Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“Where you going?” Randy called to me. I was running up to the corner of Stonywood and Pine. The house Drew had claimed to live in was on the corner. I glanced both ways up Pine, no cars on the street, except two lots down there was an old blue Ford Taurus, the paint faded, rust around the wheel wells, parked at the curb. I remembered Drew pointing to a car like that at the end of our drive the night Ellen and I had been attacked. I ran up to the car, tried the door, but it was locked. The windows were all up and I peered inside. There was the usual junk. Fast-food containers and to-go coffee cups, plastic and paper bags. Also a small spiral-topped notebook and a crudely folded map of what appeared to be Promise Falls.

I wanted to see the car’s registration.

I tried all four doors on the Taurus, and when I found them all locked, I looked for something to break a window. The closest driveway had some decorative stones in the garden, each about the size of a grapefruit. I reached down for one, pulled it out of the topsoil, and smashed in the front passenger door window.

I was expecting alarms to go off, but this Taurus model was evidently too old to have an anti-theft system, or if it did have one, it no longer worked. I cleared enough glass away to unlock and open the door, then reached down to the glove box and opened it. There was a tattered owner’s manual, some pens, old maps, a packet of tissues. I found a small plastic folder, opened it up, and found the registration.

The car was in the name of a Lyle Nadeau. Shit. I’d just broken into a stranger’s car.

Then I remembered something Drew had told me during one of our lunches, that an old friend named Lyle had lent him a car. A guy just out of jail wouldn’t be able to buy a vehicle, register and insure it. I felt my initial hunch was right. Drew was driving here each day to be picked up, to maintain the fiction that he lived in this neighborhood and hadn’t been following me.

I looked at the stuff in the console. A Promise Falls map, various locations circled.

Including the area of my house.

My hand touched the small notebook, and there was something about it that tugged at my memory. I flipped through the pages. There were all manner of things written down in it. Shopping lists, lists of things to do, what appeared to be license plate numbers, columns of figures, initials and phone numbers.

I kept flipping until I came to the page I was now dreading, and expecting. And there it was. My name. My phone number. In my handwriting. Placed there the night I found Randy Finley in a hotel room with an underage hooker.

What had Drew said? He’d had a child, a daughter, but not anymore.

Sherry Underwood.

I was holding her notebook.

A dozen questions were bouncing around in my head, but these were the ones forcing their way to the front of the line:

Where was Drew now? Where was Derek? And what the hell had I done, sending my son to work with him?

The mayor was coming around the corner, huffing and puffing. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked, tapping the face of his watch. “Do you have any fucking idea?”

I reached into my jacket for my cell phone, but before I could flip it open and call Ellen, it went off. I glanced at the display. Home calling.

I put the phone to my ear. “Ellen,” I said. “Is Derek home? Have you seen him?”

“Jim,” Ellen said, her voice very sedate, as though she was forcing herself to be calm. “Drew would like to speak with you.”

There was some fumbling as Ellen handed over the phone.

“Jim?” It was Drew Lockus.

“Drew, what the hell is going on?”

“Hey, Jim,” he said tiredly. “I’m really sorry about all this.”

“Sorry about what, Drew?”

“You seem like an okay guy, you know, for the most part? Even though you let my girl down.”

“Drew, what’s going on at my house?”

“I was going to do this yesterday, but I had to find another gun. I had to leave the other one at your place the other night. An opportunity kind of presented itself.”

The gun in the grass, next to where Lester Tiffin had been parked. Drew had left us with the impression that he was not going to stick around and talk to the cops, but then he’d come back. He must have gone up to his car, grabbed the gun that killed the Langleys, Lance, and those other two whose names I couldn’t remember at the moment, and dropped it where the police could find it. Let the police start sniffing around the two men who’d terrorized us, hang the Langley thing on them.

“Drew,” I said again, trying to keep my voice calm, even if I wasn’t, “what’s going on at my house right now?”

“I’m just here with Derek and Ellen. We’re just hanging out.”

“That’s great,” I said evenly. “So what’s the deal with the gun?”

“Well, that’s what I’m going to use to shoot them if you don’t help me out.”

“Are Ellen and Derek okay, Drew?”

“Oh yeah,” he said casually. “Everyone’s fine. We’re just sitting at the kitchen table. I was kinda filling them in on everything, and I was apologizing to Derek for putting him through what I put him through the other night.”

“At the Langleys’,” I said.

I felt as though someone had touched an icicle to my neck. The memory of what I’d worried about before. That someone had gotten the wrong house.

“That was a huge mistake,” Drew said. “The mailbox, I just thought it was your place. I never even noticed the second house, your place, farther on down the lane. I feel terrible about that, honest to God, I really do. That was an awful thing that happened to them, especially the boy, what was his name? To Adam. They didn’t deserve that, but sometimes things happen the way they happen.”

“Yes,” I said. “A terrible thing.”

“I mean, even if it had been the right house? If I’d gone to your house, like I meant to in the first place, I wouldn’t have wanted to kill your wife and your boy. But I didn’t have much choice at their place, because they were witnesses, you know, and I wasn’t done doing what I had to do.”

“Sure, Drew,” I said. “I get what you’re saying.”

“I didn’t even know until a couple of days later that I’d screwed it all up. When I heard about it on the news, I felt bad. Because Mr. Langley, he wasn’t in the notebook.”

“Sherry’s notebook,” I said.

“Yeah, right. You know the one I’m talking about?”

“I have it with me now, Drew. I went by your place, trying to find you. Except it wasn’t your place.”

“No,” he said, sounding regretful. “I don’t really live there. And my mom, she died years ago. That was a fib. I’d been following you around, after I screwed the other thing up. I had to think of something fast when you saw me. You pissed about that?”

“No, Drew, it’s no big deal. Listen, would you mind if I talked to Ellen for a second?”

“In a minute, Jim. I haven’t even told you what I want you to do.”

Randy Finley tugged at my sleeve, pointed again to his wristwatch. “Hello?” he said. “Could you chitchat a little later? I got this date with Congress. Remember that?”

“Is that him?” Drew asked.

“Is that who?” I said.

“The mayor.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay, that’s good, because he’s what I need your help with.”

“What is it you want, Drew?”

“You know what he did, don’t you? Between what Sherry told me, before she died, and what Lance told me before I killed him, and what you told me from when you worked for him, I figured out that he was one of the ones. One of the ones who killed my daughter. They all killed my daughter, you know. All the men who used her, who paid her for sex.”