The Twenty-Three

by Linwood Barclay

  “I know. She said she had to go.”

  I nodded. “That’s right. Do you have any idea who it was?”

  “No. Not a clue. What happened? Did something happen?”

  “Yes. Cleo, someone killed Lorraine Plummer. I think whoever did it was the person who interrupted her chat with you.”

  She set down her juice. “That’ s—no, that’s crazy.” Her eyes started to well with tears. “How do you know this? You’re wrong.”

  I shook my head slowly. “I wish I were.”

  “How? Who?”

  “That’s why I’m here talking to you. To find out who.”

  “Oh God,” she said, putting a hand over her mouth and looking out into the parking lot. “Thackeray is so totally fucked.”

  I leaned in slightly. “What?”

  “I mean, come on. They had this perv attacking girls, and he gets shot, and then the security boss or whatever he was is run over by my fucking professor? What the hell’s wrong with that place?” She shook her head forcefully. “I’m done. I am never setting foot on that campus again. The place is totally nuts. This whole fucking town is nuts. Did you hear about what happened at the drive-in?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And then today you can’t even drink the water without dropping dead. I mean, what the hell is going on?”

  “You’re right,” I said, keeping my voice low and calm. “You’re absolutely right. There’s been a lot of strange stuff going on these past few weeks.” And she didn’t even know about the squirrels, or the mannequins on the Ferris wheel, or that goddamn bus.

  Or that anonymous phone call I’d had the other day from someone congratulating me on putting things together.

  “And now, there’s this, with Lorraine,” I said, hesitating, not wanting to share more than I should, or overspeculate. But I said, “Maybe, in some way, it’s tied in to some of the other things that have been going on.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just kind of a feeling I have. But right now, this second, I want you to concentrate on Lorraine. Did she have a boyfriend?”

  Cleo tried to focus. “Um, uh, not that I know of. She might have, but I don’t know.”

  “Can you think of anyone she might have been seeing, if not recently, then going back a ways?”

  “I can’t, I just—”

  She stopped suddenly, as though she’d just remembered something.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The other day when I saw her, she did say something weird.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Just—she said she met this guy who was really cute, but he was off-limits.”

  “Did she say who he was?”

  “No.”

  “A student at Thackeray?”

  “She didn’t say that, either.”

  “What did she mean by this guy being off-limits?” I asked.

  “He was married,” Cleo said. “The guy was married. It was sort of like a crush.”

  “When did she tell you this?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. In the last few days?”

  “What day?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea. It was just something she said recently.”

  Suddenly, she gathered up her purse, stood, and said, “I’m outta here. I’m quitting this school, and getting out of this town. Fuck it, I’m done.”

  “I just had a couple more questions about—”

  “No, I mean it. I’m done. I’m going back to Syracuse, even if it means living with my nutso parents.”

  With that, she walked briskly out of the Dunkin’s.

  I put in a call to Joyce Pilgrim.

  “Still no coroner or anyone else here,” she said without even saying hello.

  “Lorraine was interested in a married man,” I said.

  “She was having an affair?”

  “Not sure about that. She was interested in him, but felt he was off-limits. I don’t know if she had something going with him or not.”

  “Professors aren’t supposed to have relationships with their students,” Joyce said.

  I thought, Yeah, and they’re not supposed to give them roofies and include them unwittingly in their lifestyle sex parties, either. But I already knew that had happened. And, according to further interviews I’d had with Professor Peter Blackmore, they’d happened with Lorraine Plummer, although not recently.

  Could Lorraine have been referring to Clive Duncomb or Blackmore? Or even the writer, Adam Chalmers? All three were married, and at the time of her death Lorraine was unaware—I had not yet interviewed her about this, and had still been sorting out how to tell her she was a sexual assault victim—just how despicable those three men were. It was possible she’d made her comment to her friend Cleo about being interested in a married man before the deaths of Chalmers and Duncomb, and the arrest of Blackmore.

  So it could have been one of them she was referring to.

  But it couldn’t have been any of them who killed her. Only Blackmore was alive the night of her murder, and he was in custody.

  Which would mean that her comment about having a crush on a married man was a lead that was going to go nowhere.

  Still.

  “You there?” Joyce asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “When you’re talking to people about Lorraine, ask them about who she might have been seeing. Married, unmarried, student, professor. Whatever.”

  “What am I now?” Joyce Pilgrim asked. “A detective?”

  “Just ask, okay?”

  “You want me to be a coroner, too? ’Cause there’s still been no one here to look at the body. I’m waiting out front of the building for someone to show up. I can’t exactly check that security video while I’m killing time here.”

  “I’ll make another call,” I said, thanked her, and put the phone down on the plastic tray, next to the two donuts.

  I hadn’t taken a bite out of either of them yet. They seemed to be taunting me, daring me to eat them.

  To show I was weak.

