Broken Promise

by Linwood Barclay

“The customer is always right,” she liked to say, because the dead did not lie. The dead, Wanda believed, desperately wanted to speak to her, and what they wanted to tell her was the truth.

  Over the years, she’d accepted invitations from a number of groups—Probus, Rotary, the local chamber of commerce—to talk about her job.

  “I like to think that everyone who ends up on that table is an individual. That each and every one is special. You don’t want them all to become a blur, if you know what I mean. Even after all these years, I remember every one of them.”

  Sometimes she’d see something on one victim that brought to mind something she’d seen on another. Ten years back, police were looking for someone who was mugging johns after they’d visited prostitutes in the south end of town. Hitting them in the head with a brick, lifting their wallets. Often he came up with nothing, evidently not learning that if you’re going to rob someone who’s visiting a hooker, if you do it prerendezvous, your target’s likely to have a little more money on him.

  A couple of these poor bastards ended up dead.

  Wanda Therrieult noticed that even though the murders were several weeks apart, the microscopic chips of stone in their skulls were similar. The killer was using the same brick.

  One night, police patrolling the south end pulled over a driver for failing to signal. And there, on the front seat, was the brick.

  “It was my lucky brick,” the man told the judge before being sentenced to fifteen years.

  There was something about Rosemary Gaynor’s death that was making a bell go off, ever so faintly, in the back of her head.

  Given Wanda’s photographic memory for these things, she wondered why it wasn’t coming up right away. She could usually close her eyes and call up bludgeonings and gunshot wounds as though they were snapshots from a family album.

  What had happened to Rosemary Gaynor reminded her not of something she had seen, but of something she had heard about.

  Something three or four years ago.

  Another murder.

  Three years ago, right around this time, she’d taken a two-month leave of absence. Her sister Gilda, in Duluth, had been dying, and Wanda had gone up there to look after her in those final weeks. It had been a sad time, but also profoundly meaningful. It became one of the most important periods in her life. Wanda still made calls back to Promise Falls, checking in, catching up on what was going on. Gilda had jokingly accused her at one point of being more interested in the fully dead than the aspiring.

  Wanda opened another program. Photo files from other cases, arranged by date. She went back to the beginning of her leave, opening one file after another.

  A five-year-old girl run over by a car.

  A forty-eight-year-old roofer who tripped off the top of a church he was reshingling.

  A nineteen-year-old Thackeray student from Burlington, Vermont, who’d brought his father’s Porsche 911 to school for a week, lost control of it, and crashed it into a hundred-year-old oak at eighty miles per hour.

  A twenty-two-year-old woman who—

  Hang on . . .

  Wanda clicked on the file.

  Opened up the photos.

  Took a sip of her coffee as she studied the images.

  “Oh, boy,” she said.

  SIXTY-SIX

  ONCE Agnes Pickens was finished talking to her nephew, she went up the stairs to her second-floor home office and closed the door. She sat down at her desk, fired up her computer, opened Word, and selected the letter format.

  She wanted the margins just right. What she had to write was short, so she didn’t want the letter to start too high on the page, which would leave acres of white space at the bottom. It would look unbalanced.

  So she wrote what she had to say, then selected “print preview” to make sure it looked presentable. It didn’t. She had pushed the message too far down on the page. She deleted a few indents above the text, then looked at the preview again, and was happy with how it looked.

  She hit “print.”

  The letter came out, and she read it one more time, looking for typos. That would be so embarrassing, to have a typographical error or a spelling mistake in something of this nature.

  Agnes had dated it at the top, then written below:

  I hereby resign my position as administrator and general manager of the Promise Falls General Hospital, effective immediately.

  She had considered, briefly, expanding on it. Perhaps a word about regret. Maybe a line or two about her lifelong commitment to the Promise Falls community and public health. An apology about failing to live up to the high standards she had set for herself. But in the end, a simple, unembellished resignation seemed the way to go.

  She signed the letter, folded it, and slipped it into an envelope on which she wrote, To the Promise Falls General Hospital Board.

  She left it on the keyboard, then went in search of her husband, Gill. Agnes had thought he was upstairs, perhaps in their bedroom, but she did not find him there. She located him in the basement, standing next to the pool table, holding a cue in hand vertically, the end touching the floor. The balls were racked, but Gill just stood there, staring vacantly across the table.

  “Gill,” she said.

  He turned. “Yes, Agnes.”

  “I have to go out.”

  “Have you heard from Natalie?”

  “Not since she arrived at the station.” She hesitated. “But everything’s going to be okay.”

  Gill set the pool cue on the table. “But if you haven’t heard from Natalie—”

  “They’re going to drop the charges against Marla. Before the day is over, I’d guess.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I’m just . . . fairly confident.”

  Gill said haltingly, “About . . . Carol. I—”

  “I don’t care,” Agnes said.

  “But—”

  She raised a hand. “I don’t care. Your betrayal is . . . nothing, in the overall scheme of things.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gill said.

