Too Close to Home Page 9

  “Sure,” Derek said.

  “You think that means anything? I mean, you look around this house, and there’s not a thing out of place, except for maybe in Adam’s room. Donna Langley, she kept this place like a home out of House Beautiful or something. A place for everything and everything in its place. I just thought this panel, partly open like this, looked a bit odd.”

  “I don’t know,” Derek said.

  “Maybe,” I offered, “since they were going away for a few days, maybe Albert got some stuff out of there, like a cooler or something. The kind of stuff you only take out when you’re going for a trip.”

  “That might be,” Barry said. “I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s just, when I looked at it, I thought, what a perfect place for someone to hide.”

  “When we were little,” Derek offered, “Adam and I used to play in there all the time. Like it was a cave. We’d pretend we were explorers or something, or Indiana Jones, you know? But now, I don’t think I could even fit in there.”

  “Too big now?” Barry said. “You know what? Why don’t you try it on for size?”

  “Huh?”

  Barry slid the panel back. The space was filled with boxes, most with Magic-Markered labels like “Xmas bulbs” and “Yearbooks.” He said, “Someone must have been in here. The dust is pretty thick on the cement floor in here, except just inside the opening, where it’s kind of been rubbed away. Come on in, have a look.”

  “I don’t really want to,” Derek said. “I just want to get out of here.”

  “I’ll do it then,” Barry said, taking his hands out of his pockets, getting down on his hands and knees, and back-crawling into the space. “Now, I’m a big fat fucker compared to either one of you guys, but I can squeeze in here, so I guess just about anybody could.”

  “But, Barry,” I said, “you already figured the killer, or killers, came in through the front door. So what’s this prove, that someone could fit in the crawlspace?”

  He crawled back out, huffing and puffing when he got back on his feet. I hoped he wasn’t going to have a heart attack. “Damned if I really know,” he said. “You just want to keep your mind open to everything.”

  “Are we done?” I asked Barry.

  “I guess we are.” He let out a long sigh, still recovering from his crawlspace adventure. “So, Derek.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You said you left here around eight, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d hook up with Penny.”

  I spoke without thinking. “I thought you said she was grounded or something. She hit her dad’s car or something like that?”

  “Well, yeah, she was. What I meant was, I was going to see her, but then we couldn’t get together, so I just kind of hung out a bit, and then I went home.”

  “Hung out where?” Barry asked.

  Derek sniffed, took a hand out of his pocket and rubbed his nose, then slipped it back in. It almost seemed like he was buying time.

  “Just walked around, was in town a bit, went by the video-game place. Just stuff.”

  Barry didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “What time did you get home?”

  “I guess, I don’t know. Nine or nine-thirty, I think.”

  I tried to recall whether I’d heard Derek come in that night. Ellen and I had gone to bed pretty early. By half past nine, I thought. I didn’t remember hearing him come in. We certainly hadn’t spoken to him.

  “That sound right to you?” Barry asked me.

  I opened my mouth, thought for half a second, and said, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  “You heard him come in?” Barry asked, wanting to be sure.

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  NINE

  AFTER BARRY GAVE ME ONE of his cards and got in his unmarked car to drive back into Promise Falls, and as Derek and I were walking slowly back down the lane toward our house, he said to me, “Why’d you do that?”

  “Why’d I do what?”

  “Tell that cop you heard me come in?”

  “Was I wrong about that? Didn’t I hear you come in around nine-thirty?”

  Derek hesitated.

  “You saying that if I thought I heard you come in then, I’d be wrong?”

  He still didn’t know how to respond. “I don’t think you heard me come in, is all I’m saying.”

  “Is that because you didn’t come in, or you snuck in so quietly you don’t think we could have heard you?”

  Derek shook his head in frustration. “Either way, I just don’t understand why you lied to him.”

  It was my turn to figure out how to respond. “I was just trying to help. Like, I don’t know, if you really were with Penny or something, if she’d snuck out even though she was supposed to be grounded, and you don’t want to have to drag her into this. It’s just easier for me to say I heard you come in.”

  Derek thought about that. “Okay.”

  I stopped walking and put my hand on my son’s arm. “Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked, looking him in the eye.

  “No.” He looked down at the gravel.

  “Look at me,” I said. “I understand what a shock this has been to you, losing your best friend, what something like that must do to your head. So I get it, you acting funny. It’d be weird if you weren’t acting this way. But sometimes I think there’s something more going on. That there’s something you’re holding back, something you should be telling us. If not Barry, certainly me and your mother. We can’t help you if you don’t level with us. This is serious shit here, Derek.”

  “I know. You don’t have to tell me that. I’m not stupid.”

  “So, is there something you want to tell me? About when you got home?”

  He paused. “It was sort of around when I said. I don’t know the exact time. I think you guys were asleep is all. I know how you are on a Friday night. You’re beat, so I came in real quiet because I figured you and Mom would have gone to bed early. Maybe not nine-thirty, maybe a little later.”

