Never Look Away

by Linwood Barclay

  “I will,” she said.

  I slipped the phone back into my coat and sped out of the lot, heading for home.

  • • •

  I was worried Duckworth or other members of the Promise Falls police might be watching my place, so I parked around the corner and walked up. I saw no suspicious cars on the street. After a while, you get to know the cars of your neighbors and their friends. Nothing out of the ordinary jumped out at me.

  I came down the side of the house and entered through the back door. As I’d suspected, I’d left it unlocked.

  I came in through the kitchen. The house was in darkness, and I was reluctant to flip on a light just in case someone was out there that I’d missed. But I needed to let my eyes adjust to be able to see where I was going. I knew my way around in the dark, but there were still several boards out of place. The house was full of booby traps, and I was suddenly worried that if Ethan had come home, he might have caught his foot in one of the holes where boards were missing.

  “Ethan!” I said. “It’s Dad! It’s okay! You can come out!”

  Then I listened. I stood there, just inside the door, and held my breath, hoping to catch some faint sound of movement in the house.

  “Ethan?” I called again.

  I let out a long, discouraged sigh. And then thought I heard a board creak, overhead, in the area of Ethan’s room.

  I went through the kitchen, stepping carefully. Dad had put all the boards I’d ripped up to one side, and pried the nails from them, but he hadn’t covered over the long, narrow holes I’d left behind.

  I went through the living room to the stairs and mounted them slowly in the dark. “Ethan?” I said.

  Surely Ethan wouldn’t be moving through the house in total darkness. After all, he was still a little boy, and, like most kids, had a fear of the dark, even in his own home.

  Are you up here?” I asked.

  The door to Ethan’s room was ajar. Sidestepping the few openings in the floor of the upstairs hall, I got to the door and pushed it open.

  A glow from a streetlamp fell through Ethan’s window.

  There was a dark shadow on the far side of his bed. Someone was standing there, someone far too tall to be Ethan.

  I reached over to the wall switch and flipped it up.

  It was Jan.

  The shock of seeing her, standing there, was overtaken by the shock of seeing the gun in her hand, which she was pointing directly at me.

  “Where’s Ethan?” she asked. “I’ve come for Ethan.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  Ethan’s dresser drawers were open and his clothes had been tossed onto the bed, next to a soft-sided flight bag, the one we kept in his closet for trips.

  I couldn’t recall Jan ever looking worse. Her hair was scraggly, her eyes bloodshot. It had only been two days since I’d seen her, but she looked as though she’d lost ten pounds, aged ten years. The gun was shaking in her hand.

  “Put that down, Jan,” I said. “Maybe you’d rather I called you Constance, but it’s hard for me to think of you as anyone but Jan.”

  She blinked. The gun didn’t move.

  “Or maybe I’ve got it wrong, and Constance isn’t your real name, either.”

  “No,” she whispered. “That’s my real name.”

  “I guess I can understand why you never wanted to introduce me to your parents,” I said. “One set was fake, and the other was dead.”

  Her eyes widened. “What?”

  “Martin and Thelma? Your real parents?” Something in her eyes said yes. “You don’t know? Someone killed them a few years ago. Slit their throats.”

  If she was troubled by this news, she didn’t show it. “Where’s Ethan?” she asked.

  I said, “He’s not here.”

  “Is he with Don and Arlene?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh no …,” she said. “No, no …”

  I took a step closer to her. “Put that gun down, Jan.”

  She shook her head. “No, he has to be here,” she said dreamily. “I’ve come for him. We’re going away.”

  “Even if he was here,” I said, “I would never, ever let you take him. Give me the gun.” I inched closer.

  “We have to find him,” Jan said.

  “I know,” I said. “But you’re not going to be looking for him with a gun.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I need it. I need this gun.”

  “You don’t need it with me,” I said, taking another step toward her. “What do you think I’m going to do to you? I’m your husband.”

  Jan stifled a laugh. “I think you’d probably like to do plenty to me. But you’re not the one I’m worried about.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “So my parents are dead,” she said, ignoring my question, her mind drifting, a slightly crazed look in her eye. “He must have thought they knew something. He must have thought they’d know where I was. He must have killed them when they couldn’t tell him anything.”

  “Are you talking about who killed your parents? Is that who you’re worried about?”

  “I did a bad thing,” Jan told me. “I did something….”

  “What did you do? What’s all of this about?” I was less than two feet away from her now.

  “Everything’s been for nothing,” she said. “The diamonds weren’t real.”

  “Diamonds?” I said. “What diamonds?”

  “They were worthless. Fucking worthless.” Another stifled laugh. “It’s like some huge cosmic joke.”

  I grabbed her wrist.

  I’d thought maybe she’d let me wrest the gun away from her, but as soon as I tried to twist it out of her hand she reacted, trying to pull her arm away. I wouldn’t let go. She swung at me with her left hand, hitting me in the side of the face. I swung my right arm up, knocked her hand away as I held on to her right. Then her free hand was clawing at me, her nails digging into my cheeks, but instead of trying to block that hand I turned in to her and got both hands on her wrist, doubling the pressure on it to make her drop the weapon.

