Never Look Away: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

  “Hindy,” I offered.

  “Yeah, that was it. For ‘Hindenburg.’”

  “How’d she handle it?” I asked.

  “The few times I saw them all together, it was kind of strange.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was like … it was like she was in another place.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Like she wasn’t there. It was like she was imagining she was someplace else, or someone else. I think it was her way of surviving.”

  I was listening, nodding my head.

  “Who’d you say you were?” he asked, and I told him my name again. “If and when you find Connie, you tell her to get in touch. Would you do that?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What are you? Some kind of private investigator?”

  “A reporter,” I said. “I’m a reporter.”

  Dad came down to the kitchen.

  “It must be dinnertime,” he said, looking at the clock. It was 6:40 p.m. “When did your mother say we were supposed to go over?”

  I said, “Huh?”

  “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  The phone rang. I glanced down at the display. Mom. Or possibly Ethan, who had learned some time ago how to use the speed dial on his grandparents’ phone.

  I picked up. “Yeah.”

  “I can’t find him,” Mom said, her voice shaking. “I can’t find Ethan.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  For the better part of half an hour, Jan drove randomly. Go a few miles, turn left. Go a few more, turn right. Get on the interstate, go two exits, get off. She hoped the more randomly she drove, the harder she’d be to follow.

  And she hadn’t noticed any black Audis in the pickup truck’s rearview mirror. When she got on the interstate, and was able to see a good mile or so behind her, and when there was no sign of the Audi, she started to feel more confident that Oscar Fine was not on her tail.

  But that was not a great comfort.

  If he could find her once, it seemed likely he could find her again.

  She must have looked like a madwoman to other motorists who happened to glance her way. Wide-eyed, her hair a mass of tangles from the wind blowing through the open side windows and the new crack in the windshield. She was holding on to the steering wheel as hard as she could not just to maintain control, but to keep from shaking.

  She was a disaster.

  Dwayne had to be dead. No way Oscar Fine was letting him walk out of that basement alive.

  The question was, how much had Dwayne said before he died?

  Did Oscar know who she was?

  Did Oscar know who she’d been?

  Had he already known before Dwayne walked in to trade his fake diamonds for six million?

  Think, she told herself, heading west on the Mass Pike. Think.

  One thing was a no-brainer. Banura had turned them in. Once they’d been to see him, and he’d examined what they had to sell, he must have tipped off Oscar Fine. But why was Oscar on alert now, after all this time? Had he been checking in with everyone in the diamond trade regularly for the last six years, reminding them to be on the lookout for those worthless stones as a way of tracking Dwayne and her down?

  Maybe. But it was also possible something had triggered Oscar Fine to start looking now, perhaps more vigorously than he had been lately.

  Had he seen a news report about her disappearance? Even if he had, those stories carried pictures of her looking like Jan Harwood, and Jan Harwood didn’t look anything like that girl who got the drop on him in the back of the limo. But maybe, when you’ve had someone cut off your hand, you remember a little more than hair color and eye shadow….

  Jan let go of the steering wheel long enough to bang it several times with her fist. Was there any part of this that she hadn’t fucked up?

  Where to start?

  Pulling the stupid job in the first place. Hooking up with Dwayne Osterhaus. Being so incredibly dumb as to not know the value of the goods they’d stolen. Coming back to Banura’s when she knew the deal was too good to be true.

  Walking away from what she had.

  She glanced down at the dash, saw that the truck was nearly out of gas. Now she had a practical matter to contend with. She took the next exit, which was littered with gas stations and fast-food joints. She put thirty dollars’ worth into the tank, then crossed the street and parked in a McDonald’s lot.

  She bypassed the ordering counter, went straight to the ladies’ restroom, rushed into a stall, and vomited before she could get the seat up. She had her hands on the stall walls, steadying herself. She was sweating and dizzy.

  And then she was sick again.

  She flushed the toilet and stood in there, blotting her face with toilet tissue. Once she was sure she was ready, she opened the door, went to the sink, and splashed water on her face, trying to cool herself down. A woman helping her daughter wash up at the sink next to hers gave Jan a cautious look.

  Jan knew what she was thinking. You’re some sort of crazy lady.

  There were no paper towels, just those confounding hot-air blowers, and the last thing Jan wanted blowing on her face was hot air. So she walked out of the restroom, and out of the restaurant, droplets of water running down her face.

  She leaned up against the brick wall of the restaurant, keeping an eye on the pickup and the traffic, always on the lookout for a black Audi. She stood there for a good half hour, as though paralyzed, not knowing what she should do next.

  A restaurant employee emptying trash cans asked if he could help her. Not really wanting to help, but wanting Jan to move on. She got back behind the wheel of the truck, sat there a moment.

  A cell phone rang, making Jan jump. She didn’t even have a cell phone. Then she remembered the one she’d stolen from the woman’s purse at the gas station. She reached into her own purse, found the phone, looked at the number.

  There was no way anyone knew how to get in touch with her, was there?

