Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

The ones that had belonged to Wyatt. When Vince had taken Reggie’s and Wyatt’s car keys, he hadn’t needed both sets, and tossed one toward the house. How would I explain it if Wedmore found those? Keys not only to their car, but their house, too.

Those keys connected me to a house where four people had been murdered. Where one of them had been murdered by me.

“No, let me tell you how it happened,” I said, taking three steps toward the driveway, forcing Wedmore to pivot and turn her back to the shrubs.

I looked her in the eye. Not just to hold her attention, but to stop myself from looking at the keys, which, at least to me, stood out like a garden gnome in a spotlight. I had to get Wedmore out of here, grab those keys, and drop them down the nearest sewer grate.

“The truth is, I’m actually a little afraid to tell you,” I said.

Wedmore’s head tilted slightly. “Why would that be?”

“I–I don’t want to get charged with anything.”

“What are you saying, Mr. Archer? Were you — were you driving under the influence?”

“Cynthia sort of intimated there that she’d moved out for a while, and I went through some periods where I was feeling pretty down, and one night, I was out, and I guess I had a little too much to drink, and I — this is the part I’m kind of reluctant to tell you — got in my car and drove home and totally missed the driveway.”

Wedmore sized me up. I couldn’t tell whether she believed it. She said, “That was an incredibly foolish thing to do.”

“I know.”

“You could have got yourself killed. Or someone else.”

Cynthia had taken a step back toward the door. She probably wanted to get back into the house, for all this to end, but standing there, if Wedmore turned toward her...

“I know, I know. I scared myself half to death when I realized what I’d done,” I said.

“Mr. Archer,” Detective Wedmore said, “you’ve got a nice life here. You’ve got a wife who looks to me like she loves you, whatever troubles you two went through. As I recall, you’ve got a lovely daughter, although she’ll have grown up a lot since I saw her last. You’ve got a family. Don’t throw it all away by doing something crazy like driving around drunk. Don’t take stupid chances like that.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll never do anything risky like that again.”

“See that you don’t,” she said. “Well, I guess I’m done here.” Wedmore smiled at me, then turned to face Cynthia. “You have a good — hello, what’s this?”

She put a foot on the lawn, learned forward, and scooped up the keys. Dirt clung to the remote.

“You lose some keys?” she asked, turning and extending her arm.

“Oh, thank God,” I said. “I’ve been going out of my mind looking for those.”

Wedmore dropped them into my palm. I closed my hand over them tightly.

“You folks take care,” she said, and headed back to her car.

It was Grace who gave us the news.

This was nearly a month after Vince’s death. In all that time I hadn’t spoken to Jane once, not since she’d dropped me off at the house and got all the guns out of the attic.

But Grace, as it turned out, had been keeping in touch. The occasional text message, two or three phone calls.

“She keeps wanting to know if I’m okay,” Grace said. “I mean, if there’s anyone we should be asking to see if she’s okay, it’s Jane, right?”

On this particular Saturday morning, Grace came down to the kitchen and said, “Jane’s going away.”

“Away?” Cynthia said.

“To Europe. She’s going to France and Spain and Italy and all those places. She’s going with Bryce.”

“I thought you’d said they broke up,” Cynthia said. That was news to me, but Grace and her mom were always updating each other on people’s relationships without bringing me into the loop, mainly because I wasn’t the slightest bit interested.

“They got back together,” Grace reported. “I thought she was going to totally dump him. She thought he’d been messing around on her, and maybe he even was, but they patched it up, I guess, and now they’re going away. She’s giving up her apartment and quitting her job and everything.”

“How long is she planning to be over there?” I asked.

“She doesn’t even know if she’ll come back.”

“That’s so exciting,” Cynthia said. “We should do something. Have a little going-away party — a bon voyage party — for them.” She looked at me. “What do you think?” Her look of excitement faded. I knew she was worried that doing anything with Jane might resurrect anxieties I was only now starting to get a handle on.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

“You won’t have to do a thing. Grace and I will look after it. We should get them some kind of going-away present. It’s so hard to pick things for people.”

“Maybe just one of those Visa gift cards,” Grace said. “They could use it anywhere in Europe, couldn’t they?”

Cynthia asked Grace to text Jane about coming over to the house the following afternoon. Grace’s thumbs tapped away at lightning speed, and within a minute Jane had accepted the invitation. They went out that afternoon to buy the fixings for a small party.

How could I rain on that parade? Cynthia and Grace had never been closer than in the last few weeks.

Jane and Bryce were invited for three o’clock. Grace began watching for them around a quarter to. She was peeking out the living room window every three minutes.

Cynthia sidled up close to me and whispered in my ear, “I did something without telling you.”

I felt a shiver. “What?”

“I bought something for Grace. I was in the mall and I just happened on it, and when I saw it, I knew it was just the right thing.”

“What?”

She told me.

When it got to be five after three, Grace said, “Where are they?”

“They’re only five minutes late,” Cynthia told her. “Which isn’t late at all. No one likes to arrive right on the dot. They’ll be here soon.”

Grace had her phone in her hand at the ready, as though she expected Jane to give progress reports on their drive from one part of Milford to another.

“Relax,” Cynthia said.

“I’ve just never known anyone before, like, someone who was a friend of mine, who was actually going to go to Europe and just stay there.”

I was passing through the living room when I saw Jane’s Mini pull into our driveway. In the passenger seat was, I assumed, Bryce. As he got out, I could see he was a nice-looking guy. About six feet tall, slim. Hair tousled in that very careful careless way. He held a bottle of wine by the neck. Jane got out, hung a long-strapped purse over her shoulder.

The two of them were almost to the front door when Jane stopped, looked down at the purse, opened it, and reached in for her phone. Someone had called her. She put the phone to her ear, and I saw her mouth, “Hello?”

And then, behind me, I heard Grace say, “Jane? Where are you? Are you coming? What? Oh my God.”

Grace was striding through the house now, edging past me so that she could be the one to open the door for them.

“I’m almost there,” she said. “This is so funny.”

She opened the door and faced Jane, both of them still holding their phones to their ears. They laughed, put their phones away, and hugged.

“So, you’re Bryce!” Grace said.

He smiled, extended a hand. “Hey,” he said reservedly.

“Come in! Come in!” Grace stood back, giving them room to enter the house. She glanced over at me, waved her phone in the air, and said, “It did that funny thing again.”