Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“I was trying to reach for it through the railing, but Brett was walking away, he said he didn’t give a shit, but I was determined to get the computer. So I tried reaching over the railing instead of through it, and I still couldn’t reach it, so I swung a leg over.”

“No,” I said, as if I could stop her now, years later, from doing something so dangerous.

“I thought if I could stand on the ledge, hold on to the railing with one hand, I could crouch down and grab the strap.”

I was slowly shaking my head with belated worry.

“I got it, and wrapped it around my wrist, and somehow, as I was trying to stand back up, I slipped a bit, my foot went off the edge, my head dropped below the top of the railing, and I guess I screamed. That’s when Brett, who’d nearly walked off the bridge by this point, turned around, saw what I was doing, and started running back.”

“Go on.”

“I had the laptop strap tight around my wrist, but the computer had dropped down below the ledge and caught on something, so I couldn’t move my arm up, couldn’t stand up, and was barely holding on to one of the railing posts with my other hand. Brett saw the fix I was in, he was shouting ‘Hang on! Hang on!’ while he was swinging his legs over the railing to help me, but he did it too fast, and when his feet landed on the ledge, he lost his balance.”

Ellen stopped. With her elbows on the table, she made a cradle for her face with her hands and began to sob.

“Ellen,” I said. I shifted my chair closer, put a hand on her shoulder. “Ellen,” I said again.

“You see, he went to reach for me, to help me, almost instinctively. But he hadn’t taken a moment to steady himself. And then I saw it in his eyes, as he realized he was teetering in the direction of the falls,” she wept. “He tried to reach out for the railing, and he almost had ahold of it, but he was such a slight boy, he had such small hands.”

Ellen looked away for a moment. “But the momentum was carrying him away. He couldn’t get a grip. And then he was gone.” She looked at me with her red, puffy eyes. “And you know what?”

“What?”

“He never even made a sound. He just slipped away into the roar of the water. I never heard him hit the bottom.”

Somehow, I pulled myself back onto the bridge,” Ellen said. “I think I must have been in some sort of shock, I don’t know. I still had the laptop. I looked down, hoping for some sign of Brett, but there was nothing. I ran to the end of the bridge, where there’s that set of stairs that goes all the way to the bottom?”

She looked at me and I nodded. I knew the stairs.

“I ran down there as fast as I could, looked all along the water’s edge, and I knew in my heart that no one could survive a fall like that. Not with all the rocks at the bottom of the falls. And then I thought I saw Brett, part of him, his back and one of his legs, on a rock, the water falling down on him, and I knew he was dead.”

She stopped. “I’d done such a horrible thing.”

“You were trying to do the right thing,” I said. “What happened was an accident, plain and simple. You did do the right thing, warning him about Conrad, what he was going to do. For all you know, Conrad was planning to do him in himself. Maybe, if you hadn’t followed Brett out to the bridge, he might have taken his own life. Thrown himself off along with the laptop.”

“If I hadn’t followed him, I think he’d still be alive.”

I would have said more to try to assuage Ellen’s feelings of guilt, but I sensed there was still more to the story. “What happened after?” I asked.

“I didn’t know who else to go to,” she said, “except Conrad.”

“You should have come to me,” I said.

“God, I wanted to,” Ellen said, her eyes pleading. “But where would I have started? You didn’t know, at this point, that I had been. . seeing Conrad. To tell you about this would have meant, ultimately, confessing to everything, and, Jim. .” She reached out and touched my arm. “I didn’t have it in me.”

I nodded.

“But I felt I had to tell someone, and that had to be Conrad, because what I’d done, I’d done because of him-not for him-but because of what he was going to do. I’d fucked it all up royally, but I was angry at him, I wanted him to share the blame, because he was the one who’d set this in motion. I went to his house. He had a place just outside the college where he lived alone, not the house he has now, of course. I just walked in through the front door and found him at the kitchen table, marking papers. I threw the laptop right in front of him, and he said, ‘What the hell is this?’

“I told him what had happened. How I’d tried to warn Brett, told him how his professor had betrayed him, and Conrad was getting red in the face, like he was going to explode. And then I told him what had happened, how Brett had tried to throw his own computer over the railing, how I’d gone after it, nearly falling to my death, how Brett had died trying to save me.”

“And his reaction to all that?”

“When I got to the part where Brett was dead, Conrad suddenly changed. He went into this kind of dead calm. He asked me if I was kidding. He asked me if that computer was Brett’s, whether it had Brett’s book on it. I assumed so, but hadn’t actually checked, so Conrad took it out of the pouch and opened it up and had a look and he didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was scrolling through something, and he was nodding, and then he closed the laptop. And all he said was, ‘I’ll look after this.’”

“He knew then he could get away with ripping it off.”

“I knew that’s what he was thinking. And I told him so. I said, ‘If you get that published under your name, I’ll let the world know what you’ve done.’ And he said to me, he grinned, he flashed me that fucking grin of his, and said, ‘And shall I tell the world how I got all the existing copies of this book? Shall I tell the world how it is that the actual, so-called writer of this book is unavailable to claim authorship? Shall I tell the world how you pushed him off Promise Falls, how you did it for me?’”

“He couldn’t have expected people to believe that.”

“That’s what I told him. I said, ‘Go ahead and try that story, but I think people are going to believe me when I lay everything out for them. And then he said, ‘What will they think when they find out you left the scene? Left Brett Stockwell to die without calling the police?’”

I must have made a face. “That wasn’t going to look good for you.”

“I know. But even that I thought I could explain. That I was in shock, which I was. I’d nearly died myself. I’d take my chances, at any rate. I knew that what Conrad had on me was potentially damaging. I could accuse him of stealing that kid’s book, but he could turn around and say he’d never meant to do that, that I’d acted on my own on his behalf-”

“Like Illeana did,” I said.

“Yeah, a bit like that. His story would be that I’d pushed Brett Stockwell off that bridge as a gift to him, so he could steal the book and get away with it.”

“It’s far-fetched, but someone might have believed it.”

“I was so confused,” Ellen said. “I was scared. And I was ashamed. I was afraid that if people believed Conrad’s story, what would that do to me? To us? And our son? We’d all be dragged into it.” She shook her head resignedly. “Coming for ward, exposing Conrad, it would have meant you finding out that we’d had an affair. It was over by the time you found that note, but by that time it was too late to come forward, to tell the truth about what Conrad had done. My silence had the effect of confirming his version of events.”