Far From True (23 page)

“I
want that Harwood bastard,” Ed Noble said, examining himself in the bathroom mirror. Garnet and Yolanda Worthington had rented a room for him at the Walcott. He tentatively touched the bandages on his nose. “I knew it was him soon as I saw him. Recognized him from the pictures I took. He was the one who was slippin’ it to Sam in the kitchen.”

“Whore,” Yolanda said to no one in particular as she sat on the bed.

“Ed,” Garnet Worthington said gently, standing in the doorway to the bathroom. “I understand how you feel, but you’re in enough trouble as it is without going after that guy.”

“All thanks to you,” he said, turning and looking at Garnet and his wife. “I need to see a doctor. I need to go to a hospital.”

“Brilliant idea,” said Yolanda, who had gone to a Rite Aid to pick up some first-aid supplies after Ed showed up at the rendezvous point.

Without Carl.

They knew the police would be called, that everyone would be looking for Ed’s pickup truck, checking the local hospital to see if he’d shown up in the ER. Out of the dozens of people who’d seen what had happened out front of the school, someone must have taken down the license plate. And even if not, by now Samantha would have told the police about Garnet and Yolanda coming to see her at her work, about Ed’s visit in the morning. Once she gave them Ed’s name, all the police would have to do was tap a few keys on a computer to find the truck registered to him.

“What a clusterfuck,” Yolanda said.

Garnet knew the police would likely be looking for him and his wife, too. Samantha would have told them she believed her former in-laws had put Ed Noble up to trying to grab Carl. “They’ll be looking for all three of us,” Garnet told Yolanda.

The best option seemed to be to lie low. Hide out in Promise Falls for a while until things cooled down. Maybe, in the interim, find a way to reach out to Samantha, tell her they were sorry, that it was all a terrible misunderstanding. They couldn’t make another run at the kid, not now. It was too risky. All they could do now was hope to avoid arrest.

Once Ed’s truck had been left in a Walmart lot, Garnet got them a room at the Walcott, a Holiday Inn–like hotel on the road that came into Promise Falls. He went to the counter, ready with his story, which was that he had lost his wallet and had no credit cards or ID, but fortunately did have cash. The young man wasn’t crazy about the idea, but Garnet Worthington, in his nice suit and tie, looked like a respectable individual.

He needed a fake name for the registration, and his mind went to people he admired, most notably Donald Trump, whom Garnet believed was just the man who should be running the country. But that was a rather obvious alias, so he wrote down “Daniel Trump,” and in the place where he was asked for type of car and license plate, he glanced out the door of the lobby for inspiration, saw a Buick Regal, wrote that in, and copied down the plate. Had any hotel clerk in history confirmed vehicle information on a hotel registration?

Once they had the room, they ushered Ed in through a side door, and Yolanda went to work tending his broken nose. She shoveled some Tylenols down his throat while Garnet went for ice to make into a compress, although it was a little late to try to bring down the swelling.

“I’ll kill him,” Ed kept saying. “I will.”

“Just shut up,” Yolanda said.

“We all need to calm down and think about how we’re going to handle this,” Garnet said. “The simplest way out is money.”

“Money?” Yolanda said.

“Yeah,” Ed agreed. “I deserve more. I got
hurt
.”

Garnet sighed. “Money for Samantha. And Carl.”

“Not a chance,” Yolanda said. “Not a dime for that slut.”

Garnet perched his butt on the dresser, glared at his wife. “The situation has changed.”

“We can spend money on Carl when he’s with us. We’ll get him anything he wants.”

“You need to listen to me,” her husband said. “Today was a mistake. It’s going to take a lot to make it right. To save our own necks.”

“
He
made the mistake,” she said, leaning her head toward Ed.

“Yes,” Garnet acknowledged. “He botched it. And now the police are looking for all of us. I’ll call the lawyers, have them contact Samantha with an offer. A good enough one that persuades her to tell the police it was a misunderstanding. That, in fact, she’d intended for us to take Carl back to Boston to spend some time with us, that she’d given Ed the okay to pick up him at school, that the whole reason this became an incident is that Harwood misinterpreted everything.”

