The Twenty-Three

by Linwood Barclay

  “I can’t just do that.”

  “Why not?” Celeste asked.

  “Are you kidding? Harry and his buddies expect to get it back when they think it’s safe. And there’s the matter of the money. They’ve paid me to do a job.”

  “How much?” Celeste asked.

  “So far, nineteen hundred.”

  “So give it back.”

  Dwayne lowered his eyes. “It’s already all gone.”

  Cal was very quiet. Thinking.

  Celeste said, “What are we going to do, Cal? What the hell are we going to do?”

  He said to his brother-in-law, “Call Harry. Set up a meeting. Tell him we want to do a return.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  SAMANTHA Worthington had taken the call Thursday afternoon while working at the Laundromat. It was someone in the prosecutor’s office in Boston, who’d been involved in the trial against Brandon.

  “He’s on the loose,” the woman said. “During a hospital visit to see his mother. He got away. Thought you should know.”

  The first thing Sam did, after going into the bathroom to throw up, was call the owner of the Laundromat and tell him she was gone. Right then, right now. She was walking out the door and she didn’t know when she would be back.

  Didn’t even lock up. There were three customers in the middle of doing their laundry. Clothes agitating in washers, spinning round in dryers. Sam walked out the back door, got in her car, and headed straight for her son’s school.

  Classes would have been over in another ten minutes, but Sam felt there was no time to spare. Her ex-husband had escaped the night before. That gave him plenty of time to get to Promise Falls. Granted, he might have a few challenges in that regard. He’d have to find transportation. He’d have to get out of the Boston area without being seen.

  But what if he had someone helping him? Ed Noble was in jail, but maybe another one of Brandon’s idiotic friends had stepped into the breach. Maybe he was in Promise Falls already. Maybe he was waiting for her at her house.

  She parked illegally at the school’s main entrance, went to the office, and said she had to pull Carl out now.

  The office secretary said, “The bell will be going in just seven minutes, Ms. Worthington, so—”

  “Now!”

  Carl was dismissed from his class and showed up in the office two minutes later. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Get in the car,” she said.

  By the time they were almost home, she’d told him what she knew. They had to get out of town before his father got there.

  “How do we even know he’s coming?” Carl asked.

  “Are you kidding me?” his mother said. “After all the shit his parents pulled? What do you think he’s going to do? Go to Disneyland?”

  But she couldn’t shake the fear that he might already be in the house. Carl had an idea.

  “Drop me off a block away,” he said. “I’ll sneak up and peek in the windows and see if he’s there.”

  Sam didn’t want to put her son in a risky situation. “Not a chance.”

  “I can do it,” he said. “I’ve done it before.”

  “What?”

  “Like, one time—you won’t get mad, okay?”

  Sam, with some reluctance, said, “Okay.”

  “I found this dead cat on the road. It had been hit by a car, but it hadn’t been split open or anything, and me and my friends wanted to have a closer look at it, you know? So we put it in a bag, but then no one else wanted to take it home and they wanted me to do it, so I said okay, but I knew you’d freak out if you saw me come into the house with a bag filled with a dead cat, so before I came in, I peeked in the windows and saw you were in the kitchen, which gave me just enough time to get in the front door and up to my room.”

  Sam was speechless.

  “Anyway, I had it for like a day in my closet and it was starting to smell, so I put it in the garbage.”

  Sam was going to ask Carl just when this had happened, then decided it did not matter.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll let you out here. I’m going to sit in the car, right here in this spot. You go find out if he’s in the house.”

  Carl bolted from the car and almost instantly disappeared, ducking between houses half a block from their place.

  Four minutes went by. Then six. Sam was starting to worry. The kid wasn’t as smart as he thought. Brandon must have been in the house and had spotted him. Grabbed him. Now she had to decide whether to call the police or—

  Carl opened the passenger door, jumped in. “All clear,” he said.

  Sam gave him his marching orders. Pack a bag, fast. She’d dig out the camping supplies. She’d find that cheap Styrofoam cooler and dump food from the fridge into it. They’d raid the cupboard for other stuff, then throw everything into the car as quickly as possible.

  One of the last things she put into the car was the pump-action shotgun.

  You just never knew.

  She’d wrapped it up in a blanket, placed it on the floor of the backseat, the barrel propped up on the hump. She’d put three shells in the chamber, pulled the fore-end back to cock the hammer and load a shell, moved the slide back forward. All she’d have to do was pull the trigger.

  “Do not touch that,” she told Carl.

  Just before hitting the road, she went to a bank machine and took out five hundred. Her daily maximum withdrawal, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been allowed to take out more. Once she’d made the withdrawal, all that was left was thirty-four bucks.

  She headed north to Lake Luzerne. It wouldn’t take long to get to Camp Sunrise. Brandon knew she and Carl still went on camping trips, but she was pretty sure he didn’t know the name of their favorite campsite.

  But when she got there, the place was fully booked. The kid in the booth suggested they try Call of the Loon Acres. There might still be some vacant campsites if they moved fast.

  They got the second-to-last spot.