  As I turned I threw my body into it and forced Jan up against the wall, hard, knocking the wind out of her. While the move may have had the effect of weakening her, it also prompted her to pull the trigger.

  The shot, which sounded like a sonic boom in Ethan’s small bedroom, went into the floor. I jumped, but I didn’t loosen my grip. I slammed her wrist against the wall. Once, twice. The third time, the gun fell from her hand and clattered to the floor. I was terrified it might go off again, but it bounced harmlessly up against the baseboard.

  I let go of Jan’s hand and dived down to get it, but the moment I let go and turned, she jumped onto my back.

  “No!” she screamed.

  I rolled, forcing her up against the metal frame of Ethan’s bed. The beam jammed into her back and she yelped in pain. I scrambled ahead, crablike, to get my hands on the gun, got it, then rolled and pointed it straight at her.

  “Just shoot me, David,” she said, winded and getting up onto her hands and knees. “Just put a fucking bullet in my head. It’d be easier.”

  “Who are you?” I shouted, both hands wrapped around the gun. “Who the hell are you?”

  She rose up, sat on the side of the bed, and put her head in her hands. After a moment, she looked up, tears running down her cheeks. “I’m Connie Tattinger,” she said. “But … I’m also Jan Harwood. No matter who I am, I’m Ethan’s mother.” She paused. “And I was your wife. For a time.”

  “What’s all of this been?” I asked her. “These last five years? Some kind of goddamn joke?”

  She shook her head. “Not a joke … not a joke. I was, I’ve been … waiting. And hiding.”

  “Waiting for what? Hiding from whom?”

  Jan took a few breaths, ran a finger under her wet nose, and said, “We hijacked a diamond shipment.”

  “What? We?”

  Jan dismissed the questions with a wave. “Six years
ago. Then, my partner, he got sent away for something else. The diamonds were in a safe place but it was going to be a few years before we could get at them. The man we took them from … he’s been looking for us, for me, all that time.”

  I was trying to take it all in. Those few short sentences, summing up years of deception. I grabbed on to something Jan had already said. “But you said they were worthless. Why would this man, why would he want them back?”

  She summoned some more strength to continue. “Because of what I did to him.”

  I waited.

  “I cut off his hand,” she said. “To get the briefcase he was attached to.” She sniffed. “He lived.”

  I was so stunned that I lowered the gun, letting it rest on the floor next to me, but still within reach. “I don’t know who you are,” I said.

  She nodded. “No, you really don’t. You never have.”

  “Where did this all happen?” I asked.

  “Boston,” she said.

  “So after it happened, you had to hide out,” I said. “You came to Promise Falls.”

  She nodded, her eyes glistening.

  “And married me. Why? Why do that?”

  She couldn’t find the words. I took a shot at helping her out. “It was like camouflage. You figured I could help you blend in. Who’d guess the nice little wife down the street had anything to do with a diamond heist?”

  She nodded again.

  “Did you really need to have a child to complete the picture?” I asked. “Is that what Ethan’s been for you? Part of a cover story?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  I shook my head. I had more questions. “So let me figure this out. When your partner got out of jail, you’d recover the diamonds?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We expected to get a lot of money for them.”

  “Enough to go away and live happily ever after,” I said.

  She closed her eyes and nodded again.

  “And I was dumb enough to think you already were. God, I’m such an idiot.”

  Jan swallowed, wiped away a tear, and said, “But they weren’t worth anything. The man whose hand I cut off—his name’s Oscar Fine—he’d been putting the word out. When we showed up at this guy’s place, this guy Dwayne—”

  “Dwayne?”

  “He was the one I stole them with,” she said. “Dwayne knew a man who’d give us cash for the diamonds. But he must have called Fine. When we went back for the money, Fine was there. He must have killed Dwayne. And he tried to kill me before I got away.”

  I rested my head up against Ethan’s closet door.

  Jan said to me, “What the hell happened to the floors? All the boards ripped up?”

  “I found the birth certificate, the one for Jan Richler,” I said. “Behind the baseboard in the linen closet.”

  “You couldn’t have,” she said. “I took it with me.”

  “I found it a long time ago, but put it back. After you disappeared, I wondered what else you might have hid. I found the other one, the real one. Why didn’t you take it, too?”

  “I needed the other envelope for the key that was in it,” she said. “It didn’t occur to me to get the other one. So … you knew about the Richlers?”

  “I knew of them, but I only went to see them after you disappeared. I found out about their daughter.”

  Jan looked away.

  “I guess that was handy in getting a new ID,” I said, not able to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “Knowing someone personally who died as a child. So you applied for a copy of the birth certificate and—”

  “No,” she said.

  “What? But I found—”

  “It was the original. I tried applying for a copy but didn’t have enough substantiating information. So I watched the Richlers’ routine for a few days, figured out when they did their groceries, got in when they went out. People generally keep those kinds of documents in one spot. A drawer in the kitchen, the bedroom. Only took me an hour to find it. Once I had it, everything else—driver’s license, Social Security—was a breeze.”

