Too Close to Home

book was bought by a big New York publisher, and he started moving in circles very far removed from ours. And then, while out in Hollywood for exploratory meetings about turning A Missing Part into a movie, he met Illeana Tiff, a B-movie actress. She had the big hair and the tits to match, but to dismiss her as an airhead was a mistake. She wasn’t a great actress and was smart enough to know she had a limited future in Hollywood. But hooking up with a famous writer was almost as good, so she came back to Promise Falls with Chase, and about a year later they were married.

Chase had so wormed his way into the college’s board that when President Kane Mortimer had a heart attack while snorkeling in Fiji, he made a strong push for the job and got it. By this time, Illeana had learned to tone down the hair and lower the winch on the boobs, and she fell comfortably into the role of the college president’s wife.

It seemed odd to many that Chase took that route. Being a college president had some cachet, no doubt about it, but not nearly as much as a famous writer. Upstate New York college presidents didn’t do talk shows, didn’t get invited to celebrity-filled parties, weren’t written about in The New Yorker.

But Conrad Chase had no follow-up to A Missing Part. For the first few years, when people asked, he claimed to be working on a new novel-supposedly his deal for A Missing Part included a follow-up book-but if he ever wrote it, it had yet to be published. Eventually, most people stopped asking, and when the rare one did, Conrad replied, “I’ve a college to run.”

The simple truth was, as far as I could tell, he was done with writing. But unlike me and my art, he’d managed to make a name for himself before packing it in.

I took the disc and the pages Derek had printed out for me and started walking back to the house. I hadn’t said anything to him when he asked me what I’d meant when I said I’d already read the book, and I didn’t say anything when he protested my showing the pages to Ellen, which it was clear, by the direction I was headed, I had every intention of doing.

Ellen was upstairs, stripping our bed. Even though it was Sunday, it wasn’t the kind of Sunday where you could sit down and relax and read the paper. We were all agitated, and Ellen’s way of dealing with that was to keep busy.

I extended the printed pages across the bed to her. She dropped the bedsheets she was holding and took them. She glanced at them without reading so much as a word and said, “What’s this?”

“Just have a read and see if it rings a bell,” I said.

“Can you just tell me what it’s-”

“Just read it.”

So she dropped her eyes to the pages and read. She got as far as the bottom of the first page and stopped.

“What’s the point of this?” she asked, looking up.

“You recognize it.”

“Of course I recognize it.” She was keeping her voice very even. I realized I was already going about this the wrong way. Ellen was going to think this was something personal about Conrad Chase, about what had happened so many years ago. She was going to think I’d chosen, after all this time, to open old wounds. That wasn’t the plan, although sometimes things turn out in ways you did not intend.

“It’s Chase’s book,” I said. I hardly needed to tell her which one. “Not word for word, I think. More like an unedited version, you know? But the same story, different title.”

“I already told you I recognize it,” she said. “How many other people have written about a guy who loses his cock and ends up with a pussy?”

Get to the point, I told myself.

“That just got printed off. It was on the hard drive of a computer that Agnes Stockwell gave Derek, which he gave to Adam to keep over at his house, and now it’s missing.”

Ellen stared at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Agnes Stockwell gave Derek a computer? That’s where he got that one he brought home a couple of weeks ago? If somebody told me that, I don’t remember.”

“We probably didn’t. It wasn’t a big deal, then.”

“Is it a big deal now?”

I took a breath. “You remember Brett Stockwell?”

Ellen nodded.

“Agnes saved all his stuff after he committed suicide, but it’s been so long, she’s finally clearing it out, at least the stuff that doesn’t hold any sentimental value. She had his old computer in her garage, and when she found out Derek’s into that kind of thing, she gave it to him. The novel, Conrad’s novel, what looks to be Conrad’s novel, is on the computer. And now that computer’s missing from the Langley house.” I paused, then added, “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

Again with the stare. Then, “Which part? That it was on the kid’s computer, or that the computer is missing?”

“All of it.”

“What kind of computer? A desktop? Not a laptop?”

“No, not a laptop,” I said. “The tower part.”

“And how the hell do you have a printout of it if the computer’s missing?”

“Derek had made a copy.”

Ellen sat down on the edge of the bed. “What are you suggesting? I can’t get my head around this. You must be suggesting something.”

“I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” I said. “I’m trying to get my head around it, too. But I can’t help but wonder, maybe Conrad isn’t the great literary genius everyone thinks he is. Maybe A Missing Part isn’t his.”

Ellen was speechless for a moment. It was, I had to admit, a somewhat stunning hypothesis, to be all professorial about it.

“Jesus, what are you saying?” she said. “That some kid wrote it? That’s ridiculous. That book was on the New York Times bestseller list.”

“I’m just putting it out there,” I said. “I’m just saying, it’s kind of a strange thing for it to be on that computer.”

“Maybe,” Ellen said, “he had a student who was such a fan, he typed it out, word for word. Or had a copy of it, a Word file or something. Did they offer books back then as e-books? Maybe Brett Stockwell downloaded it. Did you ever think of that?”

“When did Conrad’s book come out?” I asked. “When was it published?”

Ellen tried to think. “Was it nine, ten years ago? Hang on.” She got up, walked out of the room, went downstairs. I followed her down to the living room, where she was scanning the wall that’s lined with bookshelves. They’re pretty much overflowing, books tucked in sideways on top of other books, so it took Ellen a moment, cocking her head so that she could read the spines, before she could put her hands on our copy of A Missing Part.

She flipped it open to the copyright page. “It was in 2000,” she said. “The hardcover. Trade paperback a year later.”

“Brett Stockwell killed himself ten years ago,” I pointed out. “Two years before the book came out.”

“There must be a simple explanation,” Ellen said.

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe so. It’s just funny, is all. And there’s the fact that the computer’s gone missing.”

“Someone stole it?”

I shrugged. “It was in the Langley house as recently as Thursday, Derek says, and now it’s gone.”

“Did Barry say it was stolen when the Langleys were killed?”

“No. Derek noticed that it was missing when Barry took us through the house.”

She looked away from me and shook her head. “This is crazy. What did Barry say when Derek noticed that it was gone?”

“He didn’t tell Barry. He told me afterwards. He wanted to talk to me about it first, because he was too embarrassed to talk to you about a book with that kind of content. He didn’t know it was a published novel. I mean,