Linwood Barclay: Too Close to Home

Once you get past the newer subdivisions that surround the town, you reach the old part, which is big on charm with its hundred-year-old houses and large lots, like a lot of places in this part of the state and nearby Vermont. Big trees, a main street with lots of small businesses that have managed to hang on even after the Wal-Mart showed up. We had Mayor Randall Finley to thank for its arrival. He brushed off the local business association’s concerns about the monster retailer, saying they could do with a little competition, that it wasn’t enough to be quaint and charming, you had to give people value for their dollar.

Finley had managed to offend so many people in town, it amazed me he’d been reelected. But he had a constituency out there that loved it when he stuck it to unions and special interests and those who didn’t live up to some moral code voters were under the impression Finley himself adhered to. There were probably more than a few residents of Promise Falls who loved it that he’d barged in on the unwed mothers and given them a piece of his mind, and a little something extra.

“So what did you end up doing last night?” I asked, still attempting to draw Derek out. “I never heard you come in. I crashed early, went right into a coma. You see Penny?”

He’d been seeing Penny Tucker for a month or more now, and the few times she’d been by the house she struck me as a sweet kid. I could only imagine the limericks teenage boys might come up with that involved her last name.

“No,” Derek said. “She was grounded.”

“Why? What she do?”

“Banged up the car.”

“Oh no. Bad?”

“No.”

“What she hit?”

“The bumper.”

“On what?”

“Telephone pole.”

“She going to have to pay to have it fixed?”

“Don’t know.”

Jesus, it was like pulling teeth. And then, for the first time, I noticed something different about my son.

“When did you stop wearing that little stud thing in your ear?” I asked. “The peace sign.”

He reached up and touched his left earlobe, where there was a tiny dimple from a piercing, but no jewelry. Derek shrugged. “I don’t know. It fell out or something. I lost it a while ago.”

We did the Simpson place first. A medium-sized property, no hills, nothing tricky. I assigned Derek to the tractor, since he likes riding it, thinking that if I started him with something he enjoyed, his disposition would improve. I did the trimming, then got out a mower for the spots the tractor couldn’t easily reach.

Mrs. Simpson came out with a glass of water for each of us, which we gratefully accepted. I could see her husband standing back in the kitchen, looking our way slightly disapprovingly. I knew his type. We were the hired help, and if we needed water, we should know enough to bring it with us, or at least take it from the garden hose like we were a couple of golden retrievers. Mrs. Simpson, however, was not a shit like her husband.

Then all we had to do was blow the clippings off the drive, which Derek looked after. We were there barely an hour, and just as we were getting back into the truck, we were approached by a skinny kid about Derek’s age, with thick black hair and skin so white you had to wonder if he’d been getting tanned by a refrigerator bulb, wearing a pair of shorts that had at least a dozen pockets all over them. He came up to my window.

“You hiring?” he asked. He handed me a slip of paper from a wad of flyers he was holding. I glanced at it and read, “Stuart Yost. Odd Jobs.” And a phone number.

“Sorry,” I said, handing the flyer to Derek, who jammed it into the glove box. “I got my son here working with me.”

“I’m just looking for something for the rest of the summer,” he said.

“Nearly the end of July, Stuart,” I said. “Kinda late, isn’t it? Another month and you’ll be back in school.”

“I had one but I lost it,” he said. He shrugged. “Anyway, thanks.”

As he walked off I said to Derek, “You know him from school or anything?”

He shook his head no, said nothing. Derek’s disposition had not improved all morning, and I began to wonder what was eating at him. Was there another crumpled-MG incident? Had he and one of his friends been leaping from one tall building to another, maybe the police station this time, instead of the high school? Driven along the road after midnight, playing mailbox baseball, taking a bat to each mailbox they passed?

I could remember doing that. My later teen years weren’t particularly well supervised.

Surely, if he’d gotten into any real trouble, and been caught at it, Ellen and I would have heard about it by now.

Next was the lady with the cat that looked like a furry pig. Agnes Stockwell. She’d been kind enough on our last visit to give Derek an old computer she’d had sitting in her garage for the better part of a decade. It had belonged to her son, Brett, a Thackeray College student who had, tragically, jumped to his death off Promise Falls- the Promise Falls, the one the city takes its name from-when he was in his last year. She didn’t use a computer, and she’d never turned it on since his death.

“I’m not really a computer person,” she’d told Derek. The garage was open the last time we were there, and Derek, who collects old hardware so he and his friend Adam can take apart and rebuild computers for their own amusement, spotted it on a shelf. Mrs. Stockwell, whose husband passed away the year before her son committed suicide, told him to take it.

Her place was a little more work because she has a lot of beds she tends, and it’s hard to navigate the John Deere around them, so Derek and I each grabbed a lawn mower and went to work. But she rewarded us, even going beyond what Mrs. Simpson had done. She came out with lemonade as I was getting out the weed whacker to tidy up the edges, and we both gulped it down. Derek even managed a “Thank you.”

The mercury had to be pushing 95 by now.

I was about to do the finishing touches on her yard when I heard my cell phone, which I’d left on the dash of the truck, ringing. I opened the door, sat on the edge of the seat, and grabbed the phone. It was home calling.

“Yeah?”

“You might want to come back,” Ellen said. There was something in her voice, like she was keeping a lid on her emotions.

“What?”

“There’s something going on at the Langley house. There’s half a dozen cop cars, they’re putting up police tape. And there’s a cop walking up the lane headed this way right now.”

“Holy shit,” I said, and Derek, now in the truck, glanced my way. “What the hell’s going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ask around, give me a call back.”

“I went up there once but they wouldn’t tell me anything. But I figured, with some of the contacts you made back when you were at city hall, you’ll find out more than I will.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll head back now.” I flipped the phone shut and said to Derek, “There’s cop cars all around the Langley house.”

He just looked at me.

We could tell something was going on even before we got there. A quarter mile ahead, there were Promise Falls police cars, marked and unmarked, parked along both sides of the highway out front of the lane that led first to the Langley house, and then further on to ours. I slowed the truck as I approached the phalanx of vehicles, thinking, stupidly as it turned out, that I’d be able to turn down my own drive. But it was blocked with even more cars, and I could see officers stringing up more yellow police tape.

I drove on about a hundred yards and pulled the truck and trailer over as far onto the gravel shoulder as I could. Because we were on the outskirts of town, there were no curbs or sidewalks, but there were ditches that the Cutter’s Lawn Service trailer could slide into if I didn’t exercise caution.