Far From True

Six

David Harwood was asleep when he realized his cell phone was buzzing on the bedside table.

He’d muted it, as he always did before turning out the light. He didn’t want to wake his parents, who were on the other side of the wall. He wasn’t worried about waking his nine-year-old son, Ethan, who was impervious to alarm clocks. It was a kind of childhood superpower. But Don and Arlene Harwood were light sleepers, and David’s mother could become quite agitated by the sound of a phone ringing in the middle of the night.

That almost always meant bad news.

There had been more than enough of that lately. Just recently, Arlene’s sister, Agnes — David’s aunt — had died. Taken her own life, jumping off the bridge that spanned the waterfall from which Promise Falls took its name. Arlene had taken it pretty hard. Not just her sister’s death, but everything surrounding it.

Recent events had taken a toll on everyone. The Harwood family, Agnes’s husband, and, more than anyone else, their daughter, Marla.

As if all that hadn’t been enough, there was the fire. You can have one of those when someone leaves something on the burner and forgets about it.

The kitchen in David’s parents’ home was being rebuilt. There’d been a lot of water damage, too, particularly in the basement. If there’d been any good news, it was that the house hadn’t burned to the ground. In another month or so, Don and Arlene would be able to move back in.

But for now, David’s parents were living with Ethan and him, a complete reversal of the way things had recently been. After the fire, David, who now had a job and could afford to get a place of his own, found a house for rent a few blocks from his parents’ place.

He’d fallen into bed an hour ago, at half past ten. It had been a long day. Working for Randall Finley, helping that jackass with his political comeback, was not David’s idea of a dream job. But it was paying the bills, at least for now, and helping David earn back some of the self-respect he’d lost since his former employer, the Promise Falls Standard, went under.

He’d pretty much found himself — and as a former newspaper writer he hated the cliché — between a rock and a hard place. He could ditch his principles and work for a man like Finley, or he could fail to be a provider to his son.

He’d placed his phone on the table, no more than two feet from his head, but he had not turned off the vibrating feature. So when the phone went off, it sent a reverberation through the wood disruptive enough to wake David.

He opened his eyes, rolled over in the bed, grabbed the phone. The screen was so bright it took his eyes a moment to adjust, but even half-blind, he could identify the caller.

“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. Up on one elbow, he put the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”

“You in bed?”

David looked at the clock radio. It was eleven thirty-five p.m.

“Of course I’m in bed, Randy. It’s nearly midnight.”

“Get up. Get dressed. We’ve got work to do.”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“David! This is serious. Come on. Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what? Randy, I’ve been in bed for an hour. What the hell’s going on?”

“You sure you actually worked in the newspaper business? The whole world’s going to shit around you and you haven’t got a fucking clue?”

“Just tell me.”

“The drive-in. You know, the Constellation?”

David sat up, dropping his legs over the edge of the bed. He turned on the lamp, blinked some more.

“Of course I know it.”

“The whole thing just blew up.”

“What?”

“I have to get out there. Help out, be a comfort to people.” The former mayor of Promise Falls paused. “Be seen. Get my picture taken.”

“Tell me what happened, exactly.”

“The fucking screen fell over. Onto cars. There’s people dead, David. You got your pants on yet?”

There was still newspaper ink running through David’s veins. He felt the adrenaline rush. He wanted to get out there, see what was going on, interview people. Record the event.

God, he hated that he didn’t have a paper to write for anymore.

What he did not want to do was be part of turning a human tragedy into a public relations stunt for Randall Finley.

“It’s wrong,” David said.

“What?”

“It’s wrong. Going out there to have your picture taken.”

“Christ, David, it’s not like I’m asking you to follow me around like a 60 Minutes crew. You’ll be discreet. I have to tell you how to do your job? You blend into the background. I’m just helping people — I don’t even know you’re there. Whaddya call ’em, candid shots? We’ll be able to use them later. We’re wasting time talkin’ about this. And did it occur to you that I might actually give a shit and want to help?”

It had not.

Finley didn’t wait for an answer. “Be out front of your place in three minutes.” He ended the call.

David pulled a pair of jeans on over his boxers, threw on a pullover shirt so he wouldn’t waste valuable time fiddling with buttons, jammed his feet, sockless, into a pair of sneakers. He could shoot pics and video with his phone, but thought he might need something better than that, so he grabbed a camera from the home office he was in the process of setting up across the hall from his bedroom.

Despite his best efforts to be quiet, the door to his parents’ bedroom opened. His mother stood there in her pajamas.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m heading out. Don’t know how long I’ll be. If I’m not here when you wake up, get Ethan off to school.”

From inside the bedroom, his father shouted, “What’s the ruckus?”

“Work,” David said.

“Finley expects you to go out at this hour?” his mother asked.

“Does he know it’s almost midnight?” Don asked, making no attempt to whisper.

“Don’t wake Ethan,” David said.

“Why’s that man calling you out in the middle of the night?” Arlene Harwood persisted. “That’s outrageous. Doesn’t the man realize you have a young son to look after and—”

“Mom!” David snapped. “Jesus! I’ll be back when I’m back.”

When he was living under his parents’ roof, he couldn’t wait to get Ethan and himself out of there. Now he had his own place, and nothing had changed. They made him feel like he was thirteen.

He raced down the stairs, caught a brief glimpse of himself in the front hall mirror. Hair sticking up at odd angles.

Finley’s Lincoln screeched to a stop out front of David’s house. David stepped out, made sure the door was locked behind him, and ran to the curb.

Finley had powered down the window. “Chop-chop,” he said.

David got in on the passenger side. The leather upholstery was cool, and the night air was cold on his bare ankles.

Finley glanced at David’s hair. “You didn’t have time to run a comb through that?”

“Go.”

“Is that a decent camera you’ve got there?” the former mayor asked. “I hope so. I don’t want some shitty phone shots. This is an opportunity too good to piss away.”

David, staring straight ahead through the windshield, could not bring himself to look at the man.

“Just go,” David said.

“All I can say is, good thing I’m not counting on you to keep me posted on current events,” Finley said. “Good thing I was up, heard the sirens.”

David said, “You don’t live anywhere near the Constellation.” And, for the first time, glanced over at the man.

“I got more ears than just my own,” Finley said. “I’ve had some fridge magnets made up. Got a box of them in the trunk. Finley for Mayor, they say. But I don’t know, might be bad form to hand them out at an accident scene.”

“You think?” David asked, wondering, not for the first time in recent months, how it had come to this.