Linwood Barclay: Too Close to Home

That was when Derek heard the first shot. Then Adam, screaming. “Dad! Dad!”

Mrs. Langley, sounded like from up on the second floor: “Albert! Albert! What’s going on?”

And then Adam: “Mom! Don’t come-”

That was when Derek heard the second shot. The sound of something-someone-falling down some stairs.

Then, footsteps running through the house. At least two sets, frantic running, from the front of the house to the back. Only lasting a second or two.

Derek heard a third shot, then someone tumbling down the half flight of stairs toward the back door.

After that, it was very quiet.

Derek realized he was trembling. His teeth were nearly chattering. He heard more footsteps going through the house, slower now, calm steps, measured steps. They came down the half flight of stairs, paused, turned, came all the way down to the basement. Couldn’t hear the person walking around that well now, not on the basement broadloom, which was laid over cement. But he could sense someone in the room. The person who had fired the shots. A killer. A few feet away, on the other side of the couch. Derek could hear shallow, rapid breathing.

He clamped his jaw tight together, determined to stop the chattering. He wondered if the killer could hear the blood pulsing in his temple.

Then the person went back up the stairs, turned out the light. The front door opened and closed, then a car door, same thing. Open, then slamming shut. A moment later, tires rolling away on gravel.

Derek waited about five minutes, slithered his way back out from behind the couch, crossed the rec room, and went up the stairs to the landing at the back door, just enough moonlight streaming through the window to show Adam lying there, his legs still splayed across the stairs, his head in a pool of black blood.

Derek delicately stepped over him, his hand shaking as he turned back the deadbolt, opened the door, and ran off into the night.

The night they killed our neighbors, the Langleys, we never heard a thing.

It was warm and humid that evening, so we’d closed all the windows and had the air conditioner cranked up as high as it would go. Even at that, we couldn’t get the temperature in the house much below 76. This was late July, and we’d been suffering through a heat wave the last week, the thermometer hitting mid-90s pretty much every day, except for Wednesday, when it hit 100. Even some rain early in the week had failed to break it. It wasn’t getting much below the mid-80s even after the sun went down.

Normally, it being a Friday night, I might have stayed up a little later, even have been up when it happened, but I had to work Saturday. That rain had set me back with all the customers I do yard work for. So Ellen and I had packed it in pretty early, nine-thirty or so. Even if we’d been up, we’d probably have been watching TV, so it’s pretty unlikely we’d have heard anything.

It’s not like the Langleys’ place is right next door. It’s the first house in off the highway along our shared driveway. Once you pass their place, it’s still another fifty or sixty yards or so before you get to our house. You can’t see our place from the highway. Homes out here on the outskirts of Promise Falls in upstate New York have some space between them. You can see the Langleys’ house up the lane, through the trees, but we never heard their parties, and if the racket I make tuning up lawn mowers ever bothered them, they never said anything about it.

I was up around six-thirty Saturday morning. Ellen, who didn’t have to go into her job up at the college, stirred as I moved into a sitting position on the side of the bed.

“Sleep in,” I said. “You don’t have to get up.” I stood up, wandered down to the foot of the bed, saw that the book Ellen had been reading before she’d turned out the light had fallen to the floor. It was just one of a stack of books on her bedside table. You have to do a lot of reading when you organize a college literary festival.

“It’s okay,” she mumbled resignedly, turning her face into the pillow and pulling the covers tighter. “I’ll put some coffee on. You’re just going to wake me up getting dressed anyway.”

“Well,” I said, “if you’re already getting up, some eggs would be nice.” Ellen said something into the pillow I couldn’t hear, but it didn’t sound friendly. I continued, “If I heard you correctly, that it’s no trouble, does that mean you could fry up some bacon, too?”

She turned her head. “Is there a union for slaves? I want to sign up.”

I got up and walked to the window, flipped open the blinds to let the early morning sun in.

“Oh God, make it go away,” Ellen said. “Jesus, Jim, shut those.”

“Looks like another hot one,” I said, leaving the blinds open. “I was kind of hoping it might rain, then I’d have an excuse not to work today.”

“Would it kill those people if their grass missed getting cut one week?” Ellen asked.

“They pay for a weekly service, hon,” I said. “I’d rather work a Saturday than have to give them refunds.”

Ellen had no comeback for that. We weren’t quite living hand-to-mouth, but neither were we willing to throw money away. And a lawn service, especially in this part of the country, was definitely a seasonal business. You made your living from spring to fall, unless you diversified by putting a blade on the front of your pickup and clearing driveways in the winter. I’d been hunting for a used blade. The winters around here could be fierce. Couple of years back, over in Oswego, they had snow up to the first-floor roofs.

I’d only been running a lawn service for a couple of summers now, and I needed to find ways to make more money. It wasn’t exactly my dream job, and it certainly wasn’t what I wanted for myself when I was a young guy starting out, but it beat what I’d most recently left behind.

Ellen took a breath, let out a long sigh, and threw back the covers. She reached, reflexively, as she did occasionally, for where her pack of smokes used to be on the bedside table, but she’d quit the habit years ago, and there was nothing there. “Breakfast is coming, Your Majesty,” she said. She reached down for the book on the floor and said, “I can’t believe this was a bestseller. Hard to believe a novel about wheat isn’t gripping. There’s a reason they set a lot of books in cities, you know. There are people there. Characters .”

I took a couple of steps toward the bathroom, winced, put my hand on my lower back.

“You okay?” Ellen asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I did something to myself yesterday, I was holding the weed whacker and turned funny or something.”

“You’re an old man in a young man’s game, Jim,” Ellen said, putting on her slippers and throwing on a housecoat.

“Thanks for reminding me,” I said.

“I don’t have to remind you. You’ve got your aching back for that.” She shuffled out of the bedroom as I went into the bathroom to shave.

I took a look at myself in the mirror. I had some sunburn on my whiskered face. I’d been trying to remember to use sunscreen, wear a hat with a visor, but the day before, it got so hot I threw the hat in the truck at one point, and must have sweated the sunscreen clean off. I still didn’t look too bad for forty-two, and as tired as I felt, I was probably in better shape than two years ago, when I spent most of my day sitting in an air-conditioned Grand Marquis, driving around Promise Falls, opening doors for an asshole, being a glorified gofer without an ounce of self-respect. Since then, I’d lost thirty pounds, I was gaining back upper-body strength I’d lost over the last decade, and I’d never slept better in my entire life. Coming home every night dead tired had a lot to do with that. Getting up in the morning, though, that could be a challenge. Like today.