Too Close to Home (10 page)

I was shaking my head, trying to understand. “Okay, so there’s a book or something in that computer. Why didn’t you mention it to Barry?”

“I don’t know. I guess because it was kind of embarrassing.”

“Why?”

Derek showed me the closest thing to a grin that I’d seen from him in a couple of days. “It’s pretty dirty.”

I leaned up against the workbench. “Jesus, Derek. So why would Adam’s dad be pissed that you found a computer with some porno on it? I mean, it’s not your fault what’s on somebody else’s computer, and besides, Albert didn’t strike me as someone who’d have a fit about that kind of thing.”

Derek shrugged. “I don’t know. Adam never said. I mean, it wasn’t even like it had pictures with it or anything. Maybe if it was really obvious porn, he might be upset, but when it’s all written out, it doesn’t seem like it’s that big a deal. The thing is, the book was actually pretty cool. Even though it was dirty, it was pretty well written.”

“So Agnes’s son wrote high-class porno,” I mused, raising an eyebrow. “Maybe he just wanted to write his own stuff to whack off to.”

Derek blushed. He couldn’t have been shocked to learn that his father might know about such things. But I suppose my frankness had taken him by surprise. It must have made it easier for him to say, “I don’t know. It was all about sex and stuff, but it was written like an actual novel, so it really wasn’t high-class jackoff stuff, if, you know, if you get what I mean.”

I smiled at him. “I get what you mean. But really, I can’t imagine that someone would come into the Langleys’ house and kill them all over some porn story that some kid wrote more than ten years ago. That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“That was kind of why I didn’t mention it,” Derek said. “I figured I’d look like some kind of idiot.”

“And something else might have happened to that computer between the time you last saw it,” I said, “and the time the Langleys were killed.”

“I suppose.”

“Well,” I said, coming off the workbench, “since there’s no computer there now, there’s no way to read the story, or guess whether there was anything in it that would make somebody want to kill three people.”

Derek looked at the floor. “That’s not exactly true,” he said.

I waited for him to continue. “What?” I said.

“I kind of made a copy.”

TEN

D
EREK SAID HE HAD A COPY of the entire book on a floppy disc, instead of a CD, up in his bedroom. The computer was so old, he said, it didn’t have a CD-ROM drive. This was all supposed to mean something to me, evidently. This certainly wasn’t like when I was a kid, where you had to wait for someone else to finish a book before you could start it. He and Adam were reading this thing at the same time, and comparing notes the next day.

I suggested we go up to his room so I could read some of it on his screen, but Derek didn’t care much for that idea.

“Then Mom’s going to know,” he said.

“Is that a problem?” I asked him.

He looked uncomfortable. “The book’s all about, like . . . pussies. You know. Vaginas?”

I stared at him. “I’m aware,” I said. I poked the inside of my cheek with my tongue for a moment, then said, “Go up to your room, print off the first ten pages or so for me and bring them back, and if your mom asks what you’re up to, tell her you’re on the Lawn-Boy website or something printing off tips on how to fix the mower. And bring the disc, too.”

Derek ran off, kicking up gravel with his sneakers once he was out of the shed.

His departure gave me a moment to think. It didn’t seem even remotely possible that the Langleys could have been killed over something that was on some student’s ten-year-old computer. I was almost glad Derek hadn’t bothered to mention it to Barry. It seemed too out there.

But even if you accepted the premise that the computer did have something to do with their deaths, which struck me as pretty unlikely, how the hell would anyone know it was there? Okay, it sounded as though, at some point, shortly before someone killed the Langleys, Adam’s father learned about it, maybe even what was on it. But why would he have become quite so upset? Albert had never struck me as a prude. I could remember once, at a barbecue, Albert telling me dirty jokes.

Were Albert to learn his son had uncovered an aspiring—and now deceased—author’s dirty book on an old computer, did it make any sense for him to have cared? And even if he had, how could learning about the novel’s existence have triggered a series of events that culminated with someone killing him and his family?

That didn’t make any sense at all.

So I thought about it some more, that if you still accepted the premise that the missing computer had something to do with the murders, but ruled out Albert’s involvement as having anything to do with them, where did that leave you?

How would anyone have even known Adam had the computer? After all, it hadn’t even been given to him in the first place. Agnes Stockwell had given it to my son, who in turn had shared his discovery with Adam. So if someone had learned from Agnes, say, what had happened to the computer, they wouldn’t have even been looking for it at the Langley house in the first place, but then again—

“Got it!” Derek said, breathless, running back into the shed, clutching some pages fresh from his printer. He handed them to me.

“I think that’s the whole first chapter,” he said. “Seven pages. You’ll see, when you get into it, why it’s not really your basic porn story, you know? It’s, like, Agnes’s son, what was his name again?”

