Far From True (35 page)

She looked at me pleadingly. “I think I’m okay. I mean, even if they find my fingerprints in the house, that means nothing, right? I was there often. You can tell them I was with you. You’re a witness. You were with me all night. You can back me up on that. Cal, please?”

I hadn’t said anything.

“I can’t . . . I can’t go to jail. I have Crystal. I
can’t
go. Her father . . . he’s not up to it. I don’t want him to raise her. It has to be me. She could end up in a foster home or someplace like that. That
can’t
happen. They can’t take a mother away from her child. It would be inhu
mane
.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you think I’m okay?” she asked. “You know all about these things. You used to be with the police. Do you think I’m in the clear? If no one saw me? If there’s no blood?”

“I have no idea what the police have,” I told her, moving around the table, standing within two feet of her. “But I think there’s something you’ve overlooked.”

Lucy studied me, not understanding.

“What?” she asked. “Was there a camera? My father didn’t have surveillance cameras.”

“No,” I said gently. “That’s not what I mean.”

She figured it out. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “You wouldn’t tell. You wouldn’t do that to me. You wouldn’t do that to Crystal. You wouldn’t take a mother from her child.”

She stepped closer, placed her palms on my chest. “We have something,” Lucy said. “Last night. I felt it. It wasn’t just a one-night thing. I felt a connection. Are you telling me you didn’t?”

“I felt something, too,” I admitted, circling her wrists with my hands and pulling her away. “But now I’m not sure you felt
anything at all. Having me come back, that was a lucky break for you. I could be your alibi.”

“Cal, no. I’m falling in love with you. Crystal, too. I can tell. We . . . we need you. I need you. Please.
Please.
I’m not some kind of monster. It was an
accident
.”

“I . . . should go,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, grabbing my arm. “Are you going to the police?”

I pulled away, moving for the front door.

“Please, Cal, don’t do this to me. You have to understand. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I was thinking of Crystal. I want a better life for her. I want a better life for both of us. I thought that was what my father was going to give us. I couldn’t let Miriam stand in the way of that. I—I went insane for a minute. One minute of insanity can’t be held against me. Not after what I’ve been through. Cal—”

“I need to go, Lucy.”

I had the front door open. Crystal was walking up the driveway. More like trudging. Her backpack seemed to be weighing her down like a soldier’s gear.

“Oh God,” Lucy said under her breath, and began frantically wiping tears from her face, wiping her hands on her blouse. “Hey, sweetheart!” she said. “How was school?”

As she reached the door, she swung the backpack off her shoulders and it hit the ground with a thunk.

“This is so heavy,” Crystal said.

“What’ve you got in there?” her mother asked.

She unzipped it, brought out the package of paper I’d given her, and then the new markers.

“Mr. Weaver gave me these,” she said.

“Wasn’t that nice of him?” Lucy said, her voice breaking. “Did you thank him?”

“Yes,” she said.

“She did,” I said.

“I need a snack,” Crystal said, moving past both of us on her way to the kitchen.

Lucy Brighton, her eyes swimming, touched my arm.

“What are you going to do?” she asked one last time.

“I don’t know,” I said, and headed for my
car.

IT
was after midnight, but this was when Lorraine Plummer got most of her work done. Plenty of Thackeray students were like that. Lorraine’s parents said they were all “night owls.” They slept through the day, never getting up before noon, sometimes staying in bed until three or four in the afternoon. But it didn’t mean they were lazy, or unproductive. They were just on a different clock from everyone else.

Lorraine often read and studied and wrote essays until three or four in the morning. Sometimes, she’d work straight through, head down for breakfast in the college cafeteria, and, once full of scrambled eggs, greasy bacon, and a bruised banana, head back up to her dormitory room, collapse on top of the bed, and fall asleep before she could get under the covers.

Of course, if you had an early-morning lecture, that could be a bit of a problem. When she had one of those, she’d force herself to go to bed no later than one, and set the alarm on her phone to
make
sure she got up in time. But often, she’d toss and turn and stare at the ceiling and lie awake until five, finally drifting off into a deep sleep a few minutes before her phone went off.

Her first class the next day wasn’t until one in the afternoon, so she planned to work until she could no longer keep her eyes open. She was writing an essay for Professor Blackmore’s English and psychology class that was due the end of the following week. Blackmore was pretty open to letting students stray from the curriculum if they had a good idea for an assignment, and he had liked her proposal to explore the themes of cyberbullying and intimidation in modern young adult fiction designed for a female audience.

Blackmore had said, “Go for it.”

