Never Look Away

by Linwood Barclay

  I’d had enough.

  I picked up the gun, pointed it, and pulled the trigger, felt the gun kick back in my hand.

  Jan screamed as the shot filled the room.

  The bullet went into the wall over Ethan’s headboard, a good two feet to the left of Jan. She looked around, saw the hole in the wall.

  “That’s what kind of mother I think you are,” I said.

  Shaking, Jan said, “It’s true. I came here for him. I drove by your parents’ house first, didn’t see any sign of him, then I came here. It was dark, so I let myself in, decided to pack his things, then when you came home, I was going to leave with him.”

  “Jesus, Jan, what were you going to do? Kidnap him at gunpoint? Wave this in my face and drag him off? Is that really what you were going to do?”

  She was shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Jan, it’s over. Everything’s over. You have to turn yourself in. You have to tell the police what you did, how you set me up. If you love Ethan, the only way to prove it, at this point, is to make it possible for me to raise him. You’re going to go to jail. There’s no way around it. Probably for a very, very long time. But if you mean what you say, if you love your son, you have to make things right so that he has his father there for him.”

  A calm seemed to come over her. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay.”

  “But the first thing we have to do,” I said, “is find him.”

  It was as though I’d thrown cold water on her. She became, suddenly, focused. “Find him? You don’t know where he is? He’s missing?”

  “This afternoon. He was playing with the croquet set in the backyard and Mom stopped hearing—”

  “When?” Jan asked urgently. “When did she notice he was gone?”

  “Late. Like, five or six o’clock.”

  Jan seemed to be computing something in her head. “He could have gotten there by then,” she said.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Are you talking about this Oscar person?”

  She nodded. “I think he knows where I’ve been living, who I’ve been these last six years. Either from the news, or from Dwayne, before he killed him. Fine would have had time to get here. He’s driving a black Audi, something he could make good time in. He might have gotten to Promise Falls before I did. I pulled off the highway for a while, trying to gather myself together.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jan, how would he even know where to find Ethan?”

  “You think he’s stupid? All he has to do is look up your name. He’ll find this address, your parents’ address, plus …”

  “Plus what?”

  Jan’s face crumpled like paper. “He may even have a picture of Ethan.”

  It was all dizzying. Finally encountering Jan, learning about her past, coming to grips with the realization that Ethan might not just be missing, but in real danger. As I went to get up off the floor, my hand caught on the rough edge of a long piece of hardwood flooring shaped like a jagged icicle.

  “Fuck,” I said. Still not trusting Jan, I tucked the gun under the edge of my butt while I pried out a splinter with my thumb and forefinger. Blood bubbled out of the wound.

  Jan made no move for the weapon, and I took hold of it again as I got to my feet.

  “This guy,” I said, “whose hand you cut off, what would he do with Ethan if he had him?”

  Jan shuddered. “I think he’d do anything,” she said. “I think he’d do anything he had to, to get back at me.”

  The words “eye for an eye” came to me. But I wasn’t thinking about eyes. I thought of the feel of Ethan’s hand in mine.

  “Do you have a way to reach this man?” I asked, feeling frantic. “Some way to find him? So we could try to work something out? Make some sort of deal?”

  Jan said, “He might be willing to trade Ethan for me.”

  There was nothing in that plan that troubled me. Not at this moment. But I didn’t think it was our only option.

  “I’ll call Duckworth,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The detective who’s been trying to find you, to nail me for your murder. He can put the word out. Get everyone looking for Oscar Fine. You can give them a description, tell them about the car he’s driving. If the police find him, they find Ethan. I don’t think he’s going to do anything to him before he’s found you. He probably figures as long as he has Ethan, alive, he’ll have some leverage with you.”

  Jan, resigned, nodded. “You’re right. You’re right. You’re right. Call him. Call the detective. I’ll tell him anything he needs to know to find Ethan. I’ll tell him anything he needs if it’ll help find Oscar Fine, if it’ll lead us to Ethan.”

  I took out my phone.

  Jan reached out, touched my arm. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

  I moved my arm away. “Gee, you think?” I said.

  I flipped open the phone, started searching the list of incoming calls so I could find Detective Duckworth’s number, and was hitting the button to connect when a voice said, “Stop.”

  I looked up. There was someone standing in the doorway to Ethan’s room.

  A man with one hand.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  “Drop the gun, and the phone,” Oscar Fine said to me. He had a weapon of his own pointed at me. It had a long barrel, slightly wider at the end. I was guessing that was a silencer. There’d already been two unsilenced shots fired off in this room. With any luck, maybe the neighbors had heard them and dialed 911.

  My gun was aimed at the floor, and I was pretty sure I’d be dead before I could raise my arm to use it. So I let the gun fall down along the side of my leg to the floor and tossed the phone, still open, onto the bed.

  “Kick it over here,” Oscar Fine said. “Carefully.”

  I lined up the edge of my shoe with the gun and slid it toward him. It narrowly missed one of the holes in the floor. Never taking his eyes off either of us, he knelt down, and using his stump and the weapon in his one hand like a set of chopsticks, picked up the gun, and slipped it into his pocket.

