Broken Promise (43 page)

“How the fuck should I know?” the doctor fired back. “Maybe you should talk to him.”

“Talk to him?”

“I don’t know. Call him; tell him to back off. Leave this alone. You’re his goddamn aunt, for Christ’s sake. Talk some kind of sense into him.”

“I’m thinking,” she said.

“Well, you’d better think fast, because it looks like they’re having a real gabfest.”

Another silence from Agnes.

“If you don’t want to give me any direction,” Sturgess said, “I’m just going to have to deal with this as best I can.”

“Don’t you see the problem here?” Agnes asked. “We know it had to be Sarita who took the baby to Marla’s house. So she had to have figured out what really happened. To save ourselves we’d have to . . . we’d have to keep Sarita from ever talking to anyone.”

“Yeah,” Sturgess said.

“But . . . I need Sarita.”

“What?”

“I need Sarita to save Marla. If they’ve got enough to arrest her, they may have enough to send her away. They’re going to send my girl to jail, Jack. Sarita can clear her. When they hear what she has to say, they’ll have to drop the charges against Marla.”

“Agnes,” Sturgess said slowly. “You need to think about what you’re saying.”

“That’s all I’m doing is thinking! My daughter’s not going to prison.”

“Would
you
like to go there?” the doctor asked. “I know
I
don’t want to go there. Because that’s where this conversation is going. Think about this, Agnes. Even if Marla were convicted, you could mount a pretty convincing insanity defense. Diminished capacity, something like that. Out of her head as a result of a traumatic incident. Odds are, if she went to jail, it wouldn’t be for long. They might even just commit her for psychiatric care until such time as they deemed her cured. But—”

“You son of a bitch.”

“
But
if they come after us, if they find out what we did—Agnes, if they find out what I’ve done just today, with your blessing—we’ll be going away
forever
. Are you hearing me? If you let Marla take the blame, she’s out in a year or two and you can look after her. But if you go to jail, you’ll
never
be able to look after Marla. You’ll see her once a month on visiting day and that’ll be it. Is that what you want?”

“Jack, just shut up.”

“You want to be a good mother, Agnes? Let Marla go to jail. Let them treat her. And when she gets out, you’ll be there for her. Let me take care of Sarita.”

“I . . . I can’t . . . I don’t know what—”

“And, Agnes, forgive me, but Marla’s not the same kind of issue for me as she is for you. She’s your daughter, not mine. I know what I have to do to save myself.”

“God, why did I ever go along with you on—”

“You sound like Bill. We’re in this together, Agnes. You got something out of this and so did I.”

“It was all about money for you,” she said. “It was never about money for me.”

“Motivations mean fuck-all now. Just don’t try coming back at me like you had nothing to do with this.”

Agnes was quiet for another moment. Finally she asked, “Where are you?”

“David’s driving north out of town. I can see the Five Mountains Ferris wheel in the distance.”

“How much do you think she’s told him?”

“Who knows? We don’t even know how much she knows.”

In the background, the sound of an infant crying.

“What’s that?” Agnes asked. “Who’s that?”

“It’s Matthew. He’s been screaming almost the whole time.”

“You have the baby with you?” Agnes asked.

“I’m with Bill. I’ve already been through this with him. I thought it was a bad idea, too, bringing the kid, but like he says, what the hell’s he going to do? He needs a new nanny.”

“Jack, seriously, we need to think about this. What about—just give me a second—what about if there’s a way to pin it on Sarita, but . . . silence her at the same time?”

“Go on.”

“She . . . she confesses to you what she did, but then she attacks you, and you have to act in self-defense. Maybe something like that?”

“You’re grasping at straws, Agnes. And besides, what if she’s already told David everything? Have you thought about that? He may already know the whole story.”

Before Agnes could respond, the doctor said to Bill Gaynor, “It’s pretty isolated here. Flash your lights; hit the horn; get them to pull over.”

“Jack?” Agnes said.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’ll check in with you later. Think about what I said, Agnes. Think about being a good mother.”

“Don’t you hurt my nephew,” she warned. And then, “Or my grandson.”

“Oh,” said the doctor. “
Now
he’s your grandson.”

SIXTY-TWO

David

“A
good thing,” Sarita Gomez repeated, sitting in the car next to me. “I wanted to do what was right.”

The black car behind us was still honking and flashing its lights.

“Explain that,” I said, holding my speed, debating whether to pull over.

“I wanted to return Matthew to his real mother,” she said.

I glanced over at her. Not once, but twice. “Marla’s baby didn’t die.”

Sarita nodded. “I’m pretty sure. I knew Ms. Gaynor had never been pregnant, that they had adopted Matthew. She couldn’t breast-feed; she never went through all the things a woman goes through. But she didn’t want people to know. She wanted them to think she’d been pregnant. The last couple of months before they got Matthew she spent in Boston so the neighbors wouldn’t think something funny was going on. They’d never see that she was never actually pregnant.”

“Rosemary told you all this?”

“Not exactly. Bits and pieces came out. I was there so much, I figured out what had happened. Dr. Sturgess, he’d come over a lot and talk to Mr. Gaynor and I heard things. And I knew from my friends at the hospital that your cousin . . . her baby died around the same time that the Gaynors had Matthew. One time—they didn’t know I was there—I heard them talking about when she tried to steal the baby from the hospital, the doctor saying he couldn’t have predicted something like that happening. That’s when I knew what they’d done. That Ms. Gaynor’s baby was really your cousin’s baby.”

