So that meant following the woman.
Harwood’s car headed off in one direction, Sam’s in another. Harwood was headed toward Noble, so he scrunched down in the seat, trying to make himself invisible. It must have worked, because when he glanced in his mirror, he saw Harwood’s Mazda receding into the distance.
He sat up straight, started the engine. He kept a good hundred yards behind Sam. There was a chance, Ed figured, that she knew what kind of car her former in-laws drove, so he didn’t want to get close enough to spook her.
Just as he’d expected, Sam was heading for Clinton Public School. The last thing he wanted to do was get caught in that traffic clusterfuck of moms and vans, just in case someone recognized him in the car, so he held way back.
He could pretty much figure out where Sam was going to go next, anyway. It made some sense to get there before her.
So he drove to the Laundromat, parked down the street.
Sure enough, five minutes later, Sam showed up, drove to the lot behind the business, where he’d found the car the day before. She’d probably come in the back way. In another five minutes or so, the place would be open for business.
Ed figured, walk in and one pop to the head would do it.
The way he saw it, and for sure the way Yolanda saw it, if the police couldn’t prove she’d ordered it, what choice would the authorities have but to give the kid to her and Garnet? And when Brandon got out of jail, so long as he behaved himself, he’d probably get custody.
A boy should be with his father, Ed reasoned.
A boy needed a man to teach him the ways of the world. A mother, even a good one, just couldn’t do that. Ideally, a child needed two parents, one of each sex—none of this same-sex shit everyone was going on about—but if a boy could have only one, a father was the way to go, he reasoned. Ed supposed the opposite was true with a girl. If she had to be raised by one parent, better that it be the mother.
Ed Noble was something of a traditionalist in these matters.
Carl, years later, would probably look back at what was going to happen today as a good thing. A real turning point in his life.
Now that Ed knew Samantha was at work, he decided to park around back, too. When he came in, it would be through the back door. Walking in through the front, that hadn’t been a very good strategy last time. Sam had seen him out there on the sidewalk before he’d even come through the door. Gave her too much time to think. Or run. Plus, there was the chance there’d be people in there doing their laundry.
Like that dipshit who threw soap in his face.
Yeah, back door was the way to go.
He reached over for the gun on the seat next to him. Time to get this done.
FIFTY-FOUR
Cal
ONCE my pie arrived, I couldn’t think of any good reason not to tell Barry Duckworth about Adam’s former wife Felicia being parked down the street from the Chalmers house.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “You talked to her?”
I told him of our short conversation. “If she had plans to kill Miriam, she didn’t get around to mentioning it,” I said.
“But when you saw her, she wouldn’t even have known Miriam was still alive.”
I nodded slowly. “That’s right. She said she’d been talking to a lawyer, about whether she might have any claims on Adam’s estate, what with Miriam being dead.” I paused. “She seems to think she has a claim, although what it might be, I don’t know. If she came back, she might have seen Miriam pull into the driveway. Just before Miriam came into the house and found me.”
“That would have been quite a shock,” Barry said.
“Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job,” I said, “but you might want to have a word with her.” I gave him her address.
He smiled. “You shouldn’t have quit.” A reference, I figured, to my leaving the Promise Falls police, moving to Griffon, north of Buffalo near the Canadian border, and going private. “You were a decent cop.”
I hadn’t had much choice. I’d nearly beaten to death a man who’d fled a fatal hit-and-run. It had all been caught on my dash cam. The chief at the time made the video disappear in return for my resignation.
Now, when I thought back to that lapse in judgment, I realized just how catastrophic it had been. If I hadn’t assaulted that driver, I wouldn’t have lost my job, we wouldn’t have moved to Griffon, and I wouldn’t have been drawn into an ugly mess that took the lives of my wife, Donna, and son, Scott.
I lose my cool for five seconds and everything changes.
“I was a lousy cop,” I said. “I was a stupid cop.”
“Not so stupid that I won’t bounce something off you. Something totally unrelated to all this other shit.”
“What?”
“This business with the number twenty-three.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Any ideas? Other than it being the age when you thought you’d finally lose your virginity.”
I shook my head. “The Twenty-third Psalm.”
“Jesus, that’s all anyone thinks of. And maybe that’s it, but even if it is, what the hell is the message this guy’s sending by referring to it?”
I finished my pie. “And that is why you get the big bucks. Thanks for the pie, Barry. I gotta go see if I still have a place to live.”
• • •
There was yellow tape strung across the burned-out front of Naman’s Books that also blocked the door to the stairs that led up to my apartment. I stood a moment on the sidewalk, surveying the damage. Naman was there with some kind of handyman, putting up sheets of plywood where the windows once had been.
“Naman,” I said.
He turned, saw me. No hint of a smile, but you could hardly blame him for that.
“Cal,” he said. He waved his arm toward the mess. “Look at this. Just look at it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all over for me.”
