Far From True (6 page)

Cal

I
agreed to meet Lucy Brighton at her father’s house within the hour.

Once Ed was back on his feet, and had blinked the soap powder out of his eyes, he stumbled out of the Laundromat. I’d moved my wet clothes into a dryer and had about thirty minutes to go, which I figured was enough time for him to send the police my way. But no officer from the Promise Falls department materialized by the time I’d folded my boxers, so I was guessing Ed—last name unknown—had decided not to press charges.

Just as well, because I really didn’t know how many friends I still had on the force.

I’d given Sam Worthington one of my business cards and said, “If he gives you any more trouble, call me. Or call the cops.”

She took the card but did not look at it. “Don’t get involved in my troubles,” she said, and went back to cleaning the machines.

Everyone expresses gratitude in his or her own way.

I walked back to my place, dropped off the laundry, and got into my Accord, which I kept parked around the back of the bookshop. Lucy Brighton had given me an address on Skelton Drive, which I remembered as a nice part of town. The house, a sprawling ranch with a two-car garage and a deep, well-tended front yard, enjoyed the shade of several stately oak trees that had probably gotten their start before Promise Falls had been incorporated.

Lucy Brighton had said she would wait for me in the driveway, and that was where I found her, alone, behind the wheel of a silver Buick. She got out of the car as I pulled in.

I stood an inch under six feet, and I recalled from when I’d met her before that she could look me straight in the eye through her wire-framed, oval glasses. Everything about her seemed vertical. She had straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders, a long, narrow nose, a light jacket that went down to midcalf, and perfectly creased black slacks.

Her brown eyes were largely red right now, and she took off her glasses briefly to dab them with the wadded tissue in her hand.

“Cal, thank you for coming.”

“I’m very sorry,” I said.

“This is the last thing I need to be dealing with. I’ve just come from the . . . the morgue, I guess they call it.” She put her hand briefly over her mouth, composing herself. “I had to identify my . . . it was horrible. I wanted to think there’d been a mistake, but it was him. It was my father. Someone else will have to identify Miriam. I’m not really next of kin. Her brother’s going to come up, from Providence. It was so . . . so . . . it doesn’t make any sense, for something like this to happen.”

“No,” I said.

“They were going to demolish the screen in another week,” she said. “Someone made a mistake. How could someone make a mistake like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of it.” I started to wonder whether this was the real reason she’d wanted
to speak with me. Did she want me looking into who was responsible for the drive-in disaster? If she did, she’d be wasting her money. The Promise Falls police would most likely be getting state and federal help. Homeland Security might even be sticking its nose in if they thought it was more than some screwup by a demolitions firm. Collectively, all those levels of investigation would do a better job than I could.

“I’m probably in some kind of shock,” Lucy Brighton said. “Like I’m walking around in a fog. Like none of this is happening. It
can’t
be happening.”

“You seem to be holding it together.”

“If this is holding it together, I’d hate to think what losing it’ll feel like. Because I guarantee you, that’s coming. I don’t know when they’re going to release him to the funeral home. There’s so much to arrange. People to phone, relatives who may want to fly in.”

I remembered that she was divorced. I wondered what kind of family support she had right now.

“Your ex-husband,” I said. “Is he coming?”

She laughed. “Yeah, right, Gerald. Mr. There-for-You.”

“I guess that’s a no.”

“He’s in San Francisco. I’ve called and told him, but he hasn’t got enough money to get a bus to L.A., let alone fly back here. And the truth is, I’m just as glad. It gets Crystal all agitated when he comes, and that’s the last thing she needs.”

Her daughter. Lucy had mentioned her before, but I’d never met her.

“Agitated how?”

“Crystal has this fantasy view of her father, that he’s not with us because he’s doing something even more important. Fighting aliens, saving whales, building some colossal shield that will stop global warming. She doesn’t want to consider that the reason he’s not with us, doesn’t come to visit his own daughter, is because he just doesn’t care. Not that she actually talks about how she feels or anything. But it all comes through in her drawings.”

“Drawings?”

Lucy waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t call you to bore you with my personal life.”

