A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay
“I’m pretty sure she wasn’t,” I said. “But I am here about Sean, and Hanna. And Claire Sanders, too.”
“Oh, Claire, we know her,” Sheila said. “Don’t we?” she said to Adam.
“And her father,” he said wearily.
“I was trying to ask your son about her when I was struck,” I said. “I’m trying to find Claire, and I think Sean and Hanna know where she is.”
“Why are you looking for Claire?” Adam asked.
I ignored the question. “I think Hanna will know where she is, and I’m hoping Sean can put me in touch with her. Sean’s looking for Claire, too. He was asking around at Patchett’s. Sean may think he has something to fear from me, but he doesn’t. My interest is in finding Claire. If he helps me with that, I can let everything else slide.”
“Have you talked to Bert?” Adam asked. So he and the mayor were on a first-name basis.
“Yes,” I said. I looked at the cell phone in the man’s hand. “This’d be a good time to invite Sean to come home. Don’t mention I’m here.”
Adam hesitated, then placed the call. Sean’s phone probably rang three or four times, and then his father spoke. “Hey, where are you? . . . What do you mean, driving around? Driving around where? . . . Okay, listen, I don’t care where you are. Just get your ass home pronto . . . You’ll find out when you get here . . . If you’re not here in five minutes you can forget driving around in that Ranger. I’ve got a fifteen-year-old Civic on the lot that’ll suit you just fine . . . Yeah? Fine, five minutes.”
He ended the call and looked at me. “I must have done something bad in a past life to deserve all this misery.”
EIGHTEEN
The kid showed up in four minutes. Headlights splayed across the living room window. A second later, a truck door slammed, and two seconds after that, Sean Skilling came barreling into the house like a runaway train. But he put the brakes on the moment he saw me sitting with his parents in the living room. He looked like he was going to turn and run, but his father jumped to his feet and shouted, “Hold it right there, mister!”
Sean froze. But you could see it in his eyes, that he was still thinking of making a break for it.
“Get the hell in here,” Adam said, pointing to the living room. “Get the hell in here and sit the hell down.” He pointed to the chair he’d just vacated.
The kid moved cautiously, like he was expecting his father to attack him before he could sit, but he got to the chair without incident. Adam stayed on his feet, moving back and forth in front of his son in short steps, like a boxer warming up before the bell rings.
“What in the hell’s going on?” he asked.
Sean shot him a look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
That was probably true, to a point. He must have wondered whether I was here about Hanna, or Claire, or his friend punching me in the head. No doubt we’d get to all of it before the night was over, but clearly Adam Skilling wanted to address the third issue immediately.
His father said, “Who hit him? Who hit this man? I want a name!”
“I didn’t hit him. I didn’t lay a hand on him,” he said.
“But you saw him get hit, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know, maybe—”
“That’s a yes-or-no question. You saw him get hit, or you didn’t see him get hit. Which is it?”
“Adam—” his wife said tentatively.
“I’m talking here, Sheila. Yes or no?”
“Yeah, I saw him get hit. But it was dark.”
“Oh please,” Adam Skilling said. “Was it light enough for you to see him when the two of you ran off together? What if he’d been knocked unconscious? What if he’d had some kind of brain injury or something? You want to end up with a record? Is that what you want? So I’m gonna ask again, who hit—”
“Mr. Skilling,” I said firmly.
He whirled around, looked at me as though he’d forgotten I was there, even though his questions concerned me. “What?”
“We can get to who it was later,” I said.
“I’m trying to help, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know, and I appreciate it.” I turned to Sean, who looked slightly relieved. “In case you don’t remember, I’m Cal Weaver, and I’m a private investigator.”
“I know who you are.”
“I don’t think you understood what I was after when I saw you at Patchett’s. I’m looking for Claire, and I think Hanna can help me.”
“I don’t know where she is.” He looked at both his parents quickly. “Swear to God.”
“Why are you looking for Claire?” Sheila asked. “I don’t understand what’s happened with her. Is she missing?”
Sean looked down at the broadloom and shook his head. “Sort of.”
“What’s that mean? ‘Sort of’?” I asked.
“I mean, yeah, she’s gone away, but that doesn’t mean she’s missing. It just means she’s not around.”
“You know where she is?” I asked.
“I swear, I’ve got no fucking idea.”
Adam’s hand came out of nowhere and slapped the kid across the side of the head. “You watch your goddamn mouth.”
Sean winced but made an effort not to cry out. Maybe he was used to it.
“Does Hanna know where Claire is?” I asked.
Sean hesitated, bit his lower lip. “I don’t know. She might. She and Claire kind of cooked this thing up together.”
“Then we need to talk to Hanna.”
Sean said nothing.
