Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“I had a score to settle,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it. There’s days I wouldn’t mind taking a frying pan to his head myself. What did you use, anyway? Delia said you had a watering can with you.”

“That’s right.”

“Fucking hell. Now the lefties will want everyone to register their watering cans. All I wanted to say is, if you’re in a pissing match with Lance, don’t do it in my sandbox. Understand what I’m saying?”

“I hear ya,” I said.

“You ever think maybe you have a bit of a problem? You keep things all bottled up, you talk in monosyllables, then every once in a while you just explode.” A chortling noise. “Nobody knows better than me.”

“I’ll join a group.”

“There’s the spirit.” Then, adopting a softer tone, “Hey, Cutter, about your kid.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a damn shame. I see you got Bondurant. Good lawyer, and a pretty nice piece of ass, too, from what I hear, not that that’s particularly relevant to you.”

“Not really.”

“Listen, you hang in there. There’s no way a kid of yours could have done that.”

Randall caught me off guard in a way he never had before. It took me a moment to find the words, but I managed to say “Thank you.”

“Okay. Later.” And the mayor hung up.

“Who was that?” asked Drew, who’d been adding gas from a red plastic container to one of the lawn mowers, and had been in earshot the whole time.

“The mayor,” I said.

“We supposed to cut his grass, too?” Drew asked.

Before I could answer, the cell phone, still in my hand, went off again. This time I glanced at the tiny screen and saw that it was Ellen.

“We can see Derek,” she said. “Half an hour, three-thirty.”

“Have you talked to Natalie? Does she know any more about the earring?”

“I saw her briefly, but I don’t have any news. She’s going to meet us when we go in to see Derek.”

“Anything else?” I asked. I was wondering whether she’d mention her lunch at the Clover.

“No, except that there’s going to be about eight hundred and fifty bucks left in our retirement fund.”

I glanced at my watch. “I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes,” I said, and closed the phone.

Drew said he could look after this property while I left with the truck for the Promise Falls jail. I looked a fright, but no one seemed to mind when I got there. Ellen and Natalie Bondurant were already waiting for me. We were taken to a small meeting room and told to wait while a guard went and fetched Derek.

It was all I could do not to weep when he walked in. He was pale, there were circles under his eyes, his shoulders sagged, and he had a bandage on his chin.

Ellen threw her arms around him first, and then I got a hug in before we were both reprimanded by a jail official standing over by the door. No personal contact allowed, he told us.

“What happened to you?” Ellen asked, reaching out to his bandage without actually touching it.

“Some guy shoved me into a wall,” he said.

“A guard?” Natalie asked.

“No,” Derek said. “One of the prisoners. I didn’t move out of his way fast enough.”

To Natalie, I said, “What can we do about that? Can’t we get him into some sort of protective-”

She put up her hand to stop me. “I’ll look into it. I want to get started. We’ve got a lot to cover. Derek,” she said, leaning over the narrow table toward our son, “there are a few things we need to work out here.”

“Like what?”

“The police found an earring. A peace sign. They’re testing it for DNA, but tell me now. Is it yours?”

He nodded. “Probably.”

“When did you lose it?”

He seemed a bit bewildered. “I don’t know. Two, three weeks ago or so, I think.”

“Not the night you were hiding in the basement? When the Langleys were killed?”

He shook his head. Of this he seemed sure. “No, before then. Where’d they find it?”

Natalie, Ellen, and I exchanged glances before Natalie said, “In the Langleys’ bedroom. Caught down in the dust ruffle.”

Derek’s eyes darted back and forth.

“Plus,” Natalie Bondurant said, “they found your prints on the dresser.”

“Okay, wait a minute. I might have touched the dresser the night they got killed.”

I broke in. “You didn’t tell Barry you were in there.”

Derek sighed, looked briefly up to the ceiling tiles. “Shit, I just went in there for a second. I just walked around, and I think I touched it.”

“You sure you didn’t lose the earring then?” Ellen asked.

He was silent a moment. “No, not then.”

“Then how do you think it got into that room?” Natalie asked.

Derek’s eyes began to well up with tears. He looked at his mother and said, “Do we really have to get into this?”

“We really have to get into this,” Natalie said.

“It’s just. . really hard to talk about.”

Ellen did her best to give him a reassuring smile. “Ms. Bondurant can’t help you if you aren’t completely honest with her. I know it may be hard to tell her some things with us here, and if you need us to leave-”

“No,” he said. “I guess not. I mean, shit, you’ll find out sooner or later anyway, the way things have been going lately.”

Fasten your seatbelts, I thought.

“I kind of, I guess I kind of had sex with Mrs. Langley,” Derek said.

If it had been left to me and Ellen, there might have been a long, stunned silence, but Natalie dove right in with her questions. “When was this, Derek?”

“Like, three weeks ago or so.”

“One occasion, or several?”

“Just once.”

“Tell us how this happened.”

Derek took a long breath. “I’d gone over there to see Adam, but it turned out he was out with his dad, they’d gone to a movie or something. But Mrs. Langley invited me in anyway. She did that a lot, like she wanted to have someone to talk to, you know? She was always kind of nice to me. So I came in, and she made me a sandwich and opened a bag of chips, and she sat down at the table with me, just talking about all kinds of stuff, and then she was asking me about my girlfriend, you know, Penny?”

We nodded.

“And Mrs. Langley started talking about how kids nowadays, how, you know, they’re more sexually active, and she started asking me whether I was careful, about getting a girl pregnant, and about diseases and stuff, and I told her that, technically speaking, I really hadn’t, you know, hadn’t actually done it yet.” He flashed me a look, like maybe I’d be disappointed, I don’t know. “I said I’d just done some stuff, you know, but not the actual thing.”

“Okay,” said Natalie.

“She asked me if I was nervous about that, about what it would be like the first time, and I guess I said maybe a little, and she said that she might be able to help me out with that nervousness.” He paused, working up to it. “She said, like, if I never told anyone, she could give me kind of a lesson, that it would be our secret.”

We’d been living next door to Mrs. Robinson.

“So you went up to her bedroom,” Natalie Bondurant said.

Derek nodded. “She. . showed me.”

Ellen said, “She raped you.”

Derek screwed up his face. “Not. . really, Mom.”

Natalie again: “Derek, did you ever tell anyone about this? Before now? Before this very moment?”

“No. Not anybody. Nobody.”

“Do you think Mrs. Langley told anyone? Do you think it’s possible that Mr. Langley could have found out about this somehow?”

He shook his head. “I kind of think he might have said something to me.”

“But it’s not something we can prove,” Natalie said. “And now we know how the DNA test is going to come back on that earring. We might have been able to come up with some sort of story of how it got there, but with your fingerprints on the dresser, you’re placed in that room. The prosecution’s probably already working up a theory, that somehow Albert Langley found out you’d slept with his wife, that there was some kind of confrontation that night, one that ended with all of them dead.” She paused. “The good news is-”