“How will you get her to agree to that?” Ed asked.

Before Garnet could answer, Yolanda asked, “Can’t the police go ahead with charges anyway, even if Samantha says not to?”

Garnet shook his head. “What would be the point? They’d know that once it got to court, it would all be dismissed. We’d make sure that Samantha wouldn’t testify. Carl, too.”

“How much money you think it’ll take to buy that kind of silence?”

Garnet thought. “A hundred.”

Yolanda screamed as though someone had stabbed her in the heart. “Thousand?”

Ed was equally outraged. “You only gave me five hundred bucks.”

“And we overpaid,” Garnet said.

“A hundred thousand is out of the question,” Yolanda said. “You disappoint me, Garnet.”

Her husband sighed. “Yolanda, you and I will go to jail. The only upside to that is they’ll put us in different prisons.”

“Then why the hell did we try to grab him in the first place?” she shouted.

The slap was enough to send her sprawling across the bed. She put her hand to her left cheek, where Garnet had struck her.

“Because,” he said, “you wouldn’t fucking let up. That’s why. I tried to please you. I’ve tried to do what you wanted. But this is the road you’ve led us down. You’ve put us in this position, Yolanda, and you’re going to have to suck it up and listen to me. We’re going to pay her off. I’m not even sure a hundred thousand is enough. We may have to go higher. And believe me, given the lies we’ve already told her, she’ll want to see that money in her bank account before she agrees to let this go.”

Yolanda had propped herself up on one elbow. She still had a palm pressed to her cheek, and she was struggling to hold back tears.

“We could make him love us,” she said. “Once Carl was with us, he wouldn’t want to go back. And when his father got out, he’d be so happy.”

Garnet shook his head. “How could Carl love you more than
his own mother?” He paused. “How could anyone love you at all, Yolanda?”

Ed Noble, watching all this, said, “Maybe there’s a way.”

“A way what?” Garnet asked.

“A way to get Carl, a way to save your hundred grand, and a way to get Sam to stop being a pain in the ass for you guys.”

“Save it, Ed,” Garnet said.

“What I was going to say was, if Sam’s no longer in the picture, you don’t have to worry about her saying anything against you, taking your money, or standing in the way of you raising the little bastard.”

“For God’s sake, don’t talk that way,” Garnet said.

“No, wait, hang on,” Yolanda said. “Let’s hear what the man has to say.”

“SHIT,”
Clive Duncomb whispered into the phone to Miriam. “The cop wants me. Peter’s losing it. I’ll call you back.”

Duncomb put away the phone, turned, and nodded to Duckworth on his way back into Blackmore’s house. The professor was where he’d left him, on the couch in the living room, shaking his head, wiping away tears.

Detective Duckworth said to Duncomb, “You need to keep an eye on him. He needs to make some calls, get in touch with family, and in the morning, he needs to come in and make a positive ID, as best he can, of his wife’s remains.”

“Of course,” Duncomb said.

“He came to you, didn’t he?”

“What do you mean?”

“He came to you when his wife went missing.”

“Peter’s my friend. Of course he did.”

“And once again, you took matters into your own hands, just like you did with the Mason Helt business. You could have brought us in from the beginning. Told Professor Blackmore to make a formal report with us.”

Duncomb bristled. “And what difference would that have made? Would that have kept that movie screen from falling down on her? What was done was done. You’re a small man in a small pond, Duckworth.”

Duckworth put his face up close to Duncomb’s. “What happened in Boston?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why does a cop walk away from a good job like that? Kiss his pension good-bye? Come to a place like Promise Falls? Because he couldn’t take the heat? Or maybe because his bosses had something on him and quitting was his only way out? I’m from here. I grew up around here. But you’re the one who came here, who
chose
the small pond because you couldn’t handle the rough water anymore.”

Before Duncomb could come back with anything, the detective was out the door.

“Asshole,” he said to the professor.

