Broken Promise: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

  “Of course.”

  “And now I’m going to go up and see how Marla is doing. I think I’ll have her sent home today.”

  “I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

  “Well, everything about this is pretty unbelievable. Gill’s going to take some time off, or at least conduct all his business from the house, so there’ll be someone there with Marla at all times. He’s there now. We’ll spell each other.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” Carol said. She stood. “Thank you for this. And there’s just one other thing I’d like to say.”

  “Okay,” Agnes said, and waited.

  “I just know Marla didn’t do anything bad.”

  “Well, that’s nice of you, Carol.”

  “I’ve met her lots of times, and I don’t think she has a mean bone in her body. She’s a good person.”

  Agnes smiled. “Let everyone know about the rescheduled meeting. I’ll be back in a while.”

  Agnes left her office, heading for the elevators. Carol returned to her own desk, tossed her tissue into the wastebasket tucked under it, then took a small makeup mirror from her purse to make sure she looked presentable. When she was finished with that, she took out her cell phone. She found the number she was looking for, then put the phone to her ear and listened to the rings.

  After five, someone picked up.

  Carol said, “Hey, it’s me. . . . I just had the most amazing conversation with, you know, my boss. . . . She was so nice to me. I’ve been a total wreck about what’s going on, and I kind of lost it and she was really comforting. I’ve never really seen her like that before. . . . Yeah, kind of weird . . . And it got me thinking about us, you know, that maybe it’s time to, you know. I mean, there’s just no future. . . . I know, I know. . . . I just don’t think I can keep doing this. . . . I kind of figured you’d be thinking along the same lines. . . . I know. . . . I hear ya. . . . Look, I have to go; there’s a lot going on here. . . . Don’t say that. . . . You’re going to make me cry. . . . I love you, too, Gill.”

  FORTY-ONE

  WALDEN Fisher ended up taking Victor Rooney back to his house after escorting the man out of that bar. Walden wasn’t certain that, if he’d dropped Victor off at his own house, he wouldn’t just head back out and get himself into more trouble.

  So he put Victor in the spare room, the one that had once been his daughter Olivia’s bedroom, and where, Walden suspected, Victor had probably slept on more than one occasion when he was seeing Olivia, when Walden and his wife had been out to dinner or out of town.

  It was a long time since anything like that had bothered Walden. Back then, he’d suspected his daughter and Victor were having sex, and he couldn’t say he was happy about it at the time, but he and Beth had been young once, too, and it wasn’t as if they’d waited for their wedding night.

  You couldn’t run your kids’ lives, he told himself. It was hard enough when they were in their teens, but once they were adults, all bets were off. You could let them know you were there for them, but if you tried to tell them what to do, well, you might as well try teaching a goat how to drive a tractor.

  Walden was in the garage out back of the house, tending to a few things, when he saw movement in the kitchen window. He returned to the house to find that Victor was up, hair tousled, eyes dark and heavy lidded.

  “I wondered where the hell I was,” he said, his voice sounding as if it were coming through a can of gravel. “When I opened my eyes I knew I wasn’t home. I don’t even remember you bringing me here last night.”

  “You were pretty out of it,” Walden said.

  “I know where you found me. I remember that. But not a lot else.”

  “You were about to get yourself beat up good.”

  “What was I doing?”

  Walden shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. There’s still coffee. Should be hot. You should have some.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he mumbled, and disappeared back into the house. Walden went in after him, poured him some coffee.

  “Just black,” Victor said, taking the mug from Walden. “I feel kinda like shit.”

  “You look kinda like shit.”

  Victor grinned, took a sip.

  “Victor, I know this is none of my business, but I’m gonna put my oar in anyway.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” he said.

  “You’re a bright guy. I mean, you always were. Good at school. You picked up stuff fast. Good with your hands, as I recall. Mechanically inclined, but book-smart, too.”

  “A real whiz kid,” he said, nodding.

  “What I’m saying is, you’ve got something to offer. You have skills. There’s got to be someone in town here who could use those. But you have to stop getting wasted every night.”

  “You been spying on me?”

  “No, I’m just—I’m making an assumption. But tell me I’m wrong.”

  Victor set his coffee on the counter. “Why aren’t you upset?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you a mess like I am? She was your fucking daughter.”

  Walden came at him like a cannonball. He grabbed the man by his jacket, yanked him close to his face, then threw him up against the counter. Victor’s head flung back, hit the upper cupboards, rattled dishes. But Walden wasn’t finished. He grabbed hold of Victor again with everything he had, and this time threw him down onto the floor.

  He was some three decades older than Victor, but Walden had no trouble throwing the man around. Maybe it helped that he was angry, and Victor was hungover.

  “Never!” Walden shouted. “Never say that!” He brought back a leg and kicked Victor in the thigh. The younger man pulled in on himself, put his hands up over his head in case Walden’s shoe connected with him there next.

  “I’m sorry! Jesus! I’m sorry!”

