Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella (3 page)

Elliot said, ‘Cal, would you go? Find out what’s happened. I’m going to have to stay here and take care of Suzanne.’

‘I’m afraid I have some questions that won’t wait,’ Osterman told them.

‘I’ll go,’ I told Elliot. ‘I’ll call when I know something.’

I left Osterman with them and headed for my car. He’d said the body had been found near Clampett Park, which was all I needed to know.

Half a block away from the park, I started seeing police cars. Marked, and unmarked. I pulled over to the shoulder and walked the rest of the way.

Three people – two men, one woman – in hazmat-type suits were about thirty feet into the woods just beyond the sidewalk, walking around, staring intently at the ground. They were covered head to toe in white, only their faces exposed.

I was walking past an unmarked car when I heard someone say, ‘Cal?’

I stopped, turned, and saw sitting behind the wheel, with the window down, Promise Falls police detective Barry Duckworth.

‘Barry,’ I said.

‘Hey, Cal,’ he said, getting out of the car and shaking my hand. ‘Good to see you.’

‘Good to see you too. How are you?’

‘Not bad, all things considered,’ Duckworth said. ‘It’s gonna be twenty years in another couple of weeks.’

‘Twenty years with the department?’

Duckworth nodded. ‘They’re still talking it over whether to make it a municipal holiday.’

‘At the very least.’

‘I was sorry to hear about what happened.’

I nodded. I never knew what to say, so it seemed easier to say nothing. Duckworth sensed my discomfort and moved on. ‘What brings you out here? I’m guessing you didn’t just chance by.’

‘I was at the Vaughns’ when one of your people showed up.’ I looked into the woods, where I presumed the body still was. ‘The officer said they’d taken an ID for Michael Vaughn off the body.’

Duckworth nodded slowly.

‘And that the photo on it looked a lot like the deceased.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘What’s your connection to the Vaughns?’

‘We were friends back when Donna and I lived here. They called me a little while ago. They haven’t seen Mike since last night. Suzanne – that’s the wife – broke down, and her husband Elliot asked me to come out and see what was going on.’

Duckworth nodded again.

‘So what
is
going on?’ I asked.

‘We’re in the early stages of the investigation,’ he said.

‘Can I have a look?’

He shook his head. ‘Nope. Already been enough people wandering around in there messing up the scene. Maybe later, after we move the body.’

‘What happened to him? He climb up a tree and fall down and break his neck? Trip on a tree root and knock himself out?’

Duckworth said nothing.

‘Come on, Barry. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t eaten by a bear.’

‘Somebody had a go at the kid,’ he said.

‘It’s a homicide?’

‘I see you still have your keen investigative instincts.’

‘Shit,’ I said.

‘Look, Cal, leave me your card or something, and if there’s anything I can share with you later, I will. And listen, we should grab a drink some time. Maybe you’d like to come over, have dinner with me and Maureen.’

‘We’ll have to set something up,’ I said, even though I knew it would never happen.

‘She’d love to—’

‘Found something!’

It was the woman in the hazmat suit. She had something in her hands that she was holding up for all to see. She was grasping it gingerly, careful not to smear the surface of it in any way.

It was a baseball bat, and even from thirty feet away, I could see it was smeared covered with blood.

‘Well,’ said Duckworth. ‘Looks like we got ourselves a murder weapon.’

I must have done a poor job of hiding my shock at what I was seeing, because Duckworth asked, ‘Something on your mind, Cal?’

I said no. But I was thinking of that phrase, the one about life imitating art. Or maybe it was the other way around.

I got back into my car and drove straight to the Carson house. The first time I’d come here, there’d been a silver BMW in the driveway, but now there was a blue Lincoln SUV parked alongside it.

Greta Carson looked taken aback when she opened the door and found me standing there.

‘Oh, you’re back,’ she said. ‘So you’ve decided to take the case after all.’

‘May I come in?’ I said.

She opened the door wider. ‘Let me guess. You already found something we can use against them. I hope it’s someone high up, like the principal. If you’ve got something on her, we can nip this thing right in the bud.’

‘Is Chandler here?’

‘He’s up in his room,’ she said. ‘But you should tell me first what you’ve found out.’

