Too Close to Home

I didn’t bother to watch him drive off as I got into the truck. “Sorry I took so long,” I said to Derek, who’d finished up and was waiting for me to return. I noticed some tears had made tracks through the dust and debris that was stuck to Derek’s face.

“Hey man, you okay?” I noticed his cell phone was in his hand.

He shook his head, not wanting to talk.

“Come on, what is it?”

Derek sniffed, said, “Penny called me.”

“Okay. What’s going on?”

Another sniff. “Nothing.”

“Come on,” I said, reaching over and patting his knee. “We’re all in this together.”

“She just. . she said that since she’d got me on the phone, it must not have happened yet.”

“What?” I asked. “What hasn’t happened yet?”

Derek wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Without looking at me, he said, “I just want you to know that no matter what anyone says, I’m a good kid.”

I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

TWENTY

As we neared our house, I spotted a familiar car parked on the shoulder at the end of our lane. It was a silver Audi TT. Great. Just what I needed to make this a perfect day. More Conrad.

Once I put my blinker on, the Audi’s driver-side door opened and Illeana got out. She was dressed in white slacks and a top, and she seemed to shimmer in the late-afternoon sunlight.

“Isn’t that Mrs. Chase?” Derek asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What’s she want?”

“Hard to say.”

As I pulled into the drive, I put down the window and Illeana approached. “Jim,” she said, then peered around me to Derek and said, “Hi, Derek.” He barely nodded.

“Hello, Illeana,” I said. “You been waiting for us?”

“For you,” she said. “Do you have a minute?”

“You want to come on down to the house?”

“No, we can talk here,” she said. “I don’t want to be a bother.”

Given what time it was, Ellen probably wasn’t home from work yet. I asked Derek to scoot behind the wheel and take the truck in.

Illeana was rubbing her right wrist, almost unaware she was doing it.

“Have you hurt yourself?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, glancing down at her hands. “I’m getting used to this shifter. Conrad wanted to get one of these stick things and I’m still getting the hang of it.”

“Well,” I said, looking at the new car, “we all have our problems.”

“About the other day,” she said. “I’m sorry how things went. We kind of left in a hurry. After you and Conrad had your little disagreement.”

I shrugged. What was there to say? Especially to Illeana.

“If I hadn’t heard the tail end of what you were talking about,” she said, “I’m not sure he would have told me what got him so agitated.”

I didn’t want to talk to her. I was talked out. It had been a draining day. A funeral, a ride with Barry, my son in tears fearing I had no idea what. “So he filled you in on our discussion,” I said.

“He did.” She leaned up against the Audi. “I think you were out of line, Jim.”

“Illeana, I’m not sure I should be getting into this with you.”

“You accused him of something. Of plagiarism. Of stealing the work of someone else. A student.”

“All I did was ask him to explain something for me.”

“What makes you think he answers to you?” She managed to ask the question in a way that still sounded very polite.

“If there was a simple explanation, I don’t know why he didn’t just offer it.”

“You clearly caught him off guard,” Illeana said. “You blind-sided him. You didn’t even give him a chance to explain.”

I didn’t say anything. I figured if she had something to say, she’d say it.

“Conrad didn’t want to discuss this with me, said it was nothing, that he didn’t want to trouble me, but he did say that this student, this Brett Stockwell, was an extraordinary young man,” she said. “Absolutely brilliant.”

“So everyone says.”

“He’d never had a kid like him. A sensitive young man, whose insights were that of a much older person.”

I waited.

“But he was not brilliant enough to have written A Missing Part,” she said. “A boy like him, smart as he was, wasn’t capable of that.”

“Whatever you say, Illeana,” I said. I was about to say that it was in Barry’s hands now, but didn’t. Barry had seemed strangely uninterested in what I’d had to tell him, as though he’d already made his mind up about something and didn’t need the story about the missing computer clouding his vision.

“What happened was, Conrad had already written that book,” Illeana said. “He’d finished it about three years before it was published, but he hadn’t shown it to anyone. He kept tinkering with it, rewriting it, but he just wasn’t sure whether it worked or not. He wanted an opinion on it, so he gave it to Brett to read. On a disc, not a printed-out version. That explains why it was on the boy’s computer.”

I moved my tongue around the insides of my cheeks, thinking about it. “This is what Conrad told you,” I said.

Illeana nodded confidently.

“So before Conrad gave it to a colleague, or a literary agent, or some other published author, he decided to give it to one of his students,” I said.

“Exactly,” Illeana said.

“Well,” I said. “So it’s as simple as that.”

“Simple as that,” she said, smiling, showing off her perfect teeth.