Far From True (3 page)

DAVID
Harwood was asleep when he realized his cell phone was buzzing on the bedside table.

He’d muted it, as he always did before turning out the light. He didn’t want to wake his parents, who were on the other side of the wall. He wasn’t worried about waking his nine-year-old son, Ethan, who was impervious to alarm clocks. It was a kind of childhood superpower. But Don and Arlene Harwood were light sleepers, and David’s mother could become quite agitated by the sound of a phone ringing in the middle of the night.

That almost always meant bad news.

There had been more than enough of that lately. Just recently, Arlene’s sister, Agnes—David’s aunt—had died. Taken her own life, jumping off the bridge that spanned the waterfall from which Promise Falls took its name. Arlene had taken it pretty hard. Not just her sister’s death, but everything surrounding it.

Recent events had taken a toll on everyone. The Harwood family, Agnes’s husband, and, more than anyone else, their daughter, Marla.

As if all that hadn’t been enough, there was the fire. You can have one of those when someone leaves something on the burner and forgets about it.

The kitchen in David’s parents’ home was being rebuilt. There’d been a lot of water damage, too, particularly in the basement. If there’d been any good news, it was that the house hadn’t burned to the ground. In another month or so, Don and Arlene would be able to move back in.

But for now, David’s parents were living with Ethan and him, a complete reversal of the way things had recently been. After the fire, David, who now had a job and could afford to get a place of his own, found a house for rent a few blocks from his parents’ place.

He’d fallen into bed an hour ago, at half past ten. It had been a long day. Working for Randall Finley, helping that jackass with his political comeback, was not David’s idea of a dream job. But it was paying the bills, at least for now, and helping David earn back some of the self-respect he’d lost since his former employer, the
Promise Falls
Standard
, went under.

He’d pretty much found himself—and as a former newspaper writer he hated the cliché—between a rock and a hard place. He could ditch his principles and work for a man like Finley, or he could fail to be a provider to his son.

He’d placed his phone on the table, no more than two feet from his head, but he had not turned off the vibrating feature. So when the phone went off, it sent a reverberation through the wood disruptive enough to wake David.

He opened his eyes, rolled over in the bed, grabbed the phone. The screen was so bright it took his eyes a moment to adjust, but even half-blind, he could identify the caller.

“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. Up on one elbow, he put the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”

“You in bed?”

David looked at the clock radio. It was eleven thirty-five p.m.

“Of course I’m in bed, Randy. It’s nearly midnight.”

“Get up. Get dressed. We’ve got work to do.”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“David! This is serious. Come on. Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what? Randy, I’ve been in bed for an hour. What the hell’s going on?”

“You sure you actually worked in the newspaper business? The whole world’s going to shit around you and you haven’t got a fucking clue?”

“Just tell me.”

“The drive-in. You know, the Constellation?”

David sat up, dropping his legs over the edge of the bed. He turned on the lamp, blinked some more.

“Of course I know it.”

“The whole thing just blew up.”

“What?”

“I have to get out there. Help out, be a comfort to people.” The former mayor of Promise Falls paused. “Be seen. Get my picture taken.”

“Tell me what happened, exactly.”

“The fucking screen fell over. Onto cars. There’s people dead, David. You got your pants on yet?”

There was still newspaper ink running through David’s veins. He felt the adrenaline rush. He wanted to get out there, see what was going on, interview people. Record the event.

God, he hated that he didn’t have a paper to write for anymore.

What he did not want to do was be part of turning a human tragedy into a public relations stunt for Randall Finley.

“It’s wrong,” David said.

“What?”

“It’s wrong. Going out there to have your picture taken.”

“Christ, David, it’s not like I’m asking you to follow me around like a
60 Minutes
crew. You’ll be discreet. I have to tell you how to do your job? You blend into the background. I’m just helping
people—I don’t even know you’re there. Whaddya call ’em, candid shots? We’ll be able to use them later. We’re wasting time talkin’ about this. And did it occur to you that I might actually give a shit and want to help?”

It had not.

Finley didn’t wait for an answer. “Be out front of your place in three minutes.” He ended the call.