“Maybe not.”
“We’ll see. The insurance lady comes today. She already told me, all my books, because they are secondhand, because they are old, that they are probably worth nothing. I had thousands of dollars’ worth of books, Cal. Thousands. And they say they will give me nothing? What did I have insurance for? And hardly any of my books caught on fire. Most of them are soaked. All ruined by the stupid firemen.”
“They had to put out the fire,” I said. “If the books hadn’t gotten wet, they’d all have eventually burned anyway. The building is still standing. It can be fixed. And, Naman, I know this is maybe hard to appreciate, but you’re okay. You weren’t hurt. Those idiots who did this, they could have killed you.”
Me, too.
He gave me a look that felt like a knife going in. “You are no better than any of the rest of them. ‘Be thankful. It could have been worse. Don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat.’”
“That’s not what I said. I’m just glad you’re okay. I’ll help you. What can I do?”
“I don’t need your help,” Naman snapped. “Go find somewhere else to live. That’s what you’re going to do, right?”
I glanced over at the door to my apartment. There was a sticker on it, posted by the fire department, saying I could not enter the premises without being escorted by a member of the department.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I told Naman, walked over to the door, ripped off the sticker, and went upstairs to my place.
There was no visible damage, but the place stank. Naman was right. I couldn’t live here. Not for some time probably, if ever. It could be weeks, or months, before the building was repaired, the power turned back on.
So I started packing.
I dragged two suitcases from the closet, and filled them not with clothes but with files, bills, a laptop, a handful of books.
The framed pictures on my dre
sser of Donna and Scott. Perhaps the only items of any real value here.
The thing was, it was amazing how little stuff I had. When I’d emptied out the house in Griffon, and brought it to Promise Falls, most of it—all the furniture—went into a storage unit. I’d thought when I moved back here, I might someday get a house, but I quickly realized how unlikely that was. What did I need a house for? Even this small apartment was more space than I really needed. So I sold the furniture to a wholesaler about a year later and got rid of the storage unit.
The prospect of ever sharing space with another person, or persons, had seemed so remote I saw no reason to hang on to it.
Which made me, now, think of Lucy and her daughter, Crystal.
I was a long way from considering anything serious with Lucy. And yet, she was the first woman, since I’d lost Donna, I could even imagine settling down with. Perhaps that was the intoxicating quality of sex. I hadn’t been sure, for the longest time, whether I could allow myself that pleasure again. It had seemed wrong, somehow. Disloyal. So the previous night had been something of a milestone. It had, somehow, allowed me to consider a future that was not just about grieving.
I liked Lucy. I knew I wanted to see her again.
But first things first.
I opened a dresser drawer, took out some underwear and socks, brought them up to my nose. The smoke smell wasn’t just coming from the room around me. It was in the clothes. If it had permeated into the dresser, I was sure all the items I had hanging in the closet—including a couple of suits—would be even worse.
There was a box of garbage bags in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. I grabbed three and began stuffing clothes into them. The suits and dress shirts I’d drop off at the dry cleaner’s. Everything else I could deal with at the Laundromat.
There wasn’t anything to be saved from the fridge. Given that the power had been off since the night before, nothing was still cold. I poured milk and cream down the sink. Filled a garbage bag with just about everything else. Packaged items in the cupboard—cereal, sugar, peanut butter—struck me as too much to bother with for now, so I left them there.
It took four trips to get everything I was taking with me down to the car. The stuff I’d be taking to a new home I put in the trunk; the bags of clothes went into the backseat.
I went back to the apartment for one last thing.
I kept my gun in a locked box in the top of the closet. I brought it down, opened it.
I didn’t like the idea of leaving a firearm in the car, even in a locked box. Someone could steal it, bust it open later.
So I took the gun out of the box, put it into a holster that fixed to my belt at my side. I had a carry permit, and my sport jacket obscured most views of it.
Time to go.
I parked illegally out front of the dry cleaner’s first, left the flashers going. I took in my suits and dress shirts, grabbed a ticket, then got back into the car and drove the rest of the way to the Laundromat. I found a spot on the street and lugged the three bags in, in one trip.
“Hey,” said Sam, who was going from washer to washer, unlocking the coin box, dumping quarters into her small canvas bag with the leather drawstring.
“How are you?” I asked. I apologized to her again for not being able to get to the school in time the day before to help her. “But that other guy, David. He came through.”
Sam smiled. “He did, didn’t he?”
“Still, if you’re ever in a jam again, and want to give me another try, feel free to call,” I told her. “Although I hope you never need anyone’s help like that again.”
“Appreciate that.”
“Did they get the guy?”
She set the bag of coins on a washer lid. They landed with a heavy thunk. “They’re looking. And not just for him, but for my ex-husband’s parents, too, who most likely put him up to it.”
