Broken Promise: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

  “That’s not true,” Dad said. “I’m the one who lost his goddamn wallet. What a pain in the ass it was getting that all sorted out.”

  Mom poured some coffee into a mug and handed it to me with a smile. “Thanks, Mom.” I leaned in and gave her a small kiss on her weathered cheek as Dad went back to stabbing at the tablet.

  “I wanted to ask,” she said to me, “what you might have on for this morning.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “I mean, if you have some job interviews lined up, I don’t want to interfere with that at all or—”

  “Mom, just tell me what it is you want.”

  “I don’t want to impose,” she said. “It’s only if you have time.”

  “For God’s sake, Mom, just spit it out.”

  “Don’t talk to your mother that way,” Dad said.

  “I’d do it myself, but if you were going out, I have some things I wanted to drop off for Marla.”

  Marla Pickens. My cousin. Younger than me by a decade. Daughter of Mom’s sister, Agnes.

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  “I made up a chili, and I had so much left over, I froze some of it, and I know she really likes my chili, so I froze a few single servings in some Glad containers. And I picked her up a few other things. Some Stouffer’s frozen dinners. They won’t be as good as homemade, but still. I don’t think that girl is eating. It’s not for me to comment, but I don’t think Agnes is looking in on her often enough. And the thing is, I think it would be good for her to see you. Instead of us old people always dropping by. She’s always liked you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Ever since this business with the baby, she just hasn’t been right.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I opened the refrigerator. “You got any bottles of water I can put with Ethan’s lunch?”

  Dad uttered an indignant “Ha!” I knew where this was going. I should have known better than to have asked. “Biggest scam in the world, bottled water. What comes out of the tap is good enough for anybody. This town’s water is fine, and I should know. Only suckers pay for it. Next thing you know, they’ll find a way to make you pay for air. Remember when you didn’t have to pay for TV? You just had an antenna, watched for nothing. Now you have to pay for cable. That’s the way to make money. Find a way to make people pay for something they’re getting now for nothing.”

  Mom, oblivious to my father’s rant, said, “I think Marla’s spending too much time alone, that she needs to get out, do things to take her mind off what happened, to—”

  “I said I’d do it, Mom.”

  “I was just saying,” she said, the first hint of an edge entering her voice, “that it would be good if we all made an effort where she’s concerned.”

  Dad, not taking his eyes off the screen, said, “It’s been ten months, Arlene. She’s gotta move on.”

  Mom sighed. “Of course, Don, like that’s something you just get over. Walk it off, that’s your solution to everything.”

  “She’s gone a bit crackers, if you ask me.” He looked up. “Is there more coffee?”

  “I just said I made a fresh pot. Now who’s the one who isn’t listening?” Then, like an afterthought, she said to me, “When you get there, remember to just identify yourself. She always finds that helpful.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  • • •

  “You seemed to get your cereal down okay,” I said to Ethan once we were in the car. Ethan was running behind—dawdling deliberately, I figured, hoping I’d believe he really was sick—so I offered to drop him off at school instead of making him walk.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “There something going on?”

  He looked out his window at the passing street scene. “Nope.”

  “Everything okay with your teacher?”

  “Yup.”

  “Everything okay with your friends?”

  “I don’t have any friends,” he said, still not looking my way.

  I didn’t have a ready answer for that. “I know it takes time, moving to a new school. But aren’t there some of the kids still around that you knew before we went to Boston?”

  “Most of them are in a different class,” Ethan said. Then, with a 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 whether Marla would be insulted that her aunt seemed to believe she was too helpless to make her own meals, but what the hell. If it made Mom happy . . .

  Heading up the walk, I noticed weeds and grass coming up between the cracks in the stone.

  I mounted the three steps to the door, switched all the bags to my left hand, and, as I rapped on it with my fist, noticed a smudge on the door frame.

  The whole house needed painting or, failing that, a good power-washing, so the smudge, which was at shoulder height and looked like a handprint, wasn’t that out of place. But something about it caught my eye.