“Brett,” I said.

“Yeah, Brett. It was like he was trying to take a porn novel or something, but make fun of it. Like, whaddya call it, like satire or something. Like a send-up. Or maybe even like—you remember that stupid movie you showed me one time, when I was little, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator guy, he gets pregnant?
Junior,
that’s what it was called.”

I held up my hand for Derek to stop. I riffled through the pages quickly. Seven, like he’d said. Double-spaced, medium-sized paragraphs. No title page, nothing in the headers of each page with a title or the author’s name. Just a page number, tucked in the upper right corner.

I sat on the stool by the workbench and held the sheaf of papers in my hands and started to read.

My eyebrows went up. “You see?” Derek said, able to tell where I was in the story.

“It’s kind of different. But go on.”

I went on:

I looked up from the pages.

Derek said, “Pretty warped, right? So he finds out that somehow, in the middle of the night, like magic or something, he loses his, you know, his dick, and instead, he’s got a vagina.”

I glanced through the remaining pages, then set them on the workbench.

“You’re not going to read all of it?” Derek said.

“I’ve got the general idea,” I said.

“Because it does get better. Even though it’s weird, in a way, he makes it believable, all the shit that’s happening.”

“I’ve read enough,” I said.

“It’s actually more funny than porno, you know? It’s like how his life completely changes when he’s got, like, no dick anymore. How he starts to see life from the point of view of a woman, how the only way he’s going to be sexually satisfied is to make out with guys, even though he’s not gay or anything, and shit, you can see why I didn’t want to talk about this with Mom around.”

“Sure,” I said, not really listening all that closely to what Derek was saying.

“I can go print out more of it if you want, or I could just make a copy of it and e-mail it to you and you could read it on your own computer, although maybe that’s not a good idea because then Mom will see it and she might freak out or something, right?”

“You don’t have to do any of that,” I said. “I’ve already read this book.”

ELEVEN

I
T WAS NOT ACTUALLY PUBLISHED as
Nicholas Dickless.
It was released as
A Missing Part.
It was a major bestseller about eight years ago. Hit the
New York Times
list. It didn’t hurt in the slightest that some of the major non-bookstore chains, like Costco and Wal-Mart, refused to carry it out of fear of offending their more conservative customers. It was the best thing that could happen to
A Missing Part.
Once it got labeled as forbidden, Borders and Barnes & Noble and independent bookstores could barely keep it in stock.

I don’t know how many copies it actually sold. A hundred thousand, half a million, a million, did it really matter after a certain point? There was talk at one point of making it into a movie, but that never happened. If it had, I think I would have waited for the DVD. Actually, reading the book was enough, and I hadn’t particularly wanted to do that. But I couldn’t stop myself. I thought maybe reading it would provide some insights into the author, would help me understand why my wife had chosen to sleep with him. But I have to say, once I’d finished it, I was none the wiser.

What I do know is that the book made Conrad Chase a literary star. It catapulted the Thackeray College English professor to national fame and paved the way for him to become that institution’s president. It’s unlikely a guy could write a book like
A Missing Part
and be made principal of an elementary school, but a college with a fairly left-of-center point of view was a different thing altogether. Granted, someone who’d written a book about a man losing his penis and testicles and ending up with a vagina instead, if he was going to become a college president, you might have at least expected it to be a college in California, and not upstate New York.

But Conrad Chase had brought fame not only upon himself, but Thackeray as well. And while at first the college administration and fellow faculty had responded uncomfortably to Chase’s outrageous novel and were inclined to distance themselves from it, as it soared up the bestseller list, and as critics embraced it as a work of satirical genius and brilliant social commentary, the general feeling on campus was, what the hell, let’s see how we can use this to our advantage.

Chase, who taught early American literature and a course on the plays of Eugene O’Neill, became the college darling. Thackeray had never had a bestselling author before. Chase wasn’t the first professor to get published—everyone who taught there felt tremendous pressure to publish something, at some point, during their careers, even if no one would ever actually read it, which was generally the fate of most of the academic treatises that Thackeray professors produced. He wasn’t the first to publish a work of fiction, but he was the first to receive international recognition.

The administration decided to use Chase’s notoriety to fashion a new reputation for the college. They had already been running a literary festival for a couple of years that they wanted to continue as an annual event. It’s why they had hired Ellen. Now they had their own headliner in Conrad Chase. It made it easier to attract famous authors to Promise Falls. And that’s what the college had been doing for several years, running the thing over four days, setting up lots of different venues where authors could read or talk about their works, bringing in the public. They got Mayor Finley on board, who saw this not only as a way to get Promise Falls more recognition, but also as a way to give his profile a boost.

But Conrad was still a fairly anonymous professor when Ellen was hired to help set up that literary festival.