Blackmore whimpered.

“Come on, get a grip,” Duncomb said.

The man’s head shot up. “Get a grip?”

“Okay, okay, I get it. This has been a terrible shock for you. I get that. Look, you go do what you have to do about Georgina. Start making arrangements. I can scan through the rest of the discs. I gotta find her. And not just her. Any of the other girls we brought in.”

“I don’t care.”

“Yeah, well, you
better
care. You ever want to be in the position of having to explain that we just happened to be having that kind of fun with that girl a few weeks before she was murdered?”

“I didn’t kill that girl.”

Duncomb put his face up close to the professor’s. “Do you really think that matters?”

“She wasn’t even drugged,” Blackmore said. “Not like the others. Not like Lorraine. If anyone ever saw it, they’d see that Olivia knew what she was doing. She consented. She did.”

“It amazes me someone can rise to the level you have, teaching at a place like Thackeray, and be so astonishingly stupid,” Duncomb said. “All that girl ever had to do was threaten to tell anyone what we’d been doing, and we’d have all been finished. If all we did was lose our jobs, we’d have been lucky. We
should
have made sure she was drugged. She’d have forgotten the whole thing. The truth
is, we got lucky when someone killed her. We’ve never had to worry she’d talk about that night.”

Blackmore eyed Duncomb fearfully.

“I’ve always wondered if it was actually you,” Blackmore said. “That you made it look like the work of some random maniac. I don’t think there’s much you’re not capable of.”

“You don’t know anything,” Duncomb said.

“I know getting mixed up in all of this . . . that it was a mistake. The fucking
lifestyle
, it was enough for Georgina and me, for Adam and Miriam. But for you and Liz, it wasn’t. You had to up the ante. Bring in some young stuff. College girls. Invite them to dinner with some famous cult writer, slip a little something in their drink, make them part of the show. We should have fought you on it, but at the time . . . I won’t lie. I liked it. It made me feel . . . omnipotent. That we were capable of anything, that rules didn’t apply to us. That other people existed for our pleasure. That’s what you and Liz did to us. That’s the kind of people you made us. You made us depraved.”

“Oh, please.”

“Maybe that’s why that screen came down on Adam and Georgina. Some kind of divine retribution. They got what was coming to them, and we’re next.”

“You’re losing it, Peter.”

“I’m seeing clearly for the first time in years,” he countered. “I see what you and Liz have done to us. You’ve poisoned us. You connecting with Liz, what are the odds two people that twisted would end up together?”

Duncomb gripped Blackmore by the shoulders. “Peter,” he said firmly, “you need to stop talking about this. Especially to anyone else. Because I swear, I’ll put a bullet in your head just as fast as I did to Mason Helt.”

Blackmore blinked several times. He swallowed, hard. “I need a drink.”

“Sure, get yourself one. I have to call Miriam back.”

“Miriam,” Blackmore said under his breath. “She didn’t keep Adam interested enough. If she had, he wouldn’t have been with Georgina. It’s her fault.”

“Jesus, just get a drink.” Duncomb got out his phone while Blackmore slunk off to the kitchen. He tapped the screen, put the phone to his ear.

“Christ,” Miriam said. “I’ve been waiting.”

“The cop left, and then I had to calm Peter down.”

“I was trying to tell you, before you cut me off.”

“Trying to tell me what?”

“The disc isn’t missing,” she said.

“What?”

“The Fisher one, and any of the others with special guests. Adam got rid of them.”

Duncomb felt an almost euphoric wave building up inside him. “He did?”

“He hated parting with them, but he knew it was a risk to keep them. He destroyed them months ago.”

“God, Miriam, that’s the first bit of good news in some time.”

“So me being alive, that’s not?”

“We’ve been going out of our minds here looking for that one disc and—”

“All right, fine. I hear you.”

“I’m sorry about Adam, Miriam. It’s horrible.”

“Enough,” Miriam said. “I have . . . I have things to do.”

She ended the call.

Duncomb slipped the phone into his pocket, made two fists, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “Yes!”