And then, suddenly, she put both hands over her mouth and turned away from me, her shoulders hunched and shaking. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say, not looking at me.

I rested a tentative hand on her shoulder, left it there for a good five seconds before taking it away. “It’s okay. You’re on overload. Anyone would be.”

She sniffed a couple of times, used the wadded tissue to wipe her nose. She half turned back toward me. “Crystal’s only eleven. It’d be hard enough to explain to any child that sometimes parents aren’t there for you. But to explain it to Crystal . . .”

“I don’t understand.”

Another sniff. “She’s just . . . not like other kids.” Lucy tucked the tissue into her purse, attempted to stand straighter. “It’s fine. Everything is fine. She’s staying with a friend right now while I deal with this. I didn’t want to bring her here, not after what’s happened.”

Lucy swallowed hard, lifted her chin. She was determined to get through this, whatever this was. I still had no real idea why we were here, in front of this house.

“Okay,” I said. “Suppose you tell me why you called.”

She focused on the house, looking at it with what almost seemed a sense of wonder. No, not wonder. More like trepidation. “Something’s not right here,” she said.

“You said you thought there was a break-in.”

“I think so.”

“You came out to the house this morning? After you heard your parents were killed at the drive-in?”

Lucy shot me a look. “Not my parents. My father, and his wife.”

“Adam Chalmers was your father, but Miriam . . .”

“His third wife,” Lucy said. “My mother died when I was in my teens. Then my father remarried, to Felicia, and that lasted six years before she left him, and then Miriam came along.”

“Were you close with her?”

“No,” Lucy said. “I suppose . . . I suppose I disapproved.”

“Why?”

She hesitated. “I don’t want to be that kind of person.”

“What kind of person?”

“The neighborhood priss-ass,” Lucy said.

Lucy Brighton had never struck me that way. From the first time I’d met her, she’d struck me as open-minded, nonjudgmental. She exuded a kind of athletic sexuality. I hadn’t asked, but would have guessed she was a onetime track star, or gymnast. She had the build for it. When nonprofessional thoughts crossed my mind, it occurred to me that she had the build for a number of things.

“I doubt you’re that kind of person.”

“It bothered me that Miriam was younger than I am,” she said.

“How old was she?”

“Thirty. I’m thirty-three, and my father is—
was
fifty-nine. Do you know how strange it is—how
weird
it is—to be three years older than a woman who goes around claiming she’s your stepmother?”

“I guess that’d be odd.”

“The only woman who was age appropriate for my father was my mother. They married when they were both twenty. Thirteen years later, she died, and within a year my father remarried.”

“To Felicia.”

Lucy nodded. “At least she was older than me, but only by five years. Nineteen years old. Anyone could have guessed that wasn’t going to work out, and six years later she left him. It took a while for the divorce to be finalized, and while that was going on, Dad went out with plenty of other women, and then he found Miriam three years ago. Twenty-nine years’ difference in their ages.”

I was doing some basic math in my head. Calculating the age difference between Lucy and myself. A decade, give or take.

“It happens,” I said.

“I know. And I should have been able to roll with it, but it embarrassed me, that my father wasn’t able to act his age. I think he made a fool of himself. That Miriam may have made a fool of him. That he . . .”

I waited.

“That he may have been drawn into things to try to prove to her, to prove to himself, that he was still a young man.”

“A man on the verge of sixty may be trying to prove something to himself, and to others. That he isn’t really old.”

But it was time to get back to why she’d called me here.

“Why do you think someone broke in?”

She took a deep breath. “When I heard about what had happened, when the police got in touch, I came over here. I didn’t know quite what else to do, but I also knew that sooner or later I was going to have to pick out clothes, for the funeral home, and then there’d be the whole matter of what to do with the house and . . .”

“And what?”

“When I stepped into the house, I heard the back door close. Someone was leaving as I was coming in.”

ANGUS
Carlson was managing on less than two hours’ sleep.

