Far From True by Linwood Barclay Read Free Book Online Page A

“His third wife, actually. Something’s not right there. At the house. Something might have been taken—I’m not sure. There might have been a break-in. It’s . . . very hard to explain.”
    “And you’re taking this on instead of your father, and his wife, why?”
    “Because they’re dead,” Lucy Brighton said. “Last night. At the drive-in. My father’s car was crushed.”

NINE
    “YOU’RE awfully quiet,” Arlene Harwood remarked.
    “It was a late night,” her son, David, said.
    They were in the kitchen of his house. David’s nine-year-old son, Ethan, was already off to school, and David’s father, Don, was back at the elder couple’s house, checking in on the rebuilding of the kitchen since the fire. Arlene would probably head over and join him shortly.
    “It must have been awful,” she said.
    “Which part?”
    Of course, he knew the worst part was what had happened to those people in the cars that had been crushed by the toppling screen. But almost as horrible were the antics of his new boss. Finley had no sense of propriety. No idea of what constituted appropriate behavior.
    In other words, he had no shame.
    At least Finley’d had the good sense to get out of there before Duckworth slapped the cuffs on him. All the people with phonesout—for sure someone would have gotten a picture. So the dumbass dodged a bullet there.
    David had to talk to him, try to make him understand that his efforts to raise his profile ran the risk of backfiring spectacularly. The problem was, Finley wasn’t very good about accepting advice. The man simply did not listen to anything but the big, stupid voice in his own head. David wondered whether it would be worth talking to his wife, Jane. Finley didn’t talk about her much, and ignored David when he suggested bringing her into the discussion. Maybe Jane Finley could persuade her husband to dial it back a bit. Although, David guessed, she might well have been trying to do that through their entire marriage.
    “What do you mean, which part?” Arlene asked.
    “Nothing,” David said, sitting at the kitchen table, scanning news stories on the drive-in disaster on his laptop. “It was all bad. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    “There’s just been so much sadness,” she said, pouring a coffee for herself.
    David knew she was really talking about her sister, Agnes, not what had happened at the drive-in. Agnes wasn’t the first to jump to her death from Promise Falls, and probably wouldn’t be the last, but her suicide had attracted more attention than any other in recent memory. First of all, as the boss of the local hospital, she’d been a prominent member of the community. But when it came out that she’d tricked her own daughter into believing her newborn baby had died, she was labeled a monster.
    David believed the judgments being made about his aunt troubled Arlene nearly as much as her sister’s death. Arlene herself had called Agnes a monster shortly before she’d killed herself.
    David figured Agnes had known it to be true. Unlike the town’s former mayor, Agnes had had a capacity for shame.
    But in the days since Agnes’s death, Arlene had been trying to come to understand her sister, trying to figure out her motivations. “She wasn’t a completely terrible person,” she’d said several timesin recent days. Trying to convince herself, as much as others, David suspected.
    But while Agnes was very much on Arlene’s mind, she wasn’t occupying David’s thoughts. He was thinking about last night’s disaster, his job, and one other matter.
    Sam Worthington.
    He’d been reaching out to her, trying to explain he hadn’t done anything—at least not intentionally—to betray her. Someone had evidently taken pictures through her kitchen window of the two of them having sex, and now the pics were being used as evidence that she was somehow an unfit mother.
    He felt sick about it.
    He’d tried calling her several times, left messages.