The Twenty-Three

by Linwood Barclay

  Driving slowly through the camp, David did not see Sam or Carl anywhere, and even if they were still sleeping in their tent, he saw no car that looked like hers. He made his way back to where he’d turned in off the main road, and saw that there was now someone in the booth. He pulled up alongside it and powered down the window.

  “Help ya?” said a man—no, more like a kid about seventeen—at the window.

  “I’m not staying here,” David said. “I’m trying to find somebody.”

  “Okay.”

  “Samantha Worthington,” he said. “She probably checked in Thursday night. She’s with her son, about nine or ten, and they’d have pitched a tent. They don’t have a trailer or anything like that.” He thought maybe he needed a reason to be looking for them. “There’s kind of a family emergency back home and we’ve been trying to locate them.”

  The kid appeared to be consulting a book, or maybe a laptop. David couldn’t see from where he sat.

  “I don’t have anything here. No Worthington,” he said. “When did you say they arrived?”

  “Thursday, probably.”

  “Did they have a reservation?”

  David was betting Samantha had not made one. If she’d just found out about Brandon’s escape, there wouldn’t have been time. She’d have thrown everything they needed into the car and just taken off.

  “I doubt it,” David said.

  “Well, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have been able to get in. All the sites had been booked ahead by Wednesday.”

  David felt deflated. He’d played a hunch and it had been wrong. But just because Sam wasn’t here didn’t mean she couldn’t have tried another campsite in the area.

  “Thanks,” he said to the kid. He drove out of the park, then pulled over onto the shoulder of the road to consult the Web browser on his phone, thinking he’d get the names and locations of other nearby campsites.

  Except he couldn’t get online. He had no bars on his phone. He couldn’t get cell service here.

  Maybe that was why Samantha hadn’t taken any of his calls, or tried to get in touch with him. He felt simultaneously discouraged and encouraged. He believed he was on the right track, but was still no closer to finding them.

  He got out of the car and walked back to the booth.

  “If you’re full up, where might you send someone to try next?”

  The kid in the booth didn’t hesitate. “Probably Call of the Loon.”

  “What?”

  “I know, seriously. A pretty dumb name for a place. Call of the Loon Acres. About five more miles up the road that way. They try to squeeze in extras even when they’re booked solid.”

  “Thanks,” David said, and ran back to the car.

  FORTY-THREE

  Duckworth

  WHEN the alarm went off at six, I was dreaming. It was more a nightmare than a dream, but no one ever says they were nightmaring. But that’s a more accurate word for what I was doing when the clock radio started to beep.

  I’m in the park by the falls. It’s dusk and I am standing on the sidewalk by the road that runs parallel to the park.

  I hear screaming. It seems to be coming from all directions. I turn and look one way, thinking that is where the screams are originating. But I no sooner spin around than the screams seem to be coming from behind me. I keep spinning round and round, and pretty soon it’s as though the screams are coming from everywhere.

  I am turning and turning to the point of dizziness. Finally I stop, pretty sure the screams are not all around me, but near the base of the falls. I start walking in that direction; then I feel a tap on my shoulder.

  I spin around suddenly and there, directly in front of me, is Olivia Fisher.

  She is looking at me quizzically, an almost naive expression on her face. She says, “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I did,” I say. “I just couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from.”

  “It was coming from here,” she says, opens her mouth wide, and points into it. But her mouth has opened unnaturally wide, as though her jaw is no longer hinged.

  And blood begins to pour from her mouth, like water gushing from an opened fire hydrant. Blood spills over me, and I look down and see that within seconds it is up to my knees.

  Even though her mouth is flowing with blood, I can still hear her speaking to me. “Do you know what my favorite number is?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Twenty-three. Do you know why?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You already know. You’ve figured it out.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’m not sure. I—”

  “Oh, dear,” Olivia says. Her mouth is back to normal now, no blood flowing from it. But she has her hands over her stomach, where her entrails are spilling out. She is attempting to stuff them back in.

  “How will I explain this to my mother?” she asks.

  The alarm wakes me before I can offer her a suggestion.

  Maureen sat up in bed as I reached over to kill the alarm. “If that hadn’t gone off, I’d have woken you up,” she said. “You were starting to shout things. You were having a nightmare.”

  “Yeah,” I said, throwing back the covers and putting my feet on the floor. I had a headache and my mouth was dry.

  “I can make coffee,” Maureen said. “I got bottled water yesterday.”

  “You went down to Finley’s circus?”

  “I got it at the Stop and Shop.”

  I checked my phone, which was recharging on my bedside table. I hadn’t muted it when I’d turned out the light, in case someone tried to reach me in the night. But there was a text message on the screen.

  “I never heard this come in,” I said.

  “You were out cold,” Maureen said. “When did it show up?”

  I looked. The text was from Joyce Pilgrim, and she’d sent it at eleven forty-five p.m. About half an hour after I’d lost consciousness. I told Maureen.

  “I hadn’t come to bed yet,” she said, “so I never heard it, either.”