He hadn’t returned home until shortly after four in the morning. After leaving the drive-in, he’d gone first to the address registered to the crushed 2006 Mustang convertible. It belonged to Floyd and Renata Gravelle, of Canterbury Street, but it was highly unlikely it was Floyd or Renata in the car, given that the male and female victims appeared to be in their teens.

He had to ring the bell twice, leaning on it pretty hard the second time, to wake anyone. After a minute, he heard someone yell, “Coming!” Another minute after that, a man in his pajamas opened the front door, joined seconds later by a woman tying the sash of her robe.

Carlson apologized, identified himself, confirmed their identities, and asked whether they owned a Mustang convertible.

“Yes,” Renata said. “But it’s not here right now. Galen has it. That’s our son. Has there been—oh my God.”

“What’s happened?” Floyd asked.

“Do you know if your son was taking someone on a date with him tonight? To the drive-in?”

Floyd looked to his wife. She said, “He was taking Lisa. Lisa Kroft.”

“Would you have an address for Lisa, ma’am?”

“What’s happened?” the father asked again.

It did not go well. Nor did it go any better at the Kroft household. He felt wrung out by the time he’d been to those two houses. But he wasn’t done.

At the home of Adam Chalmers, he’d been unable to raise anyone. Which told him it was likely Chalmers and his wife lived here alone. Now the trick was going to be locating next of kin.

Carlson noticed a sticker in the window of the Chalmers home, indicating that it was protected by UNYSS. Upper New York State Security, a monitoring firm that covered a large area north and east of Albany. Carlson made a call to the twenty-four-hour line, identified himself, and explained that he was trying to find anyone related to Adam Chalmers. After conferring with a supervisor, the man on duty consulted their files and said there was a Lucy Brighton listed as a contact. If the alarm went off, and UNYSS could not reach Mr. Chalmers, the next call would be to Ms. Brighton. A phone number was provided, after some verbal arm-twisting, to Carlson.

You couldn’t phone someone in the middle of the night with this kind of news. You had to go to the door. So he Googled the number from his phone and came up with an address on Promise Falls’ south side. A split-level with a Buick sedan in the driveway.

Again, it took several rings of the doorbell to raise someone, but Lucy Brighton finally appeared, trailed by a sleepy-eyed young girl who just stood there but didn’t say anything. The child obeyed when the woman told her to go back upstairs to bed, her arms hanging straight down at her sides as she walked.

Weird kid.

Lucy Brighton’s cry of despair when he told her the news
brought her daughter back, although Ms. Brighton didn’t know she was standing there when she said, “Dad was telling me, just the other day, about the drive-in closing, about it having its last night, how he might go but hadn’t made up his mind. He’s a huge film buff, he’s written for the movies, and . . . I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it. There must be some mistake. What was the car?”

“A Jaguar. An old classic one, red. An E-Type, I think.” Carlson, who’d worked out of a cruiser for years, knew every kind of car out there, even the antiques.

Lucy Brighton put a hand on the wall to steady herself.

“Was the license plate AFV-5218?” the girl asked. Her mother turned, saw that her daughter had returned.

“Oh, Crystal.” She reached out an arm and pulled her daughter close.

“Uh,” said Carlson, glancing at his notes, “yes. That is the plate.” He looked at the girl. “You have a good memory.”

“Has something happened to Grandpa’s car?” To the police detective, Crystal said, “It’s an antique.”

“I’m afraid so,” Carlson said.

“I like that car.”

“I bet.”

“Sweetheart,” Lucy said, “I’m just trying to find out what—”

“Are they dead?”

Lucy hugged the child, patted her head. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

“I hope they’re not dead,” she said flatly, trying to free herself. “I’m supposed to go over there on Saturday when you go to the conference. I like to go over.” Crystal said to Carlson, “My grandpa has pinball games in his basement.”

“Is that so?” Carlson said.

“Miriam is nice to me. She isn’t my grandmother, but she’s nice to me.”

“Sweetheart, please go up to bed. I’ll come see you after the policeman leaves.”

“Okay.” Crystal made the trip back up the stairs.

“I just have a few more questions,” Carlson said. But he also had information to pass along, including where the bodies would be taken. In another ten minutes, he was out of there.

