Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

As I was putting the trimmer back into the truck, I heard the front door open and there was Agnes with a tall glass of lemonade, beads of moisture dripping down the side. I walked up the drive and took the glass from her.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked her.

She had a couple of garden-type chairs flanking the front door. “Of course not, Mr. Cutter,” she said. I was going to invite her to sit down, too, but she was in the other chair before I had a chance. I suppose, when you lived alone, it was nice to have someone to talk to once in a while, even if it was just the guy who cut the grass.

“Call me Jim,” I said.

“Jim,” she said quietly.

“This lemonade really hits the spot,” I said, and that was the truth. Her cat brushed up against my leg. “What’s his-her? — name?”

“That’s Boots,” Agnes Stockwell said.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a cat like her,” I said.

“She’s pretty hideous,” Agnes said, “but I love her.”

I took another drink of lemonade, nearly polished off the glass. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. If I looked like a sweaty mess to her, she didn’t seem to mind.

“Did you hear about that lawyer?” Agnes asked me. “The one who was killed? Along with his wife and his son?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s sort of out where you live, isn’t it?”

“It is out our way,” I admitted. “A terrible thing.”

Agnes was shaking her head. “Oh yes, just awful. It makes you think. You know, things like that just don’t happen around here.”

I nodded. “Pretty rare event. Like you say, makes you think.” We both took a moment to do just that. And then I said, “My son wanted me to pass on his thanks again for the computer.”

“Oh, that was my pleasure,” Agnes said. “I’m just glad to see someone else get some use out of it. I wasn’t sure it would be good to anyone, being so old and all. I was surprised he’d even want it.”

“The older the better,” I said. “He’s a tinkerer with that kind of stuff. He’s lucky you hadn’t already given it to anybody else. You’ll have all the boys in the neighborhood coming here to see if you’ve got any other computers to give away.”

“I don’t really know that many. I’m just glad I found someone who could take it.”

“You didn’t happen to mention to anyone that you gave Derek that computer, did you?”

Agnes appeared puzzled by the question. “Why no, I don’t think I did. Why?”

Had to think fast. “I was just thinking, if you had, you might get others coming by, seeing what else you had to give away.”

She nodded. That made sense to her. “Oh no, no troubles like that. Maybe, someday, I’ll have a little garage sale. Every summer, I think about doing that but never get around to it. What did you say your boy’s name is again?”

“Derek.”

“He seems like a good boy.”

“He is,” I said. “He has his moments, but he’s a great kid.”

“They all have their moments,” Agnes said. “Brett certainly did. I felt a little guilty, giving away his computer, but what can you do? You can’t hang on to these things forever. He had one of those other computers, those little ones that fold up, but I must have gotten rid of that a long time ago. I don’t even remember what happened to it. His clothes, I didn’t hang on too long to those. Gave them to the poor. I think that’s what he would have wanted.”

“I’ll bet he was a good son,” I said.

That sad smile again. “Oh yes. There’s not a day. .”

She let the sentence hang there a moment. “Not a day?” I said.

She sighed. “There’s not a day I don’t wonder. Wonder why he did what he did. You know what happened to Brett, don’t you, Mr.-Jim?”

“I had heard,” I said, “that he took his own life.”

She nodded. “I can’t even go downtown. I can’t go near the falls. I could pop into town and drop off my property tax payment, but I just mail it in. I can’t look at the falls, don’t even want to hear it.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I try not to blame myself. But even now, it’s hard not to. I should have been able to read the signs. But I swear, I never noticed anything. I didn’t see it coming. Just that last day or so, just before he killed himself. He seemed just fine right up to that point, but that last day, he seemed so troubled, so upset about something, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. That’s why I have such a hard time forgiving myself. I didn’t appreciate just how unhappy he was then. And yet, he was my whole life after my husband died. There must have been signs in the weeks leading up to that day, but I didn’t spot them. How could a mother not see that her son was that troubled, before it was too late?”

I shook my head slowly in sympathy. “We never know everything about our own children,” I said. “There’re always things they keep from us. I’m sure Derek’s no different.” I tried a light chuckle. “Sometimes there are things you don’t want to know.”

Agnes stared out into her yard, saying nothing.

I said, “Tell me about Brett. What was he interested in? What did he like to do?”

“He wasn’t like the other boys,” she said. “He was-” She stopped suddenly. “Would you like to see a picture of him?”

“Of course.”

She excused herself, was gone no more than half a minute, and returned with a framed high school photo. “That was his graduating year, it would have been four years before he, well, it’s pretty much how I remember him.”

Brett Stockwell was a good-looking young man. Sandy-colored hair that came down over his ears, brown eyes, fairly unblemished skin for a boy his age. He had a sensitive, artistic look about him. Not jock material.

“I think I can see your eyes in him,” I said.

She took the picture back and studied it, as though looking at it for the first time. “He looked a lot like his father. Took after him, I think. Borden was a small man, only five-five, and Brett had that same kind of build.”

“You were saying he wasn’t like the other boys.”

“He didn’t care much about sports. Never went out for football, didn’t care much about that stuff. He liked to read. And he loved movies. But not the ones everyone else liked. He liked the ones with the words at the bottom.”

“Subtitles.”

“That’s right. Movies in different languages. He liked to watch those. He had an appreciation for things that other people didn’t care much about.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “We don’t need everyone to be the same. What kind of world would that be?” I had another drink of my lemonade.

“And he loved to write,” Agnes Stockwell said. “He was always writing things.”

“What sort of things?” I asked.

“Oh, you name it. When he was little, he liked to write stories about going to other planets. People traveling through time, things like that. And poems. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems. Not the kind that rhyme, though. Poetry’s not like it was when I was a girl. It doesn’t have to rhyme anymore. Doesn’t even seem like poetry if it doesn’t rhyme. It’s just a bunch of sentences otherwise.”

“I can’t say as I know a lot about poetry. Ellen, she likes to read poetry sometimes.”

“Is that your wife?”

“Yes.”

“You should bring her around sometime. I’d love to meet her.”

“I should do that. I think she’d like to meet you, too. She knows you as the one who gives us lemonade.”

She smiled, then, “Sometimes, on my birthday, Brett would write me a poem. He’d try to make those ones rhyme because he knew I didn’t understand the other ones as well. They were a bit more like the ones you find in greeting cards, you know?”