A moment of silence passed between them. “So how’d that go, Vick? Do you have it together now?”
“You think I don’t?”
Stan swallowed. “You just—I mean, forgive me for saying this, but you look like you had kind of a rough night. Your eyes look a bit bloodshot.”
Victor’s eyes narrowed. “They always look like that. And I started running last night, so I’m kind of tired.”
“Running?”
“You know, trying to get back in shape. Didn’t get real far. About half a mile. But I’m building up slowly.” It was true. The part he’d left out was that after half a mile he was throwing up. He’d walked home and had a drink.
“Sure, I guess that could be it,” Stan said, trying to sound as though he actually believed it.
“You don’t believe me,” Victor said.
Stan shrugged. “Look, it’s not up to me to judge, Vick.” He raised the piece of paper in his hands. “Why don’t I hang on to this? Keep it on file. And if something comes up, I can give you a call. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, we’ve been going through a real slowdown lately. Who hasn’t, right? Just about everybody I know isn’t doing as good as they were a year ago.” He raised his hands in a gesture of futility. “I had to let a couple guys go in the last six months, and if I did do any hiring, I’d have to bring them back first, if they haven’t found something else. And odds are, they haven’t. I hope you understand.”
Victor rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, sure.”
“You might want to consider looking elsewhere. Like Albany, Schenectady, Binghamton.”
“I’m not leaving Promise Falls,” Victor Rooney said. “I’ve got a history here. This is my town.”
“Maybe, if you’re interested in anything part-time, if something like that came up, I could give you a shout.” He glanced back down at the page for a second. “Your number is on there—that’s good.” He smiled.
Victor stood up.
“You’re no better than the rest of them,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re—”
“The ones who did fuck all.”
That took a moment to sink in. Finally, Stan got out of his chair. “Come on, Vick, that’s pretty low.”
“No one in this town has the guts to do what’s right.”
“I don’t know about that. Sometimes, people, they want to do the right thing, but they’re scared. They’re kind of, you know, frozen. By the time they know what the right thing to do is, it’s too late.”
“You sound like you speak from experience,” Victor said. “Makes me wonder if you were one of them. The police, after all the interviews they did, figured there was twenty-two—whaddya call ’em—eyewitnesses, but they never released the names. The paper tried to get them but couldn’t. For all I know, you were on the list.”
“For Christ’s sake, Vick, I wasn’t.”
“You give me a job, you try to do the right thing now, maybe I could find it in my heart to forgive you.”
Stan pushed back his chair an inch. “Excuse me?”
“I’m saying, you could hire me. Do some good.”
“I don’t owe you anything, Vick. I got no reason to ask for your forgiveness. And even if I wanted to give you a job, which, frankly, I don’t, I can’t just pull one out of my ass.” He shook his head sadly. “Look, I’ll hang on to your résumé. Maybe, if something comes up sometime, I’ll have forgotten how you just behaved here.”
Victor stared at the man.
“Did you hear her screams?” he asked.
“What?”
“When Olivia was being killed. Did you hear the screams?”
“Vick, you should go.”
“It’s a simple question.”
“I wasn’t even in Promise Falls then,” Stan said, sighing. “I was in England. I was staying with my aunt and uncle. Working over there for a few months. I was reading the Standard, online. That’s how I found out about it. Couldn’t believe it, it was so horrible.”
“Sure.”
“You should talk to somebody, Vick. Or whoever you were talking to, you should go talk to them again.”
Victor turned and headed for the door.
“Come on, man,” Stan Mulgrew said. “Look, I’m sorry. I know you’ve been through hell. Maybe there’s some other way I can help you out. Why don’t we have lunch? How ’bout you come back later—we go get a beer?” He choked on the word. “Well, maybe not a beer, if, like you say, you’re trying to stay off the stuff and—”
Victor kept on going.
Stan came around the desk and followed his onetime high school friend out to the parking lot.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “If I offended you, I’m sorry.”
Victor got behind the wheel of his old van, slammed the door, and, without looking Stan’s way, gave him the finger as he drove off.
ELEVEN
Cal
I agreed to meet Lucy Brighton at her father’s house within the hour.
Once Ed was back on his feet, and had blinked the soap powder out of his eyes, he stumbled out of the Laundromat. I’d moved my wet clothes into a dryer and had about thirty minutes to go, which I figured was enough time for him to send the police my way. But no officer from the Promise Falls department materialized by the time I’d folded my boxers, so I was guessing Ed—last name unknown—had decided not to press charges.
Just as well, because I really didn’t know how many friends I still had on the force.
I’d given Sam Worthington one of my business cards and said, “If he gives you any more trouble, call me. Or call the cops.”
She took the card but did not look at it. “Don’t get involved in my troubles,” she said, and went back to cleaning the machines.
Everyone expresses gratitude in his or her own way.
