Linwood Barclay: Far From True

It had not.

Finley didn’t wait for an answer. “Be out front of your place in three minutes.” He ended the call.

David pulled a pair of jeans on over his boxers, threw on a pullover shirt so he wouldn’t waste valuable time fiddling with buttons, jammed his feet, sockless, into a pair of sneakers. He could shoot pics and video with his phone, but thought he might need something better than that, so he grabbed a camera from the home office he was in the process of setting up across the hall from his bedroom.

Despite his best efforts to be quiet, the door to his parents’ bedroom opened. His mother stood there in her pajamas.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m heading out. Don’t know how long I’ll be. If I’m not here when you wake up, get Ethan off to school.”

From inside the bedroom, his father shouted, “What’s the ruckus?”

“Work,” David said.

“Finley expects you to go out at this hour?” his mother asked.

“Does he know it’s almost midnight?” Don asked, making no attempt to whisper.

“Don’t wake Ethan,” David said.

“Why’s that man calling you out in the middle of the night?” Arlene Harwood persisted. “That’s outrageous. Doesn’t the man realize you have a young son to look after and—”

“Mom!” David snapped. “Jesus! I’ll be back when I’m back.”

When he was living under his parents’ roof, he couldn’t wait to get Ethan and himself out of there. Now he had his own place, and nothing had changed. They made him feel like he was thirteen.

He raced down the stairs, caught a brief glimpse of himself in the front hall mirror. Hair sticking up at odd angles.

Finley’s Lincoln screeched to a stop out front of David’s house. David stepped out, made sure the door was locked behind him, and ran to the curb.

Finley had powered down the window. “Chop-chop,” he said.

David got in on the passenger side. The leather upholstery was cool, and the night air was cold on his bare ankles.

Finley glanced at David’s hair. “You didn’t have time to run a comb through that?”

“Go.”

“Is that a decent camera you’ve got there?” the former mayor asked. “I hope so. I don’t want some shitty phone shots. This is an opportunity too good to piss away.”

David, staring straight ahead through the windshield, could not bring himself to look at the man.

“Just go,” David said.

“All I can say is, good thing I’m not counting on you to keep me posted on current events,” Finley said. “Good thing I was up, heard the sirens.”

David said, “You don’t live anywhere near the Constellation.” And, for the first time, glanced over at the man.

“I got more ears than just my own,” Finley said. “I’ve had some fridge magnets made up. Got a box of them in the trunk. Finley for Mayor , they say. But I don’t know, might be bad form to hand them out at an accident scene.”

“You think?” David asked, wondering, not for the first time in recent months, how it had come to this.

It was the worst thing Detective Barry Duckworth had seen in twenty years of working for the Promise Falls police.

He’d arrived at the drive-in at 11:49 p.m., and by 12:31 a.m. he’d established a few basic facts.

The screen had come down about twenty minutes past eleven. It had fallen in the direction of the parking lot, and while scattered debris had hit several cars, two had been crushed. Although it was hard to look at it this way right now, later the thinking would be that it could have been a lot worse.

Given that the rear license plates were visible, Duckworth was able to determine quickly to whom the cars belonged. The first, an older-model Jaguar, had been registered to an Adam Chalmers, of Ridgewood Drive. The fire department had cleared off enough of the car to see that there were two casualties in the vehicle, a man and a woman.

Chalmers and his wife, Duckworth guessed.

The other car, a 2006 Mustang convertible, was registered jointly to a Floyd and Renata Gravelle, of Canterbury Street. One of the firefighters had told Duckworth that it looked like two kids in the car. A boy and a girl, probably late teens.

Both dead. Heads crushed.

There were some nonfatal injuries. Bud Hillier, forty-two — whose three children, aged eight, eleven, and thirteen, were in the car with him — was resting his hands atop the steering wheel of his Taurus station wagon when a chunk of screen came through the glass and lopped off two of his fingers. Dolores Whitney, thirty-seven — who’d brought her daughter, Chloe, eight, to a drive-in for the first and, undoubtedly, last time — suffered four broken ribs when a large piece of wood pierced her windshield.

Compared with the people in the two convertibles in the first row, these folks had gotten off easy.

Arriving shortly after Duckworth was Angus Carlson, who’d recently been moved up from uniformed officer to detective status because the department was short of investigators. Duckworth hadn’t yet made his mind up about Carlson. The younger cop struck him as inexperienced and, at times, a bit of a jerk.

When Carlson spotted Duckworth, he went straight to him, took a quick glance at the scene, and asked, “So what movie was playing? Crash? Flatliners? Good Luck Chuck ?”

Duckworth gave him the addresses he’d gotten from running the plates on the two cars. “Go to those houses, find out who the people in those cars likely are. See if you can do it without cracking any jokes.”

Carlson frowned. “Just breaking the tension.”

“Go.”

Lionel Grayson, who’d been identified as the owner and manager, was being treated by one of the paramedics. He gave every indication of being in mild shock, and had nearly passed out before Duckworth’s arrival.

“Mr. Grayson,” Duckworth said, “I need to ask you some questions.”

The man looked at Duckworth vacantly. “It was our last night.”

“I understand that, yes.”

“It was supposed to be a... celebration. Sad, too, but a night to remember all the wonderful times people had here...”

He looked away. Duckworth could see the dried trail of tears that had run down the man’s cheeks.

“How many?” the man asked.

“How many what?”

“How many are dead?” Grayson asked.

“It appears to be four, sir, although until all the debris is removed, we won’t know for sure. Someone might have been walking along there, but it’s two cars that were crushed. Do you have any idea how this happened?”

“Marsden,” he said. “He should be here soon. I called him.”

“Who’s Marsden?”

“Clifford Marsden. He owns Marsden Demolition.”

“Are you saying he did this? He blew up the screen?”

“He must have,” Grayson said. “But he mixed up the dates, or set the timer wrong, or something.”

“You hired him to demolish the screen?”

Grayson nodded.

“When was that supposed to happen?”

“In another week,” he said. “A week from today. I didn’t even think he’d planted the explosives yet. That’s crazy. Why would he put in the explosives a week early? Run the risk of something like this happening?”

“That’s something we’ll want to ask him.”

“He’s on his way. I tried to call him, but my hands were shaking. I couldn’t handle my phone. Someone did it for me. But he’s coming. When I get my hands on him, I... I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Why was the screen supposed to come down so soon after closing?”

“It was part of the deal.”

“What deal?”

“The sale,” Grayson said. “To Mancini Homes.”

“All this land has been sold?”