Never Look Away

by Linwood Barclay

  Standing at the top of the hill, he could see the path the SUV had taken. Grass had been flattened, dirt dug up. The Explorer had nicked a couple of trees on the way down, judging by the missing bark. A towering pine had brought the car’s trip to an end when it plowed into it head-on.

  The first thing Barry thought was, Huh?

  What was the Explorer doing here? If you looked at a map, Promise Falls was here in the middle, Lake George was up here to the north, and Albany was down here to the south. How did Leanne’s car end up at the bottom of this hill, but her body up in Lake George?

  “Someone ditches the car here hoping it won’t be found,” he said to himself, “but leaves Leanne’s body so somebody’s sure to find it.”

  The local police, who’d been down to the car several times before Duckworth arrived, said they’d found a gas station receipt on the floor for early Saturday afternoon. An Exxon just off the interstate north of the city. Duckworth took note of the location, then made sure everyone at the scene understood that the Explorer was linked to a homicide, and that it needed to be sent to a lab as soon as they figured a way to get it back up that hill.

  On his way to the Exxon, Duckworth’s cell rang, interrupting thoughts about what sort of snack foods they might sell at the gas station. He was thinking maybe a Twinkie. He hadn’t had a Twinkie in weeks.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Barry. How’s it hanging?”

  “Natalie. How you doin’, my dear?” His encounters with Natalie Bondurant were often antagonistic, but he liked her.

  “I’m doing just fine, Barry. Yourself?”

  “Couldn’t be better. Your client decided to make a full confession yet?”

  “Sorry, Barry, not just yet. I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “When your clowns did a search of the Harwood house, did they dust for prints?”

  Barry scratched his ear with the cell. “No,” he said. “They looked for any signs of violence, but not fingerprints.”

  “Why not?”

  “Natalie, it’s not officially a crime scene. We were looking for other things. Like what we found on the laptop.”

  “Anyone could have done those Internet searches, Barry.”

  He ignored that. Instead, he asked, “Why do you care about fingerprints?”

  “I want a set of the wife’s,” she said. “If you’re not planning to get a set, then I’m going to have someone go into the house and pull a set.”

  “It’s not exactly going to be a surprise to find the wife’s fingerprints all over that house, Natalie,” Barry said cautiously.

  “I want to see if they’re in any database. I want to know who she really is.”

  “So you’re buying your guy’s story. Is this the one where his wife is in the witness protection program, or is he now thinking she got replaced by a pod person?”

  “You never checked the FBI angle, did you?”

  “In fact, I did,” Barry said. “If she’s a witness, they’re not copping to it.”

  “What about this fake name she was going by? You looked into that?”

  He hadn’t, but rather than admit it, he said, “Even if she did turn out to be somebody else, it doesn’t mean her husband didn’t do her in.”

  “You’re going in the wrong direction on this one, Barry. Isn’t your sizable gut telling you that yet?”

  “Always a pleasure, Natalie,” Barry said and ended the call.

  That last comment of hers had taken all the fun out of thinking about a Twinkie. The hell of it was, there was something going on down there, in that sizable gut of his.

  FORTY

  I didn’t even remember driving home from Natalie Bondurant’s office. By the time I walked out of her building, I was so shaken by her interpretation of recent events I was in a walking coma. I was traumatized, shell-shocked, dumbstruck.

  Jan had set me up.

  At least that was how it looked. Maybe, I kept telling myself, there was some other explanation. Something that didn’t force me to reassess my life for the last five years. Something that didn’t transform Jan from a loving wife and mother to a heartless manipulator.

  But the part of me that had been trained to deal with the facts as they presented themselves—a part of me I’d been successfully suppressing lately—found it hard to reject Natalie’s theory out of hand.

  If one bought into the premise that I had something to do with Jan’s disappearance, as Detective Duckworth no doubt did, the circumstantial evidence was substantial. My story that Jan had been depressed and might well have killed herself didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The more that story fell apart, the more it looked as though I’d made it up.

  And suddenly I was a prime suspect.

  Jan had set me up.

  Those five words kept playing on a loop in my head the entire way home. Somehow, without being aware I was doing it, I’d taken the keys from my pocket, started my father’s car, driven it from one side of Promise Falls to the other, pulled into my driveway, unlocked my front door, and stepped into my home.

  Our home.

  I tossed Dad’s keys onto the table by the front door, and as I stood in that house it suddenly felt very different, like someplace I’d come into for the first time. If everything that had happened here for the last five years was built on a lie—on Jan’s false identity—then was this a real home? Or was this place a façade, a set, a stage where some fiction had been playing out day after day?

  “Just who the fuck are you, Jan?” I said to the empty house.

  I mounted the stairs and went into our bedroom, which I’d so carefully tidied after the house had been turned upside down by the police. I stood at the foot of the bed, taking in the whole room; the closet, the dresser, the end tables.

  I started with the closet. I reached in and hauled out everything of Jan’s. I tore blouses and dresses and pants off their hangers and threw them on the bed. Then I attacked the shelves, tossing sweaters and shoes into the room. I don’t know what I was looking for. I don’t know what I expected to find. But I felt compelled to take everything of Jan’s and toss them, disrupt them, expose them to the light.

