Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  Finely shook his head. “Use my water. It’s so much better.”

  “It just takes longer. I have to uncap so many bottles and—”

  “I’ll bring home one of those big jugs, make it easier.”

  “Sure, okay,” Lindsay said.

  “I don’t know what we would do without you.”

  Lindsay put the plate on the kitchen table. “There you go,” she said.

  “I’m going to go up and see Jane first,” the former mayor said. “You go home. I’ll take it from here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Got a busy day tomorrow, though.”

  “I’ll be here by seven,” Lindsay said.

  “You’re worth a million dollars.”

  Lindsay smiled. “You can give me a raise if you want.”

  Finley walked over and gave the woman a kiss on the forehead. “Has she had her pills?” he asked her.

  “She’s good to go. All you have to do is tuck her in for the night and she should be good till the morning. Unless she has to go to the bathroom or something, you’ll—”

  “I can help her with that,” Finley said. “Go, go on, get out of here. You’ve done enough.”

  Lindsay gave the man a hug, grabbed a jacket and purse that were hanging off the back of a kitchen chair, and headed for the door. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Bye, love,” he said. He poured himself a second scotch and knocked it back.

  He went upstairs.

  Were there more stairs today than yesterday? he wondered. Climbing up the flight seemed to take more energy every day. But he needed his strength. He hadn’t even declared officially yet. There was so much hard work ahead.

  Interesting development on the news. He could use that.

  Finley passed by the guest bedroom, stepped in, took off his watch, and rested it on the bedside table. Removed his tie and threw it on the bed. He sat on the end and took off his shoes, scrunched his toes into the carpet.

  “That feels better,” he said to himself.

  He stood, went a few more feet down the hall. The door to Jane Finley’s room was open an inch, and he slowly pushed it open.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” he said softly.

  His wife was in bed, on her back, the covers pulled up to her neck. Her skin was pale, her hair sparse. A soft bedside lamp cast light on a pair of reading glasses, a hardcover Ken Follett novel, and several jars of pills.

  Jane’s eyes fluttered open.

  “You’re home,” she said. “Does Lindsay know?”

  “I just sent her home.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “She made something up for me. I’ll have it in a sec. Lindsay said you had a good day.”

  “I guess,” Jane said, her eyelids heavy. “What did you do today?”

  “This and that,” he said. “I’m thinking I’ll declare tomorrow.”

  Jane took a long, deep breath. “You don’t have to do this.”

  Finley sat on the edge of the bed, reached through the covers until he found his wife’s hand, and gave it a squeeze. “I can be the man you always wanted me to be.”

  “You don’t have to prove anything.”

  “I shamed you. I—”

  “Stop,” she said, her head moving from side to side on the pillow.

  “But I did. I want people to see I’m not that man anymore. That I’m a better man. Someone worthy of you.”

  He put a hand to her forehead. “You feel warm. Would you like a cool cloth?”

  “I don’t want to trouble you,” Jane said. “Go eat.”

  He got up, went into the bathroom, and ran the water from the tap until it was cold. He held a washcloth under the stream, turned off the water, wrung as much water as he could from the cloth, and returned to his wife’s side.

  “Here,” he said, and rested the cloth on her forehead.

  “That feels good,” she said. “That feels really nice.”

  Finley picked up the Follett book. “How is this?”

  “It’s good,” she said. “But it’s so long, and heavy. It’s hard to hold up.”

  Finley opened it to where she’d left her bookmark. “Would you like me to read some of it to you?”

  “What about your dinner?” Jane asked.

  “It’s not hot. Just ham and potato salad.”

  “Okay, then.”

  He only got through half a page before Jane was asleep. He placed the book back on the bedside table, took the cloth from her forehead, turned off the light, and slipped quietly from the room.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  WHEN Duckworth saw the Finley Springs Water truck parked in his driveway, he figured it meant one of two things. The former mayor had dropped by to visit, or his son, Trevor, was here.

  Duckworth wasn’t sure whose visit he dreaded more.

  Without question, Randall was not welcome. Duckworth had had to chase him off the parking lot of the drive-in the night before when the opportunistic gasbag had tried to get his picture taken helping people out. The detective almost wished the man had refused to leave. He’d have loved to slap the cuffs on him and throw him into the back of his car.

  So that made Trevor a more welcome visitor. But it had been almost two weeks since Duckworth had seen his son, and that visit had not gone well. Trevor had spent the night at his parents’ house, showing up in a Finley truck just like the one that was in the driveway now. When Duckworth found out Randy had given his son a job, his radar kicked in.

  Randy had been leaning on Duckworth to pass along anything that might help him in his upcoming campaign—in particular, problems within the police department. He’d even suggested to Barry that if he helped him out, once elected, he’d see about firing Rhonda Finderman and making him the new chief.

  Duckworth wanted none of it.

  So when he found out his son was working for the ex-mayor’s water company, Duckworth couldn’t help but suspect Finley of wanting payback. I gave your boy a job. Now give me something I can use.