  The color had drained from Jan’s face. I’d never seen her look more frightened, or more vulnerable. Maybe, if there’d been a mirror around, I would have felt the same about myself. This is it, her expression said. It’s over.

  “Where’s my son?” I asked.

  Oscar Fine didn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed on Jan. “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “Please,” Jan said. “You have the wrong person.”

  He smiled wryly. “Really. Show a little more dignity than your boyfriend did at the end. You know what he did? He pissed himself. The poor bastard pissed himself. I’m guessing you’re made of stronger stuff than that. After all, you were the one had it in you to cut off my hand. He just sat up front. Did he piss himself then, too?”

  Jan licked her lips. I was guessing her mouth was as dry as mine. She said, “You should have had a key on you. If you’d had a key, we could have taken the briefcase without hurting you.”

  Oscar Fine momentarily looked solemn. “I can’t argue with you there. But you know what they say about hindsight.” He smiled and then said, with no hint of irony in his voice, “You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

  Jan said to him, nodding in my direction, “Please let him go. Tell him where our son is so he can go get him. He’s just a boy. Please don’t make him pay for anything I’ve done to you. I’m begging you. Is Ethan outside? Is he in your car?”

  Oscar Fine’s tongue moved around inside his mouth, like he was thinking something over.

  And then, in an instant, his arm went up and the gun in his hand went pfft.

  I shouted, “No! God, no! Jan!”

  Jan was tossed back against the wall. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t make a sound. She looked down at the blossom of red above her right breast, put her right hand up and touched it.

  I ran to Jan, tried to hold her as she started her slide down the wall. I eased her down, tried not to look at the blood tr
ail she’d left behind her. Her eyes were already glassy.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said.

  The front of her blouse was already soaked with blood. Her breathing was short and raspy.

  “Ethan,” she whispered to me.

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  I looked at Oscar Fine, who hadn’t moved since firing the shot. It struck me that he looked at peace.

  “I have to call an ambulance,” I said. “My wife … she’s losing a lot of blood.”

  “No,” he said.

  “She’s dying,” I said.

  “That’s the idea,” Oscar Fine said.

  Jan struggled to raise her head, looked at him and, with considerable effort, said, “Ethan. Where is Ethan?”

  Oscar Fine shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “But if you’d like, I’d be happy to look for your son. Once I find him, who would you like his hands sent to?” He smiled sadly at me. “It won’t be you.”

  “You don’t have him,” I said.

  “I wish,” Oscar Fine said.

  Jan’s eyelids fell shut. I slipped my arm around her, pulled her to me. I couldn’t tell whether she was still breathing.

  In the distance, we heard a siren.

  “Shit,” said Oscar Fine. He glanced at the open phone on the bed, shook his head in disgust, reached over and snapped it shut. He sighed as the siren—it sounded like only one—grew louder. In another few seconds, I could hear steps pounding on the front porch.

  “Change of plan,” Oscar Fine said. He waved the barrel at me. “Come.”

  I took my arm from around Jan and walked across the room, past Oscar Fine and through the door. He stayed close behind me. I could feel the barrel of the gun touching my back.

  “Stay very close,” he said.

  From downstairs, I heard Barry Duckworth yell, “Mr. Harwood?”

  “Up here,” I said, not shouting, but in a voice loud enough to be heard.

  “Are you okay?” Lights started coming on downstairs.

  “No. And my wife’s been shot.”

  “I’ve already called an ambulance.” Duckworth had reached the bottom of the stairs. Oscar Fine and I were standing behind the short upstairs hall railing, about to turn and come down the stairs.

  Duckworth, who had his weapon drawn, looked up. I could see the puzzlement in his face, wondering who the man behind me could be.

  Oscar Fine said, “I’m going to shoot Mr. Harwood if you don’t let us leave together.”

  Duckworth, his gun angled upward, took a moment to assess things. “There’s going to be a dozen officers out front in about two minutes,” he said.

  “Then we have to move quickly,” Oscar said, moving me down a step at a time. “Lower your weapon or I’ll shoot Mr. Harwood right now.”

  Duckworth, seeing the gun at my back, lowered his gun, but held on to it. “You need to give yourself up,” he said.

  “No,” he said. We were halfway down the stairs now. “Please back away.”

  Duckworth took a couple of steps back toward the front door.

  We reached the first floor. Keeping me in front of him as a shield, Oscar Fine started easing me toward the kitchen. He was going to take me out the back door. Maybe his car was parked a block over, and we’d be heading through the backyard and between the houses to get there.

  Duckworth watched in frustration. His eyes met mine.

  We were under the railing when I noticed Duckworth glancing up.

  Oscar Fine and I both craned our necks upward at the same time, too.

  It was Jan. She was standing at the railing, leaning over it at the waist. A drop of blood touched my forehead like warm rain.

  She said, “You will never hurt my son.”

  And then her body pivoted forward. She wasn’t leaning on the railing, she was pitching herself right over it.

  As she started to come down, I saw that she was clutching firmly, in both hands, the two-foot daggerlike plank of hardwood flooring I’d caught my hand on.

