Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“No,” I said gently. “That’s not what I mean.”

She figured it out. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell. You wouldn’t do that to me. You wouldn’t do that to Crystal. You wouldn’t take a mother from her child.”

She stepped closer, placed her palms on my chest. “We have something,” Lucy said. “Last night. I felt it. It wasn’t just a one-night thing. I felt a connection. Are you telling me you didn’t?”

“I felt something, too,” I admitted, circling her wrists with my hands and pulling her away. “But now I’m not sure you felt anything at all. Having me come back, that was a lucky break for you. I could be your alibi.”

“Cal, no. I’m falling in love with you. Crystal, too. I can tell. We... we need you. I need you. Please. Please. I’m not some kind of monster. It was an accident .”

“I... should go,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, grabbing my arm. “Are you going to the police?”

I pulled away, moving for the front door.

“Please, Cal, don’t do this to me. You have to understand. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I was thinking of Crystal. I want a better life for her. I want a better life for both of us. I thought that was what my father was going to give us. I couldn’t let Miriam stand in the way of that. I–I went insane for a minute. One minute of insanity can’t be held against me. Not after what I’ve been through. Cal—”

“I need to go, Lucy.”

I had the front door open. Crystal was walking up the driveway. More like trudging. Her backpack seemed to be weighing her down like a soldier’s gear.

“Oh God,” Lucy said under her breath, and began frantically wiping tears from her face, wiping her hands on her blouse. “Hey, sweetheart!” she said. “How was school?”

As she reached the door, she swung the backpack off her shoulders and it hit the ground with a thunk.

“This is so heavy,” Crystal said.

“What’ve you got in there?” her mother asked.

She unzipped it, brought out the package of paper I’d given her, and then the new markers.

“Mr. Weaver gave me these,” she said.

“Wasn’t that nice of him?” Lucy said, her voice breaking. “Did you thank him?”

“Yes,” she said.

“She did,” I said.

“I need a snack,” Crystal said, moving past both of us on her way to the kitchen.

Lucy Brighton, her eyes swimming, touched my arm.

“What are you going to do?” she asked one last time.

“I don’t know,” I said, and headed for my car.

It was after midnight, but this was when Lorraine Plummer got most of her work done. Plenty of Thackeray students were like that. Lorraine’s parents said they were all “night owls.” They slept through the day, never getting up before noon, sometimes staying in bed until three or four in the afternoon. But it didn’t mean they were lazy, or unproductive. They were just on a different clock from everyone else.

Lorraine often read and studied and wrote essays until three or four in the morning. Sometimes, she’d work straight through, head down for breakfast in the college cafeteria, and, once full of scrambled eggs, greasy bacon, and a bruised banana, head back up to her dormitory room, collapse on top of the bed, and fall asleep before she could get under the covers.

Of course, if you had an early-morning lecture, that could be a bit of a problem. When she had one of those, she’d force herself to go to bed no later than one, and set the alarm on her phone to make sure she got up in time. But often, she’d toss and turn and stare at the ceiling and lie awake until five, finally drifting off into a deep sleep a few minutes before her phone went off.

Her first class the next day wasn’t until one in the afternoon, so she planned to work until she could no longer keep her eyes open. She was writing an essay for Professor Blackmore’s English and psychology class that was due the end of the following week. Blackmore was pretty open to letting students stray from the curriculum if they had a good idea for an assignment, and he had liked her proposal to explore the themes of cyberbullying and intimidation in modern young adult fiction designed for a female audience.

Blackmore had said, “Go for it.”

He could be pretty cool like that, although, boy, something was very wrong with him at the lecture the other day, when he left the hall only a couple of minutes after everyone had come in. And he hadn’t been around for the tutorial he was supposed to have led that afternoon.

Lorraine had long thought that one day she would like to write a novel, but so many people said she should write about what she knew, and she believed her own life was too boring to write about. Who cared about some girl who grew up in a normal house with normal parents and led a perfectly normal life? And not everyone wrote about what they knew. What about Stephen King? She was betting he didn’t actually know any evil clowns living in the sewer.

That was more the kind of thing Lorraine wanted to write. She wanted to know what real honest-to-God writers thought about this issue, so she’d been totally thrilled when Clive Duncomb, the head of security at Thackeray, whom she had met one day when he was talking to Professor Blackmore, arranged for her to meet Adam Chalmers. Duncomb said he’d written a whole bunch of books.

She was a dinner guest at the house once. Chalmers’s wife, Miriam, who was absolutely beautiful, was there, as well as Blackmore and his wife, Georgina, who was sort of pretty but in a mousy kind of way. Also there was Duncomb, who, Lorraine learned, used to be a Boston cop and got to know Chalmers when the writer was looking for inside info on the life of a police detective. Duncomb’s wife, Elizabeth, or Liz, was this thin woman in her forties with skin that had seen way too much sun. Almost leathery. It added to a hardness about her, Lorraine remembered.

Although, she had to admit, there was a lot about that night she didn’t remember at all. She was so excited to meet a real, live writer that she got ridiculously nervous. Everyone was so nice, telling her to have some more wine to calm herself down, even though, technically speaking, Lorraine, being twenty years old, was not of legal drinking age in the state of New York. Not that she hadn’t had a drink or two — thousand — but these were grown-ups offering her booze.

Lorraine had made a joke about this, how they were all going to get into trouble.

It was Duncomb who pointed out that while the law did forbid anyone under twenty-one from purchasing alcohol, it did allow parents or legal guardians to offer someone under that age a drink in their home.

Lorraine laughed. “You guys aren’t my parents.”

Duncomb smiled. “Well, for the purposes of dinner, let’s say we are your legal guardians.”

That was good enough for her.

Trouble was, the wine went straight to her head. Big-time. Next thing she remembered, the Duncombs were driving her home.

“Please, please tell the Chalmerses I am so sorry,” she said. “I feel like such an idiot.”

“Don’t you worry about it,” Liz Duncomb said. “He thought you were lovely. We all did. Didn’t we, Clive?”

“You bet,” Clive Duncomb said.

The weird thing was, the next morning, she didn’t just feel stupid. She felt sore . Like that time after her high school grad dance, with Bobby Bratner, in his mom’s minivan, parked behind a church. But nothing like that could have happened at the Chalmerses’ place. They were all, like, good people. She couldn’t figure it out.

But what really blew her mind now was that Adam and Miriam Chalmers were dead. Crushed under that drive-in movie screen. That was so crazy . There seemed to be no end of shit going on around here.