  But when he told Trevor his suspicions, it all came out wrong. Trevor, proud to have found work after months of unemployment, felt demeaned, as though his father were suggesting he couldn’t find a job on his own terms. Trevor got in his water company van and took off.

  The two hadn’t spoken since.

  Duckworth got out of his car and walked to the front door, stood there a moment, steeling himself to whatever was coming.

  He opened the door and stepped inside.

  “Barry?” His wife’s voice, coming from upstairs. Seconds later, he saw her legs first, then the rest of her, as she descended the stairs.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Trevor’s here.”

  “I saw the truck.”

  “He’s upstairs. He was doing a run somewhere—I can’t remember where—and decided to stop by before dropping off the van at the end of his shift.”

  “Great,” Duckworth said.

  Maureen said, “He was helping himself to a beer in the fridge, but I said because he was still technically working, and responsible for one of Finley’s water delivery trucks, he should just have a Coke, and he got annoyed, said he was hardly going to get drunk on one beer, and I said, ‘Let’s say you have an accident, and it isn’t even your fault, but they do a breath test and find out you’d been drinking. That could make you and your employer liable. It could lose you your job.’ Do you think I told him the right thing? Or am I just picking on him? Do you want dinner now? It’s all ready. I asked him if he wanted anything, but he said no. He’s upstairs going through some of his old CDs that he wants to put onto his computer so he can put them on his iThingie or whatever. How’d it go today?”

  The two of them went into the kitchen. Duckworth reached into the fridge and grabbed one of the beers his son had lusted after.

&
nbsp; “Lousy day,” he said, dropping his butt onto a chair at the table.

  “Well, since you asked, mine wasn’t much better,” Maureen said.

  “Sorry,” Duckworth said. “You go first.”

  “Well, we lost Mrs. Grover’s bifocals.” Maureen managed a store that sold eyeglasses. “Things went downhill from there.”

  “Oh, shit. Did you find them?”

  “When the new pair we ordered come in, that’s when we’ll find them. But I’m guessing that’s small change to what you’ve had to deal with. The drive-in and all.”

  “Yeah. And all.”

  Maureen soon had a plate in front of him. Baked chicken without the skin, asparagus, a few carrots. Duckworth studied it, wondering what had happened to the butter-smothered baked potato.

  “The drive-in,” Maureen reminded him.

  He twisted the cap off the beer and took a drink. “They had a bomb expert out there today. It was no accident. And they’ve got this guy working with me, who I sent out to Thackeray today. I don’t know what to make of him. And the Fisher-Gaynor stuff is still driving me crazy.”

  “That’s a full plate,” she said.

  Duckworth looked down. “Speaking of which, why is there no potato?”

  “You’ve got two vegetables.”

  “But neither one of them’s a potato.”

  “If I cooked you a potato, you’d bury it in butter and sour cream. What’s the latest with Rosemary Gaynor? I thought the doctor killed her.”

  “I don’t think so. It had to be somebody else. I think it’s Olivia Fisher’s killer.”

  “That was horrible. All those people in the park who heard her screaming and didn’t do a thing. And such a black mark against the town. All that media attention, the stories about the town that didn’t care, the twenty-two people who heard what happened and did nothing. Remember they compared it to the Kitty Genovese story? You know? The woman in Queens, in 1964? Stabbed to death in Kew Gardens with a whole bunch of witnesses and nobody did anything.”

  “How many people did you say heard her?”

  “Kitty Genovese?”

  “No. Olivia Fisher.”

  “Oh. The stories back then said twenty-two.”

  Duckworth frowned. “Off by one.”

  “Sorry?”

  He filled her in on the incidents that were linked by that one number. He’d thought, briefly, maybe it had something to do with the Fisher case, but the number twenty-two hadn’t popped up anywhere.

  “What about some buttered noodles?” he asked his wife. “How long would it take to cook some noodles?”

  “What about the Twenty-third Psalm?” she asked.

  “That’s the first thing everyone thinks of. I wish I’d been here when the Olivia thing happened. I’d have a better handle on it. I was away around that time three years ago. You remember? I was in Canada. Opening of pickerel season.”

  “Oh yeah. You didn’t catch a thing.”

  “Rhonda Finderman was the primary on that. Before she was promoted to chief,” Barry said, picking at the asparagus. “What happened to the chicken skin?”

  “Please stop.”

  “Anyway, the thing that’s really been bugging me, and there’s not really anything I can do about it, is that I kind of feel like Rhonda dropped the ball here. She couldn’t have been paying very much attention to the Gaynor murder, or she’d have made a connection right away at how similar it was to the Fisher case. If we’d known that from the beginning, we might have gone at this another way. We’ve lost time on this thing.”

  “What should she have done?”

  “She can’t be reading the reports. She’s too caught up in the bureaucratic stuff, I guess. Maybe I’m being too hard on her. Maybe it’s not a big deal.”

  “It seems to be to you.”

  “You already eaten?” he asked his wife.