  But Dwayne had used the phone to call Banura. He probably had it on his phone’s log.

  She flipped it open. “Hello?”

  “Who is this?” a woman asked. “Have you got my cell phone? I’ve spent all morning looking for it and—”

  Jan broke the flip phone, like she was snapping its spine, got out of the truck and threw the two pieces into a garbage can.

  When she got back into the truck, she was shaking.

  And thinking. Thinking all the way back to the very beginning. Back to when she pushed the Richlers’ daughter into the path of that car.

  Wasn’t that when it all started, really? If she hadn’t done that—and God knows she never meant for that to happen—then her parents would never have had to move away. And then her father’s work might not have gone down the toilet, and he might not have hated her quite so much, and she might not have been so desperate to leave home so young, taken up with someone like Dwayne Osterhaus and—

  No, she never meant to kill the Richler girl. She was just angry, that was all. Angry about something she’d said. Constance Tattinger was jealous of Jan Richler. Jealous of the things she had. Jealous of how much her parents adored her. Gretchen and Horace Richler bought her Barbies, and pretty shoes, and on her birthday let her order in Kentucky Fried Chicken. They’d even bought their girl a necklace that looked like a cupcake. It was the most beautiful necklace Constance had ever seen, and she had coveted it from the moment she first laid eyes on it.

  One day, when Jan Richler wore it to school, and took it off briefly when it was itching her neck, Constance Tattinger reached into her jacket pocket and took it. Jan Richler cried and cried when she couldn’t find it, and became convinced Constance had taken it. Two days later, on Jan Richler’s front lawn, she told Constance what she believed she’d done, and Constance, angry and defensive, shoved the girl out of her way.

  Right into the path of the car. />
  All these years, the woman who would steal Jan Richler’s identity hung on to that necklace. She’d been tempted many times to throw it away, but could never bring herself to do it. It wasn’t that she loved the piece of jewelry. Far from it. The necklace was a reminder of a terrible thing she’d done. It signified not only the moment Jan Richler’s life ended, but the moment Constance Tattinger’s own life changed forever.

  She was pulled out of school.

  Her parents moved away.

  Her father began his never-ending resentment of her.

  The day she took that necklace was the day it was determined she would leave home at seventeen and never get in touch with her parents again. She wondered, sometimes, whatever had happened to them. And then she realized she didn’t much care.

  She hung on to the necklace for what it represented. A defining moment in her life. Even though it was a bad one.

  One day, Ethan would see it in her jewelry box and ask if he could have it—cupcakes were his favorite snack in the whole wide world—and his mother would say no, it really wasn’t something a boy would wear, so he begged her to wear it when they went on a trip to Chicago.

  She agreed to wear it for a day, and then never wore it again.

  She thought about all these things, about her life, about Ethan, about David, as she sat in that truck. She thought about the life she’d had with them and—

  Focus.

  The woman known as Jan gave her head a small shake. There’d be plenty of time later to wallow in self-pity, immerse herself in it like a hot bath.

  Something more urgent was nagging at her.

  There was every reason to believe Oscar Fine knew that she had been living the last few years as Jan Harwood. He could have learned this from Dwayne, or he could have figured it out from the news reports of her disappearance.

  If he knew about Jan Harwood, it wasn’t going to take him any time at all to figure out where she was from.

  If she were Oscar Fine, she told herself, wouldn’t Promise Falls be her next stop?

  She reached down next to her, looking for the photograph of Ethan she had taken from her purse only an hour or so earlier.

  It wasn’t there.

  Jan put the key into the ignition and started the engine. Without even realizing it, she’d already been driving in the direction of the place she’d called home the last five years.

  She had to go back.

  And she had to get there before Oscar Fine did.

  She made no further pit stops on the way to Promise Falls, even when she was rounding Albany and saw that she had less than a quarter of a tank left. She felt she could make it.

  She wondered where Ethan would be. It made sense that, considering the predicament she’d left David in, their son would not be at their house. David, if he hadn’t already been arrested, would probably be at the police station, or meeting with a lawyer, or driving all over hell’s half acre trying to figure out what had happened to her.

  Jan almost laughed when it hit her: I wish I could talk to David about this.

  She knew that wasn’t possible. There would be no room for forgiveness there, even though all she had to do was walk into a police station to put him in the clear. The things she’d done—you didn’t put that kind of stuff behind you and start over. Maybe, someday, some evidence might come along that would clear him. So be it.

  By then she and Ethan would be long gone.

  Ethan was her son. She was going to come out of all this with something that was hers.

  It was most likely he was with Nana and Poppa. She’d take a drive by there first.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Barry Duckworth was driving back from Albany in the late afternoon, approaching the Promise Falls city limits, when his cell rang.

  His last stop had been north of the city at the Exxon station where whoever had been using Lyall Kowalski’s Ford Explorer—and Duckworth couldn’t begin to guess whether it had been his wife, Leanne, or someone else—had bought gas. The receipt that had been found in the SUV indicated that the purchase had been a cash sale, which made sense, since Lyall Kowalski had told Duckworth that their cards had been canceled.

