Linwood Barclay - Far From True

He had a feeling maybe she was home. She was angry with him, he was guessing, and when his name came up on the caller ID of her cell or the landline, she was refusing to answer.

Making him suffer.

Well, it was working.

“Uh, when we talk about psychological determinism, what is it exactly we’re talking about? It’s quite a mouthful, I grant you. But it goes to the heart of... the heart of...”

He’d swiped upward a little too hard with his finger, placing him ten paragraphs into his lecture. He tried to move the text back into position.

“Uh, hang on here, hang on...”

She’s fallen. Good God, she’s been hurt.

It seemed so obvious. Frighteningly obvious. Up to now, he’d assumed she was trying to teach him some sort of lesson. That she’d run off somewhere. Gone to stay with a friend. Or, if she was home, was giving him the silent treatment. She’d done it before when she’d been angry with him for something he’d done.

And he had done something. Or rather, he’d said something. Something he shouldn’t have said. Made some terrible accusations.

She hadn’t taken it well.

So there’d been every reason to believe she’d gone off somewhere to cool off. But it wasn’t like her to be gone this long. He’d seen her storm off and get in her car and come back in an hour or two.

Not overnight.

And she’d never been so pissed with him that she failed to show up for work.

God, what an idiot I’ve been, he thought. He should have gone home when her office had called. She could have tripped on the stairs. Slipped getting out of the tub. Electrocuted herself somehow.

He had to get home. Right now.

Blackmore looked at his class, at the thirty expectant and confused faces. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do this today.”

He picked up the tablet, shoved it into his pocket, and headed for the exit.

He walked hurriedly to his rusting, twenty-year-old Volvo, sped out of the faculty parking lot in a cloud of exhaust.

The Blackmores lived in a two-story redbrick Victorian in the old part of Promise Falls. Over the last decade — as long as he and Georgina had been married — they’d worked to restore the home to its original glory. They’d replaced the gingerbread trim and railings on the small front porch. Reshingled the roof. Replaced the furnace.

Georgina’s car, a four-year-old Prius, was parked at the side of the house. At first, the sight of the car gave him reason for hope. He brought the Volvo to a halt behind it, killed the engine, and got out of the car so quickly he didn’t bother to close the door.

He was fumbling with his keys as he approached the side entrance. But before he inserted the key, he tried opening it. Half the time, Georgina left the house unlocked when she was home.

The knob turned in his hand.

As he pushed it open, he shouted, “Georgie! Georgie?”

No answer.

The side door opened onto a landing between two short flights of stairs. Four steps up would take him to the kitchen, four steps down to the basement.

He decided to go up to the kitchen first. What he saw stopped him dead.

Drawers pulled out, cupboards opened. Dishes and cups and utensils out of position, dumped onto the countertop.

“Jesus,” he whispered. Then, shouting, he said, “Georgina!”

He made his way to the stairs and scaled them two steps at a time to reach the second floor. He headed straight for their bedroom. It was like the kitchen. Dresser drawers pulled out, clothes tossed, suitcases pulled out from under the bed. The closet door was open, and empty shoe boxes had been opened and tossed.

“Oh my God,” he said.

The guest bedroom had been similarly tossed. Someone had been searching the house from top to bottom.

“Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” Blackmore kept repeating.

“Calm down,” said a voice behind him.

Blackmore spun around. Standing in the doorway was Clive Duncomb.

“Jesus Christ!” Blackmore cried. “What the hell is going on?”

“I came by to look for Georgina,” he said calmly.

“Where is she? Where’s Georgina?”

“I don’t know.”

“Her car’s here,” Blackmore said. “If her car’s here, where the hell is she?”

“I didn’t find a purse.”

“Her purse?”

“I didn’t find it.”

“Georgina probably has half a dozen purses.”

Duncomb nodded. “Yes, that’s true. But the one she’d currently be using would have her car keys and her wallet and her driver’s license. I didn’t find a purse with those things.”

Blackmore waved his arms at the disarray. “Look at this. Something happened here. Someone tore this place apart. Maybe Georgina caught someone doing this. Oh God. Maybe someone kidnapped her, or even—”

“I did this,” Duncomb said.

Blackmore said, “What?”

“I’ve been tearing the place apart. I just finished looking through the basement. If she took it, and if it’s here, it’s well hidden.”

“Clive, what the hell are you talking about?”

“It occurred to me that it might be Georgina. She was always uncomfortable about that one disc. And she wasn’t wrong to be. Maybe she got into the house before I did. Or maybe she took it a long time ago.”

“Goddamn it, Clive, all you had to do was ask me. If Georgina’d taken it, she’d have told me.”

“Would she? Maybe she’d have been afraid to. Maybe she did it on her own.”

“Even if — even if you’re right, she wouldn’t have hidden it. She’d have destroyed it.”

Duncomb nodded, thinking. “Probably. It’d be good if she did. But I need to know. I need to know it doesn’t exist anymore.”

Blackmore ran his fingers through his hair, then kept his hand there and pushed down, as though keeping his head from exploding.

“But if she took it or didn’t take it, it doesn’t explain where she is,” he said. “Where the hell did she go?”

“That’s the part that worries me,” Clive Duncomb said. “Maybe she has it, and now she’s deciding what to do with it.”

It took Blackmore a moment to take in what Clive was getting at. “She wouldn’t go to the police. She wouldn’t. That makes no sense at all. She’s my wife . She’d be ruining all of us, herself included. It’s absolutely impossible. It’s unthinkable.”

“I hope you’re right. Because the last thing any of us need is a video of us fucking the brains out of some girl who ended up dead.”

“We didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Olivia Fisher,” Blackmore said, searching Duncomb’s face. “Right?”

“Of course not,” he said. “But it’s not the sort of thing I’d want to have to prove.”

The door to Felicia Chalmers’s bedroom opened. A lean, six-foot-tall man, arms adorned with dragon tattoos and dressed in nothing but a pair of airplane-themed boxers, stood there, scratching his right buttock. He blinked his eyes repeatedly, bringing Felicia, and the apartment, into focus.

“The Corbin rises,” Felicia said, having just shown out the detective, the nearly empty glass of red wine still in her hand.

“I heard talking,” Corbin said.

“You didn’t hear the music, but you could hear the talking?”

“The music I’m used to,” he said. “I can sleep through Metallica. But I heard you yakking with somebody and it woke me up. Something going on?”

“Adam’s dead.”

“Uh,” Corbin said, “who’s Adam again?”

Felicia frowned. “My ex.”

That brought him fully awake. “Shit! What happened?” Felicia filled him in. “Sorry, babe. You need a hug?” He opened his arms.

“No, I do not need a hug,” she said, and went into the kitchen. She set down her wineglass and rooted around in a drawer until she found an address book.