When Duncomb went into the kitchen to share the good news, Peter Blackmore was gone.

•   •   •

Miriam, sitting on the edge of the bed in the playroom, set down her phone on the satin sheet. She pulled herself up onto the
mattress, drew the slippery covers around herself, making them into an icy cocoon. She brought her knees up to her chest and gave herself permission to cry.

Except the tears would not come.

She knew she should feel something. Anger? Sorrow? Outrage? Grief? And yet she wasn’t sure that she felt any of these things. The only emotion she could identify at that moment was relief.

It seemed so strange to her, of all the things she could feel.

But that was what she felt. Relief. And maybe . . . freedom? Was that it? She was free of Adam and all his bullshit. Free of that ex-wife of his who could never keep her nose out of their affairs. Who was always e-mailing or calling Adam on the phone. She’d never really let go, that one.

Free also of Lucy, and her disapproval. Miriam knew Adam’s daughter had never liked her. And she’d be free of that weird kid of hers. Crystal. All the time drawing her little comic books. But Adam liked—God, even
loved
—his granddaughter, so what could Miriam do? Let the little kid come over whenever Lucy needed a babysitter, that’s what. Adam would always make sure the sliding bookcase was locked into position before Crystal came over. She was already a strange kid—imagine how much weirder she’d have been if she’d found her way into the playroom.

With her husband dead, Miriam could sever all ties to Lucy and Crystal. She’d sell this house, sort out Adam’s estate, move the hell out of Promise Falls. Someplace warmer. The winters here were a
bitch. Four feet of snow last year. Who needed that? She was thinking she’d relocate to San Diego or Los Angeles with whatever money the estate left her.

Miriam hoped there was enough to help her start over. Adam had been overly concerned about financial matters in recent months, but secretive about how close to the wire things were. He’d been desperate to get a new book contract.

Suddenly, she did begin to cry. Perhaps it was the uncertainty of her inheritance that tipped her over the edge.

She made huge racking sobs. She buried her head into a pillow and moaned as if she were a wounded animal.

It wasn’t just grief. It was relief. The chance to start over. It had overwhelmed her.

After several minutes, the sobs ebbed. Exhaustion was moving in. For a while, perhaps as long as half an hour, she drifted off.

She woke with a start, took a second to realize where she was. While this was a bed she was on, it was not, typically, one she’d ever
slept
in.

It was time to go upstairs, go to sleep in their—her—bedroom. She could start sorting things out tomorrow.

The truth was, she did not like this room, this playroom. There had been some amusements here, to be sure, but she’d had enough.

Miriam threw back the covers, slipped her legs over the edge of the bed, touched her toes to the shag carpeting.

Someone was standing in the doorway.

“Jesus!” Miriam said. “You scared the hell out of me!”

“I rang the bell.”

“I didn’t hear it.”

“I let myself in. Found you down here. I was watching you.”

“Get out. I’m sick to death of you. What the hell do you want?”

“What do you think? I’m guessing you know.”

“Just get out.”

“He said if something ever happened to him, I was to come here. That he’d leave something for me. He told me where to look.”

“What? In here? Some gold-plated dildo?”

“Not in here. I think you know. I think you have it.”

“Get out.”

“I’m not leaving until you give it to me.”

“I said get out!”

Miriam charged out of the room, pushed the intruder out of her path. As she started up the stairs, she felt hands try to grab her around the ankles.

“I want what’s mine!”

“Get the fuck out of here!” Miriam screamed.

Her pursuer tried to overtake her on the stairs, came up alongside her, grabbed at Miriam’s hair to slow her down.

Miriam’s head jerked up briefly, and she lost her balance. She made a grab for the railing, but missed it.

Her body pitched backward, seemed almost suspended in midair for a second before she hit the stairs.

A sound of something snapping.

Miriam’s head rested on the bottom step, the rest of her body splayed awkwardly on the stairs.

“No! God, no! You’re not dead! You’re not dead!”

Miriam, in not replying, seemed to be suggesting otherwise.