I walked back to my place, dropped off the laundry, and got into my Accord, which I kept parked around the back of the bookshop. Lucy Brighton had given me an address on Skelton Drive, which I remembered as a nice part of town. The house, a sprawling ranch with a two-car garage and a deep, well-tended front yard, enjoyed the shade of several stately oak trees that had probably gotten their start before Promise Falls had been incorporated.
Lucy Brighton had said she would wait for me in the driveway, and that was where I found her, alone, behind the wheel of a silver Buick. She got out of the car as I pulled in.
I stood an inch under six feet, and I recalled from when I’d met her before that she could look me straight in the eye through her wire-framed, oval glasses. Everything about her seemed vertical. She had straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders, a long, narrow nose, a light jacket that went down to midcalf, and perfectly creased black slacks.
Her brown eyes were largely red right now, and she took off her glasses briefly to dab them with the wadded tissue in her hand.
“Cal, thank you for coming.”
“I’m very sorry,” I said.
“This is the last thing I need to be dealing with. I’ve just come from the . . . the morgue, I guess they call it.” She put her hand briefly over her mouth, composing herself. “I had to identify my . . . it was horrible. I wanted to think there’d been a mistake, but it was him. It was my father. Someone else will have to identify Miriam. I’m not really next of kin. Her brother’s going to come up, from Providence. It was so . . . so . . . it doesn’t make any sense, for something like this to happen.”
“No,” I said.
“They were going to demolish the screen in another week,” she said. “Someone made a mistake. How could someone make a mistake like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of it.” I started to wonder whether this was the real reason she’d wanted to speak with me. Did she want
me looking into who was responsible for the drive-in disaster? If she did, she’d be wasting her money. The Promise Falls police would most likely be getting state and federal help. Homeland Security might even be sticking its nose in if they thought it was more than some screwup by a demolitions firm. Collectively, all those levels of investigation would do a better job than I could.
“I’m probably in some kind of shock,” Lucy Brighton said. “Like I’m walking around in a fog. Like none of this is happening. It can’t be happening.”
“You seem to be holding it together.”
“If this is holding it together, I’d hate to think what losing it’ll feel like. Because I guarantee you, that’s coming. I don’t know when they’re going to release him to the funeral home. There’s so much to arrange. People to phone, relatives who may want to fly in.”
I remembered that she was divorced. I wondered what kind of family support she had right now.
“Your ex-husband,” I said. “Is he coming?”
She laughed. “Yeah, right, Gerald. Mr. There-for-You.”
“I guess that’s a no.”
“He’s in San Francisco. I’ve called and told him, but he hasn’t got enough money to get a bus to L.A., let alone fly back here. And the truth is, I’m just as glad. It gets Crystal all agitated when he comes, and that’s the last thing she needs.”
Her daughter. Lucy had mentioned her before, but I’d never met her.
“Agitated how?”
“Crystal has this fantasy view of her father, that he’s not with us because he’s doing something even more important. Fighting aliens, saving whales, building some colossal shield that will stop global warming. She doesn’t want to consider that the reason he’s not with us, doesn’t come to visit his own daughter, is because he just doesn’t care. Not that she actually talks about how she feels or anything. But it all comes through in her drawings.”
“Drawings?”
Lucy waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t call you to bore you with my personal life.”
And then, suddenly, she put both hands over her mouth and turned away from me, her shoulders hunched and shaking. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say, not looking at me.
I rested a tentative hand on her shoulder, left it there for a good five seconds before taking it away. “It’s okay. You’re on overload. Anyone would be.”
She sniffed a couple of times, used the wadded tissue to wipe her nose. She half turned back toward me. “Crystal’s only eleven. It’d be hard enough to explain to any child that sometimes parents aren’t there for you. But to explain it to Crystal . . .”
“I don’t understand.”
Another sniff. “She’s just . . . not like other kids.” Lucy tucked the tissue into her purse, attempted to stand straighter. “It’s fine. Everything is fine. She’s staying with a friend right now while I deal with this. I didn’t want to bring her here, not after what’s happened.”
Lucy swallowed hard, lifted her chin. She was determined to get through this, whatever this was. I still had no real idea why we were here, in front of this house.
“Okay,” I said. “Suppose you tell me why you called.”
She focused on the house, looking at it with what almost seemed a sense of wonder. No, not wonder. More like trepidation. “Something’s not right here,” she said.
“You said you thought there was a break-in.”
“I think so.”
“You came out to the house this morning? After you heard your parents were killed at the drive-in?”
Lucy shot me a look. “Not my parents. My father, and his wife.”
“Adam Chalmers was your father, but Miriam . . .”
“His third wife,” Lucy said. “My mother died when I was in my teens. Then my father remarried, to Felicia, and that lasted six years before she left him, and then Miriam came along.”
“Were you close with her?”
“No,” Lucy said. “I suppose . . . I suppose I disapproved.”
“Why?”
She hesitated. “I don’t want to be that kind of person.”
“What kind of person?”
“The neighborhood priss-ass,” Lucy said.
