Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“No,” she said. “I got a visit from the police. They figured out how to find me through the alarm company. They saw the stickers in the window.”

“Stickers?”

“With the security company’s name on it.”

“Was the alarm engaged when they went to the movie last night?”

“I would imagine so,” she said.

“But you don’t know for certain.”

“No, but it wasn’t like my father to ever leave the house without setting the alarm. He was... he was aware of what people with bad intentions can do.”

“So if someone got in, they’d have to know the code, or the cops would be along shortly.”

“That’s right.”

“And they’d need a key, too.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anyone else your father, or his wife, entrusted with a key and the code?”

“No,” Lucy said. “But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone.”

Once we were in the front hall, she closed the door behind us.

I don’t know a lot about decorating. A visit to my apartment would confirm that. When I had a family, and a house, Donna was in charge of how it looked, and she did a nice job of it. But she never gave up trying to educate me when it came time to get a new couch or dining room table. I could distinguish between the arts and crafts style and eclectic, which is a bit like bragging that you could tell a cat from a mongoose. The Chalmers house looked to me like “contemporary.” The living room furniture, with sleek, clean lines, was in various shades of gray and taupe. Metal legs on the chairs, a coffee table set low to the floor, recent issues of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker fanned perfectly on top of it. The paintings on the wall were not so abstract that I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. One was a woman sitting before a mirror, fixing her hair. Another, a riderless horse running off the side of a cliff.

“What’s missing?” I asked.

Lucy hesitated. “Nothing that jumps out at me,” she said. “But it might be something I don’t even know about. That’s why I have to find out who got in here. Maybe when I know who it was, I’ll have an idea what they were after.”

“Were you here often enough to notice if there were a missing painting, or something else of value?”

She gave me a look. Maybe she took the question another way. Maybe she thought I was asking whether she was close with her father and his wife.

“I think so,” she said slowly.

“Did your father keep money in the house? Is there a safe?”

“Not that I know of. But there is an office.”

“Let’s start there.”

To get there, we traveled through the kitchen, which was straight out of one of those shows on the home-and-garden channel, and bigger than my entire apartment. A long kitchen with seven leather stools running down one side. High-end German appliances in brushed aluminum. A fridge that could have had a cow in it.

We went down a hall, passed a master bedroom. I poked my head in. A bed the size of Massachusetts, and still room to walk around it. At a glance, there was nothing out of place. No drawers yanked out, the bedcovers untouched. I saw a door to an en suite bathroom. I didn’t notice anything odd there, either.

The next room was clearly the office. Big desk, a large monitor and a keyboard, plus a laptop off to one side. Books, two mugs full of pens. A printer with no paper in the tray, an empty Staples wrapper that had once held 8½ x 11 sheets.

“My father was a writer,” Lucy said.

There were several enlarged reproductions of book covers framed on the wall. There was one for Scum of America , another called Hate on Wheels . Both featured biker imagery. And blood.

Then my eyes landed on a large, framed black-and-white photo. Five bearded bikers, arms over one another’s shoulders, Harleys in the background.

“Dad’s the one in the middle,” Lucy said.

I leaned in for a closer look. Hard to make out what he really looked like with all the facial hair and the kerchief tied around his forehead.

I looked at Lucy. “This house doesn’t look like a biker pad.”

“What’s a biker pad look like?”

I thought. “A bunker. Cinder blocks with bars at the window would be how I’d decorate.”

“My father’s biker days were over. It was years ago. He got out of that, started a new life.”

I glanced at the book covers. “But he wrote about it.”

She nodded. “And sold enough books to buy this place, and live a pretty decent life. Although there hasn’t been a book in a few years.”

“What was he into?” I asked, nodding at the photo. “Illegally, that is.”

“A lot,” Lucy said. “But it was a long time ago.” She shook her head, like she wanted to change the subject. “Anything look out of place here?”

“Not that I can see.”

I dropped myself into the chair behind the desk, surveyed the domain before me. Not a lot to see aside from the computer, cups of Sharpies, a few books. I moved the mouse to bring the screen to life. Nothing there but a view of Earth from space, a standard Apple background. The usual row of programs along the bottom.

There were drawers on each side. When I went to open one, Lucy said, “Should you do that?”

“Why? You think they’re booby-trapped?”

“No. I was thinking, if someone broke in to search this office, maybe there are fingerprints. Should you be — what do you call it? — dusting for prints first?”

“I’m not really equipped for that, Lucy. And even if I did look for prints, I don’t have access to a national database. You need the police for that, and—”

“The police are too busy. They’re not going to come out here and do anything, not when they’re trying to find out what happened at the drive-in.”

“That’s what I was about to say. The cops have limited resources, particularly in Promise Falls. And when all you have to tell them is you think someone was in the house, but can’t even tell them what’s missing, they’re not going to put much effort into this. So...” I opened the top drawer. Checkbooks, more pens, paper clips.

I went through all of them. Receipts, old tax returns, a few book review clippings. Nothing of interest. Of course, if there’d been something of interest that someone took, it wasn’t here to be seen. But nothing looked disrupted.

“Let’s keep looking around,” I said. “Check that basement walkout from the inside.”

Lucy led me to a curving staircase with a wrought-iron railing. It did a quarter circle on the way to the lower floor. Along the way I asked, “What about Miriam? Your father was a writer. What about her?”

“She tended to my father’s needs.” There was something in the way she said it that suggested more than the running of a household.

“And before that?”

“A photographer. Portraits. She met Dad when she was asked by his publisher for an updated author photo. They were reissuing a couple of his early books, and she came to the house to do the shoot and didn’t leave for a week.”

That hint of disapproval in her voice.

There was a five-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling bookcase at the bottom of the stairs. A lot of the books were oversized coffee-table-type volumes. I glanced at some of the spines, saw that many of them were about cinema. Books on Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock. Several tomes on the history of sex in the cinema. One called, quite simply, Filth in Film .

Lucy noticed me reading the spines of the books and said, “I don’t know how many times I asked Dad to put those where Crystal wouldn’t come across them, but he kept insisting she was still too young to care.”

“Crystal spent time here?”