Broken Promise: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

  “Hello?”

  “David?”

  I was right. “Yeah, Mom.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “It’s a long story. I can’t really get into it right now. I’m with Marla, and Agnes has arrived.”

  “Because I don’t know if this is something you want your father to handle. I’d do it myself but I fell on the stairs.”

  I gripped the motionless steering wheel with my free hand. “Mom, what’s going on?”

  “I was coming up the stairs and slipped, but it’s nothing. But the school called about Ethan.”

  Jesus, when it rained, it poured. “What about Ethan? Is Ethan hurt?”

  “I don’t think so, but he got into some kind of fight. With another boy. He got sent to the office and they called here for you. You gave them your old cell phone number when you enrolled him and you must have forgotten to give them your new one, so if there’s an emergency—”

  “Mom!” I shouted. “What about Ethan?”

  “They want you to pick him up. They’re sending him home.”

  I closed my eyes and exhaled. “I can’t do that right now. I can’t leave the scene.”

  “The scene?”

  “Let Dad go. He can pick up Ethan, and I’ll sort things out when I get home. Okay?”

  “I’ll tell him. What did Marla do, David? Did she really take another baby?”

  “Later, Mom.”

  I ended the call, put the phone away, and lowered my head until it was touching the top of the wheel.

  “Trouble?” Marla asked.

  “Seems to be a lot of it going around,” I said. “But it’s okay.”

  I looked at the Gaynor house. The front door was being opened from the inside. Detective Duckworth emerged, locked eyes on my car, and headed our way. But before he could reach the car, two other people appeared by Marla’s open window.

  Agnes and Natalie Bondurant.

  Agnes said, “Everything’s going to be okay, child. Everything is going to be okay.”

  Duckworth reached the car and asked Agnes and Natalie to step aside. “Marla Pickens? Would you step out of the car?”

  “She has nothing to say,” Agnes said as Marla started to push open the door. Agnes pushed it back.

  “Ms. Pickens,” Natalie said, addressing Agnes, “let me take it from here. Hello, Barry.”

  “Natalie,” he said.

  “I’m representing Marla Pickens. I’m afraid she won’t be taking any questions at this time.”

  Duckworth eyed her tiredly. “I’m investigating a murder here, Natalie. I’ve got things to ask.”

  “I can appreciate that. But right now my client’s in shock and in no position to handle questions.”

  “And just when do you think your client will be taking questions?”

  “I’m not able to say at this time.”

  “Well, whether she wants to answer questions or not, you’re going to have her at the station in exactly one hour.”

  Natalie’s tongue poked the inside of her cheek. “She’s not going to have anything to tell you.”

  “Then she can not tell me anything at the station.”

  Now Agnes opened the door, took Marla by the arm, and helped her out. With Natalie on one side and Agnes on the other, they escorted her down the street, leaving me alone behind the wheel.

  “You got a lawyer, too?” Duckworth asked, looking at me through the open door.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  He glanced into the back of my car. “Where’d you get that stroller?”

  “It belongs to the Gaynors,” I said.

  “Christ on a cracker,” Duckworth said. “Open the hatch.”

  I got out and did so. I went to reach for the stroller but Duckworth slapped my hand.

  “Don’t touch that,” he said. “Have you already touched that?”

  “Yes.”

  Duckworth sighed. “Let’s you and me have a talk.”

  FOURTEEN

  “YOU sure you don’t mind my tagging along?” Walden Fisher asked Don Harwood.

  “Nah, it’s okay. I just got to go to the school and pick up my grandson, bring him home,” Don said, walking down the front steps in the direction of his blue Crown Victoria that he’d had forever. “Hop in.”

  The passenger door creaked as Fisher opened it.

  “Gotta put some WD-40 on that,” Don said.

  “Your grandson sick?”

  “No. He got into some kind of scrap with another kid.”

  “He okay?”

  “Well, they weren’t calling from the hospital, so I guess that’s a good thing,” Don said. “Truth is, the boy could use some toughening up. Getting in the odd fight probably be a good thing for him. I’ll scoop him up, bring him home, and we can go grab a coffee. Just want to check in on Arlene when I get back, though.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She just took a little trip on the stairs, banged up her leg. I want to make sure she’s okay.”

  Walden nodded understandingly. Backing out of the driveway, Don glanced over and thought he saw a look of sadness wash over the man’s face. “Arlene was telling me . . . she saw the notice in the paper about . . .”

  “Beth?” Walden said.

  “Right, yeah, Beth. I couldn’t remember her name. Arlene was telling me she passed away recently.”

  “Nine weeks,” he said. “The big C.”

  “Sorry,” Don said. He didn’t know what else to offer in the way of condolences. He wasn’t good at that sort of thing. “I’m not sure whether I ever met her.”

  “Probably at some Christmas party, a million years ago,” Walden said. “A different time.” A pause. “She was never really the same, after.”

  “After the diagnosis?”

  Walden shook his head. “Well, yeah, that’s true. But what I meant was, after what happened to Olivia.”