  “You think you’re the only one who grieves?” Walden said, still shouting. “Goddamn your arrogance, you little shit.”

  “Okay! I didn’t mean it!”

  Walden collapsed into a kitchen chair, rested his arms on the table, and worked on catching his breath. Slowly Victor got to his feet, pulled out a chair on the other side of the table, and sat down.

  “I was out of line,” he said.

  Walden’s hands were shaking.

  “Really. That was wrong. I should never have said anything like that. You’re a good man. I know you miss her. You’ve always been good to me. What you did for me last night, bringing me here, I appreciate that. That was real decent of you.”

  Walden looked at his hands, put one over the other to stop the trembling. Slowly he spoke.

  “I had Beth,” he said. Victor looked at him, not sure what he meant by that, so he waited. Walden continued. “I had Beth, so I had to hold it together. She went to pieces. She was never really able to move on. What would have happened to her; who would have looked after her if I went to the bar every night to feel sorry for myself? Where would she have been then?”

  He lifted his hand and pointed an accusing finger at Victor. “I couldn’t be as selfish as you. I couldn’t drown my sorrows the way you have. I had responsibilities, and I met them.”

  “I had nobody to be responsible for,” Victor said. “So what difference did it make what I did?”

  “What difference?” Walden asked. “Are you asking what’s the point?”

  “Is there one? What about you? Now that your wife is gone? Now that you’ve lost the person—the people—who were most important to you, what’s the fucking point?”

  “We honor them,” Walden said.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “When you do what you do, you shame Olivia.”

  “What? I don’t get that. I don’t get that at all.”

  “People see you and they think, What kind of m
an is he? Can’t make anything of himself. Full of self-pity. They wonder, What was Olivia thinking, that she’d spend the rest of her life with this man? What you do, the way you act, it diminishes Olivia. Makes people think less of her.”

  “That’s horseshit. People aren’t entitled to grieve?”

  “Of course they are. For a period. But then you have to show people what you’re made of. Show people what Olivia saw in you in the first place. So people know she was a good judge of character. It’s all about character.”

  Victor appeared to be thinking about that. “I don’t know. What about you? How do you honor her? How do you honor Olivia? And Beth?”

  “I’m finding my own way to do that,” Walden said. He looked away, out the window. “You should go,” he said.

  “Okay,” Victor said, pushing back his chair.

  “Of all the things you said last night, you were right about one thing.”

  “What was that?”

  “You shouldn’t have been late,” Walden said. He turned away, looked down at his right hand, spotted a rough fingernail, brought it to his mouth and bit it.

  FORTY-TWO

  David

  I was planning to head straight to the address I had for Marshall Kemper, the Davidson Place custodian who’d booked off sick who, I hoped, might know where I could find Sarita Gomez.

  I felt an urgency to get there, but I realized my route would take me to within a block of where Marla’d told me Derek Cutter, the young man who’d gotten her pregnant, lived. He was someone I wanted to talk to, and this might be my best chance at catching him.

  So I hung a left and pulled up in front of a brick duplex, a simple box of a building, constructed without a single nod to any kind of architectural style. One apartment on the first floor, another on the second. Marla had said Derek shared the upper apartment with some other students. I parked at the curb, then went up and rang the bell for the top unit.

  I heard someone running downstairs, and then the door opened. It was a young woman, maybe twenty, in a tracksuit, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Hi,” I said. “I was looking for Derek.”

  Her mouth made a big “O.” “Oh, yeah, right, he said he called you late last night, after all the shit that went down. He’ll be glad to see you.”

  “Wait, I think—”

  But she was already heading back up, taking the steps two at a time, shouting, “Derek! Your dad’s here!” She must have turned right around when she got to the top, because a second later she was flying past me. “Just go on up. I gotta do my run.”

  I climbed the stairs, and as I reached the door to the second-floor apartment it opened, and a man I guessed was Derek looked startled to see me.

  “You’re not my dad,” he said. He looked thin in his T-shirt and boxers, his legs coming out of them like two white sticks. He had a patchy beard, and black hair hanging over his eyes.

  “No, I’m sorry, your girlfriend, she just assumed. I didn’t have a chance to set her straight.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend; she’s a roommate, and, like, who are you?”

  “Marla’s cousin,” I said. “I’m David Harwood.”

  “Marla?” he said. “You’re Marla Pickens’s cousin?”

  “You got a minute?”

  “Uh, sure, yeah, come on in.”

  He created a space on the couch by clearing away several books and a laptop. I sat down and he perched himself on the end of a coffee table that was littered with half a dozen empty beer cans.

  “Why are you here about Marla?” he asked.

  When his roommate mentioned something about “all the shit that went down,” I’d assumed it had to do with the Gaynor murder, and Marla’s possible involvement. It had made the news.

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “I’ve heard about what went down on campus last night, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Marla, does it?”

  Now it appeared neither of us was up to speed, but on totally different events. “What happened at Thackeray?” I asked.

