Broken Promise

by Linwood Barclay

“We’ll know more as the investigation proceeds, Mr. Gaynor, but it appears this attack happened yesterday afternoon. Coming home last night . . . it’s unlikely it would have made any difference.”

  Bill Gaynor closed his eyes and breathed in slowly.

  “I noticed you have a security system,” Duckworth said.

  He opened his eyes. “Yes. But Rose only turned it on at night when she went to bed. She didn’t have it on through the day. Every time she’d go out, to go to the store, or take Matthew for a walk in his stroller, she’d have to disengage it before she opened the door. So she only put it on at night.”

  “Okay. What about just locking it?”

  A fast nod. “That she almost always did. She’d turn the dead bolt every time she came back in the house.”

  “What about friends? Did your wife belong to any clubs? Like a university women’s club or a gym? Anything like that?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  “And I have to ask, Mr. Gaynor, whether it’s possible there could have been anyone else.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Duckworth said nothing, just let the question sink in.

  “Oh, no, God. I mean, we were devoted to each other, and she just had a baby. She’s hardly— That’s a terrible thing to ask.”

  “I’m sorry. Any kind of trouble with the law?”

  “Are you serious? Of course not. Okay, she got a speeding ticket a week or so ago, but I’d hardly call that being in trouble with the law.”

  “Nor would I,” Duckworth said gently. “Do you have family in town?”

  “No. We don’t really have any extended family at all. I was an only child and my parents passed away when I was in my teens. And Rose, she did have an older sister, but she died years ago.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “Horseback riding. She fell off a horse and broke her neck.”

  Duckworth winced. “Parents?”

  “Like me, Rose’s mother and father passed away fairly early. I think she lost her mother when she was nineteen, and her father when she was twenty-two.”

  “So there’s no parents, in-laws, who might have keys to the house.”

  “No, just Sarita.”

  “Who’s Sarita?”

  “The nanny. I don’t know where she is. She should be here. I’m pretty sure this is the day she comes in the morning.”

  “What’s Sarita’s last name?”

  Gaynor’s mouth opened but nothing came out.

  “Her name?” Duckworth repeated.

  “I don’t . . . I don’t think I’ve ever known Sarita’s last name. Rose, she took care of that end of things.” His face reddened with embarrassment. “I know I should know this.”

  “That’s okay,” Duckworth said, keeping his disapproval to himself. “But what can you tell me about her?”

  “When we had Matthew, I thought it would be a good idea for Rose to have some help. She’s had . . . health problems over the years. So if we had someone come in a few times a week to help out . . . Sarita isn’t exactly a nanny, although she’s got training and has worked with children. But even if she could be here just to spell Rose. Give her a chance to get out of the house. Do some shopping without having to lug Matthew and the car seat and all that. Plus, Sarita helped out with other things. Cleaning, getting the laundry caught up. Cooking. That kind of thing. All before she headed off, if she had a shift.”

  “A shift?” Duckworth asked.

  “Yeah. She pulled a few shifts at a nursing home or a hospital or something. I don’t know exactly what it was.”

  “How did you find Sarita? To hire her?”

  “It wasn’t me who did it. I told Rose I thought it’d be a good idea for her to have help, but she did the actual looking. I think she saw an ad online somewhere; there was a phone number. She called and Sarita came out for an interview and Rose liked her and that was that.”

  “And you’re sure you don’t know her last name.”

  Gaynor shook his head.

  Duckworth was thinking that Rosemary Gaynor would probably have a number for the nanny in the contacts in her phone. Failing that, it would probably be written down somewhere. Then he had another thought.

  “How’s Sarita paid? You must have some canceled checks. There’ll be a name on those.”

  “It was . . . cash,” he said. “We always pay Sarita in cash. She’s not, strictly speaking . . . I’m not sure whether Sarita is here legally.”

  “Okay. Where’s she from?”

  “I didn’t even think people from Mexico came this far north, but she might be from there. Or she might be from the Philippines. She doesn’t look really, you know, that foreign, like maybe one of her parents was an American. Like, a white American.”

  Duckworth said nothing, made a note.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure about this. Does it matter where she’s from? I mean, you’ve got that insane woman who had Matthew. That’s who you need to be talking to.”

