Far From True

Eleven

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.”