Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

Or maybe tapping into someone else’s creativity, I thought.

“Anyway, what’s on your mind?” he asked, putting the Promise Falls painting at the front of the pile.

“I had something I think should be passed on to Barry Duckworth,” I said, “but Ellen felt you were entitled to know about it first.”

“Really?” His eyebrows rose a notch. “And what might this be about?”

“You remember a student you had, about ten years ago, by the name of Brett Stockwell?”

“Of course,” he said without hesitation. I guess I was hoping he’d briefly pretend to forget, say the boy’s name a couple of times like he was struggling to remember. “Brilliant student, absolutely brilliant,” he offered. “A terrible tragedy. He committed suicide, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“I was stunned. Although, at the same time, I wasn’t totally shocked.”

“Really? Why was that?”

“Sometimes, very creative people are very troubled as well. Creativity’s more than a gift, Jim. It can be a curse. I don’t have to tell you.” He gestured again at my paintings. “You’ve had your downslopes, am I right? Times with the black dog? You have all these thoughts you want to get out, but if there’s not an avenue, no outlet, that can be terribly damaging.”

“So you’re saying you saw signs. With Brett.”

Conrad shrugged. “Well, Brett was moody. I remember that. Hard on himself. Like whatever he did, it wasn’t good enough. That line, that idea in your head, it never seems quite as good when you get it down on paper.” He paused. “So what makes you bring up Brett Stockwell?”

“Did you ever know his mother, Agnes?”

“I met her at the funeral, of course. I went to the service for Brett, and I can still see her there, standing over his coffin, crying. And so alone. Her husband was already dead.”

“She’s one of our customers,” I said. “Derek and I look after her yard.”

“Isn’t that nice,” Conrad said.

God, I just wanted to kill him right then and there. Get my lawn tractor out and run right over the smug fuck.

“She says you were very kind to her after her son died. Sent her flowers, even some concert tickets.”

He nodded, remembering, but there was something in his look that told me he was unnerved that I knew this.

“Agnes, she’s hung on to a lot of Brett’s things over the years,” I continued, “couldn’t bear to part with them, but a few weeks ago, she gave his old computer to Derek. Derek and Adam, the Langley boy, they liked to mess around with old computers.”

“Is that so,” Conrad said. He was running his hand again over the hedge trimmer, looping his finger over the trigger, squeezing, nothing happening because it wasn’t plugged in.

“Brett, he was evidently quite the writer, as you already know, having taught him. And on this computer, there’s an entire book.”

Slowly, Conrad said, “That’s not too surprising. I’d be surprised if there weren’t a book, or two or three, on his computer. He had ambitions to become a novelist.”

“All the boys found was the one, as far as I know. It’s about a man named Nicholas who wakes up one day to find his plumbing a bit rearranged.”

Conrad’s eyebrows floated upward. “No shit? Seriously?”

“He wakes up with a pussy instead of a dick.”

“I’m familiar with the story,” Conrad said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“The computer that this was on, it was in the Langley house as recently as a couple of days ago. But it’s not there now.”

Conrad remained stone-faced. “I still don’t understand.”

“Frankly, neither do I. How does your book end up on a dead kid’s computer? How does it end up there a couple of years before your book even comes out? So I was thinking, it would make sense to bring this to Barry’s attention. Let him figure it out. But Ellen said I should talk to you about it first. That there might be a very simple explanation.” I paused. “As a courtesy.”

Conrad’s cheeks looked flushed, but his voice remained very even. “I don’t want to seem incredibly thick here, Jim, but I’m still having a little trouble understanding this. If this so-called computer you say your son was given is missing, how can you be so informed about what’s on it?”

I swallowed. “Because my son made a-” And then I stopped myself. I was overplaying my hand.

“Made a copy?” Conrad said.

I didn’t say anything. But I didn’t have to. I had a lousy poker face. Conrad understood correctly what I had been about to say.

Conrad said, “You know what I think, Jim? I think this is complete and total horseshit, that’s what I think. And I’m surprised at you. I thought you’d moved on. I thought you were enough of a man to leave the past in the past. Ellen, she’s a wonderful woman, but she means nothing to me now and she hasn’t for years. It was a fleeting relationship, a triviality. We have a completely professional relationship now. She’s a valuable member of the Thackeray staff. She puts together an annual literary event that makes this town proud. But I am not having an affair with her. I have a wife. A beautiful wife.”

Funny, how you could hate a guy for screwing your wife, but at the same time be enraged by his insinuation that she wasn’t as desirable as the woman he had now.

“Jim, I’ve tried with you, I’ve really tried, to let bygones be bygones, to be a friend to you, to consider you a friend-”

“Don’t put yourself out,” I said.

“As I was saying, I’ve tried to make things civil between us, not just for the sake of my working relationship with Ellen, but for all of us, as reasonable human beings. So why you’d choose, at this time, years later, to concoct some scheme to discredit me, well, it’s completely beyond me. I am astonished. I’m flabbergasted. And let me make something perfectly clear to you. If you attempt some feeble scheme to try to damage my reputation, I will come back at you with everything I have. I will crush you. I will destroy you. It’ll be fucking shock and awe, my friend. And although I’ll feel terrible about this, there’s no way Ellen won’t be dragged down with you when it happens. And that’ll be a terrible shame. But at least now you know where things stand. I will not be ruined by some petty, lawn-cutting cuckold.”

There it was again. Was it because it almost sounded like “cock” that the word packed such a punch?

I held his gaze through the entire speech. When he was done, I said, “Why’d you only write the one book, Conrad? Your ghostwriter take a fall?”

I thought he’d get angry, but he grinned. “Is that what you think? Oh, Jim, I’d have thought you were above all this. The fact is, I’m just completing a book, something I’ve been working on for years. My New York agent’s up at her place on Saratoga Lake and she’s dropping by this week to fill me in on all the publishers who are fighting to see who gets to read it first. Want me to find out, while she’s up here, if she represents failed artists who get by doing people’s lawns?”

“What’s going on?” It was Illeana, standing just outside the garage door. “What are you two fighting about?”

What the hell did you say to him?” Ellen asked me as Conrad and Illeana sped up the lane in his shiny new Audi. “He looked like thunder after you were done talking to him.”

“Maybe I should have found a more polite way to suggest that he ripped off some dead kid’s novel,” I said.

“This is terrific,” Ellen said, shaking her head. “Just fucking terrific. I guess I can start looking for a new job tomorrow.”

“Hey, I was only doing what you suggested,” I said. “I talked to him before going to Barry.”