  I was actually impressed, but only for a moment. “You have any idea what you’ve done to those people? Bad enough what happened when you were a little girl.”

  Jan shot me a look, evidently figuring out I knew she’d pushed the other girl into the path of the car.

  “But to use their daughter’s name now, all these years later, that—”

  “Okay, so I’m a shit,” she said. “I’m poison. Anyone who comes in contact with me, their life eventually goes into the toilet. Jan Richler, her parents, my parents, Dwayne.”

  “Me,” I said. “Ethan.”

  Jan met my eye and looked away again.

  “The whole depression thing, it was masterful,” I said.

  “My mother,” Jan whispered. “She spent most of her life down in the dumps. Can hardly blame her, considering what she was married to, the bastard. I just modeled myself on her, without the booze.”

  “Well, you set me up beautifully. I was the perfect patsy, wasn’t I? Your sole audience. So when you disappeared, it looked like I was lying. Like I was trying to make them think you killed yourself, and the cops would figure I’d killed you. The trip to Lake George, the horseshit you told that guy in the store. Everything pointed to me. And it was you who sent the email.”

  Half a nod. “You’d already heard from that woman. I knew you’d fall for the email.”

  “And the tickets you ordered online. How’d you get into the park?”

  “I paid cash,” she whispered.

  “Was Dwayne the one who ran off with Ethan? So I’d have this crazy story to tell the cops, and give you time to slip away?”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Please,” I said. “How’d you pull it off?”

  “I had a change of clothes, a wig, in the backpack. When you ran after Ethan, I went into the restroom and changed, then walked out of Five Mountains.”

  My fingers touched the gun resting on the floor.

  “There’s more,” she said quietly. “Sites you supposedly visited on the laptop, blood in the trunk, a receipt for duct—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. And talking me into the life insurance policy. About the blood. Did you really cut your wrist?”

  “No. I nicked my ankle so I could leave a sample in the trunk.”

  “You’re really something,” I said. “The thing I don’t get—the thing I will probably never get—is why?”

  Jan wiped a finger under her nose again. “They wouldn’t be looking for me if they thought I was already dead,” she said. “Even if they never found a body, if they figured you’d killed me …”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I’m asking why.”

  She didn’t seem to follow.

  “Why would you do this to me?” I asked her. “How could you do this? How could you do this to me? How could you do this to Ethan?”

  Her eyes moved about for a second, as though searching for the answer. Then they stopped abruptly, as though the answer had been right in front of her.

  She said, “I wanted the money.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  “What did you think was going to happen?” I asked. “After I ended up going to jail for killing you?”

  “I figured, maybe, because there was no body, you’d end up getting off,” she said. “But they’d still think you did it, and they wouldn’t come looking for me.”

  “And if they convicted me?”

  “Your parents would look after Ethan,” she said. “They love him. He’d be safe with them.”

  “But you had to know,” I said, “that if I did get off, I wouldn’t rest until I found you.”

  “I’d already had someone looking for me,” Jan said. “And he hadn’t, until now, found me. I figured I could deal with that, once we had the money from the diamonds.”

  The word “we” had triggered something in me. “This Dwayne,” I said. “Were you in love with him?” />
  She didn’t need time to think. “No,” she said. “But he was useful.”

  I nodded. “Like me.” I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “And what about me? Did you ever love me?”

  “If I said yes, would you even believe it?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “What about Leanne? How’d she end up dead?”

  Jan shook her head tiredly. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. But Dwayne and I, we ran into her, outside Albany. She saw me in the truck, came over, wondered what I was doing there, who Dwayne was. Dwayne did what he had to do. We got rid of her car, and took her up to Lake George, in the pickup, under the cover.”

  “That meant a lot of backtracking.”

  “I had this idea,” she said, looking down into her lap, “that if we left her body up there, it would … it would build the case against you.”

  I ran my fingers across the gun again, slowly took it into my hand.

  “I never knew you for a minute,” I said.

  She looked at me. “No, you never did.”

  “Why did you have him?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Why did you have Ethan? When you got pregnant, why did you go ahead with it? Why didn’t you get an abortion?”

  She bit her lip. “I was going to,” she said. “I thought about it. Having a child, it was never part of the plan. I couldn’t believe it when it happened. I thought I’d taken precautions, but … I lay awake at nights, convinced I was going to do something about it. I made some calls, went to a clinic in Albany. I had an appointment.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “I couldn’t do it. I wanted to have him. I wanted to have a baby.”

  Now I was shaking my head. “You’re something else. You know what you are?”

  She waited.

  “A monster. A psychopath. The goddamn devil in a dress. I loved you. I really loved you. But it was all an act. None of it real. Not for one fucking minute.”

  Jan struggled to find the words she wanted to say. “I came back because of love,” she said.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I came back for Ethan,” she said. “You, I figured you could find a way to fend for yourself. But with Oscar Fine out there, looking for me, looking for ways to get to me, I knew I had to come back for Ethan, to protect him. He’s my son. He belongs to me. I’m his mother, for Christ’s—”