No Safe House by Linwood Barclay
“Not exactly. We’re slowly taking a look at the various things Mr. Fleming was involved in, and one of them appears to have been an operation where he would hide things for other criminal operations—cash, drugs, what have you—in the homes of individuals who were not on any police department’s radar. Decent, upstanding folks.” She paused. “Like yourselves.”
“You’re saying he used our house?” I asked. “To hide stuff? You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not,” Wedmore said calmly. “Most likely, in your attic.”
“That’s impossible,” Cynthia said. “We’ve got a security system.”
“Well, seems he may have found ways around that. Do you have a dog?”
“A dog?” I said. “No, we don’t have any pets.”
“That’s one way he got access. You heard of dog walkers? People who come into your house through the day to take your dog for a walk? They have keys, access codes.”
Cynthia took this one. “For a while, I had a place across town, an apartment. Terry and I—I just needed some time to myself, and the man who lived across the hall from me, he did that.”
I wondered what she was doing. But I was betting Wedmore already knew Cynthia had lived, for a short while, across from Nathaniel Braithwaite. She’d have been waiting to see whether Cynthia volunteered this.
“That’s right. That’d be Mr. Braithwaite.”
“Yes,” Cynthia said. “Are you saying he was doing this for Vince? He couldn’t have had our key or access code.”
“One way to be sure would be to check your attic. Would you mind?”
We said we thought she was wasting her time, but I got a ladder and set it up under the access panel upstairs. She climbed up and spent about five minutes rooting around up there before concluding there was nothing to be found.
She was hot and sweaty by the time she came down, and this time she accepted the offer of a cool drink instead of coffee. Back in the living room, Cynthia handed her a bottle of water from the fridge.
“So I guess this means that whatever Vince was up to, it didn’t involve us,” Cynthia said.
Don’t be too eager.
“Maybe not,” Wedmore said slowly, uncapping the bottle and taking a drink.
“Does this have anything to do with all those people who got shot?” I asked.
“It might,” Wedmore said. “The Stockwells—Reggie and Wyatt Stockwell—were acquiring large sums of cash through fake IRS returns. They might have needed someplace to hide it. Maybe Mr. Fleming was hiding it for them and decided to hang on to it, and they didn’t like that. But that’s just one theory.”
Cynthia and I both looked at her expectantly, as if we couldn’t wait for the next tidbit of inside information.
“What’s interesting,” Wedmore said, “is how your names have popped up a couple of times in connection with all this.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Your house is on a list Mr. Fleming kept of places where he might have hidden proceeds of crime. Your wife happened to live, briefly, across the hall from this Mr. Braithwaite, who may have been helping Mr. Fleming. And you both have a history with Mr. Fleming.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Cynthia said, shaking her head in wonder at these coincidences. She looked at me. “You have any ideas?”
I shook my head, too. “I don’t. But I’m glad no one got into this house.”
“Well,” Wedmore said, standing, “thanks for your time. If you think of anything—anything at all—please call.” She left a card for us on the coffee table.
We showed her to the door. We all said our good-byes and closed the door behind her as she left.
“Dear God,” Cynthia said, falling back against the wall.
I had a hand on my forehead as I caught my breath. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
“When she asked about—”
The doorbell rang again. We looked at each other, terrified. We took five seconds to pull ourselves together, and Cynthia opened the door.
Wedmore said, “Sorry. I meant to ask. What happened to your front yard?”
I’d done my best to repair the lawn where Cynthia had torn it up with the car, but there were still two parallel streaks where the grass was having a hard time growing back.
Wedmore motioned for us to step outside, and reluctantly we did so. “See what I’m talking about?” she asked, pointing to where the grass had been dug up to within a couple of feet of the shrubs under the front window.
Something caught my eye. Something bright. In the soil, at the base of the shrubs.
“Yeah, let me tell you about that,” Cynthia said slowly, clearly struggling to come up with something. While Wedmore focused on her, I stole a quick look down.
It was the extra set of Beemer keys.
The ones that had belonged to Wyatt. When Vince had taken Reggie’s and Wyatt’s car keys, he hadn’t needed both sets, and tossed one toward the house. How would I explain it if Wedmore found those? Keys not only to their car, but their house, too.
Those keys connected me to a house where four people had been murdered. Where one of them had been murdered by me.
“No, let me tell you how it happened,” I said, taking three steps toward the driveway, forcing Wedmore to pivot and turn her back to the shrubs.
I looked her in the eye. Not just to hold her attention, but to stop myself from looking at the keys, which, at least to me, stood out like a garden gnome in a spotlight. I had to get Wedmore out of here, grab those keys, and drop them down the nearest sewer grate.
“The truth is, I’m actually a little afraid to tell you,” I said.
Wedmore’s head tilted slightly. “Why would that be?”
“I—I don’t want to get charged with anything.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Archer? Were you—were you driving under the influence?”
