A Tap on the Window

by Linwood Barclay

  The door was opened by a silver-haired man in his late forties, early fifties, probably just home from work. The collar of his crisp white shirt was unbuttoned, his tie askew, the cuffs of his dress pants rested on black socks instead of shoes. The big toe of his right foot was peeking at me through a hole. In his hand was an oversized wineglass that was half full of red.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Mr. Rodomski?” I said.

  “Whatever it is, we don’t want any.”

  “I’m not selling. I’m here to—”

  “Who is it, Chris?” a woman shouted from someplace else in the house.

  He swiveled his head around, yelled, “I don’t know!” Then, back to me, he said, “What’d you say you’re selling?”

  “I said I wasn’t. My name is Cal Weaver. I’m a private investigator.” I extended a hand.

  Chris Rodomski shook my hand, which was clammy enough to make me sorry I’d offered it. “Really?” he said.

  I took out my wallet and displayed my license for half a second. I could have allowed him a closer look, but his eyes were glassy and I didn’t see the point.

  A woman I presumed was his wife appeared at the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the door. Big hair, auburn in color, and a little too much lipstick, suggesting to me that when she was little, she had a hard time coloring within the lines. Her cheeks were overly rouged, almost clownlike. She had a glass of red wine in her hand as well, but it was just about ready for a refill.

  “Who’s this?” she said to her husband. There was a hint of slurring. She hadn’t reached total inebriation, although I had a sense it was her destination.

  “It’s a detective, Glynis.”

  “The police?” she said, and the skin beyond the red circles on her cheeks instantly paled. She set the glass down on the closest surface, a side table.

  I told her my name. “I’m not with the police. I’m private.”

  “What’s this about?” She’d put one hand to her chest, as though checking to see how quickly her heart was beating.

  “I’m sure everything is fine,” her husband said. He looked at me apologetically. “Glynis always assumes the worst.”

  “That’s because that’s how things usually turn out,” she shot back.

  “May I come in?” I asked, nodding toward the living room.

  “Just tell me if it’s about Hanna,” Glynis Rodomski said. “I have to know if this is about Hanna.”

  “It is,” I conceded. “At least, in part. Is she here?”

  “No,” her husband said quickly. “She’s not.” Which immediately made me wonder whether she was.

  We sat down in the adjoining living room. I caught a glimpse of the kitchen through a doorway. Dishes piled by the sink, a leaning stack of newspapers, an uncorked bottle of wine, an open box of Cheerios. Unless they were having cereal for dinner, that box had to have been sitting there all day. By contrast, the living room was pure Martha Stewart. Two matching couches, two matching chairs, with perfectly positioned throw pillows on all of them.

  Chris Rodomski tossed a pillow aside before taking one of the chairs, and it hit the broadloomed floor silently. Glynis scowled at him, ever so briefly, but I was guessing my presence was more disconcerting to her than his contempt for her decorating touches. She sat on one of the couches and I took the other empty chair.

  “Do you know where Hanna is now?” I asked.

  They exchanged looks. “Not right this second,” he said. “There are a number of places she could be.” He tried to be offhand about it. “With her friends, probably.” He adopted a look of grave concern toward me. “We really need to know what this is about before we start answering your questions.”

  “It’s about that little business she has with her boyfriend, isn’t it?” Glynis blurted. “I told her that would end up biting her in the ass.”

  Chris Rodomski shot her a look. “We don’t know that Mr. Weaver’s visit has anything to do with that.”

  “Business?” I asked.

  He waved his hand dismissively at me. “Tell us why you’re here.”

  I took a breath. “Hanna has a friend named Claire Sanders, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Glynis said.

  “Claire hasn’t been seen since last night, and I’m trying to find her. I figured Hanna might be able to help me.”

  “What do you mean, she hasn’t been seen?” she asked. “She’s missing?”

  I hesitated. There was a difference between not knowing where someone was and categorizing them as missing. “She needs to be found,” I said, and left it that.

  “I have no idea where she is,” Glynis said. “Claire, I mean. She comes around here once in a while, but she’s only going to come here if Hanna’s home, and she’s not home all that much.”

  “But she lives here,” I said, making a statement more than asking.

  “Well, sure, technically,” Hanna’s mother said, “but she spends pretty much every waking moment with her boyfriend.”

  “Not just waking,” her husband sneered.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, getting out my small notebook.

  “Sean,” Hanna’s mother said.

  “Sean what?”

  “Skilling,” Chris Rodomski interjected, putting the wineglass to his lips and taking a long sip.

  “That’s right,” Glynis said suddenly. “Sean Skilling. Every time I try to think of the name, I come up with ‘skillet.’”

  I asked, “Does Hanna carry a cell phone?”

  Glynis rolled her eyes. She seemed less tense, now that she realized I was here more about Claire than her own daughter. “Are you kidding? It’s surgically attached to her hand.” She rethought that. “Or her head. I don’t know which.”

  “Could you call her, tell her to come home?”

  “What will I tell her?”

