Read Online Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella by Linwood Barclay - Free Book Online

getting himself into anything else. So I … I followed him. But by the time I got outside, he was out of sight, so I wandered up and down the streets, and down near Clampett Park. He was walking back from there, heading toward the house. He was just walking, he wasn’t doing anything wrong that I could see, so I slipped into the woods and let him go past. And that was when I heard moaning, someone crying for help.’
    I waited.
    ‘I went into the woods and I found Mike. I had my phone with me and was using it like a flashlight. I could see his head was bleeding, really bad. He’d been hit more than once. He was making these gurgling sounds, like maybe he was close to dying.’
    ‘But not dead,’ I said.
    Malcolm turned away from the window, back to me.
    ‘He looked up at me, I think he could make out who I was, and he just said, “Why?” And I panicked. I’d read the story that got Chandler in trouble. I’d just seen him in the area. I figured there was something … something wrong in my son’s head, that maybe he wrote that piece to warn us what he was going to do. I … I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I thought Chandler’s life would be over. That when Mike told the police what he had done to him …’
    ‘So you picked up the bat and finished him off,’ I said. ‘So he wouldn’t be able to tell the police Chandler did it.’
    Malcolm turned and looked at me. ‘I wanted to save my son.’
    ‘Chandler didn’t need saving. But there was still a chance to save Michael.’
    ‘How could I … I didn’t know that.’
    ‘So you finished what Franny had started, wiped down the bat, and got out of there. And the next day you bought another bat to bolster the argument that the murder weapon wasn’t Chandler’s.’
    ‘What would you have done?’ he asked. ‘What would you do to save your son?’
    It was too late for that for me.
    Suddenly he swung the bat up over his head, both hands on the grip, and brought it crashing down onto the top of his desk. It was like a thunderclap. He took another swing, this time side to side, clearing the desk of a lamp and a clock and several other items that went crashing to the floor.
    Then he dropped the bat, and collapsed into his leather office chair.
    The door opened and Greta stood there, dumbstruck.
    ‘What’s happened?’ she asked. ‘What in God’s name has happened?’
    I found my way out, wondering whether Barry Duckworth was going to get tired of hearing from me.

ONE
    I hate this town.

THE FIRST DAY

TWO
    David
    A couple of hours before all hell broke loose, I was in bed, awake since five, pondering the circumstances that had returned me, at the age of forty-one, to my childhood home.
    It wasn’t that the room was exactly the same as when I’d moved out almost twenty years ago. The Ferrari poster no longer hung over the blue-striped wallpaper, and the kit I built of the starship
Enterprise
—hardened amberlike droplets of glue visible on the hull—no longer sat on the dresser. But it was the same dresser. And it was the same wallpaper. And this was the same single bed.
    Sure, I’d spent the night in here a few times over the years, as a visitor. But to be back here as a resident? To be
living
here? With my parents, and my son, Ethan?
    God, what a fucking state of affairs. How had it come to this?
    It wasn’t that I didn’t know the answer to that question. It was complicated, but I knew.
    The descent had begun five years ago, after my wife, Jan, passed away. A sad story, and not one worth rehashing here. After half a decade, there were things I’d had no choice but to put behind me. I’d grown into my role of single father. I was raising Ethan, nine years old now, on my own. I’m not saying that made me a hero. I’m just trying to explain how things unfolded.
    Wanting a new start for Ethan and myself, I quit my job as a reporter for the
Promise Falls Standard
—not that hard a decision, considering the lack of interest by the paper’s