“Cynthia sort of intimated there that she’d moved out for a while, and I went through some periods where I was feeling pretty down, and one night, I was out, and I guess I had a little too much to drink, and I—this is the part I’m kind of reluctant to tell you—got in my car and drove home and totally missed the driveway.”
Wedmore sized me up. I couldn’t tell whether she believed it. She said, “That was an incredibly foolish thing to do.”
“I know.”
“You could have got yourself killed. Or someone else.”
Cynthia had taken a step back toward the door. She probably wanted to get back into the house, for all this to end, but standing there, if Wedmore turned toward her . . .
“I know, I know. I scared myself half to death when I realized what I’d done,” I said.
“Mr. Archer,” Detective Wedmore said, “you’ve got a nice life here. You’ve got a wife who looks to me like she loves you, whatever troubles you two went through. As I recall, you’ve got a lovely daughter, although she’ll have grown up a lot since I saw her last. You’ve got a family. Don’t throw it all away by doing something crazy like driving around drunk. Don’t take stupid chances like that.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll never do anything risky like that again.”
“See that you don’t,” she said. “Well, I guess I’m done here.” Wedmore smiled at me, then turned to face Cynthia. “You have a good—hello, what’s this?”
She put a foot on the lawn, learned forward, and scooped up the keys. Dirt clung to the remote.
“You lose some keys?” she asked, turning and extending her arm.
“Oh, thank God,” I said. “I’ve been going out of my mind looking for those.”
Wedmore dropped them into my palm. I closed my hand over them tightly.
“You folks take care,” she said, and headed back to her car.
EPILOGUE
TERRY
IT was Grace who gave us the news.
This was nearly a month after Vince’s death. In all that time I hadn’t spoken to Jane once, not since she?
But Grace, as it turned out, had been keeping in touch. The occasional text message, two or three phone calls.
“She keeps wanting to know if I’m okay,” Grace said. “I mean, if there’s anyone we should be asking to see if she’s okay, it’s Jane, right?”
On this particular Saturday morning, Grace came down to the kitchen and said, “Jane’s going away.”
“Away?” Cynthia said.
“To Europe. She’s going to France and Spain and Italy and all those places. She’s going with Bryce.”
“I thought you’d said they broke up,” Cynthia said. That was news to me, but Grace and her mom were always updating each other on people’s relationships without bringing me into the loop, mainly because I wasn’t the slightest bit interested.
“They got back together,” Grace reported. “I thought she was going to totally dump him. She thought he’d been messing around on her, and maybe he even was, but they patched it up, I guess, and now they’re going away. She’s giving up her apartment and quitting her job and everything.”
“How long is she planning to be over there?” I asked.
“She doesn’t even know if she’ll come back.”
“That’s so exciting,” Cynthia said. “We should do something. Have a little going-away party—a bon voyage party—for them.” She looked at me. “What do you think?” Her look of excitement faded. I knew she was worried that doing anything with Jane might resurrect anxieties I was only now starting to get a handle on.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“You won’t have to do a thing. Grace and I will look after it. We should get them some kind of going-away present. It’s so hard to pick things for people.”
“Maybe just one of those Visa gift cards,” Grace said. “They could use it anywhere in Europe, couldn’t they?”
Cynthia asked Grace to text Jane about coming over to the house the following afternoon. Grace’s thumbs tapped away at lightning speed, and within a minute Jane had accepted the invitation. They went out that afternoon to buy the fixings for a small party.
How could I rain on that parade? Cynthia and Grace had never been closer than in the last few weeks.
Jane and Bryce were invited for three o’clock. Grace began watching for them around a quarter to. She was peeking out the living room window every three minutes.
Cynthia sidled up close to me and whispered in my ear, “I did something without telling you.”
I felt a shiver. “What?”
“I bought something for Grace. I was in the mall and I just happened on it, and when I saw it, I knew it was just the right thing.”
“What?”
She told me.
When it got to be five after three, Grace said, “Where are they?”
“They’re only five minutes late,” Cynthia told her. “Which isn’t late at all. No one likes to arrive right on the dot. They’ll be here soon.”
Grace had her phone in her hand at the ready, as though she expected Jane to give progress reports on their drive from one part of Milford to another.
“Relax,” Cynthia said.
“I’ve just never known anyone before, like, someone who was a friend of mine, who was actually going to go to Europe and just stay there.”
I was passing through the living room when I saw Jane’s Mini pull into our driveway. In the passenger seat was, I assumed, Bryce. As he got out, I could see he was a nice-looking guy. About six feet tall, slim. Hair tousled in that very careful careless way. He held a bottle of wine by the neck. Jane got out, hung a long-strapped purse over her shoulder.
The two of them were almost to the front door when Jane stopped, looked down at the purse, opened it, and reached in for her phone. Someone had called her. She put the phone to her ear, and I saw her mouth, “Hello?”
And then, behind me, I heard Grace say, “Jane? Where are you? Are you coming? What? Oh my God.”
Grace was striding through the house now, edging past me so that she could be the one to open the door for them.