David pulled a pair of jeans on over his boxers, threw on a pullover shirt so he wouldn’t waste valuable time fiddling with buttons, jammed his feet, sockless, into a pair of sneakers. He could shoot pics and video with his phone, but thought he might need something better than that, so he grabbed a camera from the home office he was in the process of setting up across the hall from his bedroom.

Despite his best efforts to be quiet, the door to his parents’ bedroom opened. His mother stood there in her pajamas.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m heading out. Don’t know how long I’ll be. If I’m not here when you wake up, get Ethan off to school.”

From inside the bedroom, his father shouted, “What’s the ruckus?”

“Work,” David said.

“Finley expects you to go out at this hour?” his mother asked.

“Does he know it’s almost midnight?” Don asked, making no attempt to whisper.

“Don’t wake Ethan,” David said.

“Why’s that man calling you out in the middle of the night?” Arlene Harwood persisted. “That’s outrageous. Doesn’t the man realize you have a young son to look after and—”

“Mom!” David snapped. “Jesus! I’ll be back when I’m back.”

When he was living under his parents’ roof, he couldn’t wait to get Ethan and himself out of there. Now he had his own place, and nothing had changed. They made him feel like he was thirteen.

He raced down the stairs, caught a brief glimpse of himself in the front hall mirror. Hair sticking up at odd angles.

Finley’s Lincoln screeched to a stop out front of David’s house. David stepped out, made sure the door was locked behind him, and ran to the curb.

Finley had powered down the window. “Chop-chop,” he said.

David got in on the passenger side. The leather upholstery was cool, and the night air was cold on his bare ankles.

Finley glanced at David’s hair. “You didn’t have time to run a comb through that?”

“Go.”

“Is that a decent camera you’ve got there?” the former mayor asked. “I hope so. I don’t want some shitty phone shots. This is an opportunity too good to piss away.”

David, staring straight ahead through the windshield, could not bring himself to look at the man.

“Just go,” David said.

“All I can say is, good thing I’m not counting on you to keep me posted on current events,” Finley said. “Good thing I was up, heard the sirens.”

David said, “You don’t live anywhere near the Constellation.” And, for the first time, glanced over at the man.

“I got more ears than just my own,” Finley said. “I’ve had some fridge magnets made up. Got a box of them in the trunk.
Finley for Mayor
, they say. But I don’t know, might be bad form to hand them out at an accident scene.”

“You think?” David asked, wondering, not for the first time in recent months, how it had come to this.

IT
was the worst thing Detective Barry Duckworth had seen in twenty years of working for the Promise Falls police.

He’d arrived at the drive-in at 11:49 p.m., and by 12:31 a.m. he’d established a few basic facts.

The screen had come down about twenty minutes past eleven. It had fallen in the direction of the parking lot, and while scattered debris had hit several cars, two had been crushed. Although it was hard to look at it this way right now, later the thinking would be that it could have been a lot worse.

Given that the rear license plates were visible, Duckworth was able to determine quickly to whom the cars belonged. The first, an older-model Jaguar, had been registered to an Adam Chalmers, of Ridgewood Drive. The fire department had cleared off enough of the car to see that there were two casualties in the vehicle, a man and a woman.

Chalmers and his wife, Duckworth guessed.

The other car, a 2006 Mustang convertible, was registered jointly to a Floyd and Renata Gravelle, of Canterbury Street. One
of the firefighters had told Duckworth that it looked like two kids in the car. A boy and a girl, probably late teens.

Both dead. Heads crushed.

There were some nonfatal injuries. Bud Hillier, forty-two—whose three children, aged eight, eleven, and thirteen, were in the car with him—was resting his hands atop the steering wheel of his Taurus station wagon when a chunk of screen came through the glass and lopped off two of his fingers. Dolores Whitney, thirty-seven—who’d brought her daughter, Chloe, eight, to a drive-in for the first and, undoubtedly, last time—suffered four broken ribs when a large piece of wood pierced her windshield.

Compared with the people in the two convertibles in the first row, these folks had gotten off easy.

Arriving shortly after Duckworth was Angus Carlson, who’d recently been moved up from uniformed officer to detective status because the department was short of investigators. Duckworth hadn’t yet made his mind up about Carlson. The younger cop struck him as inexperienced and, at times, a bit of a jerk.