  My phone, which had been out of my hand for only about thirty seconds, started to ring.

  It was Garvey Ottman, at the water treatment plant.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Duckworth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We found Tate.”

  TWENTY

  RANDALL Finley was talking all the way back to the water plant about what David should do next, but the former reporter was not listening.

  He was thinking about Samantha Worthington.

  He really hadn’t stopped thinking about Sam since he’d broken into her house and found out that she had left. Where had she gone? Why had she packed up and taken off? Why hadn’t she called to let him know what she was doing?

  Was he wrong in thinking that there was something there? Had he misjudged things? Had he been an idiot to think that Sam had feelings for him? David knew his feelings for her were genuine. He was, he believed, in love with this woman. Pretty funny, considering that the first time he had met her, she had a shotgun pointed at his head.

  It was one of those things they’d worked through.

  It had gotten worse before it got better. For a period of time, Sam had believed David had betrayed her, that he was helping her former in-laws, Garnet and Yolanda Worthington, in their bid to take Carl away from her and raise him themselves. Seemed pretty paranoid, David had thought at first, but he soon realized how obsessed the parents of her ex-husband, Brandon—who was serving time in prison for bank robbery—were about getting Carl. They’d even sent a nutcase by the name of Ed Noble to kidnap him at school.

  David had foiled that. Ed Noble had been arrested, and so had Garnet and Yolanda—all three charged with kidnapping. Ed Noble was up for attempted murder. They weren’t going to be a problem for a very long time. And Sam’s ex-husband, Brandon, remained in prison.

  Sam’s life was starting to approach normalcy, and she seemed ready to do what normal
people did.

  See one another. Go out. Have fun.

  Sleep together.

  It was early in the relationship, but David was sure there was a real connection here.

  Not that he hadn’t been wrong before.

  Years earlier, there was another woman David set out to rescue. Her name—at least the name she gave him at the time—was Jan. But Jan turned out not to be who she claimed to be, and things ended, as they say, badly.

  It was a long time before David could trust anyone. Not just a woman he might be interested in, but anyone at all. The number of dates he’d had in the last five years could be counted on the fingers of one hand. There had been a couple of women in Boston, one a coworker at the Globe. But there hadn’t been anyone since he’d returned to Promise Falls.

  Not until he’d found himself looking down the barrel of that shotgun.

  What was wrong with him? he kept asking himself. Why was he drawn to women who had more problems than the entire cast of Orange Is the New Black? What was it his dad said, quoting one of his favorite crime writers? “Never sleep with a woman who has more troubles than you.”

  His father really nailed it once in a while. And yet, David had not been very good at following his advice.

  He had to know what had happened to Sam.

  He’d failed to find any trace of where she’d gone at her house, but he hadn’t had a chance to check her place of work. Sam managed a Laundromat in downtown Promise Falls. Was there even a chance she might be there today? Was it possible she’d moved out of her house for some reason but hadn’t quit her job?

  It occurred to him there was someone who might know.

  Once he was back in his own car, he phoned home. His father answered.

  “David?”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “People are dying all over the place,” he said. “I feel like I should be doing something, but I don’t know what.”

  “You’re looking after Ethan, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s doing something. Have you heard anything from Mom?”

  “She called from the hospital a little while ago. She’s still there with Marla and the kid.”

  “Matthew,” David said.

  “Yeah, right. Matthew. Sounds like it’s still touch and go for Gill, but at least he’s still among the living.”

  “Dad, can you put Ethan on?”

  “Huh? Sure, hang on.”

  Seconds later, Ethan said, “Dad?”

  “Hey. You okay?”

  “Poppa is letting me drink all the Coke I want,” he said. “Nana” and “Poppa” were his names for Arlene and Don.

  “Isn’t that great,” David said. “Was Carl at school yesterday?”

  “Nope,” Ethan said.

  “You didn’t see him around at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about the day before?” That would have been Thursday. David had spoken with Sam on the phone around lunch. He had told her he would call her on Saturday about doing something that evening.

  “Uh,” said Ethan. “I think so. Yeah, he was at school on Thursday.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  He hesitated. “Maybe.”

  “What about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “This is important, Ethan. What did you guys talk about?”

  “Well, we talked about how it was kind of weird that you and his mom were boyfriend and girlfriend. He said . . .”

  “What did he say?”

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “I won’t be mad,” David said.

  “He said that when he had a sleepover at my house, you were doing it to his mom at her place.”

  David closed his eyes wearily. “Did Carl say anything about going away?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing about his mom and him moving or going on a trip or anything like that?”

  “No.” A pause. “Are you mad about the other thing?”

  “No, Ethan. You take care of yourself. I’ll check in later.”

  “Do you want to talk to Poppa?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He tossed the phone onto the seat next to him and headed for the Laundromat.