  When I was done with the closet, I yanked out all the drawers on Jan’s half of the dresser. I flipped them over, dumped their contents onto the bed, much of the stuff falling onto the floor. Underwear, socks, hosiery. I tossed the empty drawers into a pile, then tore into the items on the bed in a frenzy.

  I was venting rage as much as I was looking for anything. Why the hell had she done this? Why had she left? What was she running from? What was she running to? Why was disappearing so important to her that she was willing to sacrifice me to do it? Who was the man who’d run off with Ethan at Five Mountains? Was that why she’d left? For another man?

  And the question I kept coming back to: Who the hell was she?

  Abruptly, I walked out of the bedroom—leaving it in a much worse state than the police had—and traveled down two flights to the basement. I grabbed a large screwdriver and a hammer, then came back up to the second floor, taking the steps two at a time.

  I opened the linen closet, hauled everything out that was on the floor, got down on my knees, and started ripping out the baseboards. I set the end of the screwdriver where the wood met the wall and drove it in with the hammer.

  There was nothing delicate about the way I was going about this.

  Once I had the wood partly pried from the wall, I forced the claw of the hammer in there and yanked. The wood snapped and broke off. I did it all the way around the closet, cracking wood, throwing it into the hallway behind me.

  When I was finished with that closet—having found nothing—I started in on the one in Ethan’s room. I tossed out any toys and small shoes in the way and ripped out all the molding around the closet base. When I struck out there, I tackled our own bedroom and again came up empty.

  I did a walkabout of the upstairs, took in all the damage I’d created so far.

  I w
as just getting started.

  Dropping down to my hands and knees again, I started tapping on the wood floors throughout the house, looking for any planks that appeared loose or disturbed. I threw back the carpet runners in the upstairs hallways and started there. A couple of the boards looked as though they might have been tampered with, so I drove the screwdriver down between them and pried up. The flooring cracked and snapped as the nails were ripped out.

  I got my nose right into the hole I’d created, then rooted around with my hand. I came up with nothing.

  When I was done prying up a few other boards on the top floor, I moved down to the main floor. I dragged rugs out of the way, continued to tap on boards, pried them up here and there. Then I removed the baseboards from the inside of the front hall closet. In the kitchen, I emptied every drawer, flipped it over. Pulled out the fridge and looked behind it, dumped out the flour and sugar containers, took out every saved plastic grocery store bag from a storage unit in the pantry. Opened the lids on rarely used baking dishes. Got on a chair and looked on top of all the kitchen cabinets.

  Nothing.

  Then I had an idea and rounded up every framed family photo in the house. Pictures of Ethan. Jan. Jan and me together, pictures of the three of us. A photo of my parents on their thirtieth anniversary.

  I took apart all the frames, removed the pictures, looked to see whether anything had been slipped in between the photo and the cardboard backing.

  I turned up nothing.

  In the living room, I tossed cushions, unzipped and removed covers, flipped chairs over, tipped the sofa on its back and tore the filmy fabric that covered the underside, stuck my hand in and cut my palm on a staple.

  When I’d looked into every possible hiding spot on the main floor, I moved down to the basement.

  That meant opening up countless boxes of things. Old books, family mementos—exclusively from my side—small appliances we no longer used, sleeping bags for camping trips, stuff from my days in college.

  As in the rest of the house, the search was feverish, reckless. Items scattered everywhere in haste.

  I was desperate to find something, anything, that might tell me who Jan really was or where she might have gone.

  And I didn’t find a single goddamn thing.

  Maybe that birth certificate that had been hidden behind the baseboard in the upstairs linen closet had been it. The only thing Jan had hidden in this house. Or if there had been other things, she’d been smart enough to take them with her, too, when she disappeared.

  The birth certificate, and the envelope.

  There’d been a key in that envelope, too. A strange-looking key, not a typical door key. A different kind of key.

  Then it hit me what it probably was. A safe-deposit box key.

  Before Jan had met and taken up with me, she’d put something away for safekeeping. And the time had come for her to go and get it.

  And leave Ethan and me behind.

  Slowly, I walked through our home and surveyed the damage I’d wrought. The house looked like a bomb had hit it.

  There weren’t many places to sit down save for the stairs. I set my ass down on one of the lower steps, put my face into my hands, and began to cry.

  If Jan really was dead, my life was shattered.

  If Jan was alive, and had betrayed me, it wasn’t much better.

  If Natalie Bondurant’s take on everything was right, it meant Jan was alive, and to save my own neck, I needed to find her.

  But it didn’t mean I wanted her back.

  As I wiped the tears from my cheeks, trying to focus through my watery eyes, I looked for something in all of this that was good. Something that would give me some hope, some reason to carry on.

  Ethan.

  I had to keep going for Ethan.

  I had to get through this, find out what was going on, and stay out of jail, for Ethan.

  I couldn’t let him lose his father. And I wasn’t about to lose my son.

  FORTY-ONE

  When Jan came out of the jewelry store and got into the pickup truck, she didn’t say anything. But Dwayne sensed something was wrong. Jan’s face was set like stone and her hand seemed to shake when she reached for the handle to pull the door shut.

