Linwood Barclay: Never Look Away

“Ethan!” I said. “It’s Dad! It’s okay! You can come out!”

Then I listened. I stood there, just inside the door, and held my breath, hoping to catch some faint sound of movement in the house.

“Ethan?” I called again.

I let out a long, discouraged sigh. And then thought I heard a board creak, overhead, in the area of Ethan’s room.

I went through the kitchen, stepping carefully. Dad had put all the boards I’d ripped up to one side, and pried the nails from them, but he hadn’t covered over the long, narrow holes I’d left behind.

I went through the living room to the stairs and mounted them slowly in the dark. “Ethan?” I said.

Surely Ethan wouldn’t be moving through the house in total darkness. After all, he was still a little boy, and, like most kids, had a fear of the dark, even in his own home.

Are you up here?” I asked.

The door to Ethan’s room was ajar. Sidestepping the few openings in the floor of the upstairs hall, I got to the door and pushed it open.

A glow from a streetlamp fell through Ethan’s window.

There was a dark shadow on the far side of his bed. Someone was standing there, someone far too tall to be Ethan.

I reached over to the wall switch and flipped it up.

It was Jan.

The shock of seeing her, standing there, was overtaken by the shock of seeing the gun in her hand, which she was pointing directly at me.

“Where’s Ethan?” she asked. “I’ve come for Ethan.”

Ethan’s dresser drawers were open and his clothes had been tossed onto the bed, next to a soft-sided flight bag, the one we kept in his closet for trips.

I couldn’t recall Jan ever looking worse. Her hair was scraggly, her eyes bloodshot. It had only been two days since I’d seen her, but she looked as though she’d lost ten pounds, aged ten years. The gun was shaking in her hand.

“Put that down, Jan,” I said. “Maybe you’d rather I called you Constance, but it’s hard for me to think of you as anyone but Jan.”

She blinked. The gun didn’t move.

“Or maybe I’ve got it wrong, and Constance isn’t your real name, either.”

“No,” she whispered. “That’s my real name.”

“I guess I can understand why you never wanted to introduce me to your parents,” I said. “One set was fake, and the other was dead.”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

“Martin and Thelma? Your real parents?” Something in her eyes said yes. “You don’t know? Someone killed them a few years ago. Slit their throats.”

If she was troubled by this news, she didn’t show it. “Where’s Ethan?” she asked.

I said, “He’s not here.”

“Is he with Don and Arlene?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh no…,” she said. “No, no…”

I took a step closer to her. “Put that gun down, Jan.”

She shook her head. “No, he has to be here,” she said dreamily. “I’ve come for him. We’re going away.”

“Even if he was here,” I said, “I would never, ever let you take him. Give me the gun.” I inched closer.

“We have to find him,” Jan said.

“I know,” I said. “But you’re not going to be looking for him with a gun.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I need it. I need this gun.”

“You don’t need it with me,” I said, taking another step toward her. “What do you think I’m going to do to you? I’m your husband.”

Jan stifled a laugh. “I think you’d probably like to do plenty to me. But you’re not the one I’m worried about.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“So my parents are dead,” she said, ignoring my question, her mind drifting, a slightly crazed look in her eye. “He must have thought they knew something. He must have thought they’d know where I was. He must have killed them when they couldn’t tell him anything.”

“Are you talking about who killed your parents? Is that who you’re worried about?”

“I did a bad thing,” Jan told me. “I did something…”

“What did you do? What’s all of this about?” I was less than two feet away from her now.

“Everything’s been for nothing,” she said. “The diamonds weren’t real.”

“Diamonds?” I said. “What diamonds?”

“They were worthless. Fucking worthless.” Another stifled laugh. “It’s like some huge cosmic joke.”

I grabbed her wrist.

I’d thought maybe she’d let me wrest the gun away from her, but as soon as I tried to twist it out of her hand she reacted, trying to pull her arm away. I wouldn’t let go. She swung at me with her left hand, hitting me in the side of the face. I swung my right arm up, knocked her hand away as I held on to her right. Then her free hand was clawing at me, her nails digging into my cheeks, but instead of trying to block that hand I turned in to her and got both hands on her wrist, doubling the pressure on it to make her drop the weapon.

As I turned I threw my body into it and forced Jan up against the wall, hard, knocking the wind out of her. While the move may have had the effect of weakening her, it also prompted her to pull the trigger.

The shot, which sounded like a sonic boom in Ethan’s small bedroom, went into the floor. I jumped, but I didn’t loosen my grip. I slammed her wrist against the wall. Once, twice. The third time, the gun fell from her hand and clattered to the floor. I was terrified it might go off again, but it bounced harmlessly up against the baseboard.

I let go of Jan’s hand and dived down to get it, but the moment I let go and turned, she jumped onto my back.

“No!” she screamed.

I rolled, forcing her up against the metal frame of Ethan’s bed. The beam jammed into her back and she yelped in pain. I scrambled ahead, crablike, to get my hands on the gun, got it, then rolled and pointed it straight at her.

“Just shoot me, David,” she said, winded and getting up onto her hands and knees. “Just put a fucking bullet in my head. It’d be easier.”

“Who are you?” I shouted, both hands wrapped around the gun. “Who the hell are you?”

She rose up, sat on the side of the bed, and put her head in her hands. After a moment, she looked up, tears running down her cheeks. “I’m Connie Tattinger,” she said. “But… I’m also Jan Harwood. No matter who I am, I’m Ethan’s mother.” She paused. “And I was your wife. For a time.”

“What’s all of this been?” I asked her. “These last five years? Some kind of goddamn joke?”

She shook her head. “Not a joke… not a joke. I was, I’ve been… waiting. And hiding.”

“Waiting for what? Hiding from whom?”

Jan took a few breaths, ran a finger under her wet nose, and said, “We hijacked a diamond shipment.”

“What? We?”

Jan dismissed the questions with a wave. “Six years ago. Then, my partner, he got sent away for something else. The diamonds were in a safe place but it was going to be a few years before we could get at them. The man we took them from… he’s been looking for us, for me, all that time.”

I was trying to take it all in. Those few short sentences, summing up years of deception. I grabbed on to something Jan had already said. “But you said they were worthless. Why would this man, why would he want them back?”

She summoned some more strength to continue. “Because of what I did to him.”

I waited.

“I cut off his hand,” she said. “To get the briefcase he was attached to.” She sniffed. “He lived.”

I was so stunned that I lowered the gun, letting it rest on the floor next to me, but still within reach. “I don’t know who you are,” I said.

She nodded. “No, you really don’t. You never have.”