Linwood Barclay - Far From True

He could take care of everything at once. Kill two birds with one stone. Literally. Make Garnet and Yolanda’s troubles go away, and get even with that Harwood guy. Yolanda could give him the money Garnet was seriously thinking of giving to Samantha to shut her up. What a stupid idea that was. Okay, Ed probably wouldn’t get as much as Samantha might have, but it’d be a nice chunk of change.

The kid would end up back with the grandparents, and everything would be fuckin’ hunky-dory. Except for maybe the fact that Ed was going to have to hide out for the next several years. But with that cash to keep him going, that wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t like Ed had close family he’d miss. His parents were dead, and he had just the one sister, who, last he heard, was living on the street in Pittsburgh.

Once he came into some money, the last thing he’d want to do was have her find out. She’d want to upgrade her Frigidaire shipping container to a cardboard Miele box.

It had been quite a scene in the hotel room the night before when Yolanda urged her husband to consider Ed’s idea of taking Samantha out of the picture altogether. The guy just about blew a gasket. Saying they were in enough trouble as it was. Yolanda arguing that they were already in up to their necks — they might as well go for broke.

Garnet’s face had gone deep red. Ed was pretty sure he was going to grab Yolanda by the throat and strangle her.

So Ed spoke up, said, “Okay, okay, forget it.” Gave Yolanda a wink, then said maybe it was time for him to move on. If Yolanda could give him a lift to the bus station, or get him to Albany, where he could catch a train, he’d get out of their hair once and for all.

Yolanda piped up, “That sounds good to me.”

Garnet said, “Get him the hell out of my sight.”

Once Yolanda and Ed were in the parking lot, she handed him the keys to the Caddy. “Do what you got to do. Once it’s done, Garnet will come around. I’ll pay you well — don’t you worry about that. All I got to do now is sit in the coffee shop long enough for him to think I actually drove you to the bus station.”

Ed took the keys and was heading for the driver’s door when Yolanda said, “Hold up a sec.”

She was reaching into her purse for something, handed it over.

Ed got in the car and went hunting for Samantha. She showed up at her house around midnight, with the Harwood guy. When he didn’t come back out after half an hour, Ed knew the guy was getting his knob polished, and probably wouldn’t be coming out till morning. So he parked on the street and set his phone to wake him up at six. When he opened his eyes, Harwood’s car was still there. Half an hour later, the two lovebirds came out.

He’d follow them, see where things led. Wait for an opportunity. He knew this much: He wasn’t going to try to run them off the road. Garnet would be some pissed if he put a scratch on his Caddy. He had options, what with Yolanda giving him that little something before he got in the car. Ed reached over to the passenger seat, made sure it was still there.

A pistol. A Ruger LCP. A perfect gun for a woman, light, easy to carry in a reasonably sized purse. Ed didn’t mind that it was a bit girlie if it did the job.

Yolanda had said, “I carry it around a lot. You never know when you are going to run into bad people.”

“What is it?” Lucy Brighton asked as I returned the phone to my jacket.

“An old friend, a detective with the Promise Falls police,” I said. “He needs to see me.”

“What about?”

“Don’t know,” I said, doing up my pants, and feeling a little silly about it.

“You have to go right now?”

I nodded. I gave her a quick kiss. “Okay if I call you later?”

Lucy nodded. “Sure, yeah. I was thinking I’d have to do the rest of the funeral arrangements today, but that sort of falls to Miriam, don’t you think?”

“Have you talked to her? Since finding out she wasn’t in the car with your father?”

Lucy shook her head. “I hardly know what to say to her.”

“She hasn’t called you?”

Another head shake. She set her lips firmly together. “I’ll call her. After you leave. Tell her what I’ve done so far where my father’s concerned.”

“Okay,” I said. “Talk to you later.”

We walked to the front door. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Lucy said.

I saw that she was looking at Crystal’s bagged lunch. She must have set it down when she retied her shoe, then forgotten to take it with her.

“I swear,” Lucy said. “And with all I have to do today, I—”

“Let me,” I said. “I’ll drop it off for her by her lunchtime.”

“I can’t let—”

“It’s no trouble, really.”

Lucy told me which school, and when Crystal’s lunch was, and, grinning, said she would call ahead to let the staff know some really strange man was coming by with something for her.

I went out to my car. Duckworth had asked to meet me at Kelly’s, a downtown diner. I found him in a booth, a cup of coffee in front of him, and a plate, judging by the red smears on it, that had once had cherry pie on it.

We shook hands as I slid in opposite him. “How’s things, Barry?”

“Good, good,” he said, then pointed to the plate and grimaced. “Didn’t really have time for breakfast this morning.”

“The pie’s always been good here,” I said. “And you can never go wrong with pie for breakfast.”

“Maureen might be a bit skeptical about that,” Barry said.

“How is she?”

“Good.”

“And Trevor?”

Barry Duckworth smiled. “You’re good, remembering that. He’s okay.”

“You brought him in to work the odd time, showed him around. But that was a long time ago. I’m guessing he’s about four feet taller now.”

“He is, he is. And how about you? You settling in back here?”

“I suppose. Although I may be looking for new digs. I’m living over that bookshop that got hit with a Molotov cocktail last night.”

Barry blinked. “I don’t even know about that. I know about the bus.”

“What bus?” I asked.

We filled each other in. He mentioned the number on the back of the bus, and I told him I’d heard about his news conference, about the strange series of events that seemed to be linked.

“Let me ask you this,” Barry said. “Is it possible what happened at your place is in any way connected to these other things?”

I thought about that. “No appearance of your infamous twenty-three that I noticed. It was pretty straightforward. Couple of yahoos blaming Naman for the drive-in thing because supposedly he has a terrorist’s name.”

“Assholes,” Duckworth said. “Anyway, the reason I asked you here...”

Barry reached into his pocket for something and laid one of my business cards on the table.

“I already have one of those,” I said.

“Guess where I found this,” he said.

It wasn’t as though I’d handed out a thousand of them since I’d returned to Promise Falls. But I had handed out a few. Most recently, to Adam Chalmers’s ex-wife Felicia. And I’d handed one to Miriam the night before when she found me in her house.

“Tell me,” I said. “It’ll save us some time.”

“At the Chalmers house. Adam and Miriam Chalmers. You know them?”

“I never met Adam,” I admitted. “Miriam, yes.”

“Many times?”

“Just once.”

“When was that?”

“For God’s sake, Barry, just tell me what’s going on.”

Barry Duckworth took a sip of his coffee. “She died last night. Looks like someone pushed her down the stairs. Broke her neck.”

You try to be cool, acting all the time as though nothing surprises you. But my jaw dropped. “What?”