  “I don’t know. Something’s come up. A family matter. You need her to come home.”

  Glynis looked skeptical. “I can try.” She picked up the receiver on a landline phone that was sitting on a table next to the couch.

  She held the phone to her ear and waited. She nodded almost imperceptibly with each ring, then said, “Oh, hi, sweetheart. It’s your mother. Could you please come over? There’s something your father and I need to discuss with you. But”—she looked at me—“it’s not the sort of thing I can talk to you about on the phone.” A pause, then, with forced cheerfulness, “Hope you’re having fun.”

  Glynis ended the call. “She’ll either call back or she won’t. She probably saw it was me and didn’t answer. She sees our name and generally ignores it. I could text her, but it wouldn’t make any difference.”

  Rodomski shook his head. “Which is really a pain in the ass when you need to get in touch with her. You got kids?”

  I hesitated. “A son.”

  Rodomski nodded enviously. “You’re better off, believe me. Girls can get into so much more trouble.”

  “Have Hanna and Claire been friends a long time?” I asked.

  “Since around seventh grade, I think,” Glynis said. “They’re inseparable. Sleeping over at each other’s houses, trading clothes, going on school trips.”

  “What do you know about Claire?” I asked.

  Glynis shrugged. “She’s a nice girl.”

  Her husband said, “She’s the mayor’s daughter, you know.” A pause. “That horse’s ass.”

  “You’re not a fan?”

  Chris shook his head. “You watch the news? You see the kind of things going on half an hour’s drive south of here? You want that kind of thing happening in Griffon? Far as I’m concerned, the cops here do what they have to do, and I’m okay with it. Bert Sanders is more worried about some troublemaker’s rights than he is about our right to be able to be safe in our beds at night. I signed that petition.
Signed it more than once. Every store I go into, I sign it. How about you?”

  “I never seem to have a pen on me,” I said.

  “You either support Chief Perry or you don’t, that’s how I feel.”

  “The chief and I have a complicated relationship,” I said. I wasn’t interested in talking politics any longer. I turned to his wife and asked, “When’s the last time you saw Hanna?”

  She glanced at her husband and then back at me. “I didn’t hear her come in last night, and I guess she was off to school pretty early this—”

  “Hanna didn’t come home last night,” Chris said. “For God’s sake, Glynis, stop fooling yourself.”

  “If she didn’t come home, where was she?”

  “With that boy. Sean. She’s over at his house most nights.”

  “He lives with his parents?”

  Rodomski nodded. “I guess they don’t see anything wrong with it. A girl shacked up in their house with their son.”

  “Shacked up,” Glynis said mockingly. “What century are you from?”

  “I need Hanna’s cell phone number,” I said to both of them, “and an address for Sean Skilling.”

  “I can give you the number, but I don’t know exactly where the Skillings live,” Glynis said. “I’m sure they’re in the book, though.”

  She recited the number, which I scribbled into my notebook. “They go to school together?”

  Glynis nodded. “And Sean has a car.”

  “What kind?”

  She looked hopelessly at her husband. “It’s a pickup,” he said. “Probably a Ford. You know Skilling Ford, just outside of town?”

  I did.

  “That’s them.”

  “What kind of work do you do, Mr. Rodomski?”

  “I’m a financial adviser,” he said.

  “Here in Griffon?”

  “No, we have an office down on Military Road.” He pronounced it “milltree,” like everyone else around here did.

  “I work, too,” Glynis said indignantly. “Looking after him and our daughter. That’s a full-time job.”

  “One of Glynis’ little jokes,” Chris Rodomski said wearily. “She thinks if it’s funny once, it’s funny a hundred times.”

  I handed them each a business card. “If Hanna comes home before I run into her, give me a call. Maybe by then I’ll have found Claire anyway.”

  They each took a card without looking at it.

  “One last question. What’s this business you mentioned?”

  “Hmm?” Glynis said, playing dumb.

  “When I came in, you asked if this was about that business they’ve been running. You said you told Hanna it could come back and bite her in the ass.”

  “It has nothing to do with Claire Sanders,” Chris Rodomski said. “I think we’ve helped you out as much as we can.”

  They showed me to the door.

  As I walked back to my car, I took a small detour down the side of the house to get a look at the backyard. Even in the darkness, I could make out several garbage cans and an old rusted swing set. It had to have been years since Hanna had played on that. I thought of Chris Rodomski’s nice suit, the hole in his sock. Perfect living room, messy kitchen. Beautiful front yard, a jungle out back.

  The Rodomskis liked to make a good first impression, but didn’t give a damn what you thought once you got to know them.

  NINE

  When she pops in from work to see that he is okay, and to bring him some takeout—Buffalo chicken wings and fries—he is sitting in the chair with a car magazine open on his lap.

  “I don’t understand these what-they-call-’em nav systems,” he says. “All the cars have them now. Never had one of those in a car.”

  “I hear they don’t work that well,” the woman says. “Heard about some idiot woman, she kept doing what the system told her and drove right into a lake.”