He headed home to get some sleep before reporting back to the station at eight. He entered the house as quietly as possible, but those damned hardwood floors gave him away every time. The boards creaked under his feet as he came inside.

“Angus?” The voice came from upstairs.

“Just me. Go back to sleep, Gale.”

A woman in her thirties appeared at the second-floor landing. She flipped on a light. She had short, streaked hair and wore a frayed housecoat. “This is way past the end of your shift.” Not an accusation, just a statement of fact.

“I would have called, but then I’d have just woken you up.”

“What’s going on?”

“There was a crazy thing. The screen at the drive-in fell over, killed some people.”

“Oh my God, how could that happen?”

He waved his hand tiredly, too weary to explain. “Who knows? Just go back to sleep.”

“I was awake anyway.”

“Still, you should—”

“I was thinking.”

“I gotta eat something,” he said, and went into the kitchen.

Gale descended the stairs, followed him, asked what he wanted. There was some leftover beef stew she could reheat in the microwave. Or, given that the clock was closer to breakfast than dinner, she could scramble him some eggs.

He opened the refrigerator, took out a beer. “This’ll do for now.”

“I was thinking that—”

“I’m really tired. Do we have to do this now?”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“I don’t?” he said before drawing on the bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Let me see if I can guess.” He opened a hamper in the fridge, took out some wrapped deli meat, put the package on the counter, and ripped it open. He grabbed a handful of thinly shaved Italian salami and shoved it into his mouth.

“You think we’re ready,” he said. “Your biological clock is ticking. If we’re ever going to do it, now is the time. Why should we wait? A child will make us a family.” He cocked his head at her. “How’m I doing?”

Her eyes were starting to swim.

“Thought so,” Carlson said.

“You’d be a wonderful father,” Gale said. “I know you would.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” he said, shoving another handful of meat into his mouth.

“You’re worried about me? That’s it? You’re saying I won’t be a good mother?”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said, although it came out much less clear than that with his mouth full of salami.

“That’s what you think.”

“No one has a kid thinking they’re going to be anything less than a great mother. A great parent. It’s after they have the kid they find out they’re no good at it.”

“I know we’d be good.”

Angus Carlson studied her. “No one knows anything for sure.”

“It doesn’t have to be the way it was for you,” she said, reaching out, touching his arm. “Just because your mother—”

He pulled away. “I’ve got to get some sleep. I have to be in early.”

•   •   •

He set his phone to wake him in two hours. Thirty minutes after that, he was at the station, expecting to head back out to the drive-in, but Duckworth had other ideas.

“Some bomb experts from the state are helping us at the site today. We’ve got plenty of uniformed officers interviewing witnesses, people who were there, who’d gone to see the movie. I want you out at Thackeray.”

Thackeray College?

“What do you want me out there for?” Carlson asked.

“The Mason Helt business,” Duckworth said.

Mason Helt, the Thackeray student who’d been shot dead by the college’s head of security. Helt had been killed after attacking Thackeray security guard Joyce Pilgrim, who’d been acting as a decoy, hoping to get the attention of whoever had grabbed and molested three female Thackeray students.

“What’s left to do?” Carlson said. “They got the guy.”

Duckworth said, “According to Ms. Pilgrim, before Helt died, he said something about being put up to this, like it was a gig, a hired performance. I want to know what the others have to say. If there was someone else involved, we need to know.”

“You think I’m not good enough to work the drive-in,” Carlson said.

Duckworth shot him a look, but sidestepped the accusation. “If that screen hadn’t fallen over last night, I’d be at Thackeray myself this morning asking questions.”

Carlson said, “Fine.”

Duckworth started to walk away, paused, turned back. “About Duncomb.”

“Duncomb?”

“Clive Duncomb. Their chief of security, who put the bullet into Helt. Former Boston PD. Thinks he’s John Wayne. Should have brought us in on this from the very beginning but chose to handle it himself. So far, he seems to have admin behind him, even though
Helt’s parents have filed a multimillion-dollar suit against the college. He wrote the book on how to be an asshole.”

