Blackmore wasn’t sure he took as dim a view of the local force. Not that he’d had many dealings with them, but he wasn’t aware of any examples of gross incompetence. It wasn’t as though a professor of English literature had much reason to interact with the police.
There’d certainly been plenty of them on campus after Duncomb shot and killed that student who was going around attacking young women.
Didn’t seem to bother Duncomb at all to blow that kid’s brains out.
Sure, Blackmore thought, you could argue Duncomb did the right thing, but you’d think he’d feel something afterward. Taking another person’s life? But the guy carried on as though ending a young man’s life was just another day at the office.
Maybe, Blackmore thought, he shouldn’t be all that surprised, considering Duncomb’s background. Or his wife, Liz’s, for that matter. The details had trickled out over the last few years. How Duncomb had been working vice for the Boston PD when he met Elizabeth Palmer. He’d been gathering evidence on the escort business she ran, hoping to round her up in a sting, but he was the one who ended up being drawn into her net.
But the Boston cops hadn’t been the only ones looking at Liz. There was the IRS, for one. Duncomb, sabotaging his own department’s investigation, helped Liz destroy evidence. Records were shredded and burned. People were paid off. Duncomb quit, married Liz — motivated not just by love but by the two of them never having to testify against each other — and moved to Promise Falls when he got his security chief gig.
Was it a stretch to think a man like that might take extreme measures?
“Professor?”
“Hmm?”
It was a girl in the front row. Trish, or Tricia, something like that.
“Is something wrong?”
He realized he’d been standing there, saying nothing, off in his own world for the better part of fifteen seconds. Maybe longer. He wasn’t sure.
“Sorry,” he said. “I really am the absentminded professor, aren’t I?”
A few chuckles. Most of them, he realized, had probably never heard of the movie. A reference lost to the generations.
“Okay,” he said, resting the tablet on the lectern. The speech magically appeared. He’d bumped up the font size so he could read without having to wear his glasses.
Seconds before coming into the lecture hall, he had tried again to reach Georgina. He’d called home and her cell. No answers. He’d put in a call to the law office where she worked, just in case she’d shown up. No luck there, either.
He had a feeling maybe she was home. She was angry with him, he was guessing, and when his name came up on the caller ID of her cell or the landline, she was refusing to answer.
Making him suffer.
Well, it was working.
“Uh, when we talk about psychological determinism, what is it exactly we’re talking about? It’s quite a mouthful, I grant you. But it goes to the heart of... the heart of...”
He’d swiped upward a little too hard with his finger, placing him ten paragraphs into his lecture. He tried to move the text back into position.
“Uh, hang on here, hang on...”
She’s fallen. Good God, she’s been hurt.
It seemed so obvious. Frighteningly obvious. Up to now, he’d assumed she was trying to teach him some sort of lesson. That she’d run off somewhere. Gone to stay with a friend. Or, if she was home, was giving him the silent treatment. She’d done it before when she’d been angry with him for something he’d done.
And he had done something. Or rather, he’d said something. Something he shouldn’t have said. Made some terrible accusations.
She hadn’t taken it well.
So there’d been every reason to believe she’d gone off somewhere to cool off. But it wasn’t like her to be gone this long. He’d seen her storm off and get in her car and come back in an hour or two.
Not overnight.
And she’d never been so pissed with him that she failed to show up for work.
God, what an idiot I’ve been, he thought. He should have gone home when her office had called. She could have tripped on the stairs. Slipped getting out of the tub. Electrocuted herself somehow.
He had to get home. Right now.
Blackmore looked at his class, at the thirty expectant and confused faces. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do this today.”
He picked up the tablet, shoved it into his pocket, and headed for the exit.
He walked hurriedly to his rusting, twenty-year-old Volvo, sped out of the faculty parking lot in a cloud of exhaust.
The Blackmores lived in a two-story redbrick Victorian in the old part of Promise Falls. Over the last decade — as long as he and Georgina had been married — they’d worked to restore the home to its original glory. They’d replaced the gingerbread trim and railings on the small front porch. Reshingled the roof. Replaced the furnace.
Georgina’s car, a four-year-old Prius, was parked at the side of the house. At first, the sight of the car gave him reason for hope. He brought the Volvo to a halt behind it, killed the engine, and got out of the car so quickly he didn’t bother to close the door.
He was fumbling with his keys as he approached the side entrance. But before he inserted the key, he tried opening it. Half the time, Georgina left the house unlocked when she was home.
The knob turned in his hand.
As he pushed it open, he shouted, “Georgie! Georgie?”
No answer.
The side door opened onto a landing between two short flights of stairs. Four steps up would take him to the kitchen, four steps down to the basement.
He decided to go up to the kitchen first. What he saw stopped him dead.
Drawers pulled out, cupboards opened. Dishes and cups and utensils out of position, dumped onto the countertop.
“Jesus,” he whispered. Then, shouting, he said, “Georgina!”
He made his way to the stairs and scaled them two steps at a time to reach the second floor. He headed straight for their bedroom. It was like the kitchen. Dresser drawers pulled out, clothes tossed, suitcases pulled out from under the bed. The closet door was open, and empty shoe boxes had been opened and tossed.
“Oh my God,” he said.
The guest bedroom had been similarly tossed. Someone had been searching the house from top to bottom.
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” Blackmore kept repeating.
“Calm down,” said a voice behind him.
Blackmore spun around. Standing in the doorway was Clive Duncomb.
“Jesus Christ!” Blackmore cried. “What the hell is going on?”
“I came by to look for Georgina,” he said calmly.
“Where is she? Where’s Georgina?”
“I don’t know.”
“Her car’s here,” Blackmore said. “If her car’s here, where the hell is she?”
“I didn’t find a purse.”
“Her purse?”
“I didn’t find it.”
“Georgina probably has half a dozen purses.”
Duncomb nodded. “Yes, that’s true. But the one she’d currently be using would have her car keys and her wallet and her driver’s license. I didn’t find a purse with those things.”
Blackmore waved his arms at the disarray. “Look at this. Something happened here. Someone tore this place apart. Maybe Georgina caught someone doing this. Oh God. Maybe someone kidnapped her, or even—”
“I did this,” Duncomb said.
Blackmore said, “What?”
“I’ve been tearing the place apart. I just finished looking through the basement. If she took it, and if it’s here, it’s well hidden.”
“Clive, what the hell are you talking about?”
“It occurred to me that it might be Georgina. She was always uncomfortable about that one disc. And she wasn’t wrong to be. Maybe she got into the house before I did. Or maybe she took it a long time ago.”