Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

“God, after all that shit that went down, what, six years ago?”

“Seven.”

“Everything wasn’t okay after that?”

“We’re doing our best.”

“How’s your kid? Grace? How old’s she now?”

“Fourteen. Although it feels more like nineteen.”

“Hell on skates?”

“She has her moments.” I hesitated. “How’s Vince?”

Another shrug. “Okay, I guess. He and my mom made it legal five years ago, got married.”

“Great.”

She shook her head. “Yeah, but then, a month ago, she died. Breast cancer.”

My face fell. “I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head. “Hey, like you said, who doesn’t have something going on at some time, right? So I was officially a stepdaughter until four weeks ago, and then maybe not.” A pause, during which she appeared to be composing herself. “I moved out a while ago anyway.”

“How’s Vince holding up?”

“You know Vince. You don’t know whether to pity him or just write him off as a total dick. Anyway, I’m better off on my own. I got an apartment on the water. It’s pretty kick-ass. And there’s more.”

“Tell me,” I said.

She grinned. “There’s this guy. Bryce. We’ve been going out for a long time, and when I moved out, he and I moved in together.”

“That’s terrific. I’m glad things have worked out for you on that score.”

Jane Scavullo paused, seemed to be sizing me up. “You were pretty stand-up, Teach. You believed in me when nobody else did.”

“It wasn’t hard.”

“That,” she said, “is total bullshit.” An awkward silence ensued. “Look, I should let you go. Nice seein’ ya.”

“Sure thing.”

She gave me a hug and went over to her car. A blue Mini. She gave me a wave as she drove off.

And now, here we were, running into each other again. In the most unlikely of places, and circumstances. In the driveway of a home where my daughter was afraid she might have shot someone. A home I had searched illegally.

Where I hadn’t found Stuart. But I’d found blood.

“What are you doing here, Jane?” I asked her.

“It’s Vince,” Jane said. “He wants to have a word with you.”

Vince Fleming wanted to talk to me? Now? At this time of night? What the hell sense did that make? I hadn’t spoken to the man in seven years, not since that second visit to the hospital. Why would he want anything to do with me now?

Unless.

Had I just been prowling around Vince Fleming’s house? So far as I knew, he still lived on East Broadway, his place on the beach.

“Tell me this isn’t Vince’s house,” I said to Jane. The idea that I might have burgled that man’s home made my insides flip.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Well, thank Christ for that. If this isn’t his house, then I don’t know what he wants with me. Grace and I have to go.”

I wanted to get my daughter into the car and head straight to Milford Hospital to see whether Stuart Koch had been admitted. And depending on what we learned there, I might very well be looking for a lawyer for my daughter before the sun came up. Someone had lost some blood in that house, and the sooner we found whose it was, and how it had been spilled, the better chance we had of coming to grips with this mess. It was hard to get someone out of trouble when you didn’t know just how bad the trouble was.

“How the hell did you even know we’re here?” I asked my former student.

Jane’s eyes shifted to Grace.

“I called her,” Grace said. “A while ago. Before I called you to come pick me up.”

Grace had called Jane? Since when did Grace have Jane’s contact information? Since when did Grace even know Jane?

“What?” I asked my daughter. “Why would you call her?”

Grace said something so quietly I couldn’t make it out.

“What?” I said.

“Because she’s a friend,” Grace said. “Because I thought she could help me.”

Jane said, “I told her the person to call was you, not me.”

“What did you find?” Grace asked me. “In the house. Did you find anything?”

“Excuse me,” I said to Jane, then led Grace a few feet away so I could speak to her privately.

“I found some blood,” I told her.

“Oh God.”

“A small amount, in the kitchen. I searched everywhere else and didn’t find anything or anyone. But something happened in there. We’ll go by the hospital, see if Stuart went to the emergency room, and if that doesn’t pan out, we’ll—”

“Mr. Archer.” It was Jane. She’d never called me by my first name. It was always Mr. Archer or Teach.

“We’re talking,” I said.

“Vince really hates to be kept waiting,” she said. “Whatever you’re talking about, trust me, it’s more important that you talk to Vince.”

“I’m not getting this, Jane. What’s this got to do with him?”

She shook her head, raised her right shoulder half an inch like she was too weary for a full shrug. I remembered the gesture from when she sat in my class.

“You know I don’t get involved in his business. He does his thing and I do mine. The less I know about it, the better. It’s not like he calls on me to help him, but he figured, in this case, it might be better if I approached you. And he’s kind of got a lot on his plate at the moment.”

I looked back at the house. “This — this house — has something to do with Vince.”

Jane gave no indication either way. “Like I said, you’re going to have to find out from him.” She hesitated. “He’s gonna want to talk to Grace, too.”

“Not a chance,” I said.

“I told him you’d say that. So I made him a deal, which I’ll make with you. Grace can hang with me while he talks to you. That okay?”

I couldn’t stand there and debate this all night with her. If I refused, Vince would send some of his goons after me the way he had once before, long ago.

“Fine,” I said.

The three of us walked down the driveway to the street. Half a block up, I saw Jane’s Mini parked under a streetlight.

“Come on,” Jane said to Grace.

“Hang on,” I said. “The house on the beach?”

“Yeah,” Jane said. “Where you first had the pleasure. Remember?”

Would have been hard to forget.

It took less than ten minutes to get there. I’d driven along here many times in the last seven years, and not because I wanted to remind myself of my encounter with Vince Fleming. East Broadway was simply a Milford street I often used to get from one part of town to the other. It was also one of my favorite areas, this strip along the beach that looked out onto Long Island Sound and Charles Island, which was officially part of the Silver Sands park. Rumor had it that Captain Kidd had buried a treasure there hundreds of years ago, and I was betting if anyone had found it, it was Vince.

This wasn’t quite the idyllic part of town it was two years earlier, before Hurricane Sandy swept through, laying waste to many of these beach houses, dropping trees, devastating countless home owners and their families, dumping tons of sand hundreds of feet inland.

We’d gotten off relatively easy at our house. We had a tree come down in the yard, one window blew in, and some shingles were ripped off the roof, but it was nothing to complain about compared with the destruction so many of our neighbors endured.

East Broadway was coming back. The street had been lined with contractors’ trucks for more than twenty months. Not all homes could be repaired. The storm leveled many, knocked others off their foundations. Some houses that looked relatively unscathed still had to be torn down because they were structurally unsound.