Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“Okay,” Ethan said.

“The first thing you need to know is, regardless of anything your mom did, or what anyone might say about her, she loved you very much.”

“Okay.”

“The last thing your mother did, before she died, was to make sure nothing bad happened to you. There was a very bad man, and he was threatening to hurt you, and she stopped him.” David hesitated. “She killed him.”

“Yeah,” Ethan said. “I kind of knew that.”

“I know there’s bits and pieces of this that you know — you’ve probably heard your grandparents talking about it when they didn’t think you were listening. The thing is, even though she loved you more than just about anything else in the world, your mother wasn’t a very good person.”

Ethan glanced up at his father. “I know.”

“You know?”

He nodded. “I’ve read all about her.”

“You have?”

Ethan nodded. “There’s lots of stuff about her online. That she had a different name when she was born, that years ago she cut off the hand of that guy she killed, that she stole some diamonds that turned out to be—”

“You know all this?”

Ethan stopped. His lip quivered. “Am I in trouble? I just wanted to know. Anytime I’ve ever asked you about Mom, you just said there wasn’t much to tell, and so then I would ask Nana and Poppa about her and they said I should talk to you, so I Googled her instead. There’s a whole bunch of stories. Most of them are from around the time everything happened, like, after she died.”

David felt an enormous weight coming off him, but at the same time, he felt saddened.

“I should have guessed that you’d do that. It’s pretty impossible to keep anything a secret these days. Especially from kids.”

“Yeah.”

“So, how’d you feel about what you found out?”

Ethan shrugged. “I don’t know. A bit weird. But it was also kind of cool.”

“Cool?” David said sharply.

Ethan recoiled from his father’s tone. “I don’t mean cool, like, as in cool, neat. More like, you know, cool, interesting.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to jump down your throat. I think I understand.”

“Like, I’m glad that you’re sort of normal and ordinary, but it was kind of, you know, neat that my mom was someone people were talking about. I mean, if she was still alive, it would be awful, but because it happened a long, long time ago, it’s not so bad.”

To him, five years is an eternity, David thought. For me, it was yesterday.

“Is that it?” Ethan asked.

“Is what it?”

“That’s why you wanted to talk to me?”

“Yeah.”

“So can we go back?”

“Yeah, sure. Come here.”

David pulled the boy into him, put his arms around him. But Ethan pushed back.

“Dad, we’re on the street,” he complained, twisting his head, looking up and down the sidewalk.

“Sorry,” David said, releasing his grip. “Don’t want to embarrass you.”

“You can hug me when we get home if you still want to.”

“I might. I just might.”

When they got back to the house, they found two people waiting for them. Sam Worthington and her son, Carl. Her car, slashed tires replaced, was at the curb.

“Hi,” David said.

“Carl,” Sam said, prodding her son.

“Mr. Harwood, thank you for what you did today,” the boy said.

David smiled. “No problem.”

Turning his attention to Ethan, the boy said, “Do you have trains here, too?”

Ethan shook his head. “Just at my grandpa’s house. But Nana — that’s my grandma — made some blueberry pie, although you have to be careful not to get it on your shirt because it won’t come off.”

“That sounds okay,” Carl said, and the boys ran into the house, David and Sam watching them go.

David said, “How are you doing?”

“Okay,” Sam said. “Got my tires replaced, although I don’t know how I’ll pay the Visa bill when it comes in. The cops are looking for Ed and my ex-in-laws. They figure they’ll try to sneak back to Boston.”

“You worried they’ll try again?”

She shook her head slowly. “Not right now. Not after what happened. I mean, they have to know everyone’s trying to find them. They’re going to want to disappear for a while. Anyway, I came by to answer your question.”

“My question?”

“The one you left on my voice mail. The answer’s yes.”

“What did I ask you?” he asked.

“You asked if I wanted to go to dinner. The answer is yes.”

David nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“We’re going to do it right this time,” Sam said. “Dinner first .”

Once I was done talking to the police about Ed Noble’s visit to the Laundromat that morning, I called Lucy Brighton and said I wanted to update her. She invited me to come to her house at eight.

On the way, I had the radio tuned to a local phone-in show.

“Who says we couldn’t be a target of terrorists?” asked the bombastic host. “Are we too insignificant up here? A couple of hours away from New York? Is that what we’re foolish enough to think? Let me tell you something, my friend. You want to strike fear into the hearts of Americans? Then go to the heart of America. The big cities are the obvious targets. But why not Promise Falls? Why not — I don’t know — Lee, Massachusetts? Saratoga Springs? Middlebury, Vermont? Duluth? Make Americans feel unsafe wherever they happen to be. That’s what those Islamist fanatics are thinking, and you can be damn sure blowing up a drive-in theater is totally their kind of style. Let’s go to the phones. Go ahead, Dudley.”

Dudley?

“Yeah, I think we need to be looking very closely at our neighbors, because these people, what they do is, they hide amongst us.”

“No kidding, my friend, no kidding. And now we’ve got Mr. Twenty-three out there trying to scare us half to death, according to the brilliant cops in Promise Falls. Well, I’m telling you right now, I don’t scare easy. Your shtick with twenty-three might work on some people, but it won’t work on me.”

Mr. Twenty-three? What the hell was that about?

I decided it was something I didn’t need to know right now, and turned off the radio. When I rang the bell at the Brighton house, a young girl answered the door. I remembered Lucy telling me her daughter was eleven.

She was holding a clipboard in one hand, several sheets of paper held down by the metal arm. In the fingers of her other hand, an uncapped, fine-point Sharpie pen. She had straight brown hair that fell below her ears, and bangs across her forehead. She reminded me of the Peanuts character Marcie, minus the glasses.

If she’d been Peppermint Patty, she probably would have offered some kind of greeting.

Crystal offered none. She stared at me.

“Hi,” I said. “You must be Crystal.”

Crystal said nothing.

“My name is Mr. Weaver. I think your mom’s expecting me.”

She turned and shouted: “Mom!”

So, she could speak. She fixed her gaze on me again. I pointed to the clipboard.

“What are you working on?”

Crystal turned the clipboard so I could see it. She had divided the page into six squares, and filled each of them with crudely drawn characters and word bubbles.

“A comic book,” I said.

“No.”

“Sorry, I thought, with the panels, that it looked like a—”

“It’s a graphic novel,” she said. She flipped ahead through the pages. Dozens of them, all drawn in a similar style to the top one. Some of the pages were just scraps; a few were construction paper in red and green. On every one, more squares, more drawings. While the people were simply drawn, I understood what they were about. She’d managed to capture hand gestures and expressions, which seemed odd, given that, so far, Crystal seemed to have very few of her own.