  I waited.

  “So that’s all.”

  “What about what Barry asked you?” I said. “What were you up to between eight and when you got home?”

  “Nothing,” he said defensively. “Nothing really.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Jesus, what the fuck is this, anyway? You think I killed our fucking neighbors?”

  I didn’t flinch or back down. “No,” I said evenly. “Of course not. But I am starting to wonder whether you know something about what happened there. Answer my question. Where were you between the time you left the Langleys and the time you came home? I’m figuring you weren’t with Penny, that she wasn’t allowed to leave the house.”

  “I went for a walk,” he said.

  “To Penny’s house? She’s all the way into town. That’d take you thirty, forty minutes.”

  “No. Just around. Is that a crime? That I took a walk?”

  “Where?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where did you walk?”

  “Around. Down the highway, to the creek. I sat down there, called Penny on my cell, we talked for a while, I guess for an hour or something, and then I walked back home. I guess I was feeling kind of down. We’re kind of going through a rough patch right now.”

  That was either the truth or bullshit designed to garner sympathy, get me to back off. I was inclined to believe the latter.

  “Things looked okay between you two in the middle of the night.”

  “Yeah. It’s mostly her parents, you know. They don’t like me.”

  “What do you mean? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “Well, it might have something to do with her dad kind of finding us, you know, making out. In her room.”

  “You think?” I said.

  “He’s a real tight-ass,” Derek said.

 
“You don’t have to be much of a tight-ass to get upset finding some guy making out with your daughter in her bedroom. Under your roof.”

  “Yeah, well, that was sort of why she had to sneak out here to see me.”

  “For Christ sake, Derek, you’re just going to make things even worse with her dad, you start letting her do things like that.”

  “Jesus,” he said, adopting a tone I didn’t much care for, “you gonna start getting all tight-ass on me too?”

  I squeezed his arm and shook him. “Don’t you ever speak to me like that. I don’t care how much shit you might be in, you talk to me like that and I’ll knock your fucking block off.”

  If I’d actually struck him he couldn’t have looked any more stunned. I kept my grip on him for another second, then let go.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “We clear?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you were saying.”

  “Uh . . .” Derek had lost the thread of his story. Then, “Okay, what I was trying to say is, please don’t say anything about her being here, because she snuck out of the house after her dad fell asleep. One of her friends picked her up and dropped her off on the highway and she came in. She got right past that cop parked up at the end of the drive.”

  That was a comforting thought, but hardly surprising. There was so much tree cover out here, it would take a team of cops to keep watch in all directions at all times.

  “Whatever’s going on between us didn’t really matter when she found out what happened to Adam. She came over to see how I was doing.”

  I thought there were enough things to worry about having a seventeen-year-old son. I couldn’t imagine being Penny’s parents and finding out she’d slipped away in the night to visit her boyfriend where three people had been murdered only a few hours earlier.

  “You shouldn’t have even let her come out here,” I said. “It’s not safe, a girl going out in the middle of the night. Anywhere. Let alone out here, after what happened to the Langleys.”

  “So now I’m in shit for what she does, too?”

  This was invariably what happened in parent-teen discussions. You started off getting mad about one thing, and before you knew it you were getting mad about something else. Focus, I told myself.

  “You’re leveling with me?” I said.

  Derek nodded slowly.

  “Honestly?”

  He nodded again, but then looked ready to say something.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just . . .” he said. “It’s just, well, I mean, it might not be anything. Because Adam said something, I think, before he left, before he got in the car with his parents, but the thing is, it might not mean anything at all.”

  “What are you talking about?” I felt my pulse quicken.

  “I think I noticed something missing in the house. Something that was there the other day, but wasn’t there just now.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “What did you—”

  “Hello!” It was Ellen, standing at the front door. “You coming inside, or what?”

  BACK IN THE KITCHEN, Derek was finally persuaded to have some breakfast. For a boy who half an hour ago claimed to have no appetite, he downed four slices of French toast drowning in butter and syrup like he’d just been released from prison.

  “You want some coffee with that?” Ellen asked. Derek’s mouth was so full all he could do was nod.

  When Ellen had called out to us from the house, Derek had whispered quickly, “I’ll tell you later.”

  And I had said, “Okay.”

  It wasn’t that I wanted to keep secrets from Ellen. But if there was a chance Derek was willing to tell me something I needed to know, then I was willing not to make a fuss about his not being open with both of his parents until I knew what it was.

  Ellen threw her arms around him when he came into the house, fearing he might have been somehow traumatized by having to tour the Langley house with Barry Duckworth.

  “It was fine,” he said. “No big deal.”

  Ellen looked at me, trying to read in my face whether Derek was really okay, or putting up a front. I shook my head, unable to give her a definitive answer. Then she talked him into downing an enormous breakfast.