  She and Carl pitched the tent, brought in their sleeping bags, set up the Coleman stove on their picnic table. If you were going to hide out, you might as well have some fun doing it. This, at least, was a hideout Sam could afford. She had enough cash to stay here for a week or more. They’d live on the food they’d taken from the house, and when that ran out, they’d hit a local grocery store.

  No restaurants, no fast-food joints. Too expensive. Sam didn’t know how long they’d have to stay here. She figured the police would be out in force looking for Brandon and would have him back behind bars before too long.

  Sam parked her car around the back of the tent. She hadn’t wanted to keep the shotgun in the tent with her. Didn’t want to take that kind of risk with Carl in there. But she had left it on the backseat of the car, the blanket no longer wrapped around it, but covering it loosely. So, if need be, she could run to the car, open the back door, and have that shotgun in hand in seconds.

  She felt bad about David.

  Carl had asked her, “Are you going to call him?”

  She wanted to. But hadn’t she involved him enough in her problems? David had already rescued Carl from Ed. Did she want him having to rescue them from Brandon? Shouldn’t she be able to handle her own shit?

  The truth was, David was better off without her. Samantha Worthington, she told herself, was bad news.

  About as bad as it got.

  By the time they’d set themselves up at Call of the Loon—seriously, how did they come up with that?—it was something of a moot point. There was almost no cell service there. And Sam was starting to think she was safer with the phone turned off completely. She didn’t want anyone triangulating her position. Not that Brandon was likely to have the means to do that, but who knew? Maybe he had a friend somewhere who could do something like that.

  Not worth taking the chance.

  So now it was Sunday morning. They’d spent three nights sleeping in this tent, and the novelty was wearing off. The first couple of days had been,
considering everything, fun. They’d gone on some hikes, seen a deer, if not a loon. The park bordered on the lake, and while it was still too early in the year to swim—the water was freezing—they’d wandered out onto the docks, skipped some stones.

  But the night before, as they were bunking down for the night, Carl had said, “Can we go back tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This has been fun, but I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to go back. I want to see my friends. I want to see Ethan. I want to be in school Tuesday. I don’t know what I missed on Friday. I’m going to have to catch up. If we’re gone for lots of days, I’m going to get way behind and then I won’t get into the next grade.”

  “I don’t know if it’s safe to go back. Tell you what. Tomorrow, we’ll take a ride someplace where we get cell reception, and I’ll make a call. See if the police have found your father.”

  “Would it be so bad?” he’d asked.

  “Would what be so bad?”

  “If he found us?”

  She could hardly believe what he was asking.

  “Your father—and I’m sorry to say this—is a convicted criminal, Carl. He robbed a bank. He knocked someone out in the hospital. He’s a bad, bad person.”

  Carl had thought about that. “I know.”

  “And now he’s an escaped convict. A person like that is pretty desperate. There’s no telling what he might do.”

  “But doesn’t Dad love me?” Carl had asked.

  Sam had felt the tears welling up in her eyes. “Yes, he loves you. For all his faults, he loves you.”

  “He never beat me or anything.”

  “I know. He never did that.”

  “If he was a really bad man, he’d have beat me. And you. Did he ever beat you?”

  Sam hadn’t wanted to get into the times Brandon had scared the hell out of her. Had he ever actually, deliberately hurt her? There was that time he’d knocked the speaker off the shelf and it had landed on her foot, but he couldn’t have known that would happen. But he’d shaken a fist at her more than once. She’d seen him start to take a swing, then stop himself.

  She knew he had it in him.

  “Go to sleep,” she’d finally said.

  They both slept well. Sam looked at her watch, saw that it was nearly nine. Carl was still sleeping soundly. She got dressed, laced up her shoes, then slowly raised the front flap zipper without waking her son. Sam slipped out, stood, did some stretches. Sleeping on the ground was not all it was cracked up to be. The truth was, she wanted to be home as much as Carl did.

  She fired up the Coleman, filled a small pot with water from a nearby tap. Some of the other guests had mentioned something about the water in Promise Falls being contaminated. Maybe getting out of town had its benefits.

  She put the pot on the stove. She spooned out some instant coffee from a jar of Nescafé into a paper cup. Once the water was boiling, she’d pour it in. It wasn’t exactly Starbucks, but it would have to do.

  Sam filled the cup, tossed the rest of the boiling water onto the dirt, turned off the flame on the stove. She blew on the coffee, then took a tentative sip.

  “Ahh,” she said.

  “You always did like your cup of joe in the morning.”

  The voice came from behind her. She whirled around so quickly she dropped the coffee onto the ground.

  “Hi,” said Brandon. “It’s great to see you, Sam.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Duckworth

  I finished up in the bathroom, got dressed, and headed downstairs. Maureen, aware that I was in a hurry to get out of the house, had a breakfast ready for me. Coffee made with bottled water, a bowlful of blueberries and strawberries, and some kind of bran-granola mix that looked like something we’d put out in the bird feeder, with a small container of milk alongside.

  “Okay, I’ll admit, the berries look delicious,” I said, “but what is this?”

  “I promise it won’t kill you.”

  “I might want to drink town water after the first mouthful. Did this come out of that bag of stuff you give to the starlings?”