  The man laughs softly. “That smells like wings,” he says, taking the Styrofoam box and opening it. “Looks delicious.”

  “I brought you lots of napkins and wet wipes,” she says, handing them over. “Try not to drop the bones all over the room.”

  Like it would matter. He’s always spilling his food. Once a week or so she tries to get in here and clean up the mess, but honestly, doesn’t she have enough to do? The room reeks, but she stopped noticing the smells long ago.

  “Did you think about what I said this morning?” he asks, biting into a wing, tearing at the chicken with his gray teeth.

  “What did you say this morning?” she replies. She remembers—she always knows what it will be about—but feigning ignorance stalls things for a while.

  “About going in to work? Or just going out?”

  “Enough. You’re wearing me out.”

  She gathers some magazines on the bed—car magazines, a People and half a dozen National Geographics—and sets them neatly on the bedside table. “You can’t ask me the same thing every day and think you’re going to get a different answer. You—oh for God’s sake, there’s toast crusts in your bed.”

  The man says, “If it’s getting me out that worries you, I think I could manage the stairs myself. It’d just take a while, that’s all.”

  “It’s not about that,” she says. “You know that.”

  Something that troubled her that morning is eating at her again. Where’s the book? The one he writes in three times a day, or more? Now that she thinks about it, she hasn’t seen it for days.

  “Where’s your stupid little notebook?” she asks.

  “I told you, I write in it after you leave.”

  “Since when?”

  “I just do.”

  “Where is it right now?”

  “I think it fell under the bed. Might be stuck between the bed and the wall.”

  “Move aside, I’ll find it for you.”

  “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

  “Better find it fast or you’ll forget what to write,” she says, deciding to drop it, at least for now. She has to go.

  As she turns to leave, he says, “Wait.”

  She stops. “What?”

  “The boy,” he says. “What’s up with the boy?”

  She is confused for a moment, unsure which boy he’s referring to. His stepson, or the one who’s caused them so much trouble lately. She decides on an answer that covers all the bases.

  “Everything’s under control,” the woman says. “We’re doing our best to sort things out.”

  “Maybe,” the man says, allowing a naive sliver of hope to creep into his voice, “it’s a good thing, what happened. I mean, it might mean things will change.” He smiles at her with those gray teeth. “I could use a change.”

  “No,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that at all.”

  TEN

  He was always on my mind. It was true all through this period, but even now, after all this time, that’s still the case. Almost like a low-pitched hum, no matter what you’re doing, that’s always there in the background.

  I thought about what he was like, the things we did together. Moments. Mental snapshots. Some of the memories were pleasant, some less so. Some of them were like signposts along a journey.

  When Scott was eight, the school called because he’d been in a fight with another boy. Donna couldn’t get away from work, but I was between jobs, so I headed over. I found him sitting on a bench in the office, staring down into his lap, his legs just barely long enough to touch the floor with the tips of his sneakers. He was swinging his feet back and forth.

  “Hey,” I said, and he looked up. His eyes were red, but he was not crying at that moment. I sat down beside him, our thighs touching, and he leaned into me.

  “I thought I was doing the right thing,” he said.

  “Start from the beginning.”
r />   “Mickey Farnsworth threw a rock at a car and I told the teacher. She told me she was busy and I guess she forgot to do anything about it and at recess Mickey said I was a tattletale and started beating me up and we got into a fight and now we’re both in trouble.”

  “Where’s Mickey?” I asked.

  “His mom came and got him. She called me a tattletale, too.”

  That really pissed me off, but I had to let it go. The thing was, Scott had some history here. Of tattling. He didn’t like to see others getting away with things, but seeing that justice was done often had a way of backfiring for him.

  Welcome to the world.

  “It’s wrong to throw rocks at cars, right?” he asked.

  “It is.”

  “And you and Mom say it’s wrong to do nothing when people break the law. Isn’t it against the law to throw rocks at cars?”

  “It is.”

  “So why am I being suspended?”

  I put my arm around him and patted his shoulder. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make me a hypocrite. I gave it my best shot.

  “Sometimes doing the right thing hurts.” I paused. “Sometimes, doing the right thing is not always worth doing. It’s hard to be right all the time. It’s not an easy way to live your life.”

  “Don’t you always do what’s right?” Scott asked, turning his head to look at me.

  “I’ll always try to where you’re concerned,” I said.

  He rested his head against my chest. “The principal wants to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you have to take me home.”

  “Okay.”

  “Am I going to be punished?”

  “You have been already,” I said. “For the wrong things, for the wrong reasons.”

  “I don’t understand, Dad.”

  “Me, neither,” I said. “Me, neither.”

  * * *

  As I went in search of the Skilling residence, I gave more thought to what I was doing, and why I was doing it. I needed to know Claire Sanders was okay. I needed to know, having been dragged unwittingly into this mess, whether my actions had put her at risk. If they had, I’d have to see what I could do about it. I didn’t like to see kids in trouble.