Too Close to Home

“Whatever’s going on between us didn’t really matter when she found out what happened to Adam. She came over to see how I was doing.”

I thought there were enough things to worry about having a seventeen-year-old son. I couldn’t imagine being Penny’s parents and finding out she’d slipped away in the night to visit her boyfriend where three people had been murdered only a few hours earlier.

“You shouldn’t have even let her come out here,” I said. “It’s not safe, a girl going out in the middle of the night. Anywhere. Let alone out here, after what happened to the Langleys.”

“So now I’m in shit for what she does, too?”

This was invariably what happened in parent-teen discussions. You started off getting mad about one thing, and before you knew it you were getting mad about something else. Focus, I told myself.

“You’re leveling with me?” I said.

Derek nodded slowly.

“Honestly?”

He nodded again, but then looked ready to say something.

“What is it?”

“It’s just. .” he said. “It’s just, well, I mean, it might not be anything. Because Adam said something, I think, before he left, before he got in the car with his parents, but the thing is, it might not mean anything at all.”

“What are you talking about?” I felt my pulse quicken.

“I think I noticed something missing in the house. Something that was there the other day, but wasn’t there just now.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “What did you-”

“Hello!” It was Ellen, standing at the front door. “You coming inside, or what?”

Back in the kitchen, Derek was finally persuaded to have some breakfast. For a boy who half an hour ago claimed to have no appetite, he downed four slices of French toast drowning in butter and syrup like he’d just been released from prison.

“You want some coffee with that?” Ellen asked. Derek’s mouth was so full all he could do was nod.

When Ellen had called out to us from the house, Derek had whispered quickly, “I’ll tell you later.”

And I had said, “Okay.”

It wasn’t that I wanted to keep secrets from Ellen. But if there was a chance Derek was willing to tell me something I needed to know, then I was willing not to make a fuss about his not being open with both of his parents until I knew what it was.

Ellen threw her arms around him when he came into the house, fearing he might have been somehow traumatized by having to tour the Langley house with Barry Duckworth.

“It was fine,” he said. “No big deal.”

Ellen looked at me, trying to read in my face whether Derek was really okay, or putting up a front. I shook my head, unable to give her a definitive answer. Then she talked him into downing an enormous breakfast.

I could tell Ellen wanted to ask him about his experience in the Langley home, not to find out what he’d seen-she could find that out from me later-but to determine what kind of effect it had had on him. But I think she concluded that if he was able to eat like this, perhaps there was no permanent damage to his psyche. I was less sure. If there was one thing I knew about teenage boys, it was that you could turn off the outside world long enough to stuff yourself.

“I was thinking,” Derek said, looking at me, his mouth still full, “that we should try to fix that one mower today. Since we’ve got the time.”

“Sure,” I said. “I think it might be as simple as a gummed-up spark plug.”

“I got a theory,” Derek said, “it could be the fuel filter. Maybe it’s all gummed up with crap.”

Ellen had a choice, listening to this. She could figure that Derek was reaching out to his father, looking for comfort in his company in the wake of tragedy, or he was up to something.

Not being quite the cynic I am, she said, “That sounds great. You two could get a few things done today.” She smiled at me. She’d bought it.

When Derek finished the last of his toast, he got up and went to take his plate to the sink, but his mother stopped him and said, “I’ll look after that. Why don’t you help your father.”

“Okay,” he said, and went out the back door.

“I’ll be right there,” I called out after him. Ellen looked to me and I knew she wanted to hear something about our tour through the Langley house. “He was okay,” I told her. “It was awful over there, but he was okay.”

“Barry never should have-”

“Don’t worry about it. He’s just doing his job. You’d have been proud of Derek, holding it together over there.”

“What was it like-” Ellen started to ask. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

I found Derek in the shed, fiddling about, wielding an oversized electric hedge trimmer. I was not surprised to see that he was not paying the slightest bit of attention to our ailing lawn mower.

“So,” I said. “What did you want to tell me? What was missing?”

“Like I said, it might not be anything. But you remember when we went to Mrs. Stockwell’s house?”

“Agnes? The one with the cat that looks like a pig?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean, when we went there? We go there pretty much every week.”

“This was like, two times ago,” Derek said. “She gave me the computer.”

“Right,” I said, nodding. “Some old piece of crap. From her garage.”