  I could tell Ellen wanted to ask him about his experience in the Langley home, not to find out what he’d seen—she could find that out from me later—but to determine what kind of effect it had had on him. But I think she concluded that if he was able to eat like this, perhaps there was no permanent damage to his psyche. I was less sure. If there was one thing I knew about teenage boys, it was that you could turn off the outside world long enough to stuff yourself.

  “I was thinking,” Derek said, looking at me, his mouth still full, “that we should try to fix that one mower today. Since we’ve got the time.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I think it might be as simple as a gummed-up spark plug.”

  “I got a theory,” Derek said, “it could be the fuel filter. Maybe it’s all gummed up with crap.”

  Ellen had a choice, listening to this. She could figure that Derek was reaching out to his father, looking for comfort in his company in the wake of tragedy, or he was up to something.

  Not being quite the cynic I am, she said, “That sounds great. You two could get a few things done today.” She smiled at me. She’d bought it.

  When Derek finished the last of his toast, he got up and went to take his plate to the sink, but his mother stopped him and said, “I’ll look after that. Why don’t you help your father.”

  “Okay,” he said, and went out the back door.

  “I’ll be right there,” I called out after him. Ellen looked to me and I knew she wanted to hear something about our tour through the Langley house. “He was okay,” I told her. “It was awful over there, but he was okay.”

  “Barry never should have—”

  “Don’t worry about it. He’s just doing his job. You’d have been proud of Derek, holding it together over there.”

  “What was it like—” Ellen started to ask. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  I found Derek in the shed, fiddling about, wielding an oversized electric hedge trimmer. I was not surprised to see that he was not paying the slightest bit of attention to our ailing lawn mower.

  “So,” I said. “What did you want to tell me? What was missing?”

  “Like I said, it might not be anything. But you remember when we went to Mrs. Stockwell’s house?”

  “Agnes? The one with the cat that looks like a pig?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean, when we went there? We go there pretty much every week.”

  “This was like, two times ago,” Derek said. “She gave me the computer.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding. “Some old piece of crap. From her garage.”

  I hardly needed to say “some old piece of crap.” It was all Derek and Adam liked to collect. They loved—well, had loved—tearing them apart, messing around with the hard drives, comparing the guts of old computers to the guts of new ones. Derek hadn’t left with the whole computer, just the tower. The keyboard and the monitor weren’t of much interest to him, although we did take them off Agnes’s hands and dropped them off at the dump on one of our occasional trips up there. I had a soft spot in my heart for Agnes Stockwell, living alone in her bungalow on Ridgeway Drive. She loses a husband, then a year later son Brett, a Thackeray College student, kills himself by jumping off Promise Falls. It’s not the highest waterfall in the world by any means, but when there’s nothing but jagged rocks at the bottom, how high does it have to be?

  “So, Adam and me,” Derek said, “we’d been messing around with it. Seeing what kind of processor it had, that kind of shit, but we were also looking at what was on it.”

  That, I’d learned, was half the fun. It probably never would have occurred to Agnes that her son’s computer was a repository of information about him. Old e-mails, stories, maybe saved p
orn images. Agnes, not exactly computer literate, probably figured all that stuff had evaporated by this time. How could all those things survive in a metal and plastic box all these years? But a tower like that was the ultimate shoebox of memories.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Anyway, when we were in the house, with Barry? The cop? It wasn’t in Adam’s room.”

  “How could you tell?” I asked. The image of Adam’s room hadn’t quite burned itself into my memory like the three enormous bloodstains, but I remembered it was a mess.

  “I could tell, Dad. It had been right on top of his desk. I know what it looked like. It was like a beigy color; most of the other ones Adam had in there were black. And it wasn’t there.”

  I thought about that for a moment.

  “Was it there when you last saw Adam? Before he left with his parents?”

  “I didn’t go up to his room. We were hanging out in the kitchen mostly. Last time I’d been up in his room was, like, the day before. Thursday? It was there then.”

  “Did anything else in the room look out of place? Did it look like anything else was taken?”

  “Not that I could tell, but, like, I only looked in there for a second. But I saw right away that it was gone.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Barry?” I asked him. “That’s the kind of thing he wanted to know.”

  “It’s just, like I said, it might not mean anything. Adam said to me, one of the last things he said to me, was that his dad was kind of pissed about it.”

  “What do you mean? Mr. Langley was pissed because you had an old computer from Agnes Stockwell’s house? Why would he give a shit about that? You two were always collecting old computers and messing around with them.”

  “I think Adam must have mentioned to him what we found on it.”

  “What the hell did you find on it?” I asked.

  Derek let out a long sigh. “Like, all kinds of shit was on the hard drive. Bunch of school essays, some really lame game based on the first Star Trek series. You know, the one with Kirk and Spock and those guys. Really sad graphics, but kind of cool at the same time, you know.”

  “Okay,” I said a bit impatiently, trying to move him along.

  “And there was a résumé, and letters he wrote when he was applying to Thackeray and other schools, you know, and some letters to a teacher he had back in high school, but the main thing is, there was a story.”