We’d been living in Albany. Ellen had been working for a company that planned and organized major events. They did concerts, corporate functions, speaking series. When Thackeray started advertising for someone full-time to look after an annual literary event, Ellen applied and, to her own amazement, got the job. I was working for an Albany security firm at the time, going through, to be honest, a bit of depression because I wasn’t getting anywhere with my art.

It was something I was struggling to come to terms with. As a young adult with no parents, I’d managed to scrape up enough money to attend a single year of art college, and I’d tell myself I’d be the one to beat the odds, the one in a hundred who could actually make a living with his talent. I’d had a buddy that year, Teddy, a brilliant sculptor who could find a leopard hiding in a block of wood, and I figured if any graduate would make it, it’d be him. A few years later I ran into him driving a truck weighed down with hot asphalt.

We grabbed a beer, the smell of tar sticking to him, and I got around to asking him about the dreams he’d had in college.

“They got overtaken by fucking life, man,” he said.

I knew the feeling. How else to explain working for a security firm that was sucking a little bit more of life out of me every day? So when Ellen was offered her job in Promise Falls, I had no qualms walking away from mine and looking for something else. Even another job that had no meaning would at least be a change.

On top of all that, Derek was seven and not having the greatest time in elementary school. Didn’t pay attention, the teacher said. Wouldn’t focus on his studies, she said. Wouldn’t settle down, she said.

We chose to do what a lot of parents do. We blamed the teacher. Maybe it even was her fault, who knows. So we figured a move to Promise Falls would be a new start for all of us. Ellen would begin her new, terrific job, I’d find something better, and Derek would start afresh in a new school.

So we bought a place a couple of miles south of Promise Falls, a modest but charming two-story tucked down a lane, just beyond the Langley house. Ellen started her new job. Derek started with a clean slate at a new school, where his teacher, in about a month, asked us in for an interview to discuss the problems Derek was having paying attention, focusing on his studies, and settling down.

I found work at another security firm, spent my evenings and weekends painting, even persuaded a gallery in town to put together a show of my work. Did the whole wine-and-cheese-party thing, invited everyone we could think of, sold one painting, a small one that went for under a hundred bucks, to a friend. Ellen tried to keep my spirits up, insisted I had talent, told me stories she’d heard about great writers who’d taken a long time to be recognized. None of that helped. I fell into a deep funk that lasted several months. Ellen, either discouraged or fed up, or a bit of both, gave up trying to boost my spirits. I think Ellen had been attracted to me in the first place because I was an artist, and as I seemed to be giving up on it, I wondered if there was a part of her that was giving up on me.

I quickly came to hate my new security job. No surprise there. So when I saw an ad in the
Standard
that the mayor’s office was looking for a driver, I thought, what the hell, why not apply. Ellen ended up working very closely with Conrad to get the first festival organized. He’d offered to be an adviser for the event, given his background in English literature, particularly as practiced by those who were still alive and could accept invitations. This was a heady experience for Ellen, working with someone as charismatic and sophisticated as Conrad, and this was even a couple of years before he ended up on the cover of
Newsweek,
when it did a story on a new crop of writers who were supposedly pushing the envelope. As it turned out, Conrad mostly wanted to push himself onto Ellen, and maybe, if I had been more attentive at the time, hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own problems, dragged down by not being able to make a career through my own creative outlets, he wouldn’t have been successful.

It didn’t last long. I don’t even know whether you could call it an out-and-out affair. A misstep, perhaps, on Ellen’s part. Getting caught up in the moment. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, and it doesn’t mean I didn’t think about responding in ways that would only have made the situation worse.

But it was nearly ten years ago, and the whole thing was, for the most part, behind us. It was a rough patch, I’m not glossing it over. For a while there, Ellen tried to assuage her guilt with drink. I don’t think she was ever a bona fide alcoholic, but she certainly was in a fog for several months there, and how she managed to do her job during that time, I have no idea. It was as though a small, slow-moving hurricane had settled on our house for several months. The turbulence was always there, but then Ellen, on her own, came to some kind of inner realization that she could not continue on the way she was going, and she stopped drinking. Just like that. That’s one thing I have to say about Ellen. When she decides it’s time to pull herself together, she does it. I remember, when her mother died, she was torn up pretty bad for a couple of weeks there, then one morning got up and said aloud, “Time to move on.”

But sometimes, while you were waiting for that moment, it could be a rough ride.

Once the storm had passed, and Ellen and I had found a way to forgive each other, life improved. We were both smart enough to know that what we had together was too good to throw away. We had a son. We weren’t going to ruin Derek’s life by splitting up.

Ellen still had regular dealings with Conrad Chase after the affair, but those became less of a worry once his 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.”