  “I’m sorry. This is my book club night. I’m supposed to be at Shirley’s in twenty minutes. I ate a while ago.”

  “I forgot it was tonight. What’s the book?”

  “You’d hate it. It’s about feelings.”

  “Say no more.”

  Trevor walked into the kitchen.

  “I didn’t even hear you come down the stairs,” Maureen said. “Say hello to your father.”

  “Hey,” he said.

  Duckworth got up. “Trev. How’s it going?”

  “Okay.” He waved a handful of CDs at his mother. “I found what I was looking for.”

  “You have to go?” Barry asked.

  “I gotta get the truck back.”

  “Job going good?”

  “It’s a job,” Trevor said.

  “You want to come by after? Your mother’s got her book club thing. I’m just hanging out here. Probably watching a game or something.”

  The young man hesitated. “I don’t know. Probably not. Kind of beat.”

  “It’d be fun,” Barry said.

  Trevor shrugged. “I gotta go.” He gave his mother a hug, half a wave to his father, and then he was gone.

  “Shit,” Barry said.

  “You tried,” his wife said. “I think he was right on the edge there. Maybe if you’d asked once more.”

  “I’m not going to beg my son to hang out with me,” he said, moving the vegetables around with his fork.

  “You hate your dinner.”

  He looked at his wife. “I don’t have the energy anymore.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have the energy I once did. This drive-in thing, I figure by tomorrow the feds will be all over it—maybe Homeland Security will want it to justify their existence. Part of me wants to tell the feds to go jump in the lake if they try to take this away, and part of me would be relieved if they did take it. I may be in over my head.”

  “That’s not true,” Maureen said.

  Then, out of the blue, Duckworth said, “Victor Rooney.”

  “What?”

  “I dropped by Walden Fisher’s house today, asked him a few things about his daughter’s death. He brought up Victor Rooney.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I just thought of him again because he and Trevor, they’d be about the same age. Rooney and Olivia were going to get married. Walden said Victor’s never gotten over it, that he’s been acting weird lately, what with the third anniversary of Olivia’s murder coming up.”

  “Have you talked to him? To this Rooney person?”

  Duckworth shook his head. “That’s what I’ve been thinking I should do.” He pushed the beer away. He’d had about a third of the bottle. “If I’m gonna go back out, I can’t have that.”

  Maureen smiled. “I’m going to hate myself for this.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a cupcake in the fridge. One. Chocolate, with chocolate icing.”

  He wondered whether he should tell her about the pain he’d had when he was at the Burger King. But not only would it get Maureen to worrying; it would mean admitting that he’d had lunch at Burger King.

  “I love you,” he said.

  • • •

  Before Duckworth left the house, he put in a call to Clark Andover, the lawyer Bill Gaynor’d hired to defend him against a slew of charges, including the murder of Marshall Kemper.

  “I’m going to drop by and see your client tonight,” Duckworth said, “and I figured you’d want to be there.”

  “Tonight?” Andover said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “In about an hour,” Duckworth said.

  “I can’t just drop everything and—”

  “I’ll bring the coffee.”

  It was dark by the time the detective tracked Victor Rooney to a house in an older part of downtown. These were mostly postwar—World War II—homes. Modest, but built to la
st. Rooney rented a room from a retired schoolteacher named Emily Townsend, whose husband had died several years ago. Hers was a small white two-story house with black shutters. There was a rusty old van in the driveway, parked next to a shiny blue Toyota.

  “I’m pretty sure Victor’s in,” she said after Duckworth showed up at the door and told her who he was. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m just hoping he can help me with something.”

  “He’s a good boy,” she said. “Well, he’s not a boy, of course. He’s a man. He’s a great help to me. Most days.”

  “What do you mean, most days?”

  “Oh—” She waved a hand. “Nothing, really. He just has his ups and downs. He’s looking for a job. Do you have any openings at the police department?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be as a policeman. I know you have to get special training for that. But maybe something looking after the police cars? Victor’s very handy with machinery. He’s got a real knack for it. That’s one of the reasons I like to have him around, as a boarder. Ever since my husband, Virgil, died, he’s looked after things around here. Cuts the grass, replaces the furnace filter, changes the batteries in the smoke detectors. Even knows how to fix electrical stuff. All the things Virgil looked after. I give him a real break on the rent because of that, and just as well, because some months he can’t pay it at all.”

  “Sounds as though you’re very good to him.”

  “And vice versa. Let me get him for you.” She called up the stairs. “Vick! Vick! There’s someone here to see you!”

  A door could be heard opening, and Victor Rooney appeared at the top of the stairs. He was wearing a T-shirt, running shorts, and sneakers. He was glassy-eyed, and Duckworth wasn’t sure if he was heading out for a run or had just come back.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “This man wants to talk to you,” Emily Townsend said. “He’s from the police!”

  Slowly, Victor descended the stairs, not taking his eyes off Duckworth. “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t think so,” the detective said.

  “What do you want?” he asked, reaching the step one from the bottom, so he could look down at Duckworth.