‘I need to speak to Chandler,’ I told her.

She sighed with disappointment. ‘Fine, then. My husband just popped in. He was in the garage, but I think he’s back in the house. You might as well meet him while you’re here. Malcolm!’

A door to the left of the stairs opened, and I caught a glimpse of oak paneling and bookshelves. A ground-floor study. A tall, thin man emerged. Nearly six feet, but he’d have been closer to six-two if it weren’t for the fact that he was slightly stoop-shouldered. He wore a dark suit, white shirt and blue and red striped tie.

‘Malcolm, this is Mr Weaver,’ she said.

‘You’re the one she called?’

I admitted it. ‘Yes.’

‘When I heard you’d turned Greta down, I thought you had some sense, but I guess I came to that conclusion a little too soon.’

‘I need to speak to Chandler,’ I said.

‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ Malcolm said. ‘I don’t quite know how we’re going to handle this yet, but it’s not going to be my wife’s way. Honestly, thinking she could blackmail the school by—’

‘It’s not blackmail,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s just fighting fire with fire. If they want to cast aspersions on his character, well, we can play that game too.’

‘I’ll go in there and talk to them myself,’ her husband said. ‘Give them a little lesson in freedom of expression. This is all a bunch of nonsense.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m supposed to be somewhere in half an hour.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘I have clients. I’m a financial adviser. I stopped by between appointments to pick up some files. It was nice to meet you, Mr Weaver, but I need to be shoving off shortly.’

‘I think maybe you should stick around,’ I said.

‘Why’s that?’

I saw that the laptop Chandler’s story had been on was still on the coffee table in the living room. ‘I’d like to read some more of your son’s story,’ I said, tipping my head in the direction of the computer.

‘Of course!’ Greta said, giving her husband a sharp, satisfied look, as if to tell him they were going to do this her way, no matter what he thought.

I dropped myself onto the couch and opened the laptop. When the screen came to life, the story was still on it. I started at the beginning, read it right through to the end. It was only about a thousand words, and I was reading quickly, so I was done in about three minutes. Twice I had to raise my hand when Malcolm Carson started to ask questions.

When I was finished, I said, ‘Okay.’

‘It’s better the second time you read it, don’t you think?’ Greta asked.

What struck me was not the story’s literary merit, but how close the names of the two characters in it – Charlie and Martin – were to Chandler and Michael.

‘Why’d you have to read it again?’ Malcolm asked. ‘The issue is not what’s in the story. The issue is that the school wants to control what its students think.’

‘Does Chandler have a girlfriend?’ I asked.

Malcolm looked as though I’d thrown cold water in his face. Maybe he wasn’t used to people answering his questions with more questions.

‘I’m not sure,’ Greta said. ‘There was a Karen a little while ago, but I think that ended.’

The girl being fought over in the short story was Katherine.

But the most troubling part of Chandler’s little assignment was that Charlie had killed Martin by whacking him in the head with a baseball bat.

In the woods.

‘Let’s get Chandler down here,’ I said. ‘Right now.’

Malcolm moved to the bottom of the stairs and called up: ‘Chandler!’

A muffled voice from behind a closed door shouted back: ‘What?’

‘Get down here!’

I heard a door open, then thumping on the stairs one might have associated with the approach of a stampeding rhino. When he hit the first floor and saw me sitting at the laptop, Chandler hit the brakes.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘Mr Weaver is back to help us,’ Greta said.

I was not unaccustomed to misrepresenting myself in the pursuit of information, but I didn’t want to completely mislead the Carsons. I said, ‘I wouldn’t count on that. I’m just trying to sort out some things before I take my next step.’

Which might be turning Chandler over to the police for the murder of his friend Mike Vaughn.

‘Have a seat,’ I said to him.

He sat across the coffee table from me, squirmed for several seconds trying to get comfortable.

‘Yeah?’ he said.

‘When did you write this?’

‘I guess two, three days ago?’

‘Did you show it to anyone other than your teacher?’

Did I see something in his eyes? A brief look away? An attempt to avoid eye contact?

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I just gave it to her.’

‘And then she showed it to the principal and another person?’

‘Ms Brighton,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’

‘Why this story?’

‘Huh?’