  There was a topic Don didn’t want to touch with a barge pole. Don might not keep up with the death notices the way Arlene did, but there wasn’t anyone in Promise Falls who didn’t know about Olivia Fisher and what happened to her. Three years ago—Don was thinking it was three years ago this month—the twenty-two-year-old woman was fatally stabbed one night in the downtown park, just steps away from the base of the falls from which the town got its name.

  Olivia Fisher was a young, beautiful woman just starting out on life’s journey. She’d recently completed a degree in environmental science at Thackeray, had lined up a job with an oceanic institute in Boston that was dedicated to preserving sea life, and was about to marry a young man from Promise Falls.

  The world was waiting for her to make it a better place.

  No one had ever been arrested for the crime. The Promise Falls police brought in help from the state, even an FBI profiler, but never made any real headway.

  Don felt uncomfortable, not sure what to say. The best he could come up with was, “It must have been devastating for Beth. But . . . you, too.”

  Walden said, “Yeah, but I finally went back to work. Had to. Didn’t have any choice. The grief’s always with you, but sometimes you throw yourself into something; you just go on autopilot. It becomes mechanical, you know?”

  “Sure,” Don said, although he wasn’t sure he did know. Certainly not in this context. Maybe his son, David, would. He’d been to hell and back over his late wife, Jan, a few years ago.

  “But Beth, she was a stay-at-homer, you know? Took the odd part-time job, and when Olivia was little she did babysitting, ran a day care out of the house. But she gave that up once Olivia was around ten. So every day I went to work, Beth was home alone with nothing but Olivia’s ghost as company. I know there’s probably no way to prove this, but I think that’s why she got sick. She was so depressed, it just poisoned her. You think s
omething like that could happen?”

  “I guess,” Don said.

  “It was almost as bad for Vick. Maybe worse.”

  “Vick?”

  “Oh, sorry, I just keep thinking everybody knows all the details. Victor Rooney. The one who nearly became our son-in-law. They were going to get married in three more months. He kind of went off the deep end, too. Started drinking hard. Never finished his degree in chemical engineering, got a job with the fire department. But the drinking got worse. They did their best for him, considering the circumstances and all. Sent him a couple of times to one of those places to dry out, get himself straightened up, but he never did pull it together. I think they finally fired him, or he quit, don’t know which, and if he ever found any other work I don’t know. See him the odd time just driving around town in his van. Too bad. Seemed like a good kid. I met him back when he had a summer job once with the town, working in the water treatment plant.”

  “They still got Tate Whitehead working there? See him around town once in a while. He must be due to retire soon.”

  “On the night shift, I think,” Walden said. “Where he can do the least damage.”

  “Yeah, well, Tate has a good heart but he’s no nuclear physicist,” Don said. “The school’s just up here.”

  “I’ll wait in the car,” Walden said.

  “Sure.”

  Don found a parking spot, left the keys so Walden could listen to the radio if he wanted, and went into the building, following the signs to the office. As soon as he walked in, he saw his grandson seated in a chair this side of a raised counter. Ethan’s face was scraped, and there was a tear in one knee of his jeans. His eyes were red.

  The boy was startled. “I didn’t know you were coming,” Ethan said. “I thought it would be Dad.”

  “He’s got his hands full,” Don said.

  “A job interview?”

  Don shook his head. “I wish.”

  A woman seated at a desk behind the counter got up and approached. “May I help you?”

  “I’m Ethan’s grandfather. Who are you?”

  “I’m Ms. Harrow. I’m the vice principal.”

  “There was some kind of trouble?”

  “He and another boy got into a fight. They’re both suspended for the rest of the day.”

  “Who’s the other kid? Where’s he?” Don asked.

  “That’d be Carl Worthington.”

  “Who started it?” Don asked.

  “That’s not really the issue,” Harrow said. “We have a zero-tolerance policy about fighting. So they’re both being disciplined.”

  “You start it?” Don asked his grandson.

  “No,” Ethan said meekly.

  “There,” he said to the vice principal. “If he didn’t start it, why’s he being suspended?”

  “Carl says it was Ethan who started it. I just got off the phone with Sam Worthington having this very same discussion.”

  “That’s the father of the kid that started it?”

  The vice principal started to speak but Don held up his hand. “Save it. I’ll take him home. In my day, we’d just let the kids sort it out and didn’t get so goddamn involved. Let’s go, Ethan.”

  Don tried to get some details out of Ethan on the way to the car, but he didn’t want to talk about it. But when he saw someone sitting in the front seat of the Crown Victoria, he asked, “Who’s that?”

  “Friend of mine. Well, sort of. Someone I worked with a long time ago, before I retired. Don’t be asking him anything about anybody.”

  “What would I ask him?”

  “I don’t know. But just don’t, okay?”

  Ethan got into the back of the car. Walden Fisher turned in his seat and extended a hand.

  “I’m Walden,” he said.

  Ethan accepted the handshake warily. “I’m Ethan. I don’t have anything else to say.”

  “Okay, then,” Walden said.