“Okay,” Carlson said. A pause, then, “Thanks for the heads-up.”

The three students who’d been attacked—presumably all by Helt—were Denise Lambton, Erin Stotter, and Lorraine Plummer. None of them had seen the man’s face, but their descriptions of what he’d been wearing—a hoodie with the number 23 on the front—matched.

He had contact information for all three, but only one of them,Lorraine Plummer, was available for a face-to-face. This, it turned out, was the end of the semester, and most students had returned home. Erin Stotter had gone back to Danbury, Connecticut, and Denise Lambton had gone to Hawaii—a graduation present from her parents.

Lorraine, however, was staying, having signed up to take courses from May to August so she could obtain her degree more quickly. She agreed to meet with Carlson in the college’s main dining hall, an arena-sized room with a vaulted ceiling. There were only half a dozen students there when Carlson arrived. Lorraine was sitting near one corner, working on a small laptop, a paper cup of coffee next to it.

“Ms. Plummer?” he said.

“You’re the policeman?” said the student, who Carlson guessed wasn’t more than five feet tall, maybe 110 pounds wet. She wore her black hair to her shoulders and was dressed in a gray sweatshirt and jeans.

He offered a hand, which she took. “Carlson,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “Pretty empty in here today.”

“Most everyone’s gone, but they’re still keeping the cafeteria open with a skeleton staff,” she said. “Thank God, or I’d starve to death.”

“So you’re hanging in for the summer?”

She shrugged, made a face. “Yeah. I’m trying to fast-track my degree. Don’t want to be here for four solid years. Want to get on with my life, do something, you know? Try to get started on a career before having kids and stuff.”

“You have a boyfriend?”

She blushed. “No. I just think way ahead.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“So, you have questions? About the guy who grabbed me?”

He nodded. “I’m sure you’ve had to go over all this before, but it would help us if you could do it again.”

“But they got the guy, right? I mean, isn’t it over?”

“What we’re wondering is what Mason Helt—and we’ve no reason to think it wasn’t Helt who attacked you—might have said.”

“Okay, well, I was walking by the pond. You know, Thackeray Pond?”

“Yeah.” It was a small body of water at the college. Most pictures of Thackeray featured the pond with the stately buildings in the background reflected within in it. Students hung out by it, strolled and jogged around it.

“It’s real pretty there, although I’m totally freaked about even putting my toe into it. Some kid here put a baby alligator in there as a joke. I mean, it might be dead, but you never know. So I was walking around it at about ten. At night. No one else was out, which was kind of dumb of me—I realize that now. When I got close to some trees, all of a sudden this guy runs out and grabs me. I’m not very heavy, you know, and he puts his arms around me and lifts me right off my feet and takes me into the bushes. And I’m totally scared and ready to scream, and he puts his hand over my mouth and puts me down on the ground, and then he’s all, hey, don’t worry, it’s okay.”

“What’d he say, exactly?”

She paused, took a sip of her coffee. “I was kind of scared, you know? So it’s hard to remember exactly. But it was like, ‘I’m not
going to hurt you. I’m not going to do anything to you. But tell them what happened. Tell them to be afraid.’ Yeah, like that.”

“‘Tell them to be afraid’?”

Lorraine nodded.

“Tell who to be afraid?”

“Well, he didn’t exactly say. I guess he meant, tell everyone?”

“There were two other students,” Carlson said. “Erin Stotter and Denise Lambton.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know them, but not really well. But they told me he said kind of the same thing to them, too. But you probably know all of this, right? Mr. Duncomb—he’s the head campus-cop guy—would have told you right after it happened?”

Carlson knew, from what Duckworth had passed along, that all this information had come late to the Promise Falls police.

“What makes you think he would have done that?” he asked.

“Well, I told him I was going to call the police myself, but he said that wouldn’t be necessary, that he’d be calling them. And that he’d be passing along my statement, and if you needed more from me, you’d interview me.”

Carlson smiled. “He did, did he?”

Lorraine nodded.

“I figured he’d do it. Because I sort of already know him, and figured he’d be straight with me.”