  It looked like smeared blood. As if someone had swatted the world’s biggest mosquito there.

  I touched it tentatively with my index finger and found it dry.

  When Marla didn’t answer the door after ten seconds, I knocked again. Five seconds after that, I tried turning the knob.

  Unlocked.

  I swung it wide enough to step inside and called out, “Marla? It’s Cousin David!”

  Nothing.

  “Marla? Aunt Arlene wanted me to drop off a few things. Homemade chili, some other stuff. Where are you?”

  I stepped into the L-shaped main room. The front half of the house was a cramped living room with a weathered couch, a couple of faded easy chairs, a flat-screen TV, and a coffee table supporting an open laptop in sleep mode that Marla had probably been using to say some nice things about a plumber in Poughkeepsie. The back part of the house, to the right, was the kitchen. Off to the left was a short hallway with a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom.

  As I closed the door behind me, I noticed a fold-up baby stroller tucked behind it, in the closed position.

  “What the hell?” I said under my breath.

  I thought I heard something. Down the hall. A kind of . . . mewing? A gurgling sound?

  A baby. It sounded like a baby. You might think, seeing a stroller by the door, that wouldn’t be all that shocking.

  But here, at this time, you’d be wrong.

  “Marla?”

  I set the bags down on the floor and moved across the room. Started down the hall.

  At the first door I stopped and peeked inside. This was probably supposed to be a bedroom, but Marla had turned it into a landfill site—disused furniture, empty cardboard boxes, rolls of carpet, old magazines, outdated stereo components. Marla appeared to be an aspiring hoarder.

  I moved on to the next door, which was closed. I turned the knob and pushed. “Marla, you in here? You okay?”

  The sound I’d heard earlier became louder.

  It was, in fact, a baby. Nine months to a year old, I guessed. Not sure whether it was a boy or girl, although it was wrapped in a blue blanket.

  What I’d heard were feeding noises. The baby was sucking contentedly on a rubber nipple, its tiny fingers attempting to grip the plastic feeding bottle.

  Marla held the bottle in one hand, cradling the infant in her other arm. She was seated in a cushioned chair in the corner of the bedroom. On the bed, bags of diapers, baby clothes, a container of wipes.

  “Marla?”

  She studied my face and whispered, “I heard you call out, but I couldn’t come to the door. And I didn’t want to shout. I think Matthew’s nearly asleep.”

  I stepped tentatively into the room. “Matthew?”

  Marla smiled, nodded. “Isn’t he beautiful?”

  Slowly, I said, “Yes. He is.” A pause, then: “Who’s Matthew, Marla?”

  “What do you mean?” Marla said, cocking her head in puzzlement. “Matthew is Matthew.”

  “What I mean . . . Who does Matthew belong to? Are you doing some babysitting for someone?”

  Marla blinked. “Matthew belongs to me, David. Matthew’s my baby.”

  I cleared a spot and sat on the edge of the bed, close to my cousin. “And when did Matthew arrive, Marla?”

  “Ten months ago,” she said without hesitation. “On the twelfth of July.”

  “But . . . I’ve been over here a few times in the last ten months, and this is the first chance I’ve had to meet him. So I guess I’m a little puzzled.”

  “It’s hard . . . to explain,” Marla said. “An angel brought him to me.”

  “I need a little more than that,” I said softly.

  “That’s all I can say. It’s like a miracle.”

  “Marla, your baby—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” she whispered, turning her head away from me, studying the baby’s face.

  I pressed on gently, as if I were slowly driving onto a rickety bridge I feared would give way beneath me. “Marla, what happened to you . . . and your baby . . . was a tragedy. We all felt so terrible for you.”

  Ten months ago. It had been a sad time for everyone, but for Marla it had been devastating.

  She lightly touched a finger to Matthew’s button nose. “You are so adorable,” she said.

  “Marla, I need you to tell me whose baby this really is.” I hesitated. “And why there’s blood on your front door.”