“I’m almost there,” she said. “This is so funny.”
She opened the door and faced Jane, both of them still holding their phones to their ears. They laughed, put their phones away, and hugged.
“So, you’re Bryce!” Grace said.
He smiled, extended a hand. “Hey,” he said reservedly.
“Come in! Come in!” Grace stood back, giving them room to enter the house. She glanced over at me, waved her phone in the air, and said, “It did that funny thing again.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. “What?”
“You know? That night, I told you . . .”
She stopped herself because she didn’t know how much Bryce knew about the evening she and Stuart had broken into the Cummings house. I hoped not a damn thing. I’d kept my mouth shut and trusted Jane had done the same.
“Is something wrong with your phone?” I asked.
“Sometimes there’s this funny echoing. It happened just then, and twice that other time . . . you know. Once talking to you and . . .”
Grace glanced at Jane, then back at me. Jane was looking at me now, too. Her eyes searching mine.
In an instant, it all made perfect sense.
Bryce said, offhandedly, “That just happens when the person you’re talking to is close enough you could practically touch them.”
Cynthia appeared from the kitchen. “Hey, everyone’s here!”
Bryce extended a hand. “Mrs. Archer. Pleasure to meet you.”
“Call me Cynthia. Come on in. Would you like a drink? A beer? A glass of wine?”
I forced a smile and said, “I just need to talk to Jane for half a second. Grace, give this young man something to eat.”
Grace smiled, said, “Sure!”
I didn’t think she’d quite figured it out yet.
As everyone else moved toward the kitchen, I took Jane gently by the arm and led her out the front door.
“What?” she said.
I stared at her. “The phone thing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just tell me.”
“Tell you what?” She’d been studying my expression seconds earlier, but now didn’t want to look me in the eye.
“When Grace phoned you that night, when she asked for help, before she called me, she got that echo on the phone. Like what just happened now.”
“Cell phones are always doing stupid stuff,” my onetime student said. It was the way she said it, the way she turned her head away, that convinced me I was on to something.
“You were already there.” It wasn’t a question. “If Grace had known, she wouldn’t even have needed her phone to talk to you.”
Jane squeezed the top of her purse with her left hand, her fingers kneading the leather. Her right hand tightened, opened, tightened again.
“I don’t know what—”
“Cut the shit, Jane.”
She looked out toward the street. After several seconds, she sighed, then said, “I thought, at one point, that she’d actually seen me. When she phoned. I thought she’d spotted me and that was why she called. But she hadn’t. Grace was calling for help, calling to ask me what she should do.”
I said nothing. I waited for more.
“Vince had screwed me over,” Jane whispered. “And he wasn’t there for my mother. I was furious with him.” She paused. “At the time.”
“So you decided to rip him off.”
“My mother’s house was supposed to go to me, but he kept it. I didn’t know he was going to try to make it right. But he told me, when you guys saved me from those creeps.”
I was feeling light-headed. “You were always good at listening in on people, snooping around. Let me guess. You knew all about Vince’s business. You knew where the keys were. You found a listing of the security codes. You got into the house the easy way. Not like Stuart, who had to break in.??
Jane nodded. “But I didn’t realize how big a score was in that house. I had no idea. I thought it’d just be a few thousand. That Vince might not even miss it for months and months.”
“How much?”
“There was two hundred thousand,” she said. “That, and a vase.”
I was amazed and horrified at the same time. “What were you going to do? When Vince figured out it was gone? When someone came back to claim that money? It could have turned out that way.”
Jane kept her voice low, her head down. “I didn’t think that far ahead. I didn’t know what to do. And then things started happening so fast.”
We still hadn’t talked about the bigger issue.
“Stuart,” I said. Jane started to turn away, but I reached for her shoulder and made her face me. “Stuart. You killed Stuart.”
“I didn’t mean to. That was a total accident.”
“And taking a gun with you? That was an accident, too?”
“I just . . . There were always guns around. Seemed dumb to go into a house without . . . you know, anything. I heard him and Grace in the house, but I had no idea who it was at first. I was in the kitchen, and this person came in, and I just kind of . . . I got scared. I panicked.”
“Jesus,” I said quietly.
“I realized real quick who it was, who I’d shot. I had to get out of there. Grace was freaking out, had her hands over her eyes, screaming, and I ran right past her. I hid outside for a while—a cop car was coming down the street—and then I heard Grace coming out of the house and my phone buzzed. I saw it was her and, like I said, I thought she’d seen me. But she hadn’t.”
“Then you called Vince. So he could clean up the mess everyone had made.”
“I told him,” she said. “The truth.”
“But not then,” I guessed.
“Like I said, right after you two saved me from those creeps. You were in the other room. I told him. I thought maybe he was going to need the money. I had it in a bag, under my desk at work. I thought he’d snap, you know? But I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. I figured I’d take whatever he dished out. But he went all funny. Instead of being angry, he was really sad. Said he’d been awful to me. Said he’d work it out.”