Too Close to Home

There’s certainly no church to get up and dressed for. I’m not a big fan of organized religion. Ellen’s parents raised her as a Presbyterian, but sometime in her late teens she simply didn’t buy it anymore and couldn’t be persuaded to go. I was never sure whether being a lapsed Presbyterian was that big a deal. It wasn’t like being a lapsed Catholic. My parents, on the other hand, had raised me to be nothing, other than a decent, I hoped, and responsible individual who could figure out what was the right and moral thing to do in any given situation, and then do it.

My track record in that regard, however, had not always been exemplary. Working for as long as I did for Mayor Finley is a case in point.

While for Derek, a standard sleep-in means getting up in time for supper, for me and Ellen, it’s somewhere between eight and nine in the morning. But this was hardly a typical Sunday morning, not even twenty-four hours since we’d learned about the Langleys.

And even though our scare in the night-Derek’s rendezvous with Penny-had turned out to be nothing, it took us a long time to get back to sleep after that. Around six, lying on my side and staring at the clock radio’s digital display, I sensed Ellen was awake as well. We had our backs to each other, and no one was moving, but there’s a way she breathes when she’s sleeping, deeper, that I wasn’t hearing, so I reached over and lightly touched her back.

“Hey,” I said.

Ellen turned over without saying anything, looked into my eyes without so much as a smile, then reached out and pulled me close to her, pressing her body up against mine. I responded as she knew I would, and she rolled me on top of her. We engaged in an act of wordless lovemaking that was born not out of any kind of sexual frenzy, but a need to reassure ourselves that we were still alive, that we had each other, that we could connect in this most intimate of ways, aware that at any moment, without any warning whatsoever, it could all end.

Ellen was putting a plate of French toast in front of me when she looked out the window and said, “Barry’s coming around the side of the house.”

A moment later, Barry Duckworth was on the deck, rapping lightly at the back door. It was nearly eight in the morning by now, and Ellen and I had been up a couple of hours but only just now gotten to breakfast.

I stayed in my seat at the kitchen table while Ellen opened the screen door. “Hi, Barry,” she said.

Barry nodded, almost apologetically. “Sorry to disturb you folks so early,” he said.

“Come on in,” I said.

“Coffee?” Ellen said.

“That’d be nice,” Barry said. “Black.” He stepped into the kitchen, moving tentatively toward the table and me. Only eight in the morning and already his white shirt was starting to stick to his ample stomach. Ellen handed him a mug of black coffee as he glanced at my breakfast, drenched in maple syrup. Ellen noticed, and said, “A slice of French toast, Barry?”

“I really shouldn’t,” he said.

“It’s no trouble.”

“Well, if you insist,” he said. “All I had before I left home was a tiny bowl of bran with some strawberries on it.”

“Sounds healthy,” I said.

“Maureen’s trying to get me to lose some weight,” he said. “So I eat healthy at home, then get something else later.”

I smiled and motioned to the chair across from me. Barry took a load off. I saw Ellen dipping two slices of bread into some eggs, turn the heat back on under the frying pan.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

Barry ran his hand over his nearly bald pate. “Well, we’re following a number of enquiries,” he said. “Isn’t that how the Brits say it?”

“I think so,” I said.

“You can’t have been a lawyer as long as Albert was and not made a few enemies over the years. I’m sure he knew plenty of folks who might be capable of this sort of thing.”

Ellen said, “I can’t imagine anyone being capable of what happened over there.”

“Yeah, well,” Barry said. “I know what you mean. I was gonna say, when you’re in my line of work, you start accepting that people are capable of all sorts of horrible things, but the God’s honest truth is, I’ve never seen anything like this. Not a whole family. Not like that. Not in Promise Falls.”

“This is America,” Ellen said, putting the two slices of bread into the frying plan. “These kinds of things can happen anywhere.”

“We’ve had more than our share the last little while,” he said. I perked up at that. “You have?”

“Well, a couple anyway,” Barry Duckworth said. “There was that one out back of the Trenton, three weeks ago.” A bar on the north side of town. Not an area where I get many calls to cut people’s lawns. “Guy named Edgar Winsome. Forty-two, married, couple of kids, cement worker. Shot in the chest.”

“Jesus,” I said. “A bar fight?”

Barry shook his head. “Maybe. But it didn’t spill out of the bar. No one saw him having it out with anybody. Nobody remembers him getting into an argument or anything. Came in, had half a dozen beers, talked with a few of his buddies, leaves, they find him later, out back. Loud music, no one heard a thing.”