  Duckworth said, “Can you excuse me for five seconds?”

  He left the dining room, waved over Officer Gilchrist. “Find out where Marla Pickens lives and seal that house off. No one gets in. Right now.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  Duckworth went back to his living room chair. Gaynor had a cell phone in his hand. He wasn’t making a call or checking mail. He was simply staring at it.

  “I feel like I should be calling someone,” he said. “But I can’t think who.”

  “Let’s get back to Sarita. You say she should have been here today. Is that right?”

  “Yes. I’m certain this is her morning to come. And yesterday. She was supposed to be here yesterday.”

  “Okay,” Duckworth said. “If she’s supposed to be here, and she isn’t, that raises a couple of possibilities, Mr. Gaynor. One is that she may have something to do with this, or know something about what happened here. And . . .” Duckworth hesitated a moment. “And it may mean that she’s in some kind of trouble herself.”

  Bill Gaynor blinked. “Oh, my God. This Marla woman didn’t just kill Rose. She’s killed Sarita, too, hasn’t she?”

  THIRTEEN

  David

  I’D put Marla back in my car, up front in the passenger seat. I got behind the wheel, but we weren’t going anywhere. Officer Gilchrist had ordered me to surrender my keys earlier, and then he was back asking to see Marla’s driver’s license, as if he wanted to know where she lived. He got on his radio to pass along some information, then kept watch on us to make sure we didn’t leave the scene. Agnes had gone down the street, to where they’d strung the police tape, to watch for lawyer Natalie Bondurant.

  “Remember coming up to the cabin?” Marla asked. The question came out of nowhere.

  “Wow, that was a long time ago,” I said. “I only went up half a dozen times, when I was sixteen or seventeen? Eighteen maybe?”

  Marla was referring to a place her parents owned on Lake George, barely an hour’s drive north of Promise Falls. And to call it a cabin was to do the place a disservice. It was a beautiful home. The property had been in Gill Pickens’s family for several generations, and long ago there had been a simple cabin and an outhouse on the site. Gill’s parents tore it down and built a house in its place, but it never stopped being called “the cabin.”

  Back when Agnes and my mother were getting along better than they were now, my family was invited up there for a few weekends. I swam and waterskied and went searching up and down the lake in Gill’s boat for teenage girls. Marla was a little kid then, probably six or seven.

  “I had a crush on you,” she said quietly, looking down into her lap.

  “What?”

  “I mean, even though you were my cousin, and, like, ten years older, I really liked you. Don’t you remember me following you around all the time?”

  “You were my shadow,” I said. “I remember anytime I wanted to go anywhere, you wanted to go with me.”

  She smiled weakly. “Remem
ber that time I found you? With what’s-her-name?”

  I cocked my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “In the boathouse. I went in there and caught you making out with that girl. I think her name was Zenia or something. You had your hand right under her shirt.”

  “Yeah, I remember that. I begged you not to tell anyone.”

  Marla nodded. “I made you take me to the marina, in Dad’s boat, and get me something at the snack bar. I was bought off for the price of a milk shake.”

  I shot her a smile. “Yeah. I remember that, too.”

  “I should have asked for more, considering what I’d end up doing for you later.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That same summer?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t think I know what you’re referring to.”

  She waved a hand, dismissed it. “All my memories of the cabin used to be good. It was my happy place, you know? But I don’t think I can ever go back there.” She went silent for several seconds, then said, “That’s where I lost her, you know. Where I lost Agatha.”

  “Agatha,” I repeated.

  “That’s what I would have named her. I had a name all picked out. Agatha Beatrice Pickens. A mouthful, I know.” Her eyes, which hadn’t had much of a break from crying in the last couple of hours, moistened yet again.

  “I didn’t know it happened up there,” I said.