  When he got to the station, he showed a picture of Leanne to staff who’d been on duty at the time, but no one had any recollection of seeing Leanne Kowalski, or the Explorer, even though she would have had to come inside to pay. That didn’t surprise Duckworth. With the hundreds of customers coming in here in a single day, the odds that anyone would remember Leanne were slim. Even though Duckworth knew, from the receipt, the time of the purchase, there was no surveillance tape to check. The equipment was broken.

  For good measure, he showed them pictures of Jan Harwood and David Harwood. No joy there, either.

  So he got back into his cruiser and began the trek back home. It gave him some time to think.

  Just about from the beginning, he’d liked David Harwood for this. You always look to the husband first, anyway. And there were so many parts of his story that didn’t hold together. His wife’s so-called depression certainly didn’t. The ticket that was never purchased. The evidence from Ted, the store owner in Lake George. And if you were looking for motive, there was that $300,000 life insurance policy. Just the sort of safety net a guy working in newspapers—or anywhere else these days, for that matter—might be glad to have.

  It looked very much like Harwood took his wife to Lake George and killed her. After all, no one had seen her since, so long as you didn’t count the boy, Ethan. But Duckworth had been having doubts about his initial theory ever since the discovery of Leanne Kowalski’s body. From the moment David Harwood had looked into that shallow grave and seen her there. Duckworth had been watching closely for the man’s reaction.

  Duckworth had not anticipated what he saw.

  Genuine surprise.

  If David Harwood had killed that woman and put her into the ground, he might have been able to feign shock. He could have put on an act and looked shattered. And faking tears, lots of people could pull that off. All of those things the seasoned detective would have expected.

  But why had Harwood looked so surprised?

  It had flashed across the man’s face for a good second. The eyes went wide. There was a kind of double take. There was no mistaking it. Leanne Kowalski’s body was not the one he had been steeling himself to see.

  That told Barry Duckworth a couple of things. Harwood was not Kowalski’s killer. And it wasn’t very likely that he’d killed his wife, either.

  If Harwood had killed Jan Harwood, and disposed of her elsewhere, he wouldn’t have looked so taken aback. He’d have known he was going to be looking down at someone other than his spouse. Even if he had killed Kowalski, and knew she was going to be there, he might have acted surprised, but that’s what it would have been: an act. What Duckworth saw was the real deal.

  And then there was the business of the Explorer.

  Harwood might have had time to kill Leanne Kowalski between taking his wife up to Lake George and going to Five Mountains the next day, but Duckworth couldn’t for the life of him figure out how the Explorer got all the way down to Albany and ended up at the bottom of an embankment. When did Harwood have time to do that? How did he manage it alone? Wouldn’t you need one person to drive the Explorer, and another for the car that you’d need to get back to Promise Falls?

  Duckworth wasn’t liking Harwood for this nearly as much as he once had. Maybe there was something to the reporter’s claims that his wife had taken on a new name, changed her identity, after all. It had seemed pretty outrageous to him at first, but now he was feeling obliged to give it a look-see. He could find out again the names of those people Harwood had been to see in Rochester. See what they had to say.

  He was starting to get a new feeling in that gut of his that Natalie Bondurant had so maligned.

  And that was when his cell rang.

  “Duckworth.”

  “Yeah, Barry, it’s Glen.”

  Glen Doug
herty. Barry’s boss. The Promise Falls police chief.

  “Chief,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t normally be me calling you with this, but some lab results just got copied to me and I wondered if you had them yet.”

  “I’m on the road.”

  “This Jan Harwood disappearance. You’re handling that.”

  “As we speak,” he said.

  “You asked for tests on some hair and blood samples in the trunk of the husband’s car.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They’re back. They both match the missing woman, based on the hair samples you took from the house when you had it searched.”

  “I hear ya.”

  “I think you need to move on this,” the chief said. “Looks like this clown moved her body in the trunk.”

  “Maybe,” Duckworth said.

  “Maybe?”

  “There’s parts of this I don’t like,” the detective said.

  “Looks to me like you’ve got this son of a bitch dead to rights now. Time to bring him in again, sweat him out. Once you lay this out for him, he’s gonna fold.”

  “I can bring him in again, but I’m not sure.”

  “Look, Barry, I’m not going to tell you what to do. But I am going to tell you this. I’m getting a lot of pressure on this one. From those fucking amusement park people, from the tourism office, and the mayor’s office. As well as that weasel Reeves. God, I hate that guy. The bottom line is, Five Mountains makes a lot of money not just for Five Mountains, but for the area. People start thinking there’s someone snatching kids there, they’re going to stay away. And from the sounds of it, this guy may have made up all that shit about his kid getting abducted there. You hearing me?”

  “Absolutely,” Duckworth said.

  “If I were you, I’d bring him in again.”

  “He’s hired Natalie Bondurant.”

  “Well, by all means, bring her in, too. Once she sees what you’ve got on her client, she may just tell him to take some kind of deal.”