Far From True

Thirty-three

Once I was done talking to the police about Ed Noble’s visit to the Laundromat that morning, I called Lucy Brighton and said I wanted to update her. She invited me to come to her house at eight.

On the way, I had the radio tuned to a local phone-in show.

“Who says we couldn’t be a target of terrorists?” asked the bombastic host. “Are we too insignificant up here? A couple of hours away from New York? Is that what we’re foolish enough to think? Let me tell you something, my friend. You want to strike fear into the hearts of Americans? Then go to the heart of America. The big cities are the obvious targets. But why not Promise Falls? Why not — I don’t know — Lee, Massachusetts? Saratoga Springs? Middlebury, Vermont? Duluth? Make Americans feel unsafe wherever they happen to be. That’s what those Islamist fanatics are thinking, and you can be damn sure blowing up a drive-in theater is totally their kind of style. Let’s go to the phones. Go ahead, Dudley.”

Dudley?

“Yeah, I think we need to be looking very closely at our neighbors, because these people, what they do is, they hide amongst us.”

“No kidding, my friend, no kidding. And now we’ve got Mr. Twenty-three out there trying to scare us half to death, according to the brilliant cops in Promise Falls. Well, I’m telling you right now, I don’t scare easy. Your shtick with twenty-three might work on some people, but it won’t work on me.”

Mr. Twenty-three? What the hell was that about?

I decided it was something I didn’t need to know right now, and turned off the radio. When I rang the bell at the Brighton house, a young girl answered the door. I remembered Lucy telling me her daughter was eleven.

She was holding a clipboard in one hand, several sheets of paper held down by the metal arm. In the fingers of her other hand, an uncapped, fine-point Sharpie pen. She had straight brown hair that fell below her ears, and bangs across her forehead. She reminded me of the Peanuts character Marcie, minus the glasses.

If she’d been Peppermint Patty, she probably would have offered some kind of greeting.

Crystal offered none. She stared at me.

“Hi,” I said. “You must be Crystal.”

Crystal said nothing.

“My name is Mr. Weaver. I think your mom’s expecting me.”

She turned and shouted: “Mom!”

So, she could speak. She fixed her gaze on me again. I pointed to the clipboard.

“What are you working on?”

Crystal turned the clipboard so I could see it. She had divided the page into six squares, and filled each of them with crudely drawn characters and word bubbles.

“A comic book,” I said.

“No.”

“Sorry, I thought, with the panels, that it looked like a—”

“It’s a graphic novel,” she said. She flipped ahead through the pages. Dozens of them, all drawn in a similar style to the top one. Some of the pages were just scraps; a few were construction paper in red and green. On every one, more squares, more drawings. While the people were simply drawn, I understood what they were about. She’d managed to capture hand gestures and expressions, which seemed odd, given that, so far, Crystal seemed to have very few of her own.

I pointed to one of the panels. “Is that a car?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like a sports car.”

“It’s a Jaguar. My grandfather has one. But it’s flat now. Something big fell on it.”

Suddenly, Lucy was there.

“Sorry!” she said to me, pushing her daughter to one side. “Go on in, sweetheart.” The child withdrew. “I was downstairs putting something into the dryer and didn’t even hear the bell.”

“It’s okay. It gave me a chance to meet Crystal.”

Lucy made a smile that was more a grimace. “If she seemed rude—”

“She wasn’t.”

“If she seemed rude,” Lucy pressed on, “she doesn’t mean to be.”

“She was showing me her graphic novel. I made the mistake of calling it a comic book.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,” Lucy said. She led me into the living room, where she’d already put out cups, a plate of cheese and crackers, and a carafe of coffee.

“Whoa,” I said.

“It’s no bother.”

“I like Crystal’s drawing style. Kind of minimalist, but you can tell what’s going on, what people are thinking.”

Lucy smiled, shook her head. “That child. She’s drawing all the time, on any shred of paper she can get her hands on. The other day I’d run out of checks and found out she’d been turning the backs of them into four-panel strips. The perfect size, she said. I try not to get mad, but—”

“She’s a talented kid.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes talent and trouble go hand in hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve just met her, but you can see she lacks certain social graces. She’s challenged that way. Doesn’t quite know how to act. Sometimes” — and almost instantly Lucy began to tear up — “other kids... they can be so cruel to her. She’s the oddball, you know?”

“Sure,” I said. “My son, Scott, was kind of like that.”

“Was he diagnosed?”

“Diagnosed?”

“Did they figure out what was wrong with him?”

“It wasn’t quite like that. He just had different interests than other kids. He didn’t fit into the mainstream.”

“So it wasn’t anything like Asperger’s?”

“Is that what Crystal has?”

“I don’t even know. Her GP thinks maybe. She has some of the checkmarks. Poor social communication, repetitive behavior. And this obsession with drawing, doing her doodles on everything. I couldn’t find one of my reports the other day, found Crystal had done ‘The Adventures of Lizardman’ on the backs of the pages.”

“Years from now, she’ll be making a million a year drawing for Marvel,” I offered.

“Yeah, well, I could use some of that cash now. There’s a place I’d like to take her, where they’d test her, and then there’s a school that would be better suited to her needs, where they’d find a way to draw her out, even let her do more of this stuff she’s so good at. But I don’t exactly get paid a fortune. I’d talked to my father about it, whether he could, you know, help out. He said he would think about it...”

“And now...”

“Yeah, and now. Crystal has always been kind of like this, but I think it got worse when her father left us. She needed a male figure in her life. I think that’s why she liked spending time around my dad. She was good with him.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Well, enough about all this,” Lucy said, and then lowered her voice to a whisper. “I take it you called because you’ve found out something? Do you have the discs?”

