Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“You should have let me do it.”

“You already tried, didn’t you? While I was out this morning. You called but didn’t get him.”

“All right, so I wanted to talk to him before you did. Without all the added baggage that you’d bring to things. And if he hadn’t shown up with Illeana, I’d probably have done it before you got back.”

“I gave him a chance to explain,” I said. “I’d call that doing him a favor.”

“And?” Ellen asked. “What’d he say?”

“A lot of things. But none of them included any kind of explanation.”

“What do you mean, a lot of things? If he didn’t explain, what did he say?”

“He thinks this is personal. He thinks I’m going after him because of what happened between you two.”

Ellen started to say something and then stopped.

“I know that’s what you’re thinking, too,” I said. “But what do you think I did? That somehow I came up with this elaborate plan? That I arranged for Agnes Stockwell to have this computer that she could give to Derek, and then somehow I managed to get a copy of Conrad’s novel onto it, knowing Derek and Adam would eventually find it and Derek would show it to me, and then I could use it to start asking questions that would end up destroying Conrad’s reputation? Is that what you think I did? And I did it all because I was still bent out of shape because you fell into bed with that fucking great literary genius years ago? All these years, I’ve been putting this plan together? And if I planned all that, just how did the Langleys figure into it? Did I know they were going to be murdered, so I timed it just right to make the computer disappear when it happened, so somehow Conrad would be implicated? Because I’ll tell you, if I was able to pull all that off, I should be running the fucking CIA.”

“Enough!” Ellen screamed at me, grabbing her empty wineglass and shattering it against the side of the house. “Enough!”

I stopped.

We stood there on the back deck, a foot apart, facing each other but unable to look each other in the eye, the gulf between us as big as a football field.

“Look,” I said, “maybe it’s true that-”

But then there was the sound of a car racing down the driveway. We both turned our heads to see Derek driving Ellen’s Mazda up to the house. He hit the brakes a bit too hard and the car did a short slide in the gravel. Before he was out from behind the wheel, I could see his face was flushed with anger. He looked as red as Conrad had when he’d left.

“Those bastards!” he said.

He got out of the car and slammed the door and stormed toward the house. He tried to get past us as he crossed the deck, but I got in front of him and gently put my hand on his chest. His lips were held tightly together and I could hear the air whistling through his nostrils.

“Whoa,” I said. “Slow down, pardner. What’s going on?”

“Penny’s parents,” he said. “Fucking assholes.”

“What happened?” Ellen said. “The Tuckers? What did they say? What happened?”

Derek shook his head angrily. “I couldn’t believe them.”

“Just tell us what happened,” I said. I hoped to God there hadn’t been some kind of fight, that Derek hadn’t slugged Penny’s father or something. That was all we needed right about now.

“They wouldn’t let me see her,” he said. “I couldn’t get her on the phone, she wouldn’t answer her cell, and when I called the house her parents wouldn’t put her on, so I drove over there.”

“Why?” Ellen asked. “Why wouldn’t they let you see her?”

“They think-fuck, I don’t know what they think. It’s, like, I don’t know, I guess it’s not safe to know me because I live next door to a house where everybody got offed.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“Yeah, well, tell them.”

“So you got there,” Ellen said. “Then what happened?”

“I knocked on the door and Mrs. Tucker opened it and I asked for Penny and she said Penny couldn’t see me.”

“She say why?” I asked.

“I asked her. I said, ‘Why can’t Penny talk to me?’ And all she’d say is, ‘This isn’t a good time.’”

“I don’t get it,” Ellen said. “Because of what happened next door? They think she shouldn’t see you?”

I thought about that, tried to see it from the point of view of Penny’s parents. “If it were our daughter,” I said to Ellen, “maybe we’d be scared for her to come over here, to be this close to a place where something that bad happened.”

“What?” Ellen said. “You’re taking their side? They don’t want our son to see their daughter and you think that’s fine?”

I couldn’t win with Ellen today. “I’m not taking sides. I’m just trying to figure it out.”

“I don’t even know if it was that,” Derek said. “They were really weird. Then Mr. Tucker comes to the door and tells me to move along.”

“‘Move along’?” I said. “That’s what he said? ‘Move along’?”

“And I’m leaving and I see Penny up in her bedroom window, you know? And I look up there and give her this shrug, right?” He demonstrated. “Figuring she’d do that, too, like she was sorry her parents were being such assholes, but she doesn’t do anything, she just looks at me, and then her mom shows up at the window and pulls her away.”

“I’m going to call them,” Ellen said.

Almost in unison, Derek and I said, “No.” Derek added, “Jesus, no, don’t do that.”

“Let’s let it go for now,” I said. “We’ve got enough on our plates. We hardly need to get into a fight with Penny’s family.”

“They have no right to treat Derek that way,” Ellen said, looking as though she wanted to hit something. If there’d been another wineglass handy, I think she’d have thrown it against the house, too. Suddenly, she threw up her hands. “I can’t deal with this,” she said, and went back into the house.

I stood out there with Derek, put a hand on his shoulder. He shook it off.

“What?” I said. “What are you pissed with me for?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m just, fuck, I’m just so mad.”

I waited a few seconds. “Okay,” I said. “I can understand that. But everyone, not just us, but everyone even remotely connected to this, everyone’s feeling it. People are scared. Somebody killed the Langleys, and people are scared about what’s going to happen next. The Tuckers, they’re probably scared, you’re scared, your mom is scared, I’m scared.”

He took a few breaths. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

“You okay?” I asked. “Because I need to ask you something.”

“What about?”

“The computer.”

He looked at me, as though he’d already forgotten about the computer, even though it had only been a few hours since he’d filled me in on what he’d found on it. “What about it?”

“After Agnes gave it to you, did you tell anyone you had it? Or what you’d found on it?”

He didn’t need time to think. “No. Nobody. Well, nobody other than Adam.”

“Okay,” I said. “What about Penny? Did you tell her?”

“No, I. . I don’t think I told her.”

“Are you sure?”

“I mean, I might have told her we found some book on it. But not much more than that.”

“Would she have told anyone?”

“I don’t see why. I mean, she probably didn’t care. I’m always talking about shit Adam and I find on old computers, and I don’t think she’s ever listened before.”

“What about Adam?” I asked him. “Who might he have told?”

“Why? What’s the deal?”

“Derek, figure it out. If-and it’s still a big if-but if someone went into that house for that computer, they had to know it was there. So do you think Adam told anybody about it?”