  Agnes shook her head ever so slightly. “Be strong for Marla. She’s going to need you. Whatever reservations I may have had about you, there haven’t been any where Marla is concerned. I know you love her very much. The next little while is going to be very difficult for her, but I’m hoping there will be some consolation. That she’ll get what she wanted. What was taken from her.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Agnes turned and walked away.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  David

  “WHO is this?” the 911 operator said.

  “David Harwood. Detective Duckworth knows who I am.”

  “I’m transferring you to a nonemergency line.”

  “This is an—”

  But then she was gone. Seconds later a man answered. “Hello?”

  “Detective Duckworth?”

  “Nope. This is Angus Carlson. You wanna leave a message?”

  “Get him. Put him on the phone. Tell him it’s David Harwood.”

  “I’m not sure where he is right now. I just got in. Hang on.” Several seconds went by, then: “He’s busy right now. What’s this about?”

  “It’s about Marla Pickens. And Rosemary Gaynor. I know what happened.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m guessing Detective Duckworth does, too,” Carlson said. “He’s with the Pickens woman right now in interrogation.”

  “She’s been arrested?”

  “Yup.”

  “For the Gaynor thing?”

  “No, jaywalking.”

  “She didn’t do it. Marla’s innocent.”

  “So, wait a second,” Carlson said. “Are you saying we’ve arrested the wrong person? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that happening before.”

  “Have you ever heard of a cop being a total asshole?” I asked. “That’s happening right now.”

  “Oh, sorry, you’re breaking up,” he said, as clearly as if he were in the car with me. “Try again
later.”

  Carlson ended the call.

  “Dickhead,” I said, handing the phone back to Sarita.

  “What happened?”

  I shook my head, too angry to repeat it. “They’ve arrested Marla,” I said. “She’s being questioned now.” I paused to let it sink in. “She’ll go to jail, Sarita. She’ll go to jail if you don’t tell the police what you know, and what you did.”

  “What if they think I did it?” she asked. “I had Ms. Gaynor’s blood on me.”

  “No, they’re not going to be looking at you. They’re going to be looking at Dr. Sturgess and Mr. Gaynor. Sarita, in five more seconds, Sturgess would have killed me. He was going to stick me with that fucking needle. And then he would have done you. The safest thing for you to do is tell the cops everything you know.”

  She bit her lower lip, stared out her window again. “Okay,” she said, not looking at me. “I will do it. I will help. I won’t try to run away.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I think . . . I think running and hiding would be even harder.” She turned, and I saw that she had been crying. “At least there is good news for Marla, yes? She must at least feel good to know her baby is alive.”

  “She doesn’t know,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t actually tell her, did you? When you handed Matthew to her?”

  Sarita had to think. “I . . . I guess I didn’t. I guess I thought she would just know. I mean, all she would have to do is look into the face of that baby and she’d have to know it was hers.”

  That made me smile. “Marla’s not good with faces,” I said.

  • • •

  I kept glancing in the rearview mirror all the way home, and never saw the Audi. As soon as I got into the house, I’d try Duckworth again. I’d tell him why Marla was innocent. I’d tell him about Sturgess and Gaynor. What I didn’t know, I’d get Sarita to tell him.

  There was a lot of it I still did not understand.

  If the doctor had somehow tricked Marla into thinking her child was dead so that he could arrange for the Gaynors to have him, how had he been able to trick Agnes?

  She’d been right there.

  Unless she wasn’t.

  No, Agnes had gone to the cabin. There was no way she wouldn’t be totally involved in everything that was going on. Aunt Agnes wasn’t someone who was easily fooled.

  I was hoping to get some answers very soon, provided Agnes showed up at the house as promised.

  When I pulled into the driveway, I saw Dad coming out of the side door of the garage, a beer in hand. That wasn’t like him.

  He approached the car as Sarita and I were getting out. He gave Sarita a puzzled look.

  “Sarita,” I said, “this is my father, Don Harwood.”

  “Hello,” she said, extending a hand.

  “Uh, yeah,” Dad said, accepting it, glancing back and forth between us. Maybe he was wondering if I had a new girlfriend. “Nice to meet you. So, how do you two know each other?”

  “Long story, Dad,” I said. “Where’s Mom?”

  “In the house someplace. She might have gone upstairs to lie down. Her leg’s been bugging her.” He looked up the street, his attention caught by another approaching car. “Hello, what’s this?”

  It was Agnes. The car screeched to a halt. She got out so hurriedly she didn’t even bother to close the door. I could hear the chiming of a key left in the ignition. She came straight to me.

  “You’re okay,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You knew.”

  Her face paled.

  “You knew something was going to happen. That Dr. Sturgess was going to try something. He had a syringe, Agnes. He was getting ready to jab the thing—”

  She held up a hand. “Please. I know.” She set her eyes on Sarita. “You’re the nanny.”

  Sarita nodded.

  “You took the baby to Marla’s house. That has to be how Matthew got there.”

  Sarita nodded again.

  “Because you knew,” Agnes said.

  A third nod from Sarita.

  “Do you know who did it?” my aunt asked her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you know who killed that woman? It wasn’t Marla. It can’t have been Marla. Tell me it wasn’t her.”

  I stepped in. “The blood on Marla’s door came from Sarita.”