  David got a space right out front, and was encouraged when he saw the OPEN sign in the Laundromat window. Below that, however, was a hastily scribbled sign that read: “USE AT OWN RISK WATER WARNING.” He jumped out of the car and ran inside.

  Despite the warning, there were three customers in the shop. One man was standing at a folding table, taking clothes out of a nearby dryer. A woman was loading washing into a machine, and a second woman was killing time, reading a copy of the New York Times. A couple of the machines had signs taped to them saying that they were out of order.

  One of the machines had bullet holes in it. David knew all about that. That detective, Cal Weaver, had been here when Ed Noble showed up to kill Samantha. Shots had been fired, but Sam had not been hurt.

  Shook-up, though. Big-time.

  There was an office at the back where Sam often hung out when she wasn’t tending the machines. The door was closed. David walked briskly from one end of the place to the other, turned the knob on the door, and stepped in without knocking.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  It wasn’t Sam asking. It was a thin, balding man in his seventies, sitting at a desk.

  “Who are you?” David asked.

  The man reared back. “Who am I? Who the fuck are you, busting into my office?”

  “I’m sorry,” David said. “I was looking for Sam. Samantha Worthington.”

  “Yeah, well, she ain’t here, is she?”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m David Harwood. We—we were kind of going out. Who are you?”

  “I own this place. Sam runs it for me. Or she did.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Maybe you can tell me,” he said gruffly. “She calls me Thursday afternoon and says she won’t be coming in anymore. I tell her, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ She says she’s quitting. I say okay, but I need two weeks’ notice. She says she’s leaving right now.”

  “What do you mean, right now?”

  “Like, right fucking now. She calls me from this desk, says she’s walking out the door soon as she hangs up the phone.”

  “Why?”

  The owner raised his shoulders. “Damned if I know. So I had to get down here right away and I don’t even live around here. I’m in Albany, for Christ’s sake. This place is my pension. I own it—she runs it and looks after it. And then, just like that, she takes off on me. Goddamn her, anyway. I don’t need this kind of shit at my age. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the water’s poisoned or something. I’m tellin’ people to put in extra soap.”

  “She must have said something,” David persisted. “About why, or where she was going.”

  “I didn’t ask her where to send her last check because damned if I was going to pay her if she was going to leave me in the lurch like this. I gotta find someone else to run this place. I can’t do it. I got a bad ticker. You need a job?”

  “No.”

  “Know anyone who does?”

  David shook his head.

  “Go try her at home,” the man said. “Maybe she’s there. You see her, tell her thanks a bunch from me.”

  “Already been there,” David said. “No sign of her. And she’s not answering her phone.”

  “So maybe you two weren’t the item you seem to think you were,” the owner said, “if she took off without letting you know where she was going.”

  That wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but it was what he’d been thinking.

  “Maybe it’s you she was running away from,” the man said, and laughed.

  “I just don’t understand,” David said.

  “Any man says he can understand how a woman thinks is living in a fool’s paradise,” the man said.

>   “Sorry to have bothered you,” David said, backing out of the office. “Uh, you probably shouldn’t be letting these people wash their clothes with this water.”

  The owner shrugged. He said, “Maybe the other guy will find something out. You can find out from him.”

  David stopped. “What other guy?”

  “The guy who was in here yesterday asking around for her.” David immediately thought of the private detective. “Was his name Weaver? Cal Weaver?”

  The man shook his head. “No, that wasn’t it. What was the name he gave me? Hang on. Oh yeah. Brandon. That was it.”

  David felt a chill. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, Brandon. Nice guy. Wanted to find Sam, but mostly he was looking for the boy.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  ONCE he was back at his place, he didn’t go into the house. He wanted to check the garage first.

  He used his key to unlock the side door. He’d been making sure the door was pulled closed since his carelessness a few nights ago, when he’d thought he’d locked it, but had failed to pull it tightly into the jamb.

  That boy had gotten in.

  Well, not exactly a boy. A young man. A check of his wallet turned up a driver’s license in the name of George Lydecker. A Thackeray College student.

  Stupid bastard.

  Thought he’d sneak in and steal something. But when the man caught him in the act, George wasn’t stealing anything. He was trying to figure out what was in all the clear bags.

  Hundreds of them, piled in a heap in the center of the garage floor. All filled with something white and powdery looking. They’d been hidden under a tarp, but curiosity had gotten the better of George, and he had pulled it back.

  The dumb kid figured it was cocaine.

  If it had been cocaine, the man wouldn’t have come into the garage wearing a gas mask, would he?

  The bags were all gone now. The same could not be said for George. After the man had stabbed George with a croquet post, sprinkled the body liberally with lime, then rolled it up in plastic sheets secured with duct tape, he’d dragged the body to a corner of the garage and hidden it behind some boxes.

  Couldn’t have George telling anyone what he’d seen.

  Not just the bags of chemicals.