  When they got back home, Ethan burst out of the car like it was rigged to explode and ran in ahead of his grandfather. He found Arlene on the living room couch watching CNN, an ice pack on her leg. She tried to ask him what had happened, but he ran up to his room and closed the door.

  Don asked his wife how she was doing, said he didn’t have to go have a coffee with Walden if she needed his help, but she said she was fine, which was not the answer he was hoping for.

  So, with some reluctance, Don Harwood went to Kelly’s, where he had a coffee and a piece of cherry pie with whipped cream on top, and spent the better part of an hour talking to Walden about blueprints and water-main bursts and buried electrical lines, and when it was all over he came home and plunked down in his reclining chair with the intention of taking a nap.

  But he could not sleep.

  FIFTEEN

  David

  “HOW are you involved in all this?” Barry Duckworth asked me.

  We’d moved to his unmarked cruiser. He was behind the wheel and I was up front next to him.

  “Marla’s my cousin,” I explained. I told him about dropping by that morning with some food my mother had prepared.

  “Why would your mother do that?”

  “Because she’s nice,” I said.

  “That’s not what I mean. Marla Pickens is a grown woman. Why does your mother think she needs to send her food? Is Marla out of work? She been sick?”

  “She’s had a rough few months.”

  “Why?”

  “She . . . she lost a child. At birth. A little girl. She hasn’t been quite right since.” I didn’t get into details, and I didn’t volunteer the story about Marla trying to kidnap a baby from Promise Falls General. I had no doubt he’d find that out sooner or later, but I wasn’t going to be the one who told him.

  It wasn’t that I feared my aunt’s wrath at divulging that. Okay, maybe a little. But it really was Marla I was looking out for. What she’d done at the hospital was hugely damning in the current circumstances, and I wasn’t sure Duckworth or anyone else with the Promise Falls police would feel the need to pursue a very broad investigation once they had that tidbit. Marla killed Rosemary Gaynor and made off with her baby. Simple as that. Case closed, let’s go get a beer.

  I didn’t know that it was that simple. Then again, maybe it was.

  There was no denying Marla had Matthew Gaynor. And even though her story of how he’d come into her life seemed unlikely, I wasn’t convinced Marla had it in her to have committed the kind of savagery I’d seen—if only for an instant—inside that house.

  I hoped to God she didn’t.

  “What do you mean, hasn’t been quite right?” Duckworth asked.

  “Depressed, withdrawn. Maybe not taking as good care of herself as she could. Which was why my mom wanted to send some food over.”

  “Why you?”

  “What do you mean, why me?” I asked.

  “Why didn’t she take it over herself?”

  I licked my upper lip. “I had the time. I’m back home living with my folks. I’m out of work. Maybe you heard, the Standard went under.”

  “And the Gaynors’ baby was there? At Marla’s house?”

  I nodded.

  “And this didn’t seem right to you? Because you knew she didn’t have a child?”

  “That’s right. She told me a woman handed her the baby yesterday.”

  “Just out of the blue, someone knocked on the door and said, ‘Here, have a kid.’”

  “Yeah.”

  Duckworth ran a palm over his mouth. “That’s quite a story.”

  “That’s what she says happened.”

  He shook his head slowly, then said, “I thought I’d heard you’d moved to Boston.”

  “I had.” I guessed it wasn’t that strange that Duckworth would take notice of what I was up to, given that we knew each
other from my troubles five years earlier. “But I moved back. Things weren’t working out at the Globe. I was working nights most of the time and never got to see Ethan. You remember Ethan.”

  “I do. Good boy.”

  Even with everything that was going on, I couldn’t stop worrying about what had happened with Ethan at school.

  “I wanted to be close to my parents,” I told Duckworth. “They’re a great help. I got rehired at the Standard just as the paper closed.”

  Duckworth wanted to know how I’d made the connection with the Gaynors. I told him, and about arriving at the same time as the husband. Duckworth wanted to know how Bill Gaynor seemed, before we’d found his wife.

  “Agitated. He said he’d been trying to raise her on the phone, couldn’t.”

  He asked me whether I knew anyone named Sarita.

  “No. But I heard Gaynor say the name. That she’s the nanny. Haven’t you talked to her?”

  “Not yet.” He paused. “You’re not getting your car back.”

  “I kind of figured.”

  “Eventually, but not for a while.”

  “You’re going to find my prints on that stroller.”

  “Uh-huh,” Duckworth said.

  “I just thought I should mention it. I put it in the car when we came over here.”

  “Okay.”

  “And probably in the house, too,” I added. “I was inside, briefly, with the husband. So on the door, maybe some other places. I don’t remember. I might have touched something.”

  “Right,” Duckworth said. “Thanks for filling me in.”

  I thought maybe, in retrospect, that pointing those things out didn’t do me the service I was hoping it would.

  SIXTEEN

  JACK Sturgess had two patients currently in the hospital he felt obliged to check in on before he left Promise Falls General and went back to the medical building a few blocks away, where he kept his office. But he couldn’t get his mind off what Agnes had told him at end of the canceled board meeting.

  That there was trouble, again, with Marla. Just when you think things are settling down, another bomb goes off.