Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

There was something about the forthright way he told me that I almost admired. “Did you look at what was on it before you did all that?” I asked.

“Briefly.”

“Did you notice anything else in there? Some letters, for example?”

Conrad cocked his head and eyed me curiously. “Letters?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I didn’t notice. Why?”

I waved my hand at him. “Doesn’t matter now.”

He settled into his chair, tented his fingers before his chin. “You’re a decent guy, Jim, and I understand your view of me,” he said. “And you have every right to be angry at-to be appalled by-what happened to you and Ellen. You were terrorized. What my wife, Illeana, put into motion, it’s unforgivable. But there’s a reason why I asked Ellen not to identify Illeana’s brother Lester when he went into that lineup. To expose what Illeana did, and her motives, no matter how misguided and unnecessary, runs the risk of subjecting me to greater scrutiny, and ultimately, that’s going to reflect on Ellen.” Another pause. “And that will have an impact on you. And your son.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said.

Conrad leaned in closer to me. “You need to talk to your wife,” he said.

I need to tell it from the beginning,” Ellen said, sitting at our kitchen table. When I’d come out of Conrad’s study, I’d headed straight for Ellen, said nothing more than “Let’s go,” and drove home with barely a word between us. When we got inside, Derek was sitting in the living room. MTV was on the tube, but he appeared to be fast asleep. Cutting grass all day in the sun will do that to you. I gave him a nudge. He woke with a start. “What? Where am-oh, okay.” He scratched his head. “Hey, buddy,” I said. “Your mom and I need to talk. Why don’t you hit the sack?”

“Yeah, sure.” Groggily, and with great effort, he made his way upstairs. When we heard his door close, we found ourselves in the kitchen, standing, moving from counter to fridge to table, as though circling each other.

“Let’s sit down,” I said, and we each took a seat at the kitchen table. “Conrad said I should talk to you. That you had some things you needed to tell me. Other things, not about what Illeana did.”

“I don’t quite know what you mean,” she said. “Things I had to tell you about what?”

“About everything,” I said. “About how all this got started. He wasn’t exactly specific.” I paused.

Ellen took in a long breath and when she exhaled she seemed to tremble. “I suppose it’s time,” she said. “It’s always has been, really. I’ve wanted to talk to you about this so many times, but never felt I could. Maybe, because talking about it wouldn’t change anything, except it would probably change your impression of me.” She laughed quietly to herself. “Or maybe not. Maybe your last impression was formed when you found out about me and Conrad.”

“I got past that,” I said.

“No, you didn’t,” she said.

“It was a long time ago.”

“It doesn’t matter. I hurt you, and you’ve never healed. And what I have to tell you now, I don’t know whether it will make things better or worse between us. It’s why I’ve held off telling you.”

“I need to know what’s going on,” I said.

And that was when she said she needed to start at the beginning.

“When I got the job here,” she said, “and we made the move from Albany, they paired me up with Conrad pretty much from the beginning.”

“I know,” I said. Like maybe I’d forgotten.

“We-you and I-were going through a bit of a rough patch then,” Ellen said. “I’m not blaming you. It was me, too. I was throwing myself into my work, you were depressed about yours. Your art, the lousy security jobs.”

“What does that have to do with-”

“Just let me tell this,” Ellen said. “It’s hard.” She took a long breath. “Conrad advised me, offered input on who we should try to get for the festival. He read a wide cross section of stuff, from the very literary to so-called popular fiction. And so did I, although I didn’t bring a Ph.D. in English literature to the table. But together, we were able to come up with a list of people we wanted to bring to the festival, and once we’d settled on the ones we hoped to attract, we started approaching them, or at least the people who represented them.”

I still didn’t know what this had to do with anything, but I listened.

“That was how Conrad got to know Elizabeth Hunt. She represented a wide range of people, from the oh-so-literary to that guy who wrote about the serial killer who collected the hearts of his victims. The one they made a movie out of? Anyway, they kind of hit it off, and she said to Conrad, if he ever wrote anything, he should definitely show it to her.

“And the truth is, he’d been working on something. For years. The Big Novel.” She said the words like they had quotes around them. “And as I got to know him better, I realized that his project, this book that meant so much to him, was going nowhere.”

“Aw,” I said.

Ellen’s head snapped up. “I can’t tell this if that’s what you’re going to do.”

Admonished, I shut up.

“He was feeling under a lot of pressure to produce something, to make his mark as a member of the Thackeray faculty. Others had been published, not that they’d had bestsellers or anything, but they’d written academic works that had been well received within the community. They had something to show for themselves. But Conrad didn’t want to produce some essay that would be read by fifty people and then tucked away on a library shelf. He wanted to do more than that.” She took a breath. “And then he met Brett Stockwell.”

“His student.”

“That’s right. A promising, gifted student. Gay, and troubled, moody, and mature beyond his years. Certainly where his writing ability was concerned. Conrad, who normally didn’t have a good thing to say about any of his students-who felt so much above them-talked about him all the time.”

“Let me guess. Brett showed him the novel he was working on.”

“He wasn’t just working on it. He’d finished it. He wanted Conrad to read it, tell him what he thought about it.” She shook her head and looked downward again. “He worshipped Conrad. He desperately wanted to know what his favorite professor thought of his novel. He so looked up to him.”

“And Conrad betrayed him,” I said.

Ellen gave me the look again. The one that said shut the fuck up and let her tell it.

“So Brett gave him this book to read. He told him he’d been working on it for months, hadn’t shown it to anyone else, hadn’t had the nerve to even tell anyone else what it was he’d been working on. Conrad was very skeptical at first, because, even though he regarded Brett as a fine student, he doubted he had the stuff to write a novel at his age, at least a good one. Brett had the book on a disc, which he gave Conrad, and which Conrad read on his own computer. And he was blown away by it. It was a strong piece of work, satirical, provocative, funny. It was vastly superior to the book Conrad had been struggling to write for years.”

Ellen stopped. “I need a drink,” she said.

She got up, opened the fridge, and I expected her to pull out a bottle of wine. I figured that, after pouring out what she’d had the other day, she’d had a change of heart and replenished her supply.

But she brought out a bottle of Fruitopia and held it up to me, asking, without asking, if I wanted one. I nodded.

Ellen sat back down, uncapped the bottle, poured it into two glasses, and continued. “The thing was, Brett’s book was similar in subject matter to the one Conrad had been working on. I mean, not the exact same idea by any means, about a man who wakes up one day and finds his entire sexual identity has been changed, but it was a satire of contemporary sexual attitudes, and I think when Conrad read the book, he somehow convinced himself that this was the book he’d been trying to write all along, that in many ways he and Brett were on the same wavelength. Conrad wanted a professional opinion at this point. He wanted to know whether he was alone in thinking it was brilliant. So he sent the book to Elizabeth Hunt.”