Linwood Barclay: No Safe House

Bradley shouted out in pain and collapsed toward the couch, catching the edge and falling onto the floor.

“Enough,” the woman said. She said to her partner, “Sweetheart, you want to turn down some of these lights? It’s awfully bright in here.”

“Sure,” he said, found the light switch, and flicked it down.

“My foot,” Richard whimpered. “You broke my goddamn foot.”

“Let me help him,” Esther said. “Let me get him an ice pack.”

“Stay put,” the man said.

The woman perched her butt on the edge of the coffee table, where she could easily address Esther or look down to the floor to Richard.

She said this:

“I’m going to ask the two of you a question, and I’m only going to ask it once. So I want you to listen very carefully, and then I want you to think very carefully about how you answer. What I do not want you to do is answer my question with a question. That would be very, very unproductive. Do you understand?”

The Bradleys glanced at each other, terrified, then looked back at the woman. Their heads bobbed up and down weakly in understanding.

“That’s very good,” the woman said. “So, pay attention. It’s a very simple question.”

The Bradleys waited.

The woman said, “Where is it?”

The words hung there for a moment, no one making a sound.

After several seconds, Richard said, “Where is wh—?”

Then cut himself off when he saw the look in the woman’s eyes.

She smiled and waved a finger at him. “Tut, tut, I warned you about that. You almost did it, didn’t you?”

Richard swallowed. “But—”

“Can you answer the question? Again, you need to know that Eli says it’s here.”

Richard’s lips trembled. He shook his head and stammered, “I–I don’t — I don’t—”

The woman raised a palm, silencing him, and turned her attention to Esther. “Would you like to answer the question?”

Esther was careful with her phrasing. “I would appreciate it if you could be more specific. I–I have to tell you that name — Eli? I don’t know anyone by that name. Whatever it is you want, if we have it, we’ll give it to you.”

The woman sighed and turned her head to her partner, who was standing a couple of feet away.

“I gave you your chance,” the woman said. “I told you I’d only ask once.” Just then, the house next door began to thump once again with loud music. The windows of the Bradley house began to vibrate. The woman smiled and said, “That’s Drake. I like him.” She glanced up at the man and said, “Shoot the husband.”

“No! No!” Esther screamed.

“Jesus!” Richard shouted. “Just tell us what—”

Before the retired teacher could finish the sentence, the man had reached into his jacket for a gun, pointed it downward, and pulled the trigger.

Esther opened her mouth to scream again, but no sound came out. Little more than a high-pitched squeak, as though someone had stepped on a mouse.

The woman said to her, “I guess you really don’t know.” She nodded at her associate, and he fired a second shot.

Wearily, she said to him, “Doesn’t mean it’s not here. We’ve got a long night ahead of us, sweetheart, unless it’s in the cookie jar.”

“We should be so lucky,” he said.

I don’t know where I got the idea that once you’ve come through a very dark time, after you’ve confronted the worst possible demons and defeated them, that everything’s going to be just fine.

Doesn’t work that way.

Not that life wasn’t better for us, at least for a while. Seven years ago, things were pretty bad around here. Bad as they can get. People died. My wife and daughter and I came close to being among them. But when it was over, and we were whole, and still had each other, well, we did like the song says. We picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and started all over again.

More or less.

But the scars remained. We went through our own version of post-traumatic stress. My wife, Cynthia, certainly did. She’d lost all the members of her family when she was fourteen — I really mean lost ; her parents and her brother vanished into thin air one night — and Cynthia had to wait twenty-five years to learn their fate. When it was all over, there were no joyful reunions.

There was more. Cynthia’s aunt paid the ultimate price in her bid to shine the light on a decades-old secret. And then there was Vince Fleming, a career criminal who was also just a kid when Cynthia’s family vanished, who’d been with her that night. Twenty-five years later, against his own nature, he helped us find out what really happened. Like they say, no good deed goes unpunished. He got shot and nearly died for his trouble.

You might have heard about it. It was all over the news. They were even going to make a movie about it at one point, but that fell through, which, if you ask me, was for the best.

We thought we’d be able to close the book on that chapter of our lives. Questions were answered; mysteries were solved. The bad people died, or went to prison.

Case closed, as they say.

But it’s like a horrible tsunami. You think it’s over, but debris is washing ashore half a world away years later.

For Cynthia, the trauma never ended. Every day, she feared history repeating itself with the family she had now. Me. And our daughter, Grace. The trouble was, the steps she took to make sure it wouldn’t led us into that area known as the law of unintended consequence: the actions you take to achieve one thing often produce the exact opposite result.

Cynthia’s efforts to keep our fourteen-year-old daughter, Grace, safe from the big, bad world were pushing the child to experience it as quickly as she could.

I kept hoping we’d eventually work our way through the darkness and come out the other side. But it didn’t look as though it was going to happen anytime soon.

Grace and her mother had shouting matches on a pretty much daily basis.

They were all variations on a theme.

Grace ignored curfew. Grace didn’t call when she got to where she was going. Grace said she was going to one friend’s house but ended up going to another and didn’t update her mother. Grace wanted to go to a concert in New York but wouldn’t be able to get home until two in the morning. Mom said no.

I tried to be a peacemaker in these disputes, usually with little success. I’d tell Cynthia privately that I understood her motives, that I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Grace, either, but that if our daughter was never allowed any freedom, she’d never learn to cope in the world on her own.

These fights generally ended with someone storming out of a room. A door being slammed. Grace telling Cynthia she hated her, then knocking over a chair as she left the kitchen.

“God, she’s just like me,” Cynthia would often say. “I was a horror show at that age. I just don’t want her making the same mistakes I made.”

Cynthia, even now, thirty-two years later, carried a lot of guilt from the night her mother and father and older brother, Todd, disappeared. Part of her still believed that if she hadn’t been out with a boy named Vince, without her parents’ permission or knowledge, and if she hadn’t gotten drunk and passed out once she’d fallen into her own bed, she might have known what was happening and, somehow, saved those closest to her.

Even though the facts didn’t bear that out, Cynthia believed she’d been punished for her misbehavior.

She didn’t want Grace ever having to blame herself for something so tragic. That meant instilling in Grace the importance of resisting peer pressure, of never allowing yourself to be put into a difficult situation, of listening to that little voice in your head when it says, This is wrong and I’ve got to get the hell out of here.