  She plunged over the side, the plank pointing straight down ahead of her.

  Oscar Fine had no time to react before its sharp, ragged end caught him where neck meets shoulder. The force of Jan’s fall rammed the plank deep into his torso, and that, combined with the weight of Jan’s body, put him down on the floor in an instant.

  Neither of them moved after that.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Jan and Oscar Fine were both declared dead at the scene. Once the initial panic was over, I couldn’t bring myself to go back into the front hall and look at the tangled wreckage that was my wife and her killer.

  I spent the better part of an hour with Barry Duckworth, explaining everything to him as best I could. Broad strokes, mostly. Many of the details I didn’t know, and didn’t expect I ever would.

  I had the sense he believed me.

  But even before we got into that, I had something more urgent to discuss with him.

  “Ethan’s still missing,” I said. “Jan was certain Oscar Fine had taken him, but upstairs there, just before everything happened, he said he didn’t know anything about him.”

  “Was he lying, you think?” Duckworth asked. “Messing with you?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “If he’d had Ethan, I think he would have enjoyed taunting us with the fact.”

  But to be certain, we found a black Audi—registered to Oscar Fine—one street over. We checked the back seat and trunk for any signs of Ethan.

  We came up empty.

  “We have everyone working on this,” Duckworth assured me as the two of us sat together at the kitchen table. “Every single available member of the department is looking for your boy. We’ve brought people in on their days off. We’re doing a block-by-block search.”

  “What if Ethan’s disappearance … what if it has nothing to do with any of this?” I asked. “What if he just wandered off? Or some sick son a bitch just happened to be driving through the neighborhood and—”

  “Regardless,” Duckworth said, “we’re doing everything, exploring all those angles. We’re interviewing everyone on your parents’ street and your street, doing a door-to-door right now.”

  None of this made me feel any better.

  “She did it for Ethan,” I said. “And for me.”

  “She did what?” Duckworth said.

  “She pulled it together long enough to kill that man so I’d be there for Ethan.”

  “I guess she did,” Duckworth said.

  “She said she didn’t expect my forgiveness,” I said.

  “Maybe, if she could ask you now …”

  I said nothing and looked down at the table.

  Mom and Dad arrived shortly after that. There was hugging and crying, and as I had done with Duckworth, I tried to tell them what I knew about the events of the last three days.

  And the last six years. And even before that.

  “Where could Ethan be?” Mom asked. “Where would he go?”

  While Duckworth went off to help oversee the crime scene, the three of us sat at the table, not knowing what to do.

  We were tired, depressed, traumatized.

  Part of me was grieving.

  Sometime around midnight, the phone rang. I picked up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Mr. Harwood?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve done a terrible thing.”

  I was there by 3 a.m.

  Detective Duckworth put up some objections at first. First, he didn’t want me leaving the crime scene. Second, if I knew who had taken my son, if he’d been kidnapped, Duckworth had to send in the police.

  “I don’t know that it’s exactly a kidnapping,” I said. “At least not now. It’s kind of complicated. Just let me go and get my boy. I know where he is. Let me bring him home.”

  He mulled it over a moment, then finally said, “Go.” He said he’d try to pave the way for me with the New York Thruway authorities, maybe save me the trouble of gett
ing pulled over for speeding.

  When I pulled up in front of the Richlers’ house on Lincoln Avenue in Rochester, the living room lights were on. I didn’t have to knock. Gretchen Richler was standing at the door waiting for me, and had it open as I came up the porch steps.

  “Let me see him,” I said.

  She nodded. She led me upstairs and pushed open the door to what I presumed to be the bedroom she shared with her husband, who was not around. Ethan was under the covers, his head on the pillow, sound asleep.

  “I’ll let him sleep for a bit more,” I said.

  “I’ve put on some coffee,” Gretchen said. “Would you like some?”

  “Yes,” I said, following her back downstairs. “Is your husband …”

  “Still in the hospital,” she said. “They have him in the psychiatric ward, I guess they call it. They’ve got him under observation.”

  “How do they think he’s going to be?”

  “It’s a kind of wait-and-see situation,” she said. “With any luck, he could be home in a few days, although I … I don’t know how he’ll fend on his own.”

  She filled two mugs with coffee and set them on the kitchen table. “Would you like some cookies?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Coffee’s fine.”

  Gretchen Richler took a seat across from me. “I know what I did was wrong,” she said.

  I blew on the coffee, took a sip. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Well, first of all, we were looking at that picture you left with us, the one of your wife. It was the necklace she was wearing. The cupcake.”

  “Yes?”

  “It had been our daughter’s. She’d lost it just before she died. She’d accused Constance of stealing it. When I saw it on your wife, it all came together. I knew.”

  “It was the only time I remember seeing her wear it,” I said. “She had it in her jewelry box but never put it on. But just before that trip, Ethan found it. He loves cupcakes and begged her to wear it.”

  “That last time you called, just after Horace tried to take his own life, when you said you thought your wife was still alive, that you thought maybe you were going to find her, I went … I went a little crazy.”