Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“Front desk.”

“Sandra Bottsford, please.”

“I’m afraid she’s not here right now. Can I have her call you?”

Duckworth left his name and cell phone number. “She’ll know what it’s about.”

Then he set off for Peter Blackmore’s house.

It was a two-story redbrick Victorian in the old part of town. There were lights on behind the curtained windows, and what looked like the bluish light from a television.

Duckworth parked at the curb, got out of the car, taking the purse Garth had retrieved from the trunk of Adam Chalmers’s crushed Jaguar, which he had tucked into a plastic grocery bag, and headed for the front door.

Once Miriam Chalmers had kicked me out of her house, I phoned Lucy Brighton.

“Yes?” she said.

“You sitting down?”

“What is it?”

“Miriam’s alive.”

“What?” She said it so loud, I pulled the phone away from my ear.

“She just returned home, walked in while I was looking around. She’d gone to Lenox for a couple of days to think about her marriage, apparently, and didn’t know anything about the drive-in.”

“Oh my God,” Lucy said. “That’s... wonderful. I’m glad she’s okay. I just wish my father had also...”

“I know.”

A pause at the other end, and then, “If it wasn’t Miriam in the car with my dad, then who was it?”

“Miriam thinks a woman named Georgina Blackmore. Ring a bell?”

“No. There’s a professor at Thackeray with that last name, I think. But I’m not really sure. Cal, should I call the police? Tell them they’ve got it wrong? That it’s somebody else?”

“I imagine they’ll be hearing from Miriam herself pretty soon. I told her she should call her brother. Lucy, I don’t know that there’s anything else I can do for you at this point. The missing discs, they’re really Miriam’s problem now.”

“Yes, I guess so. I’m going to have to call her.”

“A heads-up. She’s pissed you hired me. She wasn’t pleased to find me in the house. And she was beyond horrified when she realized someone had been into that room, and that the discs were taken.”

“I have to — what am I going to say when I call her? I mean, I’ve started making the arrangements for my father. He’s been moved to the funeral home. There are things to do, to plan, and—”

“Tell the funeral home. Have them call her,” I suggested.

“This is all so hard to believe. Cal, thank you for everything you’ve done.”

“It hasn’t been much,” I said, getting into my car. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do. In the meantime, I’m heading home.”

“Okay, thanks. Good-bye, Cal.”

I keyed the engine and pulled away from the Chalmers house, thinking about Miriam. She’d looked more upset about the discovery of the playroom, and those missing discs, than she had about her husband’s death.

But it wasn’t my headache anymore.

There was a parking space set aside for me in the lot behind my building, but there was no access to my apartment from there. That meant I had to walk down a narrow alley that delivered me to the main street, where I’d find the ground-level door to my second-floor apartment right next to Naman’s Books.

It was after ten, and the light was on in the store.

The jangling bell over the door announced my arrival. Naman Safar was perched on a stool behind the cash register, his nose in an old Bantam paperback edition of The Blue Hammer , by Ross Macdonald, while some opera I’d never heard of played in the background. He glanced up at me.

“Hey, Cal.” He tucked a strip of red ribbon between the pages, closed the book, and set it next to the cash register. “You’re up late.”

“Me? What are you doing open this late?”

Naman looked at his watch. “I guess it is kind of dumb. No one’s out shopping for books at this hour. But what am I going to do at home? Sit around?”

“Naman, turn off the lights. Go home.”

He nodded obediently. “Okay, okay.”

He slid off the stool, planting his feet on the floor. He turned off the CD player and then popped open the cash register. “Big day,” he said. “Twenty-nine dollars.”

“Well,” I said.

“E-books aren’t just killing new-book stores. They’re killing me, too. I hate those things, those little things with the screens. I hate them.”

A book resting atop the pile closest to me caught my eye. Another Roth, in paperback. The Human Stain. I picked it up. “Am I too late? Have you closed the till?”

“Take it.”

“No.” I glanced at the price Naman had lightly penciled on the inside cover. Five bucks. “Here,” I said, digging into my wallet. I had a five. “Take this.”

He looked at the bill. “Okay.”

As he was taking it from my fingers, we both heard tires squealing up the street somewhere. The gunning of an engine.

“I haven’t read that one, so I can’t tell you if it’s one of his good ones,” Naman said.

“Someone recommended it to me this morning,” I said. “The woman who runs the Laundromat up the street.”

The sound of that racing engine was getting closer. Then the sudden screeching of brakes.

We both looked out the store’s front window at the same moment. A black pickup truck had appeared, passenger side facing us. The window was down, and a young white man, probably in his early twenties, was shouting.

He yelled, loud enough for us to hear through the glass, “Fucking terrorist!”

I saw an arm come up. There was something in the man’s hand. A bottle, maybe, and what looked like flame.

“Get down!” I said to Naman.

As he threw himself to the floor, the Molotov cocktail sailed through the air, hit the window of the bookshop. The glass and the bottle shattered simultaneously, and the burning rag soaked in, presumably, gasoline landed on a pile of books.

Flames erupted instantly.

The truck’s back tires squealed. The man who’d tossed the bottle let out a large whoop of victory as the vehicle sped off.

“Naman!” I shouted. “We have to get out!”

“My books!” he cried, stumbling to his feet. “My books!”

“Have you got an extinguisher?”

He looked at me with horror and panic. “No!”

“Get out!” I said again.

I dropped my copy of The Human Stain and pushed Naman toward the door, followed him out onto the sidewalk. I dug into my pocket for my phone to get the fire department.

I hated talk radio.

“I keep hoping somehow I skipped over her,” Clive Duncomb said to Peter Blackmore. Duncomb had the remote in his hand, his thumb on the fast-forward button, bodies gyrating and tangling and untangling at high speed on the TV screen.

“You’re going so fast, it’s starting to make me sick to my stomach,” Peter said. “I can’t look at it anymore.”

“She’s not on that one,” Duncomb said, ejecting the disc. He picked up another one, glanced at what had been scribbled on it in marker. Georgina-Miriam-Liz flying high. “I don’t think it could be this one. This is one where the girls had the stewardess costumes. That was after the Fisher girl died.”

“You better check it just the same,” Peter said. “I can’t think about this. Why did that man answer Georgina’s phone?”

“One crisis at a time,” Duncomb said. But then his own phone rang. He looked at it, said to Peter, “It’s Liz.”

He put the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”

“You find her yet?”

“Not yet.”

“We may have another problem,” Liz said.

“What?”

“Lucy called here.”