I reached for a cracker, put a slice of cheese on it. It occurred to me I hadn’t eaten anything for hours.

“I don’t have the discs.”

“But do you know who took them?”

“You know a Clive Duncomb?”

She shook her head. “You mentioned him before, when you were looking up contacts at my father’s house.”

“Yeah. He works at Thackeray. Heads up security there. He and your father — he and his wife were friends with your dad and Miriam.”

Lucy repeated the name. “I know a few people out at Thackeray, given what I do. But the people I know are more in the academic end of things and—”

Lucy stopped herself.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know what the name was, but my father mentioned, I’m pretty sure, that he knew someone at the college who’d given him tips for when he was writing about the police. But this man wasn’t a security guard or anything. He was a policeman, or used to be.”

“That could be Duncomb,” I said. “He’s an ex-cop. Did he say much else about him?”

“I was over there once, and he happened to say something about having this ex-cop, and his wife, and another couple over for dinner. And maybe even a student from Thackeray who wanted to know what it was like to be a writer. I’d dropped by in the afternoon and Miriam already had the table set and everything.”

“Did he say who the other couple was?”

Lucy shook her head.

“What are you thinking?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. I mean, I think we have a pretty good idea what’s on those DVDs. I had it confirmed for me by your father’s ex-wife, Felicia.” I grimaced. “She hadn’t heard about what happened at the drive-in. I ended up being the one to break it to her.”

“Oh, God, that must have been awful. For her, and for you. You don’t think she was faking, do you? That she already knew but was pretending not to?”

I thought about that. “It seemed legit.” I smiled. “But I’ve been fooled by women before.”

That brought a smile to Lucy’s face, too. “So, if she really didn’t know, there wouldn’t be any urgency on her part to break into my father’s house.”

I nodded. “Anyway, she says that when she and your father split, he gave her any discs that featured her. She destroyed them herself.”

“Unless there were copies.”

“There’s that,” I said. “Sometimes I have nothing to go on but my gut, and my gut says she didn’t do it. But I feel differently about Clive Duncomb.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He acts like he’s head of the FBI instead of security chief at a small college. But when I brought up that something was taken from the house, he didn’t even ask me what it was.”

She let that sink in. “He already knew.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Also, he’s the kind of guy your father might have trusted with a key and the code. Being an ex-cop and all.”

“You’re saying my father, and Miriam, maybe they were having sex with this Duncomb man and his wife? And recording it?”

This had to be uncomfortable for her. It wasn’t exactly comfortable for me, discussing her father’s colorful sex life.

“Maybe,” I said. “One thing I’ve learned over the years is you simply don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. And I’m not just talking about sex. Husbands and wives, parents and their children, they treat each other differently in the privacy of their homes than they do when they’re in public.”

“I got a taste of that when I was in the classroom. The things small children would say to you. Things like, ‘My mom can’t volunteer for the school trip because my daddy pushed her down the stairs.’ And they’d say it so innocently.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

“It’s all so ridiculously sordid. Maybe that’s not the word. I don’t care if people want to fool around or wife-swap or whatever. It’s a free country. I’m not like the Taliban — or somebody’s church for that matter — wanting to tell everybody how to live. But when it’s your own father... it’s embarrassing.”

“Sure.”

She went to take a bite of a cracker, then put it back on the plate. No appetite.

“I just need to know who it was. If it’s this Duncomb man, maybe I can make a personal appeal to him. Not even accuse him of anything, but just say, ‘Look, if you have those discs, please don’t ever make them public. Please destroy them.’”

I didn’t know whether that was a good idea, but said, “If he took them, and he took them to protect his own reputation, it strikes me as unlikely that he’s going to post them online, if you know what I mean.” I glanced up the stairs. “I’d say the chances of Crystal stumbling onto videos starring her grandfather are pretty unlikely.”

“Oh, God, the very thought.”

I ate another cracker with cheese, poured myself some coffee from the carafe.

“Oh, I should have done that,” Lucy said apologetically.

I took a sip, told her it was good. “You have to decide whether you want me to pursue this any further. I want to have one more look around your father’s house — you’ve hired my services for the whole day — and see if I come across anything else of interest, maybe take a closer look at his e-mails, but I don’t know how much further I can take this.”

Lucy considered. “Maybe another day or two?” She made it sound like she was asking for another sliver of cake. I sensed that she wanted a reason for me to come back here tomorrow, and the day after that.

“Why don’t I see what I learn tonight, and then we can make a decision?” I said.

“That sounds good. I can’t leave Crystal, so you’ll have to go to the house by yourself. I can give you one of my spare keys for the house, and the code is two-six-six-nine. Do you want me to write it down?”

“I can remember.”

We both stood, almost uncomfortably close. A kind of electricity seemed to be passing between us.

The phone rang.

“Just a second,” she said, detouring back into the kitchen.

“Hello?” I heard her say. “Oh, Martin. Martin, I’m so sorry.”

I poked my head into the kitchen.

“Hang on just one second,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and looked my way. “It’s Miriam’s brother. Martin Kilmer. He’s driving up from Providence.”

I raised my hand, a mini-wave. “I’ll be in touch,” I said softly, let myself out.

As I got into the car, I noticed something on the passenger seat. Several pieces of paper, stapled together.

I kept the door open to keep the dome light on and picked up the document. The cover page featured a drawing of a little girl walking through a forest at night. It was titled “Noises in the Night by Crystal Brighton.”

There was a yellow sticker attached that read: “NOT a comic book.”

I looked back at the house, to a second-floor window, presumably Crystal’s bedroom. She was silhouetted against the light, watching me.