When Carlson spotted Duckworth, he went straight to him, took a quick glance at the scene, and asked, “So what movie was playing?
Crash
?
Flatliners
?
Good Luck Chuck
?”

Duckworth gave him the addresses he’d gotten from running the plates on the two cars. “Go to those houses, find out who the people in those cars likely are. See if you can do it without cracking any jokes.”

Carlson frowned. “Just breaking the tension.”

“Go.”

Lionel Grayson, who’d been identified as the owner and manager, was being treated by one of the paramedics. He gave every indication of being in mild shock, and had nearly passed out before Duckworth’s arrival.

“Mr. Grayson,” Duckworth said, “I need to ask you some questions.”

The man looked at Duckworth vacantly. “It was our last night.”

“I understand that, yes.”

“It was supposed to be a . . . celebration. Sad, too, but a night to remember all the wonderful times people had here . . .”

He looked away. Duckworth could see the dried trail of tears that had run down the man’s cheeks.

“How many?” the man asked.

“How many what?”

“How many are dead?” Grayson asked.

“It appears to be four, sir, although until all the debris is removed, we won’t know for sure. Someone might have been walking along there, but it’s two cars that were crushed. Do you have any idea how this happened?”

“Marsden,” he said. “He should be here soon. I called him.”

“Who’s Marsden?”

“Clifford Marsden. He owns Marsden Demolition.”

“Are you saying he did this? He blew up the screen?”

“He must have,” Grayson said. “But he mixed up the dates, or set the timer wrong, or something.”

“You hired him to demolish the screen?”

Grayson nodded.

“When was that supposed to happen?”

“In another week,” he said. “A week from today. I didn’t even think he’d planted the explosives yet. That’s crazy. Why would he put in the explosives a week early? Run the risk of something like this happening?”

“That’s something we’ll want to ask him.”

“He’s on his way. I tried to call him, but my hands were shaking. I couldn’t handle my phone. Someone did it for me. But he’s coming. When I get my hands on him, I . . . I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Why was the screen supposed to come down so soon after closing?”

“It was part of the deal.”

“What deal?”

“The sale,” Grayson said. “To Mancini Homes.”

“All this land has been sold?”

Grayson nodded. “The sale goes through in a month. Before then, I have to clear the property. The screen, the outbuildings, the fencing, it all has to come down. It was one of the conditions.”

“What’s happening with the land?”

Grayson shrugged. “Houses, I guess. I don’t know. It never really mattered to me. I got just under three mil for the land. I was going to go to Florida. With my wife. Retire. But now . . . how do I . . . this is so horrible.”

Duckworth put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “We’re going to find out what happened, okay? You just hang in.”

He noticed a big car snaking its way between fire engines and ambulances, then pulling over near the fence. Duckworth wondered whether this was Clifford Marsden. But when the driver opened the door, and the interior light went on, he saw that it was someone else.

Randall Finley.

Getting out of the passenger side was another man the detective recognized. David Harwood. Former reporter, now assistant to the former mayor. Camera in hand.

Finley had already spotted something that interested him. A black SUV, covered in dust, some small chunks of the movie screen decorating the roof and the hood. The tailgate was wide open, and a woman was tending to two small girls—neither more than ten years old—sitting with their legs dangling over the bumper. One of the girls was crying and the woman was trying to console her.

Duckworth said, “Excuse me, Mr. Grayson. I’ll be right back.”

Finley walked quickly to the SUV, then slowed his approach when he was nearly there.

“How are you folks doing?” he asked.

The woman glanced around. “Hello?”

“I just wanted to see if you were okay,” he said kindly. “Are these your daughters?”

The woman indicated the girl who was crying. “This is Kaylie. She’s my niece, and this is her friend Alicia. Are you with the police?”

“No, my name’s Randall Finley. What’s your name?”

The woman blinked. “Patricia. Patricia Henderson.”

“Hello, Patricia. And hi, Kaylie, Alicia. I need to know, are any of you hurt? Do you need any medical attention?”

“We’re . . . okay,” Patricia said. “Just shook-up. Some of that . . . stuff . . . fell onto the car. The girls—not just the girls, me too—were pretty scared when it happened.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Are you with the police?” Patricia asked again.

