Linwood Barclay - Far From True

Victor stood up.

“You’re no better than the rest of them,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re—”

“The ones who did fuck all.”

That took a moment to sink in. Finally, Stan got out of his chair. “Come on, Vick, that’s pretty low.”

“No one in this town has the guts to do what’s right.”

“I don’t know about that. Sometimes, people, they want to do the right thing, but they’re scared. They’re kind of, you know, frozen. By the time they know what the right thing to do is, it’s too late.”

“You sound like you speak from experience,” Victor said. “Makes me wonder if you were one of them. The police, after all the interviews they did, figured there was twenty-two — whaddya call ’em — eyewitnesses, but they never released the names. The paper tried to get them but couldn’t. For all I know, you were on the list.”

“For Christ’s sake, Vick, I wasn’t.”

“You give me a job, you try to do the right thing now, maybe I could find it in my heart to forgive you.”

Stan pushed back his chair an inch. “Excuse me?”

“I’m saying, you could hire me. Do some good.”

“I don’t owe you anything, Vick. I got no reason to ask for your forgiveness. And even if I wanted to give you a job, which, frankly, I don’t, I can’t just pull one out of my ass.” He shook his head sadly. “Look, I’ll hang on to your résumé. Maybe, if something comes up sometime, I’ll have forgotten how you just behaved here.”

Victor stared at the man.

“Did you hear her screams?” he asked.

“What?”

“When Olivia was being killed. Did you hear the screams?”

“Vick, you should go.”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I wasn’t even in Promise Falls then,” Stan said, sighing. “I was in England. I was staying with my aunt and uncle. Working over there for a few months. I was reading the Standard , online. That’s how I found out about it. Couldn’t believe it, it was so horrible.”

“Sure.”

“You should talk to somebody, Vick. Or whoever you were talking to, you should go talk to them again.”

Victor turned and headed for the door.

“Come on, man,” Stan Mulgrew said. “Look, I’m sorry. I know you’ve been through hell. Maybe there’s some other way I can help you out. Why don’t we have lunch? How ’bout you come back later — we go get a beer?” He choked on the word. “Well, maybe not a beer, if, like you say, you’re trying to stay off the stuff and—”

Victor kept on going.

Stan came around the desk and followed his onetime high school friend out to the parking lot.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “If I offended you, I’m sorry.”

Victor got behind the wheel of his old van, slammed the door, and, without looking Stan’s way, gave him the finger as he drove off.

I agreed to meet Lucy Brighton at her father’s house within the hour.

Once Ed was back on his feet, and had blinked the soap powder out of his eyes, he stumbled out of the Laundromat. I’d moved my wet clothes into a dryer and had about thirty minutes to go, which I figured was enough time for him to send the police my way. But no officer from the Promise Falls department materialized by the time I’d folded my boxers, so I was guessing Ed — last name unknown — had decided not to press charges.

Just as well, because I really didn’t know how many friends I still had on the force.

I’d given Sam Worthington one of my business cards and said, “If he gives you any more trouble, call me. Or call the cops.”

She took the card but did not look at it. “Don’t get involved in my troubles,” she said, and went back to cleaning the machines.

Everyone expresses gratitude in his or her own way.

I walked back to my place, dropped off the laundry, and got into my Accord, which I kept parked around the back of the bookshop. Lucy Brighton had given me an address on Skelton Drive, which I remembered as a nice part of town. The house, a sprawling ranch with a two-car garage and a deep, well-tended front yard, enjoyed the shade of several stately oak trees that had probably gotten their start before Promise Falls had been incorporated.

Lucy Brighton had said she would wait for me in the driveway, and that was where I found her, alone, behind the wheel of a silver Buick. She got out of the car as I pulled in.

I stood an inch under six feet, and I recalled from when I’d met her before that she could look me straight in the eye through her wire-framed, oval glasses. Everything about her seemed vertical. She had straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders, a long, narrow nose, a light jacket that went down to midcalf, and perfectly creased black slacks.

Her brown eyes were largely red right now, and she took off her glasses briefly to dab them with the wadded tissue in her hand.

“Cal, thank you for coming.”

“I’m very sorry,” I said.

“This is the last thing I need to be dealing with. I’ve just come from the... the morgue, I guess they call it.” She put her hand briefly over her mouth, composing herself. “I had to identify my... it was horrible. I wanted to think there’d been a mistake, but it was him. It was my father. Someone else will have to identify Miriam. I’m not really next of kin. Her brother’s going to come up, from Providence. It was so... so... it doesn’t make any sense, for something like this to happen.”

“No,” I said.

“They were going to demolish the screen in another week,” she said. “Someone made a mistake. How could someone make a mistake like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of it.” I started to wonder whether this was the real reason she’d wanted to speak with me. Did she want me looking into who was responsible for the drive-in disaster? If she did, she’d be wasting her money. The Promise Falls police would most likely be getting state and federal help. Homeland Security might even be sticking its nose in if they thought it was more than some screwup by a demolitions firm. Collectively, all those levels of investigation would do a better job than I could.

“I’m probably in some kind of shock,” Lucy Brighton said. “Like I’m walking around in a fog. Like none of this is happening. It can’t be happening.”

“You seem to be holding it together.”

“If this is holding it together, I’d hate to think what losing it’ll feel like. Because I guarantee you, that’s coming. I don’t know when they’re going to release him to the funeral home. There’s so much to arrange. People to phone, relatives who may want to fly in.”

I remembered that she was divorced. I wondered what kind of family support she had right now.

“Your ex-husband,” I said. “Is he coming?”

She laughed. “Yeah, right, Gerald. Mr. There-for-You.”

“I guess that’s a no.”

“He’s in San Francisco. I’ve called and told him, but he hasn’t got enough money to get a bus to L.A., let alone fly back here. And the truth is, I’m just as glad. It gets Crystal all agitated when he comes, and that’s the last thing she needs.”

Her daughter. Lucy had mentioned her before, but I’d never met her.

“Agitated how?”

“Crystal has this fantasy view of her father, that he’s not with us because he’s doing something even more important. Fighting aliens, saving whales, building some colossal shield that will stop global warming. She doesn’t want to consider that the reason he’s not with us, doesn’t come to visit his own daughter, is because he just doesn’t care. Not that she actually talks about how she feels or anything. But it all comes through in her drawings.”