“I think I can see why you wanted out of that family,” I said.
“He—Garnet, my former father-in-law—is almost a decent human being. Almost. But Yolanda, his wife, I swear, there’s something wrong with her. Things aren’t wired right in her head. She really thinks she can just grab Carl and raise him herself, that there aren’t going to be repercussions for that. It’s like normal rules of society don’t apply to her. She’s a dangerous woman.”
“Are you concerned for your safety today?”
Sam hesitated. “I don’t think so. And I got Carl to school okay, and everyone there knows that he doesn’t go anywhere with anyone except me. I’m going to pick him up today and every day for a while, until they find Ed. I mean, they’d have to be totally insane to try anything today after what happened yesterday.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said.
She scanned my bags of laundry. “No matter how much shit happens in the world, we still have to stop and clean our clothes, right?”
I nodded. “Good thing there’s no one else here. I may use up every machine in the place.”
“Why so much stuff?”
I told her about the fire.
“Jesus,” Sam said, hoisting the bag of coins, looping the drawstring around her wrist. “Is this town going to hell or what?”
I’d made no attempt to sort the clothes by color before jamming them into the garbage bags, and now found myself trying to organize things.
Sam said, “Nothing even looks dirty.” She picked up a T-shirt at random, put it to her nose, made a face. “I can smell the smoke.”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head.
She loosened the drawstring, reached into the bag, and put at least a dozen quarters in my hand. “On the house.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
Sam rolled her eyes. “You were there for me yesterday. This is the least I can do.” She drew the string tight, looped it around her wrist.
“Thanks,” I said.
Sam continued to empty money out of the other machines while I stuffed clothes into half a dozen of them, poured in soap, loaded the quarters, then drove them home. I was going to sit down, open up a browser on my phone, start looking for apartments for rent in Promise Falls, when I realized I hadn’t locked my car.
“Nuts,” I said.
“What?” Sam asked.
“Left the car unlocked.”
I went out to the curb, intending to lock the car from a distance with the remote, but noticed the front passenger window was down halfway. I walked over to the car, dropped my butt into the driver’s seat, one foot still on the pavement, and slid in the key far enough for auxiliary power to raise the window.
That was when I noticed Crystal’s comic book adventures on the seat next to me. Sorry, graphic novel.
And her lunch.
“Shit,” I said to myself. I looked at my watch. There was still time to get my laundry done before Crystal would be expecting her lunch. Maybe, by then, I’d also have had a chance to look at her book and let her know what I thought of it.
I grabbed the stapled pages, locked up the car, and went back into the Laundromat. Sam wasn’t around. The door to the office at the back was closed. In there, I guessed.
I dropped my butt into a molded plastic chair, shifting the holstered gun at my side slightly so it wasn’t digging into me, and set Crystal’s book in my lap.
The title page, adorned with bold, two-inch-high letters, read: “Noises in the Night by Crystal Brighton.”
With a black marker, she’d covered over the entire page, just leaving the letters in white.
I flipped over to page one, careful not to rip the cover from the single staple in the upper left corner. The drawing featured a small girl in her bedroom, late at night, moonlight filtering through the curtained window, covers pulled up to her nose. The girl’s eyes were open, and she looked frightened.
The artwork was especially good. The kid, odd though she might b
e, had real talent.
I flipped over to the second page. Glancing through the coming pages, I saw that Crystal had used all kinds of paper indiscriminately. There were plenty of standard sheets of printer paper, but I guessed when she’d run short, she went to whatever was at hand. The back side of a pale green flyer for Cutter Landscaping, a pink sheet for a maid service. No doubt to her mother’s chagrin, she’d drawn all over the back side of a page that detailed school board enrollment projections.
I wondered how long Lucy might have been looking for that.
But it was clearly Crystal’s work that was more engaging. As I read on, the little girl, whose name, not surprisingly, was Crystal, slipped out from under the covers and went to the window. “Who is it?” she was saying. “Who’s out there? What do you want?”
A word bubble emerged from the darkness. “We are waiting for you.”
“Who?” the cartoon Crystal asked. “Who is it? What do you want?” The girl ran down the stairs and out the front door. “Is it you, Grandpa?” she asked. “Is it you?”
“Come into the woods,” the voice said. “Come into the woods and find out who it is.”
I glanced up for a second, noticed that the light had gone off on one of my washers. Still holding the book, I got out of my seat and went to investigate.
I opened the lid, saw my clothes sitting there in still water. I hit the start button again, but nothing happened. Maybe, I thought, the lid had to be closed for the machine to kick in again, so I dropped it down, hit the start button again.
Nothing.
“Sam?” I called out, glancing in the direction of the closed office door. “I think I got a bum washer here!”
I waited for the door to open, or for her to shout back from inside the office, but neither happened.
“Sam!” I shouted again, then thought maybe she was on the phone.
Decided to go check.