Too Close to Home

Natalie said, “If the DNA test comes back and says that’s Derek’s earring, the prosecutor’s going to wonder just how it got there. And before you know it, they’re going to have a whole lot more interesting motive than what they’ve got now.”

TWENTY-FOUR

"What the hell does it mean?” Ellen asked when I’d filled her in on what Natalie Bondurant had said.

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. The earring probably isn’t even his.”

“It looked like his,” I said.

“But what would it be doing in Albert and Donna’s bedroom?” she asked. “Maybe Derek lost it someplace in the house, Donna found it and took it into her room, dropped it or misplaced it.”

“It was right in with the sheets or something, the bed skirt,” I said.

“The bed skirt?” Ellen said. “How’s that possible? Someone must have put it there.”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I could hear the sense of defeat in my voice. What I kept wanting to do, instinctively, was go to the bottom of the stairs and call Derek down to offer up some sort of explanation. But we’d have to wait until we were next able to visit Derek and ask him questions, or his lawyer had more information for us.

“What if this DNA test proves it’s Derek’s?” Ellen asked. “What then?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said.

“You know what they’ll say?” Ellen said. “Barry? And that prosecutor? They’ll probably say Mrs. Langley dragged our son into bed or something crazy like that. That that was what Derek got in a fight with the Langleys about, not his hiding in their house.”

I felt despair overtaking me. But I was supposed to be the rock.

Ellen said, “They wouldn’t think that, would they? No one would seriously think Donna would have gone to bed with our son?”

I recalled what Barry had told me, what Donna had supposedly confessed to her sister. That she’d slept with the neighbor.

Maybe she hadn’t been exaggerating after all.

Ellen opened the fridge, took out two bottles of white wine, set them on the counter. She got the corkscrew out of the drawer and opened both of them. Christ almighty, I thought, how much is she planning to drink?

She unwound the corks from the corkscrew, tossed them across the counter, then turned both bottles upside down over the sink and drained them. “I need my mind clear to get myself through this,” she said.

If she wanted to be the rock from here on, that was okay by me.

She stood the empty bottles back on the counter, turned to me, and said, “I think we’re being punished.”

“What?”

“For things we’ve done, or not done, in the past. What’s happened to us now, it’s some kind of retribution. We’re being made to pay.”

I asked, “I don’t get you. For things we’ve done in this life, or past ones?”

She walked out of the kitchen without answering.

It was another sleepless night, at least for me. For most of it, I stared at the ceiling, unable to see anything but my son in a cell. This was his third night behind bars, away from us, and it still didn’t seem possible that all of this was happening to our family.

I was only able to stop worrying about one thing when I moved on to worry about another. I couldn’t seem to focus on any one aspect of our troubles because there seemed to be so many of them.

Derek, of course, was my primary concern. But because I remained convinced he was not responsible for the Langleys’ deaths, my thoughts kept returning to what might have actually happened there that night, and who pulled the trigger.

One thought that kept coming back to me was whether the murder of the Langleys was a mistake. Not in the obvious sense. Of course it was a mistake; a tragedy, a horrific event.

I was thinking a different kind of mistake.

And about our mailbox. With our name on it. And no mailbox with the name “Langley” on it.

What if the Langleys’ killer, or killers, had gone to the wrong door? Was it possible our house had been the target? And if so, why?

That computer. I always kept coming back to that computer. It had been given to Derek, and now it was missing. Maybe, whoever killed the Langleys assumed they’d found the right house, because what they were looking for was there.

And maybe it was all bullshit. I wished I were confident that if I went to Barry and laid this all out for him, he’d at least consider it. But the chances of that happening now were somewhere between nil and zilch.

After we turned out the lights, Ellen put her head on her pillow, and moments later, I could hear her taking tissues out of the box on her bedside table. She cried herself to sleep, and I held her until she stopped. I rolled over and pushed my face into the pillow. I figured if I could muffle my own crying, I would not wake her.