‘Of all the stories you might have thought up, why did you write this specific story?’

‘Mr Weaver,’ Greta said, ‘you’re getting to the very heart of the creative process. Why does an artist paint what he paints? How does a songwriter choose the notes he chooses?’

Malcolm rolled his eyes. ‘I hardly think Chandler’s working in the same stratosphere as Picasso or Gershwin.’

‘But it’s all the same thing,’ Greta said. ‘Isn’t that right, Chandler?’

He nodded happily, as though she had rescued him. ‘Yeah, it’s like that. It just came to me, and I wrote it down.’

‘Honestly,’ Greta said, ‘the worst thing you can ask a writer is where he gets his ideas.’

‘Still,’ I persisted, ‘the story must have come from somewhere. A situation, something you experienced, then reinterpreted.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘Are Charlie and Martin based on anyone?’

‘Charlie and Martin?’

Was Chandler thick as a brick, or was he just very good at playing dumb?

‘The two boys in the story. Are they based on you and Mike? The names are somewhat the same.’

‘I don’t know. I guess maybe I named them that way sublimely.’

‘You mean subliminally?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘And the girl they’re fighting about is named Katherine. Would she be based on Karen?’

His eyes widened. ‘You know about Karen?’

‘Your mother said you were seeing a girl by that name.’

‘Yeah, well, for a while, sort of.’

‘Did you and Mike have a disagreement about her?’

‘Not lately.’

‘But at some point.’

His eyes seemed to be focused on the wall behind me, as though searching for a way out of this.

‘Yeah. A few weeks ago. He was … he and Karen were kind of making out at a party. I found them upstairs in a bedroom.’

‘What party was this? Whose house?’ Greta demanded.

I held up a hand. The problem of unsupervised parties was not on my list of priorities. ‘Go on.’

‘I was looking for Karen and going through the house, and I found them. Not actually doing it, but messing around. You know? I was pretty pissed with both of them, but especially him, cause he was supposed to be my friend. We kind of had it out at the party.’

‘Had it out?’

‘Kind of yelling at each other, shoving each other around.’

‘People saw this?’

He looked at me like I was a science teacher explaining the second law of thermonuclear dynamics. ‘Uh, yeah.’

‘Keep going.’

‘But we made up later. Him and Karen were a bit high, and they said they didn’t exactly know what they were doing.’

‘I can’t believe this sort of thing goes on,’ Greta said. ‘They were high?’

‘Mom, please.’

‘What about you? Were you high?’

He shook his head. ‘No. I mean, not very.’

Malcolm looked at his watch again. ‘Good God.’

‘So the part in your story about the two friends fighting over a girl named Katherine,’ I said, ‘parallels what actually happened between you and Michael over Karen.’

‘Parallels,’ Chandler repeated. ‘I guess.’

‘You own a baseball bat?’ I asked.

‘What?’ asked Greta. ‘Why are you asking that?’

Chandler shrugged. ‘I did. Me and some of my friends like to play. Sometimes we do it at the school.’

This struck me as almost quaint. I had been under the impression that today’s generation of teens had sworn off all physical activity except for texting.

‘What do you mean, you did?’

‘I lost it. I left it by the bleachers when I went inside to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, it was gone.’

‘No you didn’t,’ Malcolm said.

‘Huh?’

‘I’m sure I’ve seen your bat. Hang on.’ He left the room and returned about a minute later with a baseball bat in his hands.

‘It was in the garage,’ he told Chandler.

‘Oh, okay. Maybe Mike found it and left it there.’

‘Well, that’s good news,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid I have some bad.’

‘What do you mean?’ Chandler asked.

I motioned to Greta and Malcolm, who had been standing this entire time, that maybe they should take a seat. They did, although Malcolm appeared reluctant.

‘What’s going on?’ they asked.

‘I think you can expect a visit from the police before long. They’re going to want to talk to Michael Vaughn’s friends.’

‘Why?’ Chandler asked.

‘He’s dead.’

The stunned silence was short-lived. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Malcolm Carson asked.

‘Do you have a lawyer?’ I asked him.

‘Why the hell would I need a lawyer?’

‘For Chandler. I think there’s a chance he might need one.’