had his old computer in her garage, and when she found out Derek’s into that kind of thing, she gave it to him. The novel, Conrad’s novel, what looks to be Conrad’s novel, is on the computer. And now that computer’s missing from the Langley house.” I paused, then added, “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

Again with the stare. Then, “Which part? That it was on the kid’s computer, or that the computer is missing?”

“All of it.”

“What kind of computer? A desktop? Not a laptop?”

“No, not a laptop,” I said. “The tower part.”

“And how the hell do you have a printout of it if the computer’s missing?”

“Derek had made a copy.”

Ellen sat down on the edge of the bed. “What are you suggesting? I can’t get my head around this. You must be suggesting something.”

“I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” I said. “I’m trying to get my head around it, too. But I can’t help but wonder, maybe Conrad isn’t the great literary genius everyone thinks he is. Maybe A Missing Part isn’t his.”

Ellen was speechless for a moment. It was, I had to admit, a somewhat stunning hypothesis, to be all professorial about it.

“Jesus, what are you saying?” she said. “That some kid wrote it? That’s ridiculous. That book was on the New York Times bestseller list.”

“I’m just putting it out there,” I said. “I’m just saying, it’s kind of a strange thing for it to be on that computer.”

“Maybe,” Ellen said, “he had a student who was such a fan, he typed it out, word for word. Or had a copy of it, a Word file or something. Did they offer books back then as e-books? Maybe Brett Stockwell downloaded it. Did you ever think of that?”