Too Close to Home

was another second Derek would have to spend in his cell.

“Thank you, Drew,” I said again.

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.” He started moving toward the door.

“Drew, where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He was walking up the lane, toward his car.

I called out after him. “Drew, you should stay. The police, they won’t have any reason to arrest you. You’re not violating your parole by saving someone’s life. They’ll understand why you did what you did.”

But he kept walking in the direction of the road and his car, and soon he was swallowed up by the night.

I wasn’t going to run after him and drag him back. He had to know that I was going to tell the police what I knew, that he wouldn’t be hard to find.

I went to the house-saw my set of keys hanging from the door and pocketed them-and found Ellen hanging up the phone in the kitchen. “They’re on their way,” she said to me.

She came into my arms, and as I held her, I said, “He must have sent them.”

Ellen pulled away, looked at me. “What?”

“Conrad,” I said. “He sent them.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He wouldn’t.”

I moved my hand to Ellen’s shoulders. “Ellen,” I said firmly, “it all fits. These guys wanted the disc of his book. They were probably prepared to kill us for it. That dead guy in our shed? At the very least he was prepared to cut off all my fingers to get it.”

“No, Jim, it doesn’t fit,” Ellen maintained. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Who else but Conrad would want it? He stole that book from that kid, and all these years later, he’s still covering his tracks. I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed that kid years ago, threw him off the falls, made it look like he killed himself. What choice did he have? How could he have Brett Stockwell going around telling everyone he’d written that book, that Conrad Chase was this huge, fucking fraud?”

“Jim,” Ellen said, “you have to listen to me.”

“No, you have to listen. I don’t know why you keep defending this guy. I know he’s your boss, but now it’s looking like he’s a killer, too. If he didn’t kill the Langleys, then he sent those two to do it. And when he found out there was still a disc with that book on it, he sent them here to get it.”

“I gave him the disc,” Ellen said.

I looked at her. I couldn’t process what she’d said to me. “What?”

“The disc. The one you gave to Natalie Bondurant. I asked for it back from her today, I told her she didn’t have to worry about it anymore. And I gave it to Conrad. I met him at lunch.”

“I don’t understand. Why would you do such a thing? Why would you do that without talking to me about it first?”

“Jim, he’s not a killer. He’s an arrogant asshole, I’ll grant you that. But he’s not a killer. He couldn’t have sent those two men here tonight. He had no reason to. He has the disc.”

My head already hurt. Now it was getting much worse.

“This isn’t making any sense at all,” I said.

And then Ellen, who had been looking in the general direction of the back door, screamed.

I whirled around, saw the shadow of someone standing there. A man, a big man.

As he came into the light, I saw that it was Drew.

He opened the door. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. He looked at me. “I decided you were right. I came back. I’ll tell the police what happened.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

In another minute, we heard the sirens.

The ambulance was far too late for Mortie. Drew stood by the door to the shed, watching uncomfortably as the paramedics assessed Mortie’s condition. Once they’d determined he was, in fact, dead, they made no attempts to move him.

By the time Barry Duckworth arrived, there were half a dozen cop cars on the scene. I figured it wouldn’t be long before the TV news crews arrived. At least they wouldn’t have to ask for directions. It would be the second time in a week that they’d been to this part of Promise Falls.

Ellen put on a large pot of coffee. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to be the best host a crime scene ever had. She just needed to keep busy. I guessed it was a good thing that she’d already decided to pour out her booze.

Drew and I came back from watching the paramedics’ examination of Mortie, sat down at the kitchen table. Ellen was looking in the fridge and the freezer, trying to find any treats to put out. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Coffee’s good.”

“Bingo!” Ellen said. She pulled out, from the farthest reaches of the freezer, a frozen cake. It was like an archeological dis covery.

“It’s good you came back,” I said to Drew.

“We’ll see,” he said as Barry appeared in the doorway.

First, we gave him the Reader’s Digest version of what had transpired. When Barry understood that one of our attackers was still at large, he asked Drew, who’d chased the man and seen him get into his car, for a description of the vehicle. Something GM, he said. A Buick, or a Pontiac. Four doors, white. Some mud splattered around the wheel wells. Barry phoned it in so police throughout the Promise Falls area could be watching for it.

Barry took a seat at the kitchen table, accepted Ellen’s offer of coffee and a piece of frozen cake, and asked us to lay it out for him.

I told him my end of the story. The two men showing up, tying me up in the shed, taping my fingers to the hedge trimmer. Ellen told her half, about the dark-haired man bursting into the house, tying her to a chair and leaving her there. Then, later, bringing her out to the shed when I’d demanded to know that she was okay.

That brought us to Drew.

“Where do I know you from?” Barry asked, looking at him warily.

“I robbed a bank,” Drew said matter-of-factly.

“Son of a bitch, that’s who you are,” Barry said.

“Five years ago,” Drew added. “The one at Saratoga and Main.”

“That didn’t go very well,” Barry said.

“If by not going very well, you mean I got caught as I was walking out the door, yeah, that’s right. I spent a little too long in there, someone hit the silent alarm, and you guys were waiting for me when I walked out.”

Barry nodded. “I don’t know that you were cut out for that line of work.”

“No.”

“And you’re out now?”

“About six weeks,” he said. “Mr. Cutter here gave me a job cutting grass.”

“Well, isn’t that nice of him,” Barry said, glancing at me. “And what were you doing out here tonight?”

“I’d busted one of Mr. Cutter’s mowers and was dropping by to fix it before we started out for work again tomorrow.”

Barry looked at me for confirmation. I nodded.

Ellen and I both told Barry what happened after Drew arrived. How he’d seen the dark-haired one take Ellen from the house to the shed, then seen the predicament I was in. How, when Ellen managed to unplug the hedge trimmer, the one whose name I knew to be Mortie lunged for her, and then Drew came in and hit him with the shovel he’d taken from the back of my truck.

“He saved our lives, Barry,” I said.

“These guys,” Barry said, “you ever see either of them before?”

We explained that we’d only gotten a look at Mortie, and only since he’d been dead, but we didn’t know him. And neither Ellen nor I had any idea who the other guy was. “But he had a tattoo,” I said. “On his arm. A knife. And