Security: A Novel - Hardcover

Amidon, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374257116 ISBN 13: 9780374257118

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

Synopsis

There isn't much crime in Stoneleigh, Massachusetts. It’s a college town, a mountain getaway for the quietly rich,

where the average burglar alarm is set off by foraging wildlife. So when Edward Inman, the owner of Stoneleigh Sentinel, gets a latenight false alarm from the home of Doyle Cutler, one of his wealthiest clients, Edward thinks nothing of it—not until a local student, Mary Steckl, claims that she was sexually assaulted at Cutler’s house.

 

Edward soon finds himself drawn to Mary’s story, even though the rest of the town doubts her, including his wife, a rising politician who has made security the platform of her mayoral campaign. While homework from a creative writing class is leaked as evidence of a dark secret between Mary and her father, Edward’s investigations lead him to his old girlfriend, Kathryn Williams, whose teenage son may hold the key to the truth about that night.

 

From the author of Human Capital, Security is a timely, wry, and riveting story of adults and children, secret lives and civic

culture, suspicion and sexual hysteria. It confirms Stephen Amidon as a master of the art and one of the foremost chroniclers of American life today.

About this title

About the Author:

STEPHEN AMIDON’s previous books include Human Capital, The New City, and Subdivision. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1The alarm came in just as he was leaving the office. His first impulse was to keep walking. Even now, in the dead of the night, the time of break-ins and drunken squabbles and combusting embers,it would almost certainly be false. Somebody coming home after a few too many and fumbling the abort code; a nightmare-addled child staggering into a forbidden room. And yet, Janine would know that he had heard, and Edward couldn’t just leave while she was in the middle of dealing with an alert. So he shut the door on the cold night and walked back into the office to see if he could lend a hand.  The gentle electronic pulse sounding from the dispatcher’s console had all the urgency of a boarding announcement at a regional airport. But Janine was all business as she slipped on her headphones and dialed the client. Edward was struck by the transformation: a moment ago she had been hinting at quitting, and now she had the tunnel vision of a frontline soldier. The word kicking around the office was that she was getting tired of the graveyard shift. And so, having found himself once again irrevocably awake at two a.m., Edward had decided to swing by to cheer her up. He’d discovered her standing beneath a nimbus of Camel smoke outside Stoneleigh Sentinel’s propped-open front door. She was wrapped in an oversized Patriots windbreaker; her outerwear seemed to be composed entirely of leavebehinds from boyfriends and husbands. She dropped the cigarette when she saw his car; the way her right shoe twisted over the butt made her look like a wallflower at a high school dance. He would have let her smoke in the office, but didn’t need the hassle of getting caught violating the town’s draconian anti-tobacco measures. They chatted at the dispatch console. It was a family thing. Her girls were running wild. She sounded like she really would walk this time, which would not be good: a skilled dispatcher was as hard to find as a plumber on a Sunday morning. As she talked, Edward found himself examining the photos of her three daughters arranged on the console. All of them in their late teens, early twenties. The only feature they shared was the panicked, pre-impact sheen of their eyes. None were in school; all still lived at home; the one with the nose stud was pregnant. He could only imagine the cramped house at night, the tense silences and explosions of temper, the sullen visiting boysslouched on weary furniture. “What do you say we swap you to days?” he asked abruptly. She narrowed her eyes in gratitude. “Well, hell yes.” And so it was decided that she would not be quitting after all. He’d switch her with Cole Birdsong, his four-hundred-pound, Bibletoting day dispatcher. The man lived with his mother and was always hinting about needing more money for her diabetes bills; he’d take the extra ten percent to work nights. Of course, Edward would have to keep Janine on that rate of pay as well, but he could afford it. Business was good. He hung around for the three a.m. status check; he felt no great rush to face the sleepless hours ahead. Janine went through the roster of the company’s eight guards, located in hushed lobbies throughout town, where they made sure nobody burgled the converted factories where their fathers and grandfathers had once held decent jobs. The tally ended with Mike Tolland, Stoneleigh Sentinel’s senior patrolman. Its “armed response,” who covered the premier residential clients in the foothills west of town. Characteristically, he was out of position in a quiet subdivision in the north part of town. Edward almost got on the horn and asked him what the hell