  “But I did not kill Ms. Gaynor,” Sarita said. “I loved Ms. Gaynor. I found her, but I would never hurt her.”

  “Who, then?” Agnes asked.

  Sarita shook her head slowly. “I have ideas, but I don’t know.”

  Agnes looked back at me. “There are things I need to explain.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  “I never meant . . . I never could have imagined it would go this far,” my aunt said. “I need to tell you . . . what I did.” She took in the three of us, as if doing a count, and said, “Where’s your mother? Where’s my sister?”

  “In the house,” Dad said. “You shouldn’t leave your keys in the car, Agnes.”

  She was already walking toward the front door. “There’s no sense telling this any more times than I have to. Let’s find her.”

  The second we were in the house, Dad shouted, “Arlene!”

  “Upstairs,” she said.

  “Get on down here! Your sister’s here!”

  “I’ll be a minute. I’ve just got some ice on my leg.”

  Agnes said, “What happened?”

  “Her leg’s all swole up since she took a fall yesterday,” Dad said.

  Agnes yelled, “Stay there! I’m coming up.”

  A convoy of us ascended the stairs. Agnes first, then Dad. I stepped aside to let Sarita go ahead of me, and then I went up last.

  We found Mom propped up on her bed, on top of the covers, a couple of pillows tucked behind her, one pant leg pulled up above her knee, a thin towel on her leg immediately under the ice pack. There was a half-empty glass of water and an open container of Advil on the bedside table, and a Lisa Gardner paperback, spine cracked, pages-down on the bedspread.

  As one person after another filed in, her eyes went wide.

  “What is all this?” she said. Her face flushed red with embarrassment, particularly at the sight of Sarita, a total stranger.

  I introduced her, and added, “This woman took the baby to Marla’s house.”

  “What?” Mom said. “So Marla really was telling the truth? Oh, thank God.” She looked at her sister apologetically. “Not that I ever doubted her.”

  Agnes said, “It’s okay. It’s taken a long time for me to figure out what happened, too. I didn’t want to believe Marla had killed that woman and taken her baby, but I knew, the moment I heard where the baby had come from, that it wasn’t just some random thing that had happened.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mom said.

  Sarita said, “Would you like me to look at your leg?”

  “What?”

  “You should prop it up some, get a pillow under it.”

  “Sarita works at Davidson Place,” I said. “She helps people.”

  While Sarita tended to her, Mom pressing her back to the headboard as though reluctant to accept help from this stranger, she said again, “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Agnes. What do you mean, it wasn’t random?”

  Agnes appeared to be struggling, so I offered some help. “Because that baby really is Marla’s. Matthew is Marla’s son.”

  Mom’s jaw dropped an inch. Agnes looked at me, then back at her sister. “He’s right.” Then, to me: “You found out more than I thought you would. Faster, too.”

  “But you never wanted me to. If you’d chased me off, like Dr. Sturgess tried to do, I’d have wondered why you didn’t want my help. That about right?”

  Agnes closed her eyes for half a second, as though in pain, and nodded. “I kept hoping the police wouldn’t really find enough to charge her, but that . . . has changed.”

 
“I heard.”

  “I still don’t . . .” Mom’s voice trailed off. “This isn’t making any sense. Don, is this making any sense to you? Do you know about this?”

  “Do you want me to get your keys out of the car?” Dad asked Agnes.

  Sarita moved out of the way when Agnes indicated she wanted to sit on the edge of the bed.

  “I could never be like you,” Agnes said to Mom.

  “Be like me how?”

  “More . . . accepting.”

  “Agnes, please tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’ve done a horrible, horrible thing,” my aunt said. “You have no idea.”

  Mom slid a hand forward to take hold of her sister’s. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

  “I can tell you maybe. The question is whether I can tell Marla. I don’t know that I can.”

  Sarita, Dad, and I stood around the bed, barely breathing, wondering what Agnes was about to confess. I wanted to call the police station again, try to get Duckworth, but I couldn’t tear myself away from this.

  She said to Mom, “You’ve always been able to roll with things better than I could. I have a need to . . . control things.”

  Credit to all of us—Sarita excepted, who did not know Agnes the way we did—for not snickering.

  “It’s what’s made you successful,” Mom told her. “You have to control things. You have a lot of responsibility. You’ve got the lives of hundreds, even thousands of people in your hands.”

  “I failed her,” she said.

  “Failed . . . Marla?” Mom asked.

  “She was determined to have the baby. When that boy got her pregnant, she was determined to have it. I couldn’t talk her out of it. I tried to get her to end the pregnancy. Told her this boy wasn’t suitable husband material, even if he was willing to step up and do the right thing. She had no way to support herself other than this Internet thing she was doing.”

  Agnes took a moment to breathe, then continued.

  “But Marla wouldn’t listen. I tried to get her to see reason. She couldn’t handle being a mother. She’s always been too emotionally immature, too . . . flighty, too needy, too distracted to look after a baby. I knew, I just knew that if she had this child, it would fall to me to look after both of them. And I’d had this feeling that she was almost back on two feet again, that she was going to move forward with her life, get her act together. A child . . . it would be an enormous setback for her.”