Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

I felt a headache coming on when Barry came down to talk to me. Again, I was dragged away from Drew so that I could be spoken to privately.

“What are you doing with that guy?” Barry asked me, tipping his head in the direction of my new employee.

“He was in the right place at the right time, more than once,” I said. “You ever think things happen for a reason? I didn’t used to, now I’m not so sure. I had an accident out front of his mother’s house, he helped me out, I found out he needed work and I gave him some.”

“He robbed a bank,” Barry said.

“So you said. I’m not planning to get him to do my taxes or make my deposits.”

Barry shrugged. “Your call.” He cleared his throat, a signal that he was about to switch gears. “Tell me about this little spat you had with Lance,” he said.

“The other day, the mayor took me for a drive, and when we got back, Lance was pushing my buttons and my elbow found its way into his stomach. He got back at me a couple of days later. Hid behind my trailer when I was out on a job, sucker punched me, left me rolled up in a ball on the street. And then I returned the favor while he was reading the sports pages.”

“You two never did get along.”

“No.”

“We found somebody lives next door says she heard something yesterday, late afternoon, just before six. She was getting ready to watch the news, heard a shot, didn’t hear another, didn’t think another thing about it.”

“Just like you said,” I said.

“I suppose you can account for your whereabouts at that time?” Barry asked.

“I’ve got a witness who can put me at my place right about then,” I said.

“Not the dead guy I found in your shed, I hope.”

“No, he came later. One of your cops. The one you had babysitting the house. He was leaving about that time, packing it in, talked to me on the way out.”

Barry nodded. “Well, there you go.” I thought he was done, and then he said, “That lady, watching the news. She did more than most people. She actually got up, went to her door, and opened it to stick her head out, just to be sure.”

“But she didn’t hear the second shot, so she sat back down.”

“Yeah, pretty much. But she thought she heard a man’s voice. Thought she heard him say one word.”

I waited.

“She heard someone say ‘shame.’”

I let the word bounce around inside my head for a second. I thought back to what Natalie Bondurant had told us after she’d spent some time interviewing our son.

“Derek,” I said. “That’s what he heard someone say, in the Langley house.”

“I know,” Barry said.

I ran my hand over the top of my head. “Barry, there’s so much going on, I can’t keep it all straight.”

“You and me both,” he said. He said I was free to go and turned to walk away, then stopped and looked back. “There might be some good news about your son today,” he said.

I started to open my mouth to ask, but Barry held up his hand. “I got nothing else to tell you.”

“Then let me ask you about something else,” I said, closing the distance between us. “There’d be a report somewhere, wouldn’t there, about Brett Stockwell taking a header off Promise Falls?”

“Ten years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“I suppose so.”

“I’d like to see it.”

Barry studied me for a couple of seconds. “Let me see what I can do.”

We still managed to get another yard in before lunch. Drew threw himself into his work. I couldn’t help thinking that if he’d put the same energy into robbing banks as he did into cutting yards, he’d have a shitload of money tucked away someplace by now. I was going to phone Ellen about Lance, but decided she didn’t need any more news to distract her from dealing with Natalie Bondurant, and getting our son sprung from jail.

For lunch, we drove back down by the river, just down from the falls, even got the same picnic table.

“So that was the mayor,” Drew said, taking a drink from his water bottle. “Finley.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you used to work for him.”

“I did. Not a period I’m particularly proud of, but we all have to do things sometimes that we don’t much care for. The thing is,” and the words were catching in my throat as I tried to say them, “he wants me to come back and work for him again, now that his regular guy is dead. And the truth is, I could use the money.”

“So. .” Drew looked at me. Here it was, his second day on the job, and it was looking like he was about to be laid off. And after all he’d done to save his boss’s life. And his boss’s wife’s life.

“Look, I haven’t made up my mind yet,” I said.

Drew bit into his sandwich. “It’s okay,” he said. “Whatever you decide.”

“Ellen won’t believe it,” I said. “If I go back and work for him, it’d have to be temporary, that’s for sure. Until he found someone else to replace Lance.”

“So Lance was his driver?”

“Yeah. He’d been with the mayor’s office a long time, doing the same thing I did, before I quit.”

“Why’d you quit?”

I took a deep breath. “There were lots of things. But they all came to a head one night. Things got a bit out of hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s just say that marriage is not all that sacred an institution for this guy, and the thing is, to a degree, if you want to fool around behind your wife’s back, that’s none of my business, you know? I don’t have to like it, but then I’m not the morality police, either. But Jesus, when it’s a kid. .”

Drew picked up on that right away. “A kid?”

“You know, a street kid. I looked at her ID. Even if he didn’t know for sure, he could have guessed she was underage, there was no excuse. Listen,” I said, recalling that I was supposed to keep my former boss’s indiscretions to myself, “I shouldn’t even be talking about this. It’s over. Maybe, I don’t know, he’s not as big an asshole now as he was then.”

Drew said, “So you just quit?”

“After I’d punched him in the nose, I kind of had to.”

“So this kid, she was hooking?”

I nodded. “I gave her my name and number, told her to get in touch with me, but she never did.”

“But you knew who she was,” Drew said. “You’d seen her ID.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You never tried to track her down, help her get her life back on track?” Drew asked.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t do that.”

I felt Drew’s eyes on me. “I remember her name,” I said. “Sherry. Sherry Underwood.”

“And you’re going to go work for that man again?” Drew asked. “A man like that?”

“Maybe people change,” I said, although I didn’t believe, in my heart, that Randall Finley was really any different today than he was back then. Maybe just more careful. “You’ve changed, haven’t you? You tried to rob a bank. Would you do that today?”

Drew thought about the question. “Maybe,” he said.

The fact was, if I went back to work for Randy, I’d be doing it for my son. To pay for Derek’s lawyer. I’d have driven Satan himself to work if it meant I’d be able to help my boy.

We were nearly wrapping up for the day. We were hot and sweaty and matted with grit. My cell rang.

“Something’s happening,” Ellen said. “Natalie just called and told me to meet her at the courthouse. Get here as fast as you can.”

I dropped Drew off at his mother’s house, then booted it downtown. He’d been pretty quiet the rest of the afternoon, at least during those moments when we weren’t using any of the equipment. Once in the town’s center, I had to circle the block three times until I found a spot long enough to accommodate the truck and trailer.