He could be pretty cool like that, although, boy, something was very wrong with him at the lecture the other day, when he left the hall only a couple of minutes after everyone had come in. And he hadn’t been around for the tutorial he was supposed to have led that afternoon.

Lorraine had long thought that one day she would like to write
a novel, but so many people said she should write about what she knew, and she believed her own life was too boring to write about. Who cared about some girl who grew up in a normal house with normal parents and led a perfectly normal life? And not everyone wrote about what they knew. What about Stephen King? She was betting he didn’t actually know any evil clowns living in the sewer.

That was more the kind of thing Lorraine wanted to write. She wanted to know what real honest-to-God writers thought about this issue, so she’d been totally thrilled when Clive Duncomb, the head of security at Thackeray, whom she had met one day when he was talking to Professor Blackmore, arranged for her to meet Adam Chalmers. Duncomb said he’d written a whole bunch of books.

She was a dinner guest at the house once. Chalmers’s wife, Miriam, who was absolutely beautiful, was there, as well as Blackmore and his wife, Georgina, who was sort of pretty but in a mousy kind of way. Also there was Duncomb, who, Lorraine learned, used to be a Boston cop and got to know Chalmers when the writer was looking for inside info on the life of a police detective. Duncomb’s wife, Elizabeth, or Liz, was this thin woman in her forties with skin that had seen way too much sun. Almost leathery. It added to a hardness about her, Lorraine remembered.

Although, she had to admit, there was a lot about that night she didn’t remember at all. She was so excited to meet a real, live writer that she got ridiculously nervous. Everyone was so nice, telling her to have some more wine to calm herself down, even though, technically speaking, Lorraine, being twenty years old, was not of legal drinking age in the state of New York. Not that she hadn’t had a drink or two—thousand—but these were
grown-ups
offering her booze.

Lorraine had made a joke about this, how they were all going to get into trouble.

It was Duncomb who pointed out that while the law did forbid anyone under twenty-one from purchasing alcohol, it did allow
parents or legal guardians to offer someone under that age a drink in their home.

Lorraine laughed. “You guys aren’t my parents.”

Duncomb smiled. “Well, for the purposes of dinner, let’s say we are your legal guardians.”

That was good enough for her.

Trouble was, the wine went straight to her head. Big-time. Next thing she remembered, the Duncombs were driving her home.

“Please, please tell the Chalmerses I am so sorry,” she said. “I feel like such an idiot.”

“Don’t you worry about it,” Liz Duncomb said. “He thought you were lovely. We all did. Didn’t we, Clive?”

“You bet,” Clive Duncomb said.

The weird thing was, the next morning, she didn’t just feel stupid. She felt
sore
. Like that time after her high school grad dance, with Bobby Bratner, in his mom’s minivan, parked behind a church. But nothing like that could have happened at the Chalmerses’ place. They were all, like,
good
people. She couldn’t figure it out.

But what really blew her mind now was that Adam and Miriam Chalmers were dead. Crushed under that drive-in movie screen. That was
so crazy
. There seemed to be no end of shit going on around here.

First, there was that whole business of getting attacked by that guy in the hoodie with “23” on the front. Which was totally nuts. Why does some guy drag you into the bushes, and then tell you he isn’t actually going to do anything to you?

Not that she was sorry that nothing worse happened. But still, it was weird.

And then the guy turns out to be Mason Helt, whom she didn’t really know, but had seen around campus. Gets his head blown off by Duncomb.

What a place Thackeray was.

Despite all that, she felt safe in this cocoon of a room, which was about the size of a walk-in closet in some of her friends’ houses.
There was a desk built into the wall, but she did most of her work on the bed, sitting on it sideways, her back propped against the wall, a pillow tucked in to provide comfort.

She had the laptop resting on her thighs, a couple of paperback novels, spines cracked, open and facedown on the covers next to her. Just within reach on the shelf above her pillow, a cup of tea.

Lorraine figured she had at least two more hours in her before she wouldn’t be able to keep her eyes open, but found, only minutes later, that she was nodding off. She had her fingers poised over the keyboard, was staring at the screen, when she felt her eyelids growing heavy.

Her phone trilled. A text.

She reached for it. It was from someone else in her English class with Blackmore. A girl named Cleo. She wrote:
Did u hear about Bmore?

Lorraine texted back:
What?

Cleo wrote:
He got arrested. Ran down someone with his car

To which Lorraine wrote back:
Holy shit

Cleo said:
Yeah

Lorraine wrote:
Hate to think of this first but what about essay

Cleo wrote:
Yeah I know

The knock on the door was like a thunderclap.

