Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“I took my mom’s car,” she said. “It’s parked on the side of the road, down a ways.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said, “before you go.”

“Okay.”

“Did Derek tell you about the computer he got from Agnes Stockwell, the one with the novel on it? That he and Adam had been reading?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He said it was really weird.”

“Did you read it?”

“No. I wasn’t really interested, you know?”

“Did you tell anyone about the book, that Derek and Adam had found it? Any of your own friends, your parents?”

She thought a moment. “I’m not sure. I mean, I’ve told them about Derek’s hobby. My dad one time, he even got Derek to restart his computer, when it was all frozen? I thought that would make my dad like him better, but it didn’t really last.”

“So you’re saying you might have told them?”

“Well, if I did, I sure didn’t tell them what it was about.”

“Sure,” I said. “I understand. Okay. Thanks. It was good of you to come by. We’ll tell Derek you were asking about him.”

Penny nodded, sniffed, wiped a tear from her cheek, and said goodbye. As Ellen walked her to the door my cell phone went off.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Hey,” a man’s voice said. “It’s Drew? Drew Lockus?”

It took me a moment. The man who’d pulled my tractor off me. “Yeah, Drew, how’s it going?”

“Look,” he said, “I talked it over with my mom, and she said if I want to earn a few extra bucks cutting grass, it’s okay with her, so yeah, if you still want me.”

“Sure,” I said. As long as I didn’t have more clients cancel like the Putnams, I thought. “Why don’t I pick you up out front of your place tomorrow morning, eight o’clock?”

“Okay,” he said. He sounded more resigned than pleased by the prospect. “See you then.”

I’d barely set the phone down on the counter when it rang again. I flipped it open. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Cutter, Natalie Bondurant, returning your call.”

I took a second to collect my thoughts. “Thanks for calling. Hey, Derek’s girlfriend, Penny Tucker, was just here. I think she’s got things to say that could help Derek.”

“She’s already on my list. I’ll set something up. As for your question, the one you left on my voicemail, the answer is yes.”

My heart sank.

“Officially, yes, New York State has the death penalty, but in 2004 the courts ruled it unconstitutional, so even if it’s on the books, it’s not being used.”

“I see.” Ever since Lance had raised the likelihood of my son facing the death penalty, I hadn’t been able to put it out of my mind. But I’d not shared my thoughts with Ellen.

“So, on that score,” Natalie said, “you can rest easy.”

“What do you mean, ‘on that score’? Is there something else?”

“The police found an earring. Very small, a peace sign.”

“Go on.”

“Did Derek lose one recently?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

Ellen was mouthing, “What?” I held up my hand to her.

“The police found one in the Langley house.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to panic. “He’s already admitted he was there. How does a found earring make things any worse?”

“First of all, it’s not yet confirmed that it’s his. They’re doing DNA analysis on it.”

“They can get that?” I asked. “Off an earring?”

“They’re working on it.”

“But I still don’t understand. So what if they prove it’s his? He’s admitted he was in the house.”

Natalie Bondurant paused. “It’s where they found it in the house.”

I felt my heart skip a beat. “Go on.”

“In Donna and Albert Langley’s bedroom. In the folds of the bed skirt. And Derek’s fingerprints are on the bedroom dresser.”

I felt numb.

Natalie said, “If the DNA test comes back and says that’s Derek’s earring, the prosecutor’s going to wonder just how it got there. And before you know it, they’re going to have a whole lot more interesting motive than what they’ve got now.”

"What the hell does it mean?” Ellen asked when I’d filled her in on what Natalie Bondurant had said.

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. The earring probably isn’t even his.”

“It looked like his,” I said.

“But what would it be doing in Albert and Donna’s bedroom?” she asked. “Maybe Derek lost it someplace in the house, Donna found it and took it into her room, dropped it or misplaced it.”

“It was right in with the sheets or something, the bed skirt,” I said.

“The bed skirt?” Ellen said. “How’s that possible? Someone must have put it there.”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I could hear the sense of defeat in my voice. What I kept wanting to do, instinctively, was go to the bottom of the stairs and call Derek down to offer up some sort of explanation. But we’d have to wait until we were next able to visit Derek and ask him questions, or his lawyer had more information for us.

“What if this DNA test proves it’s Derek’s?” Ellen asked. “What then?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said.

“You know what they’ll say?” Ellen said. “Barry? And that prosecutor? They’ll probably say Mrs. Langley dragged our son into bed or something crazy like that. That that was what Derek got in a fight with the Langleys about, not his hiding in their house.”

I felt despair overtaking me. But I was supposed to be the rock.

Ellen said, “They wouldn’t think that, would they? No one would seriously think Donna would have gone to bed with our son?”

I recalled what Barry had told me, what Donna had supposedly confessed to her sister. That she’d slept with the neighbor.

Maybe she hadn’t been exaggerating after all.

Ellen opened the fridge, took out two bottles of white wine, set them on the counter. She got the corkscrew out of the drawer and opened both of them. Christ almighty, I thought, how much is she planning to drink?

She unwound the corks from the corkscrew, tossed them across the counter, then turned both bottles upside down over the sink and drained them. “I need my mind clear to get myself through this,” she said.

If she wanted to be the rock from here on, that was okay by me.

She stood the empty bottles back on the counter, turned to me, and said, “I think we’re being punished.”

“What?”

“For things we’ve done, or not done, in the past. What’s happened to us now, it’s some kind of retribution. We’re being made to pay.”

I asked, “I don’t get you. For things we’ve done in this life, or past ones?”

She walked out of the kitchen without answering.

It was another sleepless night, at least for me. For most of it, I stared at the ceiling, unable to see anything but my son in a cell. This was his third night behind bars, away from us, and it still didn’t seem possible that all of this was happening to our family.

I was only able to stop worrying about one thing when I moved on to worry about another. I couldn’t seem to focus on any one aspect of our troubles because there seemed to be so many of them.

Derek, of course, was my primary concern. But because I remained convinced he was not responsible for the Langleys’ deaths, my thoughts kept returning to what might have actually happened there that night, and who pulled the trigger.

One thought that kept coming back to me was whether the murder of the Langleys was a mistake. Not in the obvious sense. Of course it was a mistake; a tragedy, a horrific event.

I was thinking a different kind of mistake.

And about our mailbox. With our name on it. And no mailbox with the name “Langley” on it.