  “It’s not bad. Trust me,” Maureen said. “You’ve said you’ve felt better. I’m trying to help.”

  I sat down, attacked the berries first. They were sweet enough that they didn’t need any sugar sprinkled on them. But I did it anyway. I poured the milk over the cereal, got some on my spoon, and put it in my mouth.

  “Mmm,” I said. I couldn’t think of a discreet way to spit it out. I washed it down with some coffee.

  I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Joyce Pilgrim’s call. I’d already been planning to visit Victor Rooney today. I’d wanted to ask him about his feelings of antipathy toward Promise Falls. Someone had it in for the town, and Victor had as good a reason as anyone else I could think of.

  The people of Promise Falls had failed Olivia, and by extension, they had failed him.

  I’d learned from Olivia’s father that Victor knew his way around machinery. He had the smarts to start up a mothballed Ferris wheel. He could probably figure out how to make up some basic explosives powerful enough to bring down a drive-in movie screen. He had even worked at the water treatment plant one summer in his teens. He could have known Mason Helt—this was something I’d want to check—and persuaded him to scare female Thackeray students in a “23” hoodie.

  And it didn’t take a genius to trap twenty-three squirrels and string them up on a fence, or get a bus out of the town compound and set it on fire.

  But now that I knew he’d been in the vicinity of Lorraine Plummer’s building at the time of her death, my mind was exploring all kinds of possibilities.

  Rooney’d had an alibi for the time of Olivia’s death. But was it conceivable he killed Rosemary Gaynor and Lorraine Plummer in a similar fashion as a way of making Promise Falls pay for its sins?

  My mind circled back to the “twenty-three” business. I could imagine Victor wanting to take action against the twenty-two people who did nothing when they heard Olivia’s screams. But would he really include his own inaction, bringing the number of those who’d failed to be responsible citizens up to twenty-three? Did that make any sense? Was I reaching?

  I was so busy thinking it through that I got to the bottom of the cereal bowl without realizing what I was eating.

  “I’ll have to make you that again,” Maureen said.

  I finished off the berries and downed half my coffee. “I’m off.”

  I slipped on my sport jacket and was out the door. Just as I was slipping the key into the ignition, a car stopped at the end of the driveway, blocking my path. A Lincoln.

  I got out. Finley got out of the Lincoln and met me halfway up the driveway.

  “Randy,” I said.

  He didn’t look much better to me than he had the day before at his house. “Barry,” he said. “You got a second?”

  I wanted to say no, but what came out of my mouth was, “Sure.”

  “I did put the squeeze on your son,” he said. “You already know this, but I’m telling you, you got it right. Whatever Trevor told you, it’s true. About his ex-girlfriend, and the thing that happened between them. I used that against him to get him to tell me stuff he heard you talking about. How Finderman didn’t do her job right.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “That’s me. That’s how I operate. I did it.” He paused. “I’ve come to apologize.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not going to ask whether you accept it or not. If I was you, I probably wouldn’t. But I’m telling you I’m sorry, just the same.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  “That’s not all,” Randy said. “I want to help.”

  “You’ve been doing that,” I reminded him. “Yesterday, when you were handing out water.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “That was for publicity. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I was happy to help people. But I wanted to stick it to Amanda Croydon, and I did a pretty good job.” He
managed a smile for about two seconds. “But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’m going to withdraw. I’m not going to run for mayor.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was discourage him from dropping out. I didn’t want him in charge of Promise Falls again. But I wondered if he was packing it in for the right reason.

  “Because of Jane?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I wanted to prove something to her. I can’t now.”

  “I guess you know what the right thing to do is.”

  “But like I said, I want to help. I want to help you find out who poisoned this town. I want to help find out who killed all these people.”

  Was I being conned? Was this a performance? Was Randy really pulling out, or was this an even more brilliant publicity stunt than handing out the water? I could imagine him going before the cameras to withdraw, to declare that helping the police was more important than his political future.

  “If I need your help, I’ll be in touch,” I said. I started to turn to get back into my car, but Randy grabbed my arm.

  “Don’t you get it?” he asked. “You think I’m playing you, don’t you? That this is some new stunt I’ve dreamed up. Barry, this son of a bitch, whoever did this, he killed my wife.”

  He wouldn’t let go of my arm. “He killed Jane. He killed my Jane.”

  Gently, I freed myself from his grasp. “I know.”

  “I’ll be looking for you,” he said. “Anytime I see you around town, I’m going to be bugging you, seeing if I can help. I’m going to be a huge pain in the ass.”

  It was impossible not to smile. “Randy, you’ve always been that.”

  Even he smiled. “You’re a straight shooter, Barry. Always have been. When I said you’d make a good chief, it was for real. You know how they say even a busted clock gives you the right time twice a day? Well, even when you’re a nonstop bullshit artist, occasionally the truth slips out by accident.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  DAVID Harwood made a couple of wrong turns, but eventually found his way to Call of the Loon Acres. There was no formal gate similar to the one at the previous campsite, but there was a sign directing guests to a parking lot. It read: ONE VEHICLE PER SIGHT, ALL OTHERS HERE. PLEASE LIMIT YOU’RE DRIVING THREW THE PARK.