Lorraine texted:
GTG someone here

She tossed the phone onto the bed and called out, “Who is it?”

From behind the door, a man’s voice: “Lorraine? Sorry to trouble you so late. But I need to talk to you.”

Lorraine slid the laptop off her thighs and padded in her bare feet to the door. All Thackeray dorm rooms had peepholes in the doors. She went up on her tiptoes to get a look at whoever needed to see her at such a crazy hour.

“Oh!” she said. “It’s you!”

“Do you have a second?”

“I’m—God, I’m just in my sweats. I look like a horror show!”

“I’m really, really sorry. I wouldn’t be coming by if it wasn’t important.”

“Okay, okay,” she said.

She turned back the dead bolt and swung open the door.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“May I come in? Just for a second?”

Lorraine shrugged. “Sure, but excuse the mess.”

Her visitor just needed her to turn around, have her back to him for a second. It was always easier that way.

She obliged when she turned to walk back to her bed. He was able to do it the way he had with Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor.

They struggled, but it went quickly. Surrender was almost instant once the blade went in, and across.

Like a smile.

WATER,
water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

It’s time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I had help. Thanks go to Sam Eades, Eva Kolcze, Heather Connor, Loren Jaggers, John Aitchison, Paige Barclay, Danielle Perez, Bill Massey, Carol Fitzgerald, David Shelley, Helen Heller, Brad Martin, Kara Welsh, Ashley Dunn, Amy Black, Kristin Cochrane, Spencer Barclay, Louisa Macpherson, and Juliet Ewers.

And, once again, booksellers.

Don’t miss the next Promise Falls Novel by Linwood Barclay,

THE TWENTY-THREE

Available in November 2016.

PATRICIA
Henderson, forty-one, divorced, employed at the Weston Street Branch of the Promise Falls Public Library System as a computer librarian, was, on that Saturday morning of the long holiday weekend in May, among the first to die.

She was scheduled to work that day. Patricia was annoyed the library board chose to keep all of the town’s libraries open. They were slated to close on the Sunday, and on the Monday, Memorial Day. So, if you’re going to close Sunday and Monday, why not close for the Saturday, too, and give everyone at the library the weekend off?

But no.

Not that Patricia had anywhere in particular to go.

But still. It seemed ridiculous to her. She knew, given that it was a long weekend, there’d be very few people coming into the library. Wasn’t this town supposed to be in the midst of a financial crisis? Why keep the place open? Sure, there was a bit of a rush on Friday as some customers, particularly those who had cottages or other weekend places, took out books to keep them occupied through to Tuesday. The rest of the weekend was guaranteed to be quiet.

Patricia was to be at the library for nine, when it opened, but that really meant she needed to be there for eight forty-five a.m. That would give her time to boot up all the computers, which were shut down every night at closing to save on electricity, even though the amount of power the branch’s thirty computers drew overnight was negligible. The library board, however, was on a “green” kick, which meant not only conserving electricity, but making sure recycling stations were set up throughout the library, and signs pinned to the bulletin boards to discourage the use of bottled water. One of the library board members saw the bottled water industry, and the bins of plastic bottles it created, as one of the great evils of the modern world, and didn’t want them in any of the Promise Falls branches. Provide paper cups that can be filled at the facility’s water
fountains, she said. Which now meant that the recycling stations were overflowing with paper cups instead of water bottles.

And guess who was pissed about that? What’s-his-name, that Finley guy who used to be mayor and now ran a water-bottling company. Patricia had met him the first—and, she hoped, last—time just the other evening at the Constellation Drive-in. She’d taken her niece Kaylie and her little friend Alicia for the drive-in’s final night. God, what a mistake that turned out to be. Not only did the screen come crashing down, scaring the little girls half to death, but then Finley showed up, trying to get his picture taken giving comfort to the wounded.

Politics,
Patricia thought. How she hated politics and everything about it.

And thinking of politics, Patricia had found herself staring at the ceiling at four in the morning, worried about next week’s public meeting on “Internet filtering.” The debate had been going on for years and never seemed settled. Should the library put filters on computers used by patrons that would restrict access to certain Web sites? The idea was to keep youngsters from accessing pornography, but it was a continuing quagmire. The filters were often ineffective, blocking material that was not adult oriented, and allowing material that was. And aside from that, there were freedom of speech and freedom to read issues.