Finley shook his head. “No, like I said, my name is Randall Finley, and I’m just a concerned citizen, seeing if there’s anything I can do.”

“Didn’t you used to be mayor?” Patricia asked.

“That was some time ago,” he said, shrugging.

“Why is that man taking pictures?”

Finley glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t know. Could be the press, or someone who has to document the accident scene. Just someone doing his job. I wouldn’t worry about him. Is there anything I can get for you? Do you need some water? I have some bottled water in the trunk of my car. From my own company. Or maybe there’s someone you’d like me to call for you?”

“I’m not married,” the woman said. “I’m waiting around, in case I have to talk to the police or anyone about insurance matters. But I really want to get the girls home. This is all so horrible.”

Finley nodded sympathetically, moved in closer, bent over to smile at the girls, making sure he positioned himself so David could get a good shot. “Maybe Kaylie’s or Alicia’s parents could come get the girls, and then only you’d have to stay here. Would you like me to call them for—”

“Randy!”

Finley whirled around. “Why, Barry, hello. What a terrible thing that’s happened here. What do you know so far?”

Duckworth approached. “What are you doing here?”

“Lending support,” he said. “Pitching in where I can.”

“And what about him?” Duckworth asked, pointing to David Harwood. “What support is he lending?”

“Him?”

“Why’s he taking pictures?”

“Perhaps he’s back working for the press. Out of Albany.”

“He’s working for you.”

“Well, I suppose that’s true, but I certainly wouldn’t stand in Mr. Harwood’s way if he wanted to sell some photos to the media.”

“What’s going on?” Patricia asked.

Finley turned around and flashed her his most sincere smile. “Just working out with the detective here how best to help you folks deal with this tragic situation. If you’ll give me just a moment.”

“I don’t really need your help anyway,” the woman said.

“Well, then, why are you wasting my valuable time?” Finley asked her, turning back to face Duckworth before he had a chance to see the woman’s jaw drop.

“Let’s go talk over here,” Finley said, attempting to lead Duckworth away. But the detective wouldn’t move.

“You’re in the way,” Duckworth said. “I’ve got dead people up there. Injured people. I want you out of here now.”

“Barry, come on,” Finley said. “I’m just doing my job, same as you.”

“If I have to ask you again, you’ll be leaving here in handcuffs.”

Finley met the man’s gaze. “I’m someone you’d rather have as a friend than an enemy.”

“I’d rather have you on the side of a milk carton,” Duckworth said, not breaking eye contact.

It was Finley who finally looked away. “David!” he called out, loud enough for anyone nearby to hear him. “The last thing we want to do is get underfoot. Detective Duckworth, thank you for
your continued support. God bless you and all the wonderful emergency workers we have here in Promise Falls. I don’t know where we would be without you!”

And with that, he headed back to the Lincoln, taking David with him. Duckworth watched until they were both in the car and heading out of the lot.

“You goddamn son of a bitch!”

Duckworth turned. Lionel Grayson had tackled a man, brought him down to the ground, and was now pummeling him in the face.

Evidently the demolitions guy had arrived while Duckworth was dealing with Finley. Duckworth ran, grabbed Grayson around the shoulders, and pulled him off the other man.

“Mr. Grayson!” he shouted. “Mr. Grayson, please!”

But Grayson continued to struggle, pointing at the man on the ground. “You son of a bitch! You stupid bastard! You fucking—”

“I didn’t do it!” the man shouted back, struggling to his feet. “Listen to me! I’m telling you—”

“Over there!” Duckworth barked at Grayson. He made him stand alongside the ambulance and got himself between the two men. He asked the man who’d been taking the beating, “You Marsden?”

The man stood, brushed himself off. “I am.”

“You’re the one Mr. Grayson here hired to bring that screen down?”

Marsden nodded, caught his breath. “The screen, and everything else.”

“You think maybe you got a little ahead of yourself here?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” he said, pointing a finger at Grayson.

“What?” Duckworth asked.

“We haven’t done a damn thing here yet. Only thing we’ve done is signed the contract. My guys weren’t coming out for another few days. We haven’t planted so much as a firecracker out here.”