Free Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella by Linwood Barclay Page B

hint of accusation in his voice: “If I hadn’t moved to Boston I’d probably still
be
in the same class with them.” Now he looked at me. “Can we move back there?”
    That was a surprise. He wanted to return to a situation where I was rarely home at night? Where he hardly ever saw his grandparents?
    “No, I don’t see that happening.”
    Silence. A few seconds went by, then: “When are we going to have our own house?”
    “I’ve gotta find a job first, pal.”
    “You got totally screwed over.”
    I shot him a look. He caught my eye, probably wanting to see whether I was shocked.
    “Don’t use that kind of language,” I said. “You start talking like that around me, then you’ll forget and do it front of Nana.” His grandmother and grandfather had always been Nana and Poppa to him.
    “That’s what Poppa said. He told Nana that you got screwed over. When they stopped making the newspaper just after you got there.”
    “Yeah, well, I guess I did. But I wasn’t the only one. Everybody was fired. The reporters, the pressmen, everyone. But I’m looking for something. Anything.”
    If you looked up “shame” in the dictionary, surely one definition should be:
having to discuss your employment situation with your nine-year-old.
    “I guess I didn’t like being with Mrs. Tanaka every night,” Ethan said. “But when I went to school in Boston, nobody …”
    “Nobody what?”
    “Nothin’.” He was silent another few seconds, and then said, “You know that box of old things Poppa has in the basement?”
    “The entire basement is full of old things.” I almost added,
Especially when my dad is down there.
    “That box, a shoe box? That has stuff in it that was his dad’s? My great-grandfather? Like medals and ribbons and old watches and stuff like that?”
    “Okay, yeah, I know the box you mean. What about it?”
    “You think Poppa checks that box every day?”
    I pulled the car over to the curb half a block down from the school. “What on earth are you talking about?”
    “Never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
    Ethan dragged himself out of the car without saying good-bye and headed in the direction of the school like a dead man walking.
    Marla Pickens lived in a small one-story house on Cherry Street. From what I knew, her parents—Aunt Agnes and her husband, Gill—owned the house and paid the mortgage on it, but Marla struggled to pay the property taxes and utilities with what money she brought in. Having spent a career in newspapers, and still having some regard for truth and accuracy, I didn’t have much regard for how Marla made her money these days. She’d been hired by some Web firm to write bogus online reviews. A renovation company seeking to rehabilitate and bolster its Internet reputation would engage the services of Surf-Rep, which had hundreds of freelancers who went online to write fictitious laudatory reviews.
    Marla had once shown me one she’d written for a roofing company in Austin, Texas. “A tree hit our house and put a good-size hole in the roof. Marchelli Roofing came within the hour, fixed the roof, and reshingled it, and all for a very reasonable cost. I cannot recommend them highly enough.”
    Marla had never been to Austin, did not know anyone at Marchelli Roofing, and had never, in her life, hired a contractor of any kind to do anything.
    “Pretty good, huh?” she’d said. “It’s kind of like writing a really, really short story.”
    I didn’t have the energy to get into it with her at the time.
    I took the bypass to get from one side of town to the other, passing under the shadow of the Promise Falls water tower, a ten-story structure that looked like an alien mother ship on stilts.
    When I got to Marla’s, I pulled into the driveway beside her faded red, rusting, mid-nineties Mustang. I opened the rear hatch of my Mazda 3 and grabbed two reusable grocery bags Mom had filled with frozen dinners. I felt a little embarrassed doing it, wondering