Far From True

Fourteen

I saw no obvious signs of a break-in at the home of Adam and Miriam Chalmers, but clearly, if Lucy heard someone running out the back door as she was coming in, someone had been here.

I did a walk around the house, Lucy Brighton trailing behind me. The place was built onto the side of a gentle hill, with just enough of a slope at the back to allow for a basement walkout to a thirty-foot-long kidney-shaped pool. The sliding glass doors were locked, but only, Lucy explained, because she had secured the place after the incident.

A wooded area came to within about fifty feet of the house. It was a narrow strip of forest. On the other side were the backyards of houses from the next street over. Whoever’d been in Adam Chalmers’s house had probably parked over there.

There were no scratches on the front door lock. Lucy, using her own set of keys, let me in. There was the immediate beeping of an alarm system. Lucy entered a four-digit code into a keypad and the noise ceased.

“Did you get a call from the alarm company?” I asked. If someone had broken in and the security company was alerted, they’d probably have called Lucy when the Chalmerses could not be reached. People usually listed close relatives as backup contacts — or at least someone who lived nearby — in case there was trouble at home while they were away.

“No,” she said. “I got a visit from the police. They figured out how to find me through the alarm company. They saw the stickers in the window.”

“Stickers?”

“With the security company’s name on it.”

“Was the alarm engaged when they went to the movie last night?”

“I would imagine so,” she said.

“But you don’t know for certain.”

“No, but it wasn’t like my father to ever leave the house without setting the alarm. He was... he was aware of what people with bad intentions can do.”

“So if someone got in, they’d have to know the code, or the cops would be along shortly.”

“That’s right.”

“And they’d need a key, too.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anyone else your father, or his wife, entrusted with a key and the code?”

“No,” Lucy said. “But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone.”

Once we were in the front hall, she closed the door behind us.

I don’t know a lot about decorating. A visit to my apartment would confirm that. When I had a family, and a house, Donna was in charge of how it looked, and she did a nice job of it. But she never gave up trying to educate me when it came time to get a new couch or dining room table. I could distinguish between the arts and crafts style and eclectic, which is a bit like bragging that you could tell a cat from a mongoose. The Chalmers house looked to me like “contemporary.” The living room furniture, with sleek, clean lines, was in various shades of gray and taupe. Metal legs on the chairs, a coffee table set low to the floor, recent issues of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker fanned perfectly on top of it. The paintings on the wall were not so abstract that I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. One was a woman sitting before a mirror, fixing her hair. Another, a riderless horse running off the side of a cliff.

“What’s missing?” I asked.

Lucy hesitated. “Nothing that jumps out at me,” she said. “But it might be something I don’t even know about. That’s why I have to find out who got in here. Maybe when I know who it was, I’ll have an idea what they were after.”

“Were you here often enough to notice if there were a missing painting, or something else of value?”

She gave me a look. Maybe she took the question another way. Maybe she thought I was asking whether she was close with her father and his wife.

“I think so,” she said slowly.

“Did your father keep money in the house? Is there a safe?”

“Not that I know of. But there is an office.”

“Let’s start there.”

To get there, we traveled through the kitchen, which was straight out of one of those shows on the home-and-garden channel, and bigger than my entire apartment. A long kitchen with seven leather stools running down one side. High-end German appliances in brushed aluminum. A fridge that could have had a cow in it.

We went down a hall, passed a master bedroom. I poked my head in. A bed the size of Massachusetts, and still room to walk around it. At a glance, there was nothing out of place. No drawers yanked out, the bedcovers untouched. I saw a door to an en suite bathroom. I didn’t notice anything odd there, either.

The next room was clearly the office. Big desk, a large monitor and a keyboard, plus a laptop off to one side. Books, two mugs full of pens. A printer with no paper in the tray, an empty Staples wrapper that had once held 8½ x 11 sheets.

“My father was a writer,” Lucy said.

There were several enlarged reproductions of book covers framed on the wall. There was one for Scum of America, another called Hate on Wheels. Both featured biker imagery. And blood.

Then my eyes landed on a large, framed black-and-white photo. Five bearded bikers, arms over one another’s shoulders, Harleys in the background.

“Dad’s the one in the middle,” Lucy said.

I leaned in for a closer look. Hard to make out what he really looked like with all the facial hair and the kerchief tied around his forehead.

I looked at Lucy. “This house doesn’t look like a biker pad.”

“What’s a biker pad look like?”

I thought. “A bunker. Cinder blocks with bars at the window would be how I’d decorate.”

“My father’s biker days were over. It was years ago. He got out of that, started a new life.”

I glanced at the book covers. “But he wrote about it.”

She nodded. “And sold enough books to buy this place, and live a pretty decent life. Although there hasn’t been a book in a few years.”

“What was he into?” I asked, nodding at the photo. “Illegally, that is.”

“A lot,” Lucy said. “But it was a long time ago.” She shook her head, like she wanted to change the subject. “Anything look out of place here?”

“Not that I can see.”

I dropped myself into the chair behind the desk, surveyed the domain before me. Not a lot to see aside from the computer, cups of Sharpies, a few books. I moved the mouse to bring the screen to life. Nothing there but a view of Earth from space, a standard Apple background. The usual row of programs along the bottom.

There were drawers on each side. When I went to open one, Lucy said, “Should you do that?”

“Why? You think they’re booby-trapped?”

“No. I was thinking, if someone broke in to search this office, maybe there are fingerprints. Should you be — what do you call it? — dusting for prints first?”