  “What’s going on?” Dwayne asked. “What’d they say?”

  Jan said, “Just go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Just go. Anywhere. Just go.”

  Dwayne turned the ignition, threw the truck into drive, and pulled out in front of a Lincoln that had to hit the brakes.

  “What the hell’s wrong?” Dwayne said as he drove. “You look like you just saw a ghost. Or you’re constipated.” When Jan didn’t laugh, Dwayne said, “Come on, I’m trying to make a joke. What’d they say in that store?”

  Jan turned and looked at him. “It’s all been for nothing.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “All of it. What we did, the waiting, everything. It’s all been for nothing.”

  “Jesus, Connie, would you mind telling me what the fuck you’re talking about?”

  “They’re worthless,” she said.

  “What?”

  “They’re fake, Dwayne!” she screamed at him. “They’re all cubic fucking something or other! They’re not diamonds! They’re fucking worthless! Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  Dwayne slammed on the brakes in the middle of the street. Behind him, a horn blared.

  “What are you fucking telling me?” he said, foot on the brake.

  “Are you deaf, Dwayne? Are you fucking hard of hearing? Let me tell it to you real slow so you’ll understand. They. Are. Worthless.”

  Dwayne’s face had gone crimson. His hands were gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were going white.

  Another honk of the horn, and then the Lincoln pulled up alongside, hit the brakes, and a man shouted, “Hey, asshole! Where’d you learn to drive?”

  Dwayne tore his hand off the wheel, reached under the seat for his gun, whirled around and pointed it out the window.

  “Why don’t you give me a lesson?” he shouted.

  The driver of the Lincoln floored it. The car squealed off.

  Dwayne turned back to face Jan, gun in hand. “Tell me.”

  “I showed this woman half a dozen of the diamonds. Picked them at random. She said they were all fake.”

  “That is not possible,” Dwayne said through clenched teeth.

  “I’m telling you what she said. They’re worthless!”

  “You’re wrong,” he said.

  “It’s not me who’s saying it,” Jan said. “She got out her fucking eye thing and studied them all.”

  Dwayne was shaking his head furiously. “She’s wrong. Fucking bitch is playing some sort of game. Figured if she said they were worth next to nothing, she could make you a lowball bid. That’s what she was doing.”

  “No, no,” Jan said, shaking her head. “She didn’t make any offer. She didn’t—”

  “Not now,” Dwayne said. “But you can bet she’s just waiting for you to come back in and say, ‘What would you give me for these? A thousand, five hundred?’”

  Jan screamed at him, “You’re not getting it! They’re not—”

  He lunged across the seat and with his left hand—the gun was still in his right—he grabbed her around the throat and pushed her up against the headrest.

  Jan choked. “Dwayne—”

  “Now you listen to me. I don’t give a fucking rat’s ass what you were told by some stupid bitch back there. We have a guy who is prepared to give us six million for these diamonds, and I am quite prepared to accept his offer no matter what you say.”

  “Dwayne, I can’t brea—”

  “Or maybe … let me guess. Did she say the diamonds were actually worth more? But you figure, you’ll come back out and tell little ol’ Dwayne that they’re worth nothing, so I’ll figure, fuck it, let’s forget the whole thing and hit the road, while you go back
and negotiate an even better deal and keep all the money for yourself? I had a sneaking suspicion this was always your game.”

  Jan gasped for air as Dwayne maintained his grip on her neck. She tried to bat his arms away but they were like steel rods.

  “You were able to play your little husband for all these years, so how hard could it be to play me for a few days, am I right? You wait till I get out, get the other key, get all the diamonds, and then figure out a way to get all the money, cut me out of the picture.”

  Jan felt herself starting to pass out.

  “You think I’m stupid?” Dwayne asked, his face in hers, his hot McDonald’s breath enveloping her. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

  Jan’s eyelids started to flutter, her head started to list to one side.

  Dwayne took his hand away.

  “Fuck this,” he said. “I’m trading these diamonds for our six million, and when I’ve got the money I’ll make a decision about what your share is going to be.”

  Jan coughed and struggled to get back her breath. She put her own hand to her neck and held it there as Dwayne put the truck in gear and sped off down the street.

  It was the closest she’d ever come to dying. Two thoughts had flashed across her mind before she thought it was all over.

  I could do it. I could kill him.

  And: Ethan.

  Dwayne was driving around in circles, waiting until it was two o’clock and time to return for his money. Jan had sat quietly in the seat next to him, waiting until she thought he’d calmed down.

  Finally, she whispered, “You need to listen to me.”

  He poked his tongue around inside his cheek, not turning to look at her.

  “All I want you to do is listen. Do what you want, but hear me out.” He didn’t tell her to shut up, so she continued. “If something seems too good to be true, it’s probably because it is.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I know you think I’m lying about what the lady in the jewelry store said. But let’s just say I’m telling you the truth. If I am, why did Banura look at them and say they were first-rate?”

  Dwayne shook his head. “Okay, if you’re not lying, then maybe that woman doesn’t know shit.”