Patricia knew the meeting would, as these kinds of meetings always did, devolve into a shouting match between ultraconservatives who saw gay subtext in the Teletubbies and didn’t want computers in the library to begin with, and ultra left-wingers who believed if a kindergartner wanted to read
Portnoy’s Complaint
, so be it.

At ten minutes after five, when she knew she wasn’t going to get back to sleep, she threw back the covers and decided to move forward with her day.

She walked into the bathroom, flicked on the light, and studied her face in the mirror.

“Ick,” she said, rubbing her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. “A. B. H.”

That was the mantra from Charlene, her personal trainer. Always Be Hydrating. Which meant drinking at least seven full glasses of water a day.

Patricia reached for the glass next to the sink, turned on the tap to let the water run until it was cold, filled the glass and drank it down in one long gulp. She reached into the shower, turned on the taps, held her hand under the spray until it was hot enough, pulled the long white T-shirt she slept in over her head, and stepped in.

She stayed in there until she could sense the hot water starting to run out. Shampooed and lathered up first, then stood under the water, feeling it rain across her face.

Dried off.

Dressed.

Did her hair and makeup.

By the time she was in her apartment kitchen, it was six thirty. Still plenty of time to kill before driving to the library, a ten-minute commute. Or, if she decided to ride her bike, about twenty-five minutes.

Patricia opened the cupboard, took out a small metal tray with more than a dozen bottles of pills and multivitamins. She opened the lids on four, tapped out a calcium tablet, a low-dose aspirin, a vitamin D, and a multivitamin that, while containing vitamin D, did not, she believed, have enough.

She tossed them all into her mouth at once and washed them down with a small glass of water from the kitchen tap.

Patricia opened the refrigerator and stared. Did she want an egg? Hard-boiled? Fried? It seemed like a lot of work. She closed the door and went back to the cupboard and brought down a box of Special K.

“Whoa,” she said.

It was like a wave washing over. Light-headedness. Like she’d been standing outside in a high wind and nearly got blown over.

She put both hands on the edge of the counter to steady herself.
Let it pass,
she told herself.
It’s probably nothing. Up too early.

There, she seemed to be okay. She brought down a small bowl, started to pour some cereal into it.

Blinked.

Blinked again.

She could see the “K” on the cereal box clearly enough, but “Special” was fuzzy around the edges. Which was pretty strange, because it was not exactly a tiny font. This was not newspaper type. The letters in “Special” were a good inch tall.

Patricia squinted.

“Special,” she said.

She closed her eyes, shook her head, thinking that would set things straight. But when she opened her eyes, she was dizzy.

“What the hell?” she said.

I need to sit down.

She left the cereal where it was and made her way to the table, pulled out the chair. Was the room spinning? Just a little?

She hadn’t had the “whirlies” in a very long time. She’d gotten drunk more than a few times over the years with her ex, Stanley. But even then, she’d never had enough to drink that the room spun. She had to go back to her days as a student at Thackeray for a memory like that.

But Patricia hadn’t been drinking. And what she was feeling now wasn’t the same as what she’d felt back then.

For one thing, her heart was starting to race.

She placed a hand on her chest, just about the swell of her breasts, to see if she could feel what she already knew she was feeling.

Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-tha-thump.

Her heart wasn’t just picking up the pace. It was doing so in an irregular fashion.

Patricia moved her hand from her chest to her forehead. Her skin was cold and clammy.

She wondered whether she could be having a heart attack. But she wasn’t old enough for one of those, was she? And she was in good shape. She worked out. She often rode her bike to work. She had a personal trainer, for God’s sake.

The pills.

Patricia figured she must have taken the wrong pills. But was there anything in that pill container that could do something like this to her?

No.

She stood, felt the floor move beneath her as though Promise Falls were undergoing an earthquake, which was not the sort of thing that happened often in upstate New York.

Maybe,
she thought,
I should just get my ass to Promise Falls General.

•   •   •

Gill Pickens, already in the kitchen, standing at the island, reading the
New York Times
on his laptop while he sipped on his third cup of coffee, was not overly surprised when his daughter, Marla, with his ten-month-old grandson, Matthew, in her arms, appeared.

“He wouldn’t stop fussing,” Marla said. “So I decided to get up and give him something to eat. Oh, thank God, you’ve already made coffee.”

Gill winced. “I just killed off the first pot. I’ll make some more.”

“That’s okay. I can—”

“No, let me. You take care of Matthew.”

“You’re up early,” she said to her father as she got Matthew strapped into his high chair.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“Still?”

