Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“Drawings?”

Lucy waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t call you to bore you with my personal life.”

And then, suddenly, she put both hands over her mouth and turned away from me, her shoulders hunched and shaking. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say, not looking at me.

I rested a tentative hand on her shoulder, left it there for a good five seconds before taking it away. “It’s okay. You’re on overload. Anyone would be.”

She sniffed a couple of times, used the wadded tissue to wipe her nose. She half turned back toward me. “Crystal’s only eleven. It’d be hard enough to explain to any child that sometimes parents aren’t there for you. But to explain it to Crystal...”

“I don’t understand.”

Another sniff. “She’s just... not like other kids.” Lucy tucked the tissue into her purse, attempted to stand straighter. “It’s fine. Everything is fine. She’s staying with a friend right now while I deal with this. I didn’t want to bring her here, not after what’s happened.”

Lucy swallowed hard, lifted her chin. She was determined to get through this, whatever this was. I still had no real idea why we were here, in front of this house.

“Okay,” I said. “Suppose you tell me why you called.”

She focused on the house, looking at it with what almost seemed a sense of wonder. No, not wonder. More like trepidation. “Something’s not right here,” she said.

“You said you thought there was a break-in.”

“I think so.”

“You came out to the house this morning? After you heard your parents were killed at the drive-in?”

Lucy shot me a look. “Not my parents. My father, and his wife.”

“Adam Chalmers was your father, but Miriam...”

“His third wife,” Lucy said. “My mother died when I was in my teens. Then my father remarried, to Felicia, and that lasted six years before she left him, and then Miriam came along.”

“Were you close with her?”

“No,” Lucy said. “I suppose... I suppose I disapproved.”

“Why?”

She hesitated. “I don’t want to be that kind of person.”

“What kind of person?”

“The neighborhood priss-ass,” Lucy said.

Lucy Brighton had never struck me that way. From the first time I’d met her, she’d struck me as open-minded, nonjudgmental. She exuded a kind of athletic sexuality. I hadn’t asked, but would have guessed she was a onetime track star, or gymnast. She had the build for it. When nonprofessional thoughts crossed my mind, it occurred to me that she had the build for a number of things.

“I doubt you’re that kind of person.”

“It bothered me that Miriam was younger than I am,” she said.

“How old was she?”

“Thirty. I’m thirty-three, and my father is — was fifty-nine. Do you know how strange it is — how weird it is — to be three years older than a woman who goes around claiming she’s your stepmother?”

“I guess that’d be odd.”

“The only woman who was age appropriate for my father was my mother. They married when they were both twenty. Thirteen years later, she died, and within a year my father remarried.”

“To Felicia.”

Lucy nodded. “At least she was older than me, but only by five years. Nineteen years old. Anyone could have guessed that wasn’t going to work out, and six years later she left him. It took a while for the divorce to be finalized, and while that was going on, Dad went out with plenty of other women, and then he found Miriam three years ago. Twenty-nine years’ difference in their ages.”

I was doing some basic math in my head. Calculating the age difference between Lucy and myself. A decade, give or take.

“It happens,” I said.

“I know. And I should have been able to roll with it, but it embarrassed me, that my father wasn’t able to act his age. I think he made a fool of himself. That Miriam may have made a fool of him. That he...”

I waited.

“That he may have been drawn into things to try to prove to her, to prove to himself, that he was still a young man.”

“A man on the verge of sixty may be trying to prove something to himself, and to others. That he isn’t really old.”

But it was time to get back to why she’d called me here.

“Why do you think someone broke in?”

She took a deep breath. “When I heard about what had happened, when the police got in touch, I came over here. I didn’t know quite what else to do, but I also knew that sooner or later I was going to have to pick out clothes, for the funeral home, and then there’d be the whole matter of what to do with the house and...”

“And what?”

“When I stepped into the house, I heard the back door close. Someone was leaving as I was coming in.”

Angus Carlson was managing on less than two hours’ sleep.

He hadn’t returned home until shortly after four in the morning. After leaving the drive-in, he’d gone first to the address registered to the crushed 2006 Mustang convertible. It belonged to Floyd and Renata Gravelle, of Canterbury Street, but it was highly unlikely it was Floyd or Renata in the car, given that the male and female victims appeared to be in their teens.

He had to ring the bell twice, leaning on it pretty hard the second time, to wake anyone. After a minute, he heard someone yell, “Coming!” Another minute after that, a man in his pajamas opened the front door, joined seconds later by a woman tying the sash of her robe.

Carlson apologized, identified himself, confirmed their identities, and asked whether they owned a Mustang convertible.

“Yes,” Renata said. “But it’s not here right now. Galen has it. That’s our son. Has there been — oh my God.”

“What’s happened?” Floyd asked.

“Do you know if your son was taking someone on a date with him tonight? To the drive-in?”

Floyd looked to his wife. She said, “He was taking Lisa. Lisa Kroft.”

“Would you have an address for Lisa, ma’am?”

“What’s happened?” the father asked again.

It did not go well. Nor did it go any better at the Kroft household. He felt wrung out by the time he’d been to those two houses. But he wasn’t done.

At the home of Adam Chalmers, he’d been unable to raise anyone. Which told him it was likely Chalmers and his wife lived here alone. Now the trick was going to be locating next of kin.

Carlson noticed a sticker in the window of the Chalmers home, indicating that it was protected by UNYSS. Upper New York State Security, a monitoring firm that covered a large area north and east of Albany. Carlson made a call to the twenty-four-hour line, identified himself, and explained that he was trying to find anyone related to Adam Chalmers. After conferring with a supervisor, the man on duty consulted their files and said there was a Lucy Brighton listed as a contact. If the alarm went off, and UNYSS could not reach Mr. Chalmers, the next call would be to Ms. Brighton. A phone number was provided, after some verbal arm-twisting, to Carlson.

You couldn’t phone someone in the middle of the night with this kind of news. You had to go to the door. So he Googled the number from his phone and came up with an address on Promise Falls’ south side. A split-level with a Buick sedan in the driveway.

Again, it took several rings of the doorbell to raise someone, but Lucy Brighton finally appeared, trailed by a sleepy-eyed young girl who just stood there but didn’t say anything. The child obeyed when the woman told her to go back upstairs to bed, her arms hanging straight down at her sides as she walked.

Weird kid.

Lucy Brighton’s cry of despair when he told her the news brought her daughter back, although Ms. Brighton didn’t know she was standing there when she said, “Dad was telling me, just the other day, about the drive-in closing, about it having its last night, how he might go but hadn’t made up his mind. He’s a huge film buff, he’s written for the movies, and... I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it. There must be some mistake. What was the car?”