Broken Promise (12 page)

“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.

“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 something 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.”