“I’m not really equipped for that, Lucy. And even if I did look for prints, I don’t have access to a national database. You need the police for that, and—”

“The police are too busy. They’re not going to come out here and do anything, not when they’re trying to find out what happened at the drive-in.”

“That’s what I was about to say. The cops have limited resources, particularly in Promise Falls. And when all you have to tell them is you think someone was in the house, but can’t even tell them what’s missing, they’re not going to put much effort into this. So...” I opened the top drawer. Checkbooks, more pens, paper clips.

I went through all of them. Receipts, old tax returns, a few book review clippings. Nothing of interest. Of course, if there’d been something of interest that someone took, it wasn’t here to be seen. But nothing looked disrupted.

“Let’s keep looking around,” I said. “Check that basement walkout from the inside.”

Lucy led me to a curving staircase with a wrought-iron railing. It did a quarter circle on the way to the lower floor. Along the way I asked, “What about Miriam? Your father was a writer. What about her?”

“She tended to my father’s needs.” There was something in the way she said it that suggested more than the running of a household.

“And before that?”

“A photographer. Portraits. She met Dad when she was asked by his publisher for an updated author photo. They were reissuing a couple of his early books, and she came to the house to do the shoot and didn’t leave for a week.”

That hint of disapproval in her voice.

There was a five-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling bookcase at the bottom of the stairs. A lot of the books were oversized coffee-table-type volumes. I glanced at some of the spines, saw that many of them were about cinema. Books on Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock. Several tomes on the history of sex in the cinema. One called, quite simply, Filth in Film.

Lucy noticed me reading the spines of the books and said, “I don’t know how many times I asked Dad to put those where Crystal wouldn’t come across them, but he kept insisting she was still too young to care.”

“Crystal spent time here?”

“She loved her grandfather very much. I mean, she’s not a demonstrative child, but I could tell. Crystal loved him and he loved her. He was patient with her, with all her idiosyncrasies, which was kind of something, for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“My father, and Miriam even more so... they tended to view the world from their own perspective. If something didn’t bother Miriam, she couldn’t understand why it would bother anyone else. She’d be the person who played her music loud and couldn’t figure out why her neighbors wanted her to turn it down. Maybe, in some ways, they were perfect for each other. Classic hedonists.”

“Your father only cared about himself?”

“Mostly, although I think, in the case of his daughter and granddaughter, he was willing to make an exception.”

Ranch-style homes allow for bigger basements, and this place was no exception. I wandered off a few steps into a large room that contained a pool table, half a dozen pinball games lined up against one wall, a foosball game. Perhaps most impressive, at least to the kid in me, a slot car racetrack on a table about five by ten feet. It was completely scenicked, with hills and trees and buildings, even viewing stands filled with miniature people.

“Your dad liked to play,” I said.

“Yes,” Lucy Brighton said, still standing by the bookshelves. “He was a boy at heart.”

I examined the sliding glass doors that led out to the pool. Once the alarm had been deactivated, the intruder would have felt no hesitation about fleeing this way. But there was no security pad near the door, which told me whoever’d entered the house had done so through the front door.

“Cameras?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Dad didn’t have surveillance cameras.”

Too bad. I rejoined her by the bookcase near the base of the stairs. “I don’t know what to say, Lucy. Okay, someone was in the house. But we don’t know that anything was taken, and it’s not likely we’re going to find out, given that the only ones who’d be able to tell us are your father and his wife.”

“There must be something you can do,” she said.

I leaned, wearily, up against the bookcase. “About all I can do is—”

The bookcase moved.

“What the—”

It was only a fraction of an inch, but I felt the entire bookcase slide. At first, I thought maybe it was going to pitch forward, but then realized it had moved sideways. Which didn’t make much sense, given how weighted down it was with books.

“What happened?” Lucy asked.

“This bookcase...,” I said, examining it.

The right end of the case butted up against the wall. There was a vertical bulkhead there, hiding, presumably, some ductwork, or drains or pipes that connected to the first floor, above us.

I noticed a gap between the edge of the bookcase and the bulkhead. I worked the fingers of both hands in and gave a slight push to the left. The fake wall shifted an inch.

“How are you doing that?” Lucy asked.

“It’s on a track,” I said. “It doesn’t take much to move it. Is there a room back here or something?”

“Not that I know of,” she said. “Is it some kind of panic room?”

It didn’t strike me that anyone in Promise Falls would need a secret room to flee from home invaders. New York, maybe. Like in that Jodie Foster movie from years ago. But here? Then again, maybe someone with a biker past would have concerns and enemies the rest of us didn’t.

I pushed harder, moving the bookcase a good two and a half feet, at which point it came to a stop, revealing a floor-to-ceiling opening, and a room in darkness.

I felt around inside for a light switch, hit it.

The room was about fifteen feet square, dominated by a king-sized bed covered with a thick off-white satiny comforter and at least a dozen oversized pillows arranged by the headboard. The floor was carpeted in thick shag, also white, which provided quite a contrast to the red velvetlike wallpaper. A large flat-screen TV was mounted to the wall about four feet beyond the foot of the bed, a small black cabinet below. Undoubtedly the most arresting decorating touch was the six large, framed black-and-white photographs along three walls, all depicting naked men and women entwined with one another like they were auditioning for a remake of Caligula.

Scattered across the floor were half a dozen plastic DVD jewel cases. All open, all empty.

“I don’t think it’s a panic room,” I said.