Gill Pickens shrugged. “Jesus, Marla, it’s only been a little over
two weeks. I didn’t sleep all that well before, anyway. You telling me you’ve been sleeping okay?”

“Sometimes,” Marla said. “They gave me something.”

Right. She’d been on a few things to help ease the shock of her mother’s death earlier that month, and learning that the baby she’d thought she’d lost at birth was actually alive.

Matthew.

But even if her prescriptions had allowed her to sleep better some nights than her father, there was still a cloud hanging over the house that showed no signs of moving off soon. Gill had not returned to work, in part because he simply wasn’t up to it, but also because child welfare authorities had only allowed Marla to take care of Matthew so long as she was living under the same roof as her father.

Gill had felt a need to be present, although he wondered how much longer that would be necessary. All the evidence suggested Marla was a wonderful, loving mother. And the other good news was her acceptance of reality. In the days immediately following Agnes’s jump off Promise Falls, Marla maintained the belief that her mother was actually alive, and would be returning to help her with her child.

Marla now understood that that was not going to happen.

She filled a pot with hot water from the tap, set it on the counter instead of the stove, then took a bottle of formula she’d made up the day before from the refrigerator and placed it in the pot.

Matthew had twisted himself around in the chair to see what was going on. His eyes landed on the bottle and he pointed.

“Nah,” he said.

“It’s coming,” Marla said. “I’m just letting it warm up some. But I have something else for you in the meantime.”

She turned a kitchen chair around so she could sit immediately opposite Matthew. She twisted the lid off a tiny jar of pureed apricots and, with a very small plastic spoon, aimed some at the baby’s mouth.

“You like this, don’t you?” she said, glancing in her father’s direction as he scanned his eyes over the laptop screen. He appeared to be squinting.

“Need glasses, Dad?”

He looked up. Gill suddenly looked very pale to her. “What?”

“You looked like you were having trouble looking at the screen.”

“Why are you doing that?” he asked her.

Matthew swatted at the spoon, knocked some apricots onto his chair.

“Why am I doing what?” Marla asked.

“Moving around like that.”

“I’m just sitting here,” she said, getting more apricot onto the spoon. “You want to bring that bottle over?”

The pot with the bottle in it was sitting immediately to the right of the laptop, but Gill appeared unable to focus on it.

“Is it funny in here?” he asked, setting down his mug of coffee too close to the edge of the island. It tipped, hit the floor and shattered, but Gill did not look down.

“Dad?”

Marla got out of the chair and moved quickly to her father’s side. “Are you okay?”

“Need to get Matthew to the hospital,” he said.

“Matthew? Why would Matthew have to go to the hospital?”

Gill looked into his daughter’s face. “Is something wrong with Matthew? Do you think he has what I have?”

“Dad?” Marla struggled to keep the panic out of her voice. “What’s going on with you? You’re breathing really fast. Why are you doing that?”

He put a hand on his chest, felt his heart beating through his robe.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” he said.

But he did not. Instead, he dropped to the floor.

•   •   •

Ali Brunson said, “Hang in there, Audrey. You’re going to be fine. You just have to hang in a little bit longer.”

Of course, Ali had said that many times in his career as a paramedic, and there were many of those times when he hadn’t believed it for a second. This looked as though it was turning into one of those times.

Audrey McMichael, fifty-three, 173 pounds, black, an insurance adjuster, resident of 21 Forsythe Avenue for the last twenty-two years, where she had lived with her husband, Clifford, was giving every indication of giving up the fight.

Ali called up to Tammy Fairweather, who was behind the wheel of the ambulance, and booting it to Promise Falls General. The good news was, it was early Saturday morning and there was hardly anyone on the road. The bad news was, it probably wasn’t going to matter. Audrey’s blood pressure was plummeting like an elevator with snapped cables. Barely 60 over 40.

When Ali and Tammy had arrived at the McMichael home, Audrey had been vomiting. For the better part of an hour, according to her husband, she had been complaining of nausea, dizziness, a headache. Her breathing had been growing increasingly rapid and shallow. There had been moments when she’d said she could not see.

Her condition continued to deteriorate after they loaded her into the ambulance.

“How we doing back there?” Tammy called.

“Don’t worry about me. Just get us to church on time,” Ali told her, keeping his voice even.

“I know people,” Tammy said over the wail of the siren, trying to lighten the mood. “You need a ticket fixed, I’m the girl to know.”

The radio crackled. Their dispatcher.

“Let me know the second you clear PFG,” the male voice on the radio said.

“Not even there yet,” Tammy radioed back. “Will advise.”

“Need you at another location ASAP.”