  I read the message: Call me when you get this. Might have something.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Maureen threw back the covers and headed downstairs as I texted back to Joyce: Just got this. If you’re up, phone me.

  I took the phone with me into the bathroom, placing it on a shelf just outside the shower. And thought: Is it safe to take a shower?

  I’d had one the morning before with no ill effects. Maybe water laced with sodium azide was enough to kill you if you drank it, but its effects were negligible when it washed over your skin. Those granules I’d touched the day before had made my finger itch, but hadn’t burned through my skin or anything.

  I made a call to the station to see what the latest updates were. The state health officials believed the contaminated water had moved through the system, but to be on the safe side, they were recommending against drinking anything from the taps for at least another forty-eight hours. Water for nondrinking purposes was believed to be safe. In the case of a shower, they advised, let it run for a good five minutes before stepping in.

  Well, that was a relief. The idea of taking a bath with several bottles of Finley Springs water did not appeal to me.

  I turned on the water and let it run.

  After five minutes, I stripped out of my pajamas and stepped

  under the hot spray. I was rinsing shampoo out of my hair while soaping up my ample belly when my cell phone rang.

  “Goddamn it.”

  I turned off the shower while still soapy, reached out for a towel to get my hands dry enough to pick up the phone without dropping it, then, still in the stall, put the phone to my ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Joyce. I got your text.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sorry. I was asleep when you sent yours. Just saw it.”

  “I figured.”

  “So what have you got?”

  “A witness. Maybe. Not a great one, but a witness.”

  “
Go on,” I said, using my free hand to wipe away some shampoo that was trying to find its way into my eye.

  “So I did what you asked. I reviewed the surveillance footage.” She told me about seeing a car park near Lorraine Plummer’s residence around the time of her murder, a man getting out and returning.

  “What did he look like?”

  “You can’t tell a thing from the video,” she said. “And you can’t get any kind of a good look at the car, either.”

  “Well, still, that’s something. Maybe we can get someone to enhance the video, or maybe there are some other cameras along the way to Thackeray we can check. But what’s this about a witness?”

  She told me about the appearance of the jogger in the video. How he’d run right past the parked car.

  “So last night, I camped out there, thinking maybe this was a regular run this guy takes, and I’d get a chance to ask him whether he noticed that car or not.”

  I felt my pulse quicken, which took my mind off the fact that I was freezing as soapy water clung to me. Maureen stepped into the bathroom, looked at me standing naked in the shower with a phone in my hand, gave me an up and down, and left without comment.

  “And?” I said.

  “He came by. I got out of my car and stopped him and got him to think back to the car and whether he remembered anything.”

  “Ok-k-ay.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just felt a chill, is all.”

  “So I tried to jog his memory, no pun intended, and it kind of came back to him.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. He said the car was a four-door sedan. Hard to tell at night, but dark blue or maybe black. He was a little fuzzy on the make, but he thought North American. Like a Ford.”

  “Plate number?” I knew, even as I asked it, that it was a long shot.

  “No, he didn’t take any notice of the plate. At least, not the numbers. But he thought maybe it was out of state. He thought it might have been green.”

  Green. Vermont plates were green, and Vermont was not very far away.

  “Okay,” I said. “So we’ve got a bit to go on with the car.”

  “He says he saw the guy,” Joyce Pilgrim said.

  I gripped the phone a little tighter. “Tell me.”

  “White, about six-three, ball cap—for the Yankees, he thinks—running shoes, dark blue Windbreaker, maybe a hundred and eighty to two hundred pounds.”

  “He must have got a long look at him to get that kind of detail.”

  “He says he only saw him for a second. And he didn’t see him near the car. Saw him farther away, near the building where Lorraine Plummer was killed. But he was figuring it must have been the guy whose car it was, since there wasn’t anyone else around.”

  “This is amazing, Joyce. This is really terrific work.” I took one step out of the shower and reached for a towel. I rubbed it over my soapy hair, tried to blot myself where I could with one available hand. “You got a name for this witness?”

  “Yeah, hang on, I wrote it down. Here’s the phone number. It’s—”

  “I can’t take it down right now. I can call you back in a couple of minutes. What about the name?” I stepped out of the shower all the way, my feet on the furry white bath mat.

  “Rooney,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Rooney. Victor Rooney.”

  The towel slipped out of my hand.

  I said nothing. I was trying to grasp the significance. The boyfriend of Olivia Fisher just happened to be running past Lorraine Plummer’s building at the time of her murder.

  Maybe his description of the mystery man was so good, right down to the Yankees cap, because he wanted us to have someone else to look for.

  Maybe someone he’d never seen at all.

  “Thanks, Joyce,” I said. “I’ll be getting back to you.”

  Maureen appeared again, looked at me standing there, stark naked, towel around my ankles, phone still to my ear.

  “Coffee’s ready,” she said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  THERE had been a lot of screaming and yelling before things had quieted down the previous evening. Celeste had been yelling at Dwayne to explain how Cal had come to be tied up in the garage. Dwayne was shouting back that he had no idea. Cal had cried “Bullshit!” on that. Then Celeste turned her anger on her brother, shouting that he had very likely broken her husband’s leg when Cal went at him with the two-by-four.