“Where’s Hanna, Sean?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?” Sheila asked. “She’s practically attached to you. Did she go back to her parents’ house?”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”
Sadness washed over Sheila’s face. “Oh no, did you two break up?”
“That’d be the first bit of good news we’ve had around here in some time,” Adam said.
“No,” Sean said forcefully. “We didn’t break up.”
I was sensing something more urgent here than a teen romance in trouble. “Sean, did Hanna and Claire go off someplace together?”
“I don’t know. I’m starting to wonder. The thing is, I wasn’t at Patchett’s looking for Claire.”
“Don’t lie to us,” Adam said. “The man says he saw you there, and that when he tried to talk to you, somebody hit him in the head.”
“I was there, okay? I admit I was at Patchett’s. But I wasn’t looking for Claire.”
I nodded, suddenly getting it. “You were asking if anyone’s seen Hanna.”
He looked at me, his eyes starting to fill with tears. “I don’t know where she is. She’s not answering her phone. She’s ignoring all my texts.”
“Try her now,” I said.
“I tried her just a few—”
“Just try her and hand me the phone.”
He complied. After tapping Hanna’s name in his contact list he handed the phone over and I put it to my ear.
It rang eight times before it went to voice mail. “This is Hanna!” she said cheerfully. “Leave! A! Message!” I ended the call. So her phone was on.
“Does Hanna have one of those tracking apps on her phone?”
Sean shook his head. “No.”
“Still, the fact that the phone is on means we might be able to get in touch with the provider and figure out where it is.”
“Where she is,” he said.
“She could have lost her phone, forgotten it, even had it stolen,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she’s not answering.”
I returned his phone to him and said, “Do you know why I’m here, Sean?”
He gave me a “duh” look. “You told me, at Patchett’s, that you’re trying to find Claire.?
“That’s right. But do you know why it’s me, and not someone else?”
Sean puzzled over that one for a second. “I’m . . . not sure.”
“You know what Claire and Hanna were up to last night.”
Slowly he said, “Kind of.”
“Were you supposed to be Claire’s ride? Were you the one who was supposed to pick her up out in front of Patchett’s?”
It made sense to me. Clearly, Claire and Hanna had needed a third person for their stunt. Claire had been waiting for a ride that hadn’t showed. And since Hanna was in on it, it stood to reason her boyfriend might be as well. And Bert Sanders’ neighbor had said she’d seen Claire get picked up the night before in a vehicle that could have been Sean’s.
When the boy didn’t answer, I said, “When, exactly, did you last see Hanna?”
“Last night,” he said. “Around nine thirty or ten or something like that.”
“Where was that?”
“I . . . I dropped her off at Iggy’s.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“I was driving around, just, you know, driving.”
“You had some time to kill.”
“Kind of. But then I got stopped by the cops.”
“What?” his father said, taking on a will-this-never-end expression. “What for?”
“I went through a stop sign. Okay, not really. I mean, I didn’t run it, you know? I did one of those rolling stops. I almost stopped. But there was this Griffon cop sitting there, and he hits the siren and pulls me over.” He shook his head in disgust. “You know what they’re like in this town. Any little thing, especially if you’re my age, or you’re from out of town, or if you’re like Dennis and your skin’s not exactly as white as everyone else’s.”
Adam had briefly closed his eyes. Maybe he thought if he closed them hard enough, when he opened them once again we’d all be gone.
“And they had me sitting there forever while they ran the plates and checked my license, but it’s totally clean, right? So when the cop finally came back he just gave me a warning to always come to a dead stop.”
“No ticket?” his mother said.
“That’s right,” her boy said, and smiled, grateful that there was at least one thing that had turned out right.
It also helped me fit one piece into the puzzle. That was why he wasn’t able to get to Patchett’s to pick up Claire and drive her to Iggy’s, where Hanna was waiting.
“Did you make a phone call while you were waiting for the police to run your license?” I asked.
He looked surprised. “Yeah.”
“To tell someone you were going to be late, or weren’t going to make it at all?”
I could see it in his eyes, that he was figuring it out now, too. That I was the fill-in. He’d called Claire to say he was held up, and she’d told him she’d try to hitch a ride.
“I don’t understand what’s going on at all,” Sheila said. “What are you two talking about?”
“What’d you do then, Sean?” I asked.
“I didn’t—I didn’t really know what to do. But wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“A phone call, I guess. To let me know things went . . . okay.”
Sheila interrupted again. “I still don’t—”
I held my hand up to silence her. We were finally getting somewhere.
“Did you get a call?” I asked.
Now a tear ran down his cheek. “Yeah,” he nodded.
“Who called you?”
“Hanna.”
“What did she say?”
“She was talking real fast. She said things kind of got fu—” He glanced at his father. “Things got kind of messed up, but it sort of went okay, that they did the switch, but she was all kind of freaked out.”
