Broken Promise (13 page)

“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.

His first patient was an elderly woman who’d fallen and broken her hip. She taken a tumble at the nursing home where she lived, and Sturgess was recommending she be kept here another couple of days before sending her back to let the home staff look after her.

Next was a seven-year-old girl named Susie who’d had a tonsillectomy the day before. Back around the dawn of time, a child who’d had this procedure would be kept for three or four days in the hospital, but now it was usually a day surgery: Arrive in the morning, go in for surgery, home by suppertime. Not that the patient would feel much like eating anything.

But Susie had lost a lot of blood during the operation, so she’d been kept overnight.

“How’s the princess doing today?” the doctor asked as he approached her bedside.

Struggling, she said, “Okay.”

“Hurts, huh?” he said, touching his own throat.

Susie nodded.

“They tell you you’ll get to eat all this ice cream after the operation, but once it’s over, the last thing you want to do is eat anything, am I right?”

The little girl nodded again.

“Even ice cream will hurt going down that throat of yours. But I’m betting by this afternoon you’ll want a bowl. That’s a promise. I’m sending you home today. You’re going to be just fine.”

He placed his palm on the girl’s cheek and smiled. “You’re a brave one, you are.”

Susie managed a smile. “I’m missing school,” she whispered.

“You like that?”

An enthusiastic nod.

“Maybe what we could do,” Sturgess said, “is next week, we put the tonsils back in; then we’ll take them out again so you can miss even more school.”

That brought a smile. “You’re joking,” she said hoarsely. “I don’t hate school that much.”

“You get better,” Sturgess said.

As he walked back to the car, his thoughts returned to Marla Pickens. He wondered what the problem was this time. If she’d kidnapped another baby from the hospital, surely everyone in the building would have been talking about it.

He figured sooner or later he’d learn the details. He was, after all, the family’s GP.

His car was parked in the multilevel garage that had been built four years ago. The hospital still had some ground-level lots, but over the last decade it had become nearly impossible to find a spot, even in the area reserved for staff, so a five-story parking building had been erected. The doctors were given exclusive access to the north end of the first level.

Sturgess had his remote out, pressed the button, saw the lights on his Lincoln SUV flash. He was reaching for the door handle when someone behind him, by one of the pillars, said, “Dr. Sturgess?”

There was no time to react.

The fist drove its way into his stomach the second he turned around. It felt as though it went in far enough to touch his spine. He dropped to his knees immediately, head down, a pair of worn sneakers in front of him.

Sturgess didn’t bother to look up. He didn’t know who this person was, but he didn’t have to guess who had sent him.

“Hey, Doc,” said the man standing over him. “I guess you can figure out what that’s about.”

Sturgess’s chest heaved as he struggled to get his breath back. The punch had been well placed. He didn’t believe anything had been broken. The man hadn’t caught a rib. He figured he’d be able to walk in another minute or two.

“Yeah,” he croaked.

“It’s a message,” the man said.

“I know.”

“What do you think it means?”

“It means . . . you want your money.”

“Not me.”

“The man . . . who sent you.”

“That’s right. He says you’re nearly paid up, but not quite. Until your debts and the interest are dealt with, he’s gonna keep sending me around to visit you.”

“I understand.”

“I’m not sure you do,” the man said. “Next time there will be blood.” He chortled. “And it’ll be coming from the little stump where one of your fucking fingers used to be.”

“I hear you,” the doctor said, most of his wind back now. “I gave him a hundred grand. You’d think he’d be fucking happy with that.”

“If a hundred grand was all you owed, I’m guessing he would be.” And then in a slightly more conciliatory tone, “You know, have you ever considered that maybe you’ve got a problem?”

“What?” Sturgess said; he had one knee up, and was slowly coming to a standing position. Now he was able to look his attacker in the eye. The thug was about thirty, bearded, pushing three hundred pounds easy.

The man rested a hand gently on the doctor’s shoulder. “You think I enjoy this? You think I like beating the shit out of people to get them to pay up?” He shook his head. “Not at all. I’m telling you, maybe you should get help. Gamblers Anonymous or something like that. Don’t go telling my boss I said this, because he likes the business he’s in, but hey, if you got your act together, there’s always some other dumb asshole willing to throw away his paycheck on the horses or blackjack or whatever. But you’re a doctor, right?”

Sturgess nodded.

“You help people. You probably work with your hands, doing surgery, shit like that. So when I see you next, and have to relieve you of one of your fingers, that’s kind of bad for society, you know? Like, imagine this. I chop your finger off; then I get in a car accident or something, and you’re the only doctor on call, but you can’t operate on me because your hand is fucked. That would be ironic, right?”

“It would,” Sturgess said.

“Well, then,” the man said, giving the doctor’s shoulder one more friendly pat, “you better pay up, because I’m one fucking lousy driver.”

He chuckled, turned, and walked away.

Sturgess got his door open and collapsed into the driver’s seat. The man was right. He needed to get his problem under control.

But first he had to pay off the rest of his debts. Otherwise he might not live long enough to get his act together.

SEVENTEEN

David

ONCE
Detective Duckworth was done with me, I had to find a way home. I considered calling my father, but he’d already been pressed into service to pick Ethan up at school, and I didn’t want to have to answer all the questions he’d have if he picked me up at a crime scene. And Mom, according to the brief chat I’d had with her, had hurt her leg, so I wasn’t going to trouble her, either.

So I called a cab.

You don’t hail a taxi in Promise Falls the way you do in New York. Unlike in the big city, most people here have a car and use it to go everywhere, so cabbies aren’t wandering suburban streets looking for a fare. You call in, and they send one out to you. Once I’d phoned in, I waited on the corner where I said I would be.

And thought.

What a morning.

Mom just had to send me to Marla’s with chili.