  And then Crystal had started screaming hysterically at no one in particular.

  At that point, Cal moved to calm her. He tried to bring the girl into his arms, but she was reluctant at first, standing rigidly, arms tight to her body. He knelt down next to her, spoke softly to her, but not before telling Celeste and Dwayne to go into the house.

  “Don’t think about hightailing it out of here,” Cal had warned his brother-in-law. “Because I’ll find you, and when I do, I’m gonna be mad.”

  Dwayne had said nothing as he retreated from the garage. But as he and his wife headed back toward the house, they could be heard arguing again.

  “I’m okay,” Cal had told Crystal. “I really am. I’ve got a bump on the head, but otherwise I’m fine.”

  “There wouldn’t be anybody to look after me till my dad gets here,” she said, “if you were dead.”

  “I’m not dead.” He’d put his hands on her upper arms, squeezed. “I’m sorry you had to see all that. You’ve been through enough.”

  “I heard the phone.”

  Cal smiled. “You saved me.”

  “Celeste phoned you, but I heard it. Dwayne said he didn’t hear anything, but I was sure. He was lying.”

  “Yes, he was lying.”

  “Are you going to kill him?”

  Cal had shaken his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “But you might.”

  He was reminded that Crystal was not good at detecting irony or sarcasm. “I will definitely not kill him.”

  “Because I’m okay with it if you do.”

  “Celeste would be very upset with me.” He’d given her shoulders another squeeze. “You were there for me. I don’t know what might have happened if you hadn’t found me.”

  Crystal had moved into his arms, put hers around him. “I love you,” she’d said.

  Other than Crystal, no one had had any sleep by the time the sun came up.

  Dwayne had finally come clean on what was going on. His friend Harry at the printing operation—a guy he had, years ago, gone to high school with—was part of a gang that was ripping off electronics stores. They’d stolen from parked trucks and broken into several stores over the last eighteen months and had acquired a lot of product.

  Harry said they were starting to worry the police might be onto them, and they needed a few places to hide the merchandise. Harry knew that Dwayne wasn’t making much money these days, what with the town canceling many of his paving contracts, so he approached him. “Hide this stuff for us,” he said, “and we’ll give you a thousand bucks.”

  Dwayne wrestled with it for a while. He convinced himself he wasn’t really doing anything wrong. He hadn’t stolen the goods. He wasn’t in on any of that. He hadn’t planned it, he hadn’t driven the truck, and he hadn’t broken into any places. All he was doing now was hanging on to some stuff for a friend. He told himself he didn’t really know for sure where it had come from. Harry could have been making up a wild story just to sound more important.

  Sure.

  So he started hiding stuff for Harry. He’d been doing it for the better part of a month. Celeste wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or relieved. At least she knew now that when her husband was gone at odd hours, he wasn’t having an affair.

  Although, if you got caught sleeping with another woman, you weren’t likely to end up in jail.

  When Cal guessed correctly that something was going on in the garage, Dwayne panicked. Once he’d knocked him out, he didn’t know what else to do but tie him up a
nd hide him in the garage until he figured out his next step.

  He was on the phone with Harry, trying to come up with a plan, when Crystal appeared, determined to find Cal.

  “What was Harry’s plan?” Cal asked.

  Dwayne was hesitant. “We hadn’t really come up with anything.”

  “Was Harry’s plan to kill me?”

  Dwayne, who was sitting across the kitchen table from Cal, holding an ice pack to his thigh, couldn’t look his brother-in-law in the eye. “There was no way I’d let that happen. No way.”

  “But Harry put it out there.”

  “And I shut it down.”

  “Oh my God,” Celeste said, pacing the kitchen floor. “How can this be happening? How is it possible? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I know,” Dwayne said sheepishly. “I fucked up.”

  “Fucked up?” Celeste said. “Is that what you’d call this? A fuckup? A fuckup is when you back the truck into the mailbox. This—I don’t even know what to call this—this is a catastrophe. How could you have gotten us into this? This is my brother! You actually discussed with this asshole the idea of killing my brother!”

  “I told you, that never would have happened.”

  “What if Harry decided if you wouldn’t be part of it? He’d just do it anyway?”

  Dwayne looked blankly at his wife.

  Cal said, “What if Harry decided you were as much a liability as me?”

  That made him blink. “No. I mean, we go back. Harry and me go way back.”

  Cal sighed. Celeste was about to light into her husband again, but her brother raised a calming hand. “We’re going to figure this out.”

  “Figure it out?” she said. “How? By you laying charges against my husband? Because if I was you, that’s what I’d be thinking of doing. I’d want to send this son of a bitch to jail—that’s what I’d want to do.” But then her face began to crumple. “But tell me you’re not going to do that.”

  Cal slowly shook his head. “I’m not going to do that.” He looked at Dwayne. “But that doesn’t mean you still couldn’t end up in prison. You’ve got a garage filled with stolen merchandise. You need to get rid of it.”