“Switch?” Adam said. I held up my hand again.
“What do you mean, freaked out?” I asked.
“She said she just jumped out of some guy’s car, and it was raining, and she was soaked, and she needed a ride, and she was really upset.”
“You said the last time you’d seen her was earlier. But didn’t you go and pick her up then? The police were done with you by then, right?”
“Yeah, and I was going to pick her up. She was about to tell me where she was, and then she says—and don’t be angry, Dad, because this is exactly what she said to me—she says, ‘Shit, they’re here.’”
“Who’s ‘they’? The same ones Claire was trying to lose?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’d Hanna say then?”
“She didn’t say anything. The call just ended. And I never got to know where she’d been dropped off.”
I knew.
NINETEEN
“Sean and I have to go out,” I told the Skillings.
“What for?” his mother said as we all got to our feet.
“We’re going to see if we can find Hanna, aren’t we, Sean?” I said to him.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I don’t know about this,” his father said.
“I very much appreciate your son’s cooperation, and yours,” I said. “In consideration of that, I’m inclined to let that other matter slide.”
The parents contemplated my words. Sheila spoke first. “You help this man any way you can, Sean.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “You do that.”
As their son and I moved toward the door, Sheila said, “Don’t be too late, now.” Like we were heading out to catch a movie.
Once outside, I said, “I’m parked around the corner.” We walked the short distance in silence. I hit the remote to unlock the doors and the two of us got into the Honda.
“Where are we going?” he asked as he reached over his shoulder for the seat belt.
“I was the one who gave Claire a ride last night,” I said. “When you didn’t show up at Patchett’s.”
“I figured that, but why would she have called you?”
“She didn’t. I was in the right place at the right time.” Or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you looked at it. “I was driving by, stopped at the light. Claire’d been standing there, waiting for you, and when you called and said you couldn’t make it, she tapped on my window to ask for a ride. I was going to say no, but she recognized me, said she knew Scott. So I said okay.”
“If I hadn’t got pulled over,” Sean said, “I’d have been there. Stupid cop was jerking me around for no reason.”
I keyed the ignition, turned around, gave it some gas. “Yeah. So let me guess how it went. You gave Claire a lift to Patchett’s. Then you picked Hanna up and took her to Iggy’s so she could wait for Claire.”
“Yeah. We figured no one would follow me after I dropped Claire off. They’d hang back at Patchett’s.”
“Okay. Then, after you dropped Hanna off, you were to go back and get Claire, drive her to Iggy’s. They do the switch, and Hanna, wearing that wig, gets in your car looking like Claire. How’m I doing?”
“Good,” he said, looking straight ahead.
“Hanna had me fooled for about one minute, but I guess that was okay, because I wasn’t the one she had to trick. So here’s what I’m wondering, Sean.”
He glanced over.
“Who’s following Claire that she’d go to that much trouble to get away from him? And who picked her up after Hanna took her place?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
“Really, man, I don’t know what the fuck it’s all about.” His dad wasn’t here now to slap him upside the head, and I wasn’t going to do it. I was tempted, but not over his foul language.
“You just agreed to help out without knowing a thing?”
“Claire didn’t talk to me about it. She and I
He cut himself off.
“Your friend?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a friend she used to go out with, but then she started seeing this other guy.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“This friend the same one who clunked me in the head?”
Sean shot me a cautious look. “He didn’t mean to hurt you or anything. He thought you were coming after me. He was just trying to protect me.”
“Okay,” I said. “You want me to go back, ask your parents who, out of your friends, recently got dumped by Claire Sanders? How long do you think it’ll take me to get a name?”
Sean looked ready to surrender. “You gonna have him charged?”
“No,” I said.
“You gonna throw him in a trunk or anything?”
I glanced over at Sean, then back to the road. “No. I won’t do that.”
“His name’s Roman.”
“Roman?” I said. “Roman Ravelson? Whose parents own the furniture place?”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t he a bit old for Claire?” I knew he was twenty-one.
“Whatever,” he said. “She broke it off, anyway. But now she knows how it feels, so maybe she’ll get back with him, although I kind of doubt it.”
“What, did someone dump her?” I asked.
“She started going out with this other guy, Dennis—I don’t know where he’s from exactly, but not from here; he was just here for a summer job—and she was all super in love with him, but then I guess he just wanted out, and went back to wherever he came from. Claire was, like, all devastated, and you ask me, it kind of looked good on her.”
I’d heard the name earlier tonight. “Is Dennis the black guy you mentioned?”
“Huh?”
“When you told your parents about being pulled over, you said the cops pull over people your age, out-of-towners, or people like Dennis who’s not as white as everyone else around here.”