  “Fucking security killed one of my friends, that’s what happened,” Derek said. “Shot him in the goddamn head.”

  “I don’t know anything about this,” I admitted. “Who was your friend?”

  “Mason. They’re saying he was the guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “Who was attacking girls at the college. There’s no fucking way. He wasn’t like that.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “Helt. Mason Helt. He was a really good guy. He was in the drama program with me. He was really good. They say he was attacking one of the security guards, who was, like, bait or something, and then he got shot. It’s nuts.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. “That’s why you called your dad?”

  Derek nodded. “Yeah, just because, you know, I kind of freaked out and I just needed to talk. I was surprised when Patsy said it was my dad at the door, because I didn’t tell him to come out or anything.” He fixed his eyes on me more closely. “You look familiar to me.”

  I had a feeling why that might be, but I didn’t want to lead the witness. No sense in Derek’s taking a dislike to me if it didn’t have to happen.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever met,” I said honestly.

  “You were one of the pack,” he said. “One of the ones who made my life hell. I recognize you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d have been one of them.”

  It was a long time ago. Seven, eight years? The Langley murders. Father, mother, son, all killed in their home one night. Derek and his parents lived next door, and for a period of a day or two, Derek was a prime suspect. The real killer was found and Derek completely exonerated, but it had to be a scarring experience.

  “Every once in a while,” he said, “people still look at me funny. Like they think, Maybe it wasn’t that other guy. Maybe it really was him. Thanks for being a part of that. For putting my picture in the paper. For writing stuff that wasn’t true.”

  I could have told him I’d been doing my job. That it wasn’t the press that arrested him, but the police. That the media didn’t just decide one day to pick on him, but that we were following the story where it led. That the Standard wouldn’t have been doing its duty if it had decided not to be part of the media frenzy, no matter how short-lived it was. That sometimes innocent people get caught up in current events, and they get hurt, and that’s just the way it is.

  I didn’t think he’d be interested in hearing any of that.

  “It’s why my parents split up,” Derek said.

  “I didn’t know about that,” I said, although Marla had mentioned something about it.

  “Yeah, like, for a while, it looked like maybe they could ride it out. But that didn’t happen. My parents, they couldn’t patch it all together. So my mom moved away, and they had to sell the house, and everything pretty much went to complete shit, thanks very much. If I could have gone to college someplace other than Promise Falls, I would have, but I couldn’t afford it.”

  For what it was worth, I said, “I’m not here as a reporter. I don’t even work as one anymore. And the Standard doesn’t even exist.”

  “So, what then? Why are you here? What’s going on with Marla?”

  I told him.

  “Jesus,” he said. “That’s totally fucked-up. So they think she killed this woman and ran off with her kid?”

  “That’s not what Marla says happened, but I’d bet it’s what the police think.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Trying to help. Asking around. Hoping I’ll find out something that makes it clear she didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Derek shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve talked maybe half a dozen times since
she lost the baby, ran into her a couple of times, but that’s it.”

  “Did you know about the earlier incident, when she tried to smuggle a baby out of the hospital?”

  He nodded. “She told me about it. She said she just kind of lost her mind for a second. But that was pretty crazy of her.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  His story matched Marla’s. They’d struck up a conversation in a Promise Falls bar, hooked up. Saw each other pretty seriously for a while.

  “She was one of the weirdest girls I ever went out with,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “Well, first of all, she has this thing? Where she doesn’t exactly recognize you?”

  “Face blindness,” I said.

  “Yeah. I thought she was making it up at first, but then I Googled it and found out it was a real thing. And then I saw an episode of 60 Minutes where they talked all about it. More people have it than you might think. Brad Pitt even says he thinks he’s got it. Every time I’d meet Marla, I’d walk up to her, and she’d be looking at me, like she thought it was me but she wasn’t quite sure, and then I’d say, ‘Hey, it’s me,’ and she’d hear my voice, and then she’d be sure. It was really strange. She told me to always wear my hair the same way. Like, hanging like this, you know? That if I combed it back or something, which I would never do, because I don’t really do anything at all with my hair, she’d have a harder time recognizing me. Or, like, wear a plaid shirt. I wear a lot of plaid shirts. She said those kinds of visual cues really worked for her.”

  “I know,” I said. “The family started noticing it when she was a teenager. Tell me about when you found out she was pregnant.”

  “She told me she’d missed her period. It was like a bombshell, you know?”

  “How’d you take the news?”

  “Honestly? I got off the phone—she didn’t tell me in person—and I barfed my guts out. I used, you know, protection and everything, almost every time.”

  “Almost,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know.”

  “How’d your parents take it?”

  “I didn’t tell my mom. Just my dad. He’s kind of a traditional guy. He said I had to accept responsibility, and do whatever I had to do, and he’d be there to support me. And once we kind of knew where this was all going, he’d bring my mom into the loop. So, you know, I told Marla I would stand by her, help her any way I could. That it was her decision to make, whatever she did.”