  “There was this outbreak at the hospital then, C. diff or whatever they call it, and Mom was worried about me having the baby there. Although she didn’t want anyone to know she was choosing to keep her own daughter out of the hospital. She knew how that would play, sending me elsewhere at the same time she was telling the press that the hospital was perfectly safe, that all precautions were being taken. But she was trained as a nurse and was a midwife for a while years ago—you knew that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So she said she could look after me as well as anybody could. Although she didn’t want to take too many chances, so she got Dr. Sturgess to help out. So they got me all set up at the cabin. I mean, it was a good idea, and it was really nice up there. Relaxing, you know?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Mom stayed up there with me. She had Dr. Sturgess on standby. Like, if the contractions started getting really close together, she’d call him and get him up there. Since she’s the head of the hospital, people, even the doctors, jump when she tells them to.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said.

  “So, when it looked like the baby was about to be born, she texted him and he got up there real fast. And things were going okay at first, although I had a lot of pain, you know? Lots of pain.” Her voice drifted off.

  I didn’t know what to say. Maybe there wasn’t anything she wanted me to say. Marla just wanted to talk.

  “They gave me something for it; Dr. Sturgess did. And that helped. But then things started going wrong. Something really bad. And when the baby—when Agatha—came out, she wasn’t breathing.”

  “Was it the cord? The umbilical cord?” I didn’t know a lot about the subject, but I had heard of newborns dying that way.

  She looked away and nodded. “Yeah. I’ve read about it online, and it happens a lot, but it’s rare for it to actually threaten the baby. But that’s what happened. It was all kind of surreal, because I was sort of in and out, but even so, I’ll never forget it. Not as long as I live.”

  “I’m sorry, Marla. I can’t imagine how horrible that must have been.”

  “At least I got to hold her,” Marla said. “To see her perfect little fingers.” The tears were coming now. “Mom says I held her for a couple of minutes before they had to take her away. You have any Kleenex?”

  I pointed to the glove box. She opened it, grabbed three tissues, dabbed her eyes, and blew her nose. “Mom blamed herself,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “After, she said it was all her fault. That if I’d had the baby at the hospital, maybe they could have done more to save her. She took it pretty hard. I know she comes across as a total bitch and a half, but she took it almost as bad as I did.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Do you blame her?”

  She took several seconds to answer. “No,” she said finally. “It made sense, doing things that way. I mean, I went along with it. Dr. Sturgess said it was the smartest thing to do. It was just . . . it was just the way it happened. If I blame anyone, I guess I blame God. That’s who Mom says she blames, after she’s done blaming herself.”

  I nodded.

  “And I’m not a religious person. I mean, I didn’t really believe in God until I needed Him to blame. Does that make any sense?” She searched my face.

  “I think so,” I said. “It’s hard to know how to handle these things.”

  “And up until everything went to shit, it was kind of a good time up there. I mean, just being there with Mom. She was okay. She was really nice to me. She wasn’t judging me the way she usually does, even though I know she was pretty pissed when she found out I was pregnant. But close to the end, she seemed to come to terms with it.”

  “How about the father?” I asked. “How’d he react?”

  “Derek?” she said.

  “Yeah. I’ve never known his name.”

  “Derek Cutter.”

  The name rang a bell. From my days as a reporter for the Standard.

  “I didn’t tell him right away. I hadn’t talked to him much in the last few weeks I was pregnant. She didn’t want me to have anything to do with him. I don’t think I was really in love with him or anything.”

  “He’s a student?”

  Her head went up and down twice. “He’s local. He didn’t leave town to go to college like a lot of kids do. He started out living at home, but then his parents split up, and they sold the house and his mom moved away, I think. His dad moved into an apartment, and then Derek started sharing a house close to the college with some other students.”

  “Sounds kind of rough for him.”

  “Yeah. His dad runs a gardening service or something. When Derek was a teenager, he worked for him. Cutting lawns and doing landscaping and stuff like that. But when the house got sold, he had to rent a garage or something to store his lawn mowers and everything. Mom never liked Derek. She figured I should be finding someone whose parents were lawyers or owned Microsoft or invented Google. Someone like that. But Derek was okay.”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “At a bar in town. We just kind of bumped into each other. I might have sort of lied about how old I was. I told him I’d just gotten out of school, so he’d think I was only a year or two older than him, instead of seven. But I don’t think age really matters that much, do you?”

  My phone rang. “Hang on,” I said.

  It was home calling. That could mean Mom or Dad, but I was betting Mom.

  “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.