Lucy Brighton had never struck me that way. From the first time I’d met her, she’d struck me as open-minded, nonjudgmental. She exuded a kind of athletic sexuality. I hadn’t asked, but would have guessed she was a onetime track star, or gymnast. She had the build for it. When nonprofessional thoughts crossed my mind, it occurred to me that she had the build for a number of things.
“I doubt you’re that kind of person.”
“It bothered me that Miriam was younger than I am,” she said.
“How old was she?”
“Thirty. I’m thirty-three, and my father is—was fifty-nine. Do you know how strange it is—how weird it is—to be three years older than a woman who goes around claiming she’s your stepmother?”
“I guess that’d be odd.”
“The only woman who was age appropriate for my father was my mother. They married when they were both twenty. Thirteen years later, she died, and within a year my father remarried.”
“To Felicia.”
Lucy nodded. “At least she was older than me, but only by five years. Nineteen years old. Anyone could have guessed that wasn’t going to work out, and six years later she left him. It took a while for the divorce to be finalized, and while that was going on, Dad went out with plenty of other women, and then he found Miriam three years ago. Twenty-nine years’ difference in their ages.”
I was doing some basic math in my head. Calculating the age difference between Lucy and myself. A decade, give or take.
“It happens,” I said.
“I know. And I should have been able to roll with it, but it embarrassed me, that my father wasn’t able to act his age. I think he made a fool of himself. That Miriam may have made a fool of him. That he . . .”
I waited.
“That he may have been drawn into things to try to prove to her, to prove to himself, that he was still a young man.”
“A man on the verge of sixty may be trying to prove something to himself, and to others. That he isn’t really old.”
But it was time to get back to why she’d called me here.
“Why do you think someone broke in?”
She took a deep breath. “When I heard about what had happened, when the police got in touch, I came over here. I didn’t know quite what else to do, but I also knew that sooner or later I was going to have to pick out clothes, for the funeral home, and then there’d be the whole matter of what to do with the house and . . .”
“And what?”
“When I stepped into the house, I heard the back door close. Someone was leaving as I was coming in.”
TWELVE
ANGUS Carlson was managing on less than two hours’ sleep.
He hadn’t returned home until shortly after four in the morning. After leaving the drive-in, he’d gone first to the address registered to the crushed 2006 Mustang convertible. It belonged to Floyd and Renata Gravelle, of Canterbury Street, but it was highly unlikely it was Floyd or Renata in the car, given that the male and female victims appeared to be in their teens.
He had to ring the bell twice, leaning on it pretty hard the second time, to wake anyone. After a minute, he heard someone yell, “Coming!” Another minute after that, a man in his pajamas opened the front door, joined seconds later by a woman tying the sash of her robe.
Carlson apologized, identified himself, confirmed their identities, and asked whether they owned a Mustang convertible.
“Yes,” Renata said. “But it’s not here right now. Galen has it. That’s our son. Has there been—oh my God.”
“What’s happened?” Floyd asked.
“Do you know if your son was taking someon
e on a date with him tonight? To the drive-in?”
Floyd looked to his wife. She said, “He was taking Lisa. Lisa Kroft.”
“Would you have an address for Lisa, ma’am?”
“What’s happened?” the father asked again.
It did not go well. Nor did it go any better at the Kroft household. He felt wrung out by the time he’d been to those two houses. But he wasn’t done.
At the home of Adam Chalmers, he’d been unable to raise anyone. Which told him it was likely Chalmers and his wife lived here alone. Now the trick was going to be locating next of kin.
Carlson noticed a sticker in the window of the Chalmers home, indicating that it was protected by UNYSS. Upper New York State Security, a monitoring firm that covered a large area north and east of Albany. Carlson made a call to the twenty-four-hour line, identified himself, and explained that he was trying to find anyone related to Adam Chalmers. After conferring with a supervisor, the man on duty consulted their files and said there was a Lucy Brighton listed as a contact. If the alarm went off, and UNYSS could not reach Mr. Chalmers, the next call would be to Ms. Brighton. A phone number was provided, after some verbal arm-twisting, to Carlson.
You couldn’t phone someone in the middle of the night with this kind of news. You had to go to the door. So he Googled the number from his phone and came up with an address on Promise Falls’ south side. A split-level with a Buick sedan in the driveway.
Again, it took several rings of the doorbell to raise someone, but Lucy Brighton finally appeared, trailed by a sleepy-eyed young girl who just stood there but didn’t say anything. The child obeyed when the woman told her to go back upstairs to bed, her arms hanging straight down at her sides as she walked.
Weird kid.
Lucy Brighton’s cry of despair when he told her the news brought her daughter back, although Ms. Brighton didn’t know she was standing there when she said, “Dad was telling me, just the other day, about the drive-in closing, about it having its last night, how he might go but hadn’t made up his mind. He’s a huge film buff, he’s written for the movies, and . . . I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it. There must be some mistake. What was the car?”