  THREE

  DETECTIVE Barry Duckworth, on this, the twentieth anniversary of his joining the Promise Falls Police Department, was thinking he was facing the greatest challenge of his career.

  Would he be able to drive past the doughnut shop on his way to the station without hitting the drive-through for a coffee and a chocolate frosted?

  After all, if there was ever a day where he felt entitled to a treat, this was it. Twenty years with the department, nearly fourteen of them as a detective. Wasn’t that a cause for celebration?

  Except this was only the second week of his latest attempt to lose weight. He’d tipped the scales at two hundred and eighty pounds in the past month and decided maybe it was time to finally do something about it. Maureen, bless her, had stopped nagging him about his size, figuring the choice to cut back had to be his. So, two weeks earlier, he decided the first step would be to forgo the doughnut he inhaled every morning. According to the doughnut chain’s Web site, his favorite pastry was about three hundred calories. Jesus. So if you cut out that doughnut, over five days you were eliminating fifteen hundred calories from your diet. Over a year, that was seventy-two thousand calories.

  It would be like going without food for something on the order of three weeks.

  It wasn’t the only step he was trying to take. He’d cut out dessert. Okay, that wasn’t exactly right. He’d cut out his second dessert. Whenever Maureen made a pie—especially if it was lemon meringue—he could never limit himself to one slice. He’d have one regular wedge after dinner, then go back and tidy up the edge of the last cut. That was usually just a sliver, and how many calories could there be in a sliver? So he would have a second sliver.

  He’d been making a concerted effort to give up the slivers.

  He was a block away from the doughnut place.

  I won’t pull in.

  But Duckworth still wanted a coffee. He could drive through and just order a beverage, couldn’t he? Was there any harm in that? He could drink it black, no sugar, no cream. The question would be, once he was in the line for the coffee, would he be able to resist the—

  His cell phone rang.

  This car was equipped with Bluetooth, so he didn’t have to go reaching into his jacket pocket for the phone. All he had to do was touch a button on the dash. Another bonus was that the name of the caller came up on the screen.


  Randall Finley.

  “Shit,” Duckworth said under his breath.

  The former mayor of Promise Falls. Make that the former disgraced mayor of Promise Falls. A few years back, when he was making a run for a Senate seat, it came out that he had, on at least one occasion, engaged the services of an underage prostitute.

  That didn’t play so well with the electorate.

  Not only did he lose his bid to move up the political food chain, he got turfed as mayor in the next election. Didn’t take it well, either. He made his concession speech after downing the better part of a bottle of Dewar’s, and referred to those who had abandoned him as “a cabal of cocksuckers.” The local news stations couldn’t broadcast what he said, but the uncensored YouTube version went viral.

  Finley vanished from public view for a time, nursed his wounds, then started up a water-bottling company after discovering a spring on a tract of land he owned north of Promise Falls. While not quite as big as Evian—he had named it, with typical Randall Finley modesty, Finley Springs Water—it was one of the few around here that was doing any hiring, mainly because they did a strong export business. The town was in economic free fall of late. The Standard had gone out of business, throwing about fifty people out of work. The amusement park, Five Mountains, had gone bankrupt, the Ferris wheel and roller coasters standing like the relics of some strange, abandoned civilization.

  Thackeray College, hit by a drop in enrollment, had laid off younger teaching staff who’d yet to make tenure. Kids finishing school were leaving town in droves to find work elsewhere, and those who stayed behind could be found hanging around local bars most nights of the week, getting into fights, spray-painting mailboxes, knocking over gravestones.

  The owners of the Constellation Drive-in, a Promise Falls–area landmark for fifty years that had engaged in combat with the VCR, DVD player, and Netflix, were finally waving the white flag. A few more weekends and a small part of local history would be toast. Word had it that the screen would be dropped, and the land turned into some kind of housing development by developer Frank Mancini, although why anyone wanted to build more homes in a town where everyone wanted to leave was beyond Duckworth’s comprehension.