Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

“Do you ever think,” he said slowly, “when you’ve been through something really horrendous that... I don’t know how to put this. You ever think, I’m sick of playing by the rules? Like, the hell with it. I just don’t give a fuck. Like you want to get even. Not just with some person, but the whole world.”

Cynthia took another sip. “I went through that, when I was in my later teens. You think you’re entitled to do whatever you want because you got the short end of the stick. But I got over it. I didn’t want to be a huge pain in the ass to my aunt. I mean, she was good enough to take me in. If she’d kicked me out, I’d have had no place to go. Just because something shitty happens to you doesn’t mean you get to make life harder for those around you.”

“Well, yeah, sure. Your aunt, she still around?”

Cynthia felt a constriction in her throat, a moistening in her eyes. “No.”

They sat there, shoulders touching, for a while, neither one saying anything.

Cynthia finally said, “Look, I should go.”

“I’ve got another partial bottle in the fridge. Seems stupid not to kill it off.” She felt the pressure from his shoulder grow ever so slightly.

“Nate,” she said.

“I feel like I’ve wasted these last few weeks. Having someone like you across the hall, and now you’re getting ready to leave.”

“Nate.”

“I’m just saying, I like you. You’re nice to talk to. Easy to talk to. Maybe, because of what happened to you, maybe you have more empathy than most people.”

“I don’t know about that.”

He opened his mouth to say something, stopped, tried again. “I think I may have done something I shouldn’t have,” he said.

He shifted on the stool so that he was facing her more directly, his face only inches from hers.

“Nate, it’s okay. Whatever it is, don’t worry.”

“Your husband, he’s lucky you’re coming home. If you were my wife, I’d have never let you go in the first place.”

“I should really—”

“No, I mean it. You’re a very—”

“I’m old enough to be your mother,” Cynthia said.

“Bullshit, unless you got knocked up when you were ten,” he said quietly.

“And you’re wrong — you haven’t done anything you shouldn’t have, and neither have I. We’re just having a drink. And now I’m going home.”

“No, wait — that’s not what I meant,” Nathaniel said. “The reason I asked you over here — I mean, I did ask you over here because I like you, you know? But there was something I wanted to ask you about.”

Hesitantly, she said, “Okay.”

“It’s about your friend.”

“My friend?”

“The one who dropped by here a couple of weeks ago.”

Cynthia recalled the encounter he was talking about. “What about him, Nate?”

“Remember he asked what I did, and I told him. About the dog walking.”

“Yeah.”

“So you must have told him a bit more about me that after, right?”

She tried to recall. “If I did, I didn’t have a lot to say, Nate, honestly.”

“The thing is, he got in touch with me later.”

Cynthia felt a shiver. “Oh.”

“Yeah. He must have Googled me or something because he kind of knew what I’d been through, read up on my financial problems, that what I was doing now was just a bit of a comedown from selling apps and making hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? He even looked into my personal life, knew my wife had left me, found out she was seeing some new guy.”

“Nate, what on earth—?”

“Anyway, he said he could help me out, if I could help him out.”

“Help him out how?”

He hesitated. “I don’t want to get into that part.”

“Well, what did you say?”

“I thought about it, and said sure,” Nathaniel said. “Because he said, and he was really firm about this, that nothing bad would happen. That no one would ever know.”

“Nate, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Tell me, what did you agree to do?”

He put his palm over his mouth, dragged it down over his chin. “I think it’s probably better if I don’t tell you everything.”

That suited her fine. Cynthia wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“But what I was wondering was, since he’s a friend of yours, I wonder if you could talk to him. The thing is, I want to end our arrangement. I want to break things off. I’m even willing to give back every dime he’s paid me so far. Well, most of it anyway. I spent some of it. But he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d be inclined to let someone out of a business arrangement, even though we don’t exactly have what you’d call a signed contract.”

“You want me to talk to him?” Cynthia said.

Nate nodded. “Yeah, I’d really appreciate it. I mean, Vince is your friend, right? He said he’d known you from way back, all the way to high school, that you’d kept in touch.”

It had been six months since I’d last seen Jane Scavullo.

I was in Whole Foods getting a small container of egg salad, English muffins, and some fresh pasta — enough to set me back twenty bucks — when I noticed her going through the checkout ahead of me.

I debated whether to get her attention. This was a different girl from the one I’d taught seven years earlier, when she was seventeen and a student in my creative writing class. The one who got suspended for fights with other girls, who’d rather spend her days smoking in the girls’ restroom than show up for class, who had a perpetual chip on her shoulder, who didn’t take shit from anybody, but also didn’t seem to give much of a shit about anything, either.

And she could write.

Whenever I had a stack of assignments from that class to mark, I’d always save her submission for last, assuming that she’d actually handed one in on this occasion. I still remembered this part from one of them:

“ ... you’re a kid, and you think things are pretty fucking OK, and then one day this guy who’s supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems OK, but you think, when’s it coming? That’s what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when’s it coming? Because if it hasn’t come for a long, long time, then you know you’re fucking due. ”

She wrote that assignment after her mother had moved in with a man named Vince Fleming, an individual who was, as they say, known to police, and not just here in Milford. I spent one long, harrowing night in his company seven years ago, the night he played a role in helping us find out what happened to Cynthia’s family.

He nearly died in the process.

But Vince’s good deeds that night didn’t make him a citizen in good standing.

He as much as admitted, that night, that he was responsible for one murder when he was a young man, and I suspected there were more. He made me uneasy, but he never struck me as a psychopath. Whatever acts of violence he committed were, in his world, just part of doing business. But as I’d reminded myself at the time, just because a scorpion doesn’t sting you out of spite doesn’t make it a good idea to hang out with a scorpion.

One thing he’d made clear to me in the short time we spent together: even though Jane Scavullo was not his daughter, she meant a great deal to him and he wanted the best for her. When Vince was in his early twenties, he’d become a father. A young woman he’d gotten pregnant had a baby girl, but it wasn’t long before mother and daughter were killed in a tragic accident.

I think Vince often saw, in Jane, the girl his own daughter might have grown up to be.