Too Close to Home

Derek blushed. He couldn’t have been shocked to learn that his father might know about such things. But I suppose my frankness had taken him by surprise. It must have made it easier for him to say, “I don’t know. It was all about sex and stuff, but it was written like an actual novel, so it really wasn’t high-class jackoff stuff, if, you know, if you get what I mean.”

I smiled at him. “I get what you mean. But really, I can’t imagine that someone would come into the Langleys’ house and kill them all over some porn story that some kid wrote more than ten years ago. That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“That was kind of why I didn’t mention it,” Derek said. “I figured I’d look like some kind of idiot.”

“And something else might have happened to that computer between the time you last saw it,” I said, “and the time the Langleys were killed.”

“I suppose.”

“Well,” I said, coming off the workbench, “since there’s no computer there now, there’s no way to read the story, or guess whether there was anything in it that would make somebody want to kill three people.”

Derek looked at the floor. “That’s not exactly true,” he said.

I waited for him to continue. “What?” I said.

“I kind of made a copy.”

TEN

Derek said he had a copy of the entire book on a floppy disc, instead of a CD, up in his bedroom. The computer was so old, he said, it didn’t have a CD-ROM drive. This was all supposed to mean something to me, evidently. This certainly wasn’t like when I was a kid, where you had to wait for someone else to finish a book before you could start it. He and Adam were reading this thing at the same time, and comparing notes the next day.

I suggested we go up to his room so I could read some of it on his screen, but Derek didn’t care much for that idea.

“Then Mom’s going to know,” he said.

“Is that a problem?” I asked him.

He looked uncomfortable. “The book’s all about, like. . pussies. You know. Vaginas?”

I stared at him. “I’m aware,” I said. I poked the inside of my cheek with my tongue for a moment, then said, “Go up to your room, print off the first ten pages or so for me and bring them back, and if your mom asks what you’re up to, tell her you’re on the Lawn-Boy website or something printing off tips on how to fix the mower. And bring the disc, too.”

Derek ran off, kicking up gravel with his sneakers once he was out of the shed.

His departure gave me a moment to think. It didn’t seem even remotely possible that the Langleys could have been killed over something that was on some student’s ten-year-old computer. I was almost glad Derek hadn’t bothered to mention it to Barry. It seemed too out there.

But even if you accepted the premise that the computer did have something to do with their deaths, which struck me as pretty unlikely, how the hell would anyone know it was there? Okay, it sounded as though, at some point, shortly before someone killed the Langleys, Adam’s father learned about it, maybe even what was on it. But why would he have become quite so upset? Albert had never struck me as a prude. I could remember once, at a barbecue, Albert telling me dirty jokes.

Were Albert to learn his son had uncovered an aspiring-and now deceased-author’s dirty book on an old computer, did it make any sense for him to have cared? And even if he had, how could learning about the novel’s existence have triggered a series of events that culminated with someone killing him and his family?

That didn’t make any sense at all.

So I thought about it some more, that if you still accepted the premise that the missing computer had something to do with the murders, but ruled out Albert’s involvement as having anything to do with them, where did that leave you?

How would anyone have even known Adam had the computer? After all, it hadn’t even been given to him in the first place. Agnes Stockwell had given it to my son, who in turn had shared his discovery with Adam. So if someone had learned from Agnes, say, what had happened to the computer, they wouldn’t have even been looking for it at the Langley house in the first place, but then again-

“Got it!” Derek said, breathless, running back into the shed, clutching some pages fresh from his printer. He handed them to me.

“I think that’s the whole first chapter,” he said. “Seven pages. You’ll see, when you get into it, why it’s not really your basic porn story, you know? It’s, like, Agnes’s son, what was his name again?”

“Brett,” I said.

“Yeah, Brett. It was like he was trying to take a porn novel or something, but make fun of it. Like, whaddya call it, like satire or something. Like a send-up. Or maybe even like-you remember that stupid movie you showed me one time, when I was little, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator guy, he gets pregnant? Junior, that’s what it was called.”