Too Close to Home by Linwood Barclay Page A

still not pursuing your dream,” she’d say, “but it’s no worse than what you’re doing.”
    All that went through my mind in a couple of seconds. Then, back to reality, as the mayor tended to his wounds in the bathroom, I said to Sherry, “Take off.”
    She slipped out the door. “Jesus,” I heard Linda say, probably looking at Sherry’s face. “What the fuck?”
    When the mayor came out of the bathroom, I took hold of his hand and with my other slapped the Grand Marquis keys into his palm. “Take it easy around the corners,” I said. “It turns wide.”
    I ran into Lance in the lobby.
    “What happened?” he asked, breathless. “What’s going on?”
    “He’s in there. If he asks you to bandage his dick, get a raise first.”
    “Jesus, what the hell happened?”
    I didn’t have the energy to explain. Instead, I phoned Ellen and asked her to come pick me up.

SEVEN
    A TYPICAL SUNDAY MORNING, we might have slept in. It’s the one day of the week where I don’t feel guilty sleeping late. If it weren’t for the goddamn work ethic drilled into me by my father, I think I might be happy to stay under the covers until noon most days, but I generally wake up before six, thinking about the things I have to get done. Not just work stuff, but things around the house. If there aren’t clients’ yards to mow, there’s a screen door that needs new screening, a slow drain that needs to be unclogged, a busted lawn mower that needs to be fixed.
    But Sundays, screw it.
    There’s certainly no church to get up and dressed for. I’m not a big fan of organized religion. Ellen’s parents raised her as a Presbyterian, but sometime in her late teens she simply didn’t buy it anymore and couldn’t be persuaded to go. I was never sure whether being a lapsed Presbyterian was that big a deal. It wasn’t like being a lapsed Catholic. My parents, on the other hand, had raised me to be nothing, other than a decent, I hoped, and responsible individual who could figure out what was the right and moral thing to do in any given situation, and then do it.
    My track record in that regard, however, had not always been exemplary. Working for as long as I did for Mayor Finley is a case in point.
    While for Derek, a standard sleep-in means getting up in time for supper, for me and Ellen, it’s somewhere between eight and nine in the morning. But this was hardly a typical Sunday morning, not even twenty-four hours since we’d learned about the Langleys.
    And even though our scare in the night—Derek’s rendezvous with Penny—had turned out to be nothing, it took us a long time to get back to sleep after that. Around six, lying on my side and staring at the clock radio’s digital display, I sensed Ellen was awake as well. We had our backs to each other, and no one was moving, but there’s a way she breathes when she’s sleeping, deeper, that I wasn’t hearing, so I reached over and lightly touched her back.
    “Hey,” I said.
    Ellen turned over without saying anything, looked into my eyes without so much as a smile, then reached out and pulled me close to her, pressing her body up against mine. I responded as she knew I would, and she rolled me on top of her. We engaged in an act of wordless lovemaking that was born not out of any kind of sexual frenzy, but a need to reassure ourselves that we were still alive, that we had each other, that we could connect in this most intimate of ways, aware that at any moment, without any warning whatsoever, it could all end.

    ELLEN WAS PUTTING a plate of French toast in front of me when she looked out the window and said, “Barry’s coming around the side of the house.”
    A moment later, Barry Duckworth was on the deck, rapping lightly at the back door. It was nearly eight in the morning by now, and Ellen and I had been up a couple of hours but only just now gotten to breakfast.
    I stayed in my seat at the kitchen table while Ellen opened the screen door. “Hi, Barry,” she