Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“There’s good news?” I said.

“It’s still circumstantial, and a whole lot of conjecture. But it gives the prosecution a much better motive than we thought they had.”

“I’m screwed,” Derek said.

“No,” Natalie Bondurant said. “We just have our work cut out for us.”

Derek looked at his mother, his eyes red. “I’m sorry.”

“We all make mistakes,” Ellen said.

Ditto, I thought.

“I’m never going to get out of here,” he said.

“You can’t think that way,” I said. “Ms. Bondurant, she knows what she’s doing. We’re all doing everything we can. I need you out of here. I can’t cut all those yards without you.” I hoped I could make him smile, but it wasn’t to be.

“I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup.”

“You’re not a fuckup,” I told him.

He shook his head slowly, looked off into space. “I’ve always been a fuckup. I got myself into this by being a fuckup. Even if, somehow, you and Mom manage to get me out of here, I’ll just end up doing something else, because that’s just what I always do. I always fuck up. It’s like the only thing I’m good at.”

Behind us, a door rattled. “It’s time,” said the guard.

Natalie Bondurant was on her feet, telling all of us she’d be in touch, and heading for the door. Ellen and I snuck in some quick hugs and headed for the door. Ellen had slipped out ahead of me when Derek said, “Dad?” I turned.

His eyes met mine. “You know your paintings?”

I thought, Huh? But I said, “Yeah?”

“I know you’ve been thinking about getting rid of them, but I don’t want you to.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I think they’re really good,” Derek said. “I don’t know whether I’ve ever mentioned that.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“If I have to stay here, like, if they keep me in jail a whole long time, like for a few years or forever, would they let me hang one of them in my cell?”

I managed to hold it together long enough to get back in my truck, out of Ellen’s sight.

That night, they came for us.

The day itself wound down uneventfully after I got back from seeing Derek. Drew asked me how it went, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it.

At our last house, Drew was having some trouble getting one of the hand mowers to start. He yanked and yanked on the pull cord, pumped the primer button several times, yanked again, then wondered if he might have flooded the damn thing, then decided to give it one last pull.

He pulled so hard, he did something to the mechanism that retracts the cord, and suddenly he had four feet of it dangling over the mower.

“Well, shit,” he said when I walked over to see what had happened.

“No big deal,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, holding the grip at the end of the cord, spinning the line around like it was a skipping rope. “It just came out.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“I could fix it. I could take it apart, see what I’ve done, rewind the cord-well, if I had the right tools.”

“I’ve got everything I need in my shed,” I said. “I can do it.”

“If you want, I could come over later tonight, after. . after I make my mom’s dinner. You’ve got enough on your plate, Jim, without having to clean up after my mistakes.”

“All right then,” I said, and told Drew where I lived. But I felt he was entitled to a bit of a heads-up. “There’s a cop car out front, standing guard over the Langley house. They might have a couple of questions for you before they let you come up to our place.” Not that they’d been able to intercept Penny when she’d come by-twice.

“That’s okay,” said Drew.

“If you can make it, fine,” I said. “But if you can’t, don’t worry about it.”

Later, as I was dropping him off out front of his mother’s house, he reminded me of his intentions. “I’ll come round, if my mom doesn’t need me. Might be well after dinner.”

“Drew, either way, it’s cool,” I said.

He stood by the curb, watching me drive away, and in the rearview mirror I spotted him giving me a small salute as I rounded the corner.

When I pulled into our lane at 5:50, the police tape was gone from around the Langley house, and the police car that had been there for so many days was pulling out.

I put down the window so I could talk to the cop. It was the same young man who’d been covering most of the day shifts here since the murders.

“All done?” I said.

“I don’t have to babysit the place anymore,” he said. “They’re done with it as a crime scene. It’s kind of wrapped up. What with there being an arrest and all.” He cast his eyes down so he wouldn’t have to look into mine.

“Okay then,” I said, and took my foot off the brake and continued down to our house.

I had to unlock the door to get in. Ellen was still on guard, as was I. She’d arrived a few minutes earlier with a pepperoni and double-cheese pizza, still hot in the box. I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs, all the energy drained from me.

“You disappeared pretty fast after we left Derek,” she said.

I couldn’t tell her that I was about to fall apart and didn’t want her to see me when it happened. “I had to get back to Drew,” I said.

Ellen got out some plates. It didn’t matter how much of a shambles our lives had become these last few days, we weren’t going to eat pizza out of a box.

She said, “I heard you dropped by city hall today.”

I glanced up at her. “What’d you hear, exactly?”

“That you put a huge dent in our watering can.”

“I can bang it out.”

“Jim, honestly, doing that, trying to get even with Lance, that’s not going to help things.”

“That’s probably true,” I said. “But I felt better, briefly.”

“What if he decides to press charges?”

I shook my head. “He won’t. Not after what he did to me.” I swallowed. “But he might try getting back at me again.”

“Terrific,” Ellen said, picking at a stray piece of green pepper that had somehow gotten onto our pizza by mistake.

“What about you?” I asked. “What did you do, before we saw Derek?” I wanted to ask where she’d had lunch, whether she’d met with anyone.

“Mostly here and at the bank,” she said. “Then just a couple of errands after we saw Derek, and then grabbed the pizza on the way home. I couldn’t think about dinner.”

Besides, I thought, she’d had a good lunch, with Conrad. Most likely Conrad, anyway. Sometimes Illeana drove his Audi.

I decided, at least for now, to let it go. Maybe part of me didn’t want to know. I couldn’t deal with any more complications. She did, after all, still work for the man, and if she was entitled to meet with him at Thackeray, I supposed she had the right to meet with him at the Clover.

Ellen was ignoring her pizza. “It’s all I can do to eat,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about Donna Langley. I can’t believe what she did.”

And even though Donna had once, many years ago, tried to get me into bed, I too found what she had done with my son hard to comprehend.

“I feel. . I feel so angry with her,” Ellen said. “I wish I could go over there now, tell her what I think of her.”

“Whatever sins she may have committed,” I said, “she’s paid for all of them now.”

I sat down on the couch after dinner, turned on the news, and before I realized it, I was asleep. Out cold. Three nights with almost no sleep could do that to you.

I woke up around eight, Ellen sitting across from me. She smiled, first time I’d seen her do that in several days. “You’ve been snoring your head off,” she said.