he was doing, but one personnel crisis was sufficient for a chilly November night. Instead, he headed for the door and Janine reached for her Camels. That was when they’d heard the alarm. He read the screen as he neared the console. The alert was at Doyle Cutler’s place. As premier as an account could get. Cutler lived at the very edge of the town; his five-acre mountain estate backed onto wilderness. If there was a major burglary in Stoneleigh in the dead of a Sunday night, this was as likely a spot as any. As Janine speed-dialed the home phone, Edward read the screen more closely. The house’s front door and its gate hadboth been opened. No abort code entered. “Voice mail,” Janine said. Edward listened to the police scanner mounted above the desk, but there was only static. The next step should be dispatching Tolland, though that would mean stirring him from his pint of Wild Turkey and this month’s Soldier of Fortune. It would be quicker just to send the police. Edward was about to call 911 when Janine held up a finger. Someone had picked up. “Yes, this is Stoneleigh Sentinel,” she said. “We have two alarms sounding at your house. We need you to provide your abort code.” She listened with a scowl. “I understand, sir, but you need to do that in thirty seconds or wemust respond.” Edward looked at the screen. Galt. “Could you repeat that?” Janine’s eyes were locked on the screen as well. She nodded. “Thank you. And with whom am I speaking?” She nodded. “Will you be in need of further assistance from us, Mr. Cutler? Then, have a good night.” She looked at Edward after she broke the connection. Her expression was uneasy. “What did he say?” he asked. “A houseguest just left and they forgot about the alarm.” Her voice dropped into a conspiratorial register. “He sounded funny.” “Funny as in . . .” “You know, not right.” “Drunk? Panicky?” “Jacklit.” Edward looked back at the screen. Technically, contractually, the event had just ended. Inner door, outer gate, abort code. Why a guest would be leaving unexpectedly at three a.m. fell into the vast category of things that were none of Edward’s business. But he didn’t like the sound of a stressed client—not at three in the morning on the edge of the wilderness. Especially not Doyle Cutler. Images of some sort of home invasion—unprecedented in the town’s history, though certainly not in the nation’s—shifted through his mind. “You want me to send Tolland?” Janine asked dubiously. He could call Cutler back himself, but what would he say? My dispatcher said you sounded funny? What was really required was for a seasoned pro to have a quiet look around. Not Tolland, who had just last spring tried to Taser a Mt. Stoneleigh student for “getting lippy.” He would demand entry; he’d want to rattle doors and ask all the wrong questions. If he was denied access, he would almost certainly call in the town police. “I think I’ll take a ride over there myself.” “Kind of out of your way, isn’t it?” Edward didn’t tell her that he was in fact headed in that general direction when he left, even though Cutler lived on the opposite side of town from his house. No one was supposed to know that it hadbeen almost a month since he’d slept in his own bed. “You want Tolland to meet you there?” she asked when it became clear he wasn’t going to explain himself. “I’ll let you know.” It was three miles across town to the Cutler house. He drove fast. He turned on his scanner, but there was still nothing but static. The roads were late-night empty; the traffic lights had all been switched to flashing yellow. He first passed through Cheapside, the working class neighborhood in the eastern part of town: Sentinel didn’t have many residential clients among its boxy little houses and eight-unit apartment buildings; business here was limited to a few Cumberland Farms stores and the Liquid Assets pawnshop. People robbed them, the time-lapse cameras immortalized their faces, the cops made an arrest. Next he passed through Old Town, with its sturdy Victorians and revitalized downtown. He’d installed plenty of standard home systems here, though few were premier clients. Those were up ahead, on Mountain. He was forced to slow a little after he joined the winding and sporadically lit road, which was liable at this hour to be occupied by astonished animals, some of them large enough to total a car. There were no shops or schools or traffic lights on Mountain Road; no billboards or parking lots or Little League fields. Just a few dozen estates, each hidden by its own automatic gate and impenetrable foliage and switchback driveway. Beyond these were the floor sensors and glass-break monitors and laser perimeter awareness systems, the hidden cameras and panic rooms. People up here liked to be left alone. As he powered up the hill, Edward tried to decide exactly how he was going to play this. He’d spoken to Cutler only a few times, and that had been when he’d installed his system over two years ago. There had been no activity on the account. No...

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0374257116
• ISBN 13: 9780374257118
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288