“But . . .” I was trying to get my head around this. “But Marla didn’t have a son. She had a girl.”

“They lied to her,” Sarita said. “You wrap up a baby, how are you going to know one way or the other? I think they told her it was a girl just to make everything very different. Does that make sense?”

“
None
of this makes any sense. I mean, Marla told me she held the baby. That it was dead.”

Sarita looked at me blankly. “I can’t explain that.”

The car was still honking. Sarita shifted in her seat, looked back. “That is Mr. Gaynor. That is his car. And I’m pretty sure that’s the doctor next to him.”

“Why the hell are they following us?”

“They must be looking for me.”

When had they spotted us? At the bus station?

“I’ve got a few questions for both of them,” I said, putting on my blinker, easing my foot off the gas.

“Wait,” Sarita said.

“What?” I hadn’t put my foot on the brake yet, but as the car slowed, Gaynor stopped honking his horn.

“Where is Marshall?”

“Your boyfriend?”

“He was going to meet Mr. Gaynor. He was going to get him to pay money. And there is Mr. Gaynor, but I don’t know what has happened to Marshall.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But I have a bad feeling.”

“Sarita, nothing’s going to happen. We’re right out in the open here. With what you’ve told me, I’ve got a few questions for both of those assholes. I want answers.”

Now I put my foot on the brake, steered the car over to the shoulder. It was then that I realized we were on the back side of the decommissioned Five Mountains amusement park. Alongside the road was about sixty feet of tall grass, then a perimeter fence. I noticed that just up from where we were, a section of fence had been cut, the chain link pried back.

I shifted my eyes to the mirror, watched Gaynor steer his black Audi over to the shoulder and park a couple of car lengths behind me. I felt like I was getting a speeding ticket.

The passenger door opened.

Sarita was right. It was Dr. Sturgess getting out.

“I don’t get it,” I said to Sarita. “How would they pull it off? I mean, the paperwork alone. How do you—”

Sarita cut me off. “He is a doctor. And rich, and white. He could fake it all. Death certificates, birth certificates, all of it. Who is going to question him?” She shook her head angrily. “It is why I took the baby to your cousin. When I found out what they’d done, I looked up her address, drove by her house many times, wondering if I should tell her. But I never did. Not until Matthew had no one to care for him.”

The doctor was coming up to my side of the car. I saw his image looming larger by the second in the driver’s-door mirror.

He seemed to be holding one arm pressed closed to his side.

I powered down the window.

“Dr. Sturgess,” I said, once he was even with the door.

He smiled. “Mr. Harwood. I was pretty sure that was you.” He leaned over slightly so he could see my passenger. “Hello, Sarita. How are you doing?”

Sarita said nothing.

“I wondered if we could have a talk,” Sturgess asked.

“That’s Mr. Gaynor back there, isn’t it?” I said.

“It is.”

“We all going to have a chat together?”

“That would be ideal,” the doctor said.

“Where would you like to do that?”

“If you two would like to get out, I think we could have it right here.”

I hadn’t yet killed the engine, and was reaching for the key when my cell rang.

“One sec,” I said to Sturgess, holding up a finger.

“We really need to talk
now
,” he said.

I waved that finger again, went into my pocket for the phone with my other hand. Pulled it out.

Saw who it was.

“Hello?” I said.

Aunt Agnes screamed, “
Run!
”

SIXTY-THREE

BARRY
Duckworth made a call back to Boston. The hotel patched him through for a second time to manager Sandra Bottsford.

“You were telling me,” he said, “that Mr. Gaynor’s wife, Rosemary, spent a couple of months with him at your hotel. When was this?”

The woman thought a moment. “Well, it would have been a year ago. I can check the records, but I’m pretty sure she came about thirteen months ago, and they were here for a three-month stay together.”

“Okay. I don’t imagine this is something you could have missed, but do you remember whether Ms. Gaynor was pregnant?”

Bottsford laughed. “Yes, I think I’d have remembered something like that, and no, she was not pregnant.” A pause. “There was something on the news about that. That Ms. Gaynor leaves a child? I hadn’t given it much thought until you mentioned it now. I guess they must have adopted. She wasn’t pregnant when she was here, and she wasn’t looking after an infant.”

“Thanks again,” Duckworth said. He ended the call, then sat and stared at his computer monitor.

It just had never come up.

Duckworth had never asked Bill Gaynor whether Matthew was adopted. There was no reason to, really. And suppose the baby
was
adopted? What difference would it have made, one way or another?

And yet now he had what he would call a “confluence of events.”

Marla Pickens’s baby died around the same time Rosemary Gaynor had hers. And now Duckworth knew that the Gaynor woman had not given birth to a child.

Marla ends up with the Gaynors’ baby.

Somehow.

She’d said it was her baby, although she’d backed away from that pretty quickly. Marla had never seriously argued that she’d given birth to Matthew. Matthew was, in effect, a substitute.

And besides, hadn’t Marla lost a girl?

Still . . .

He pushed himself back from his desk and went looking for Marla. She was being booked, and Natalie Bondurant was waiting for her to be finished.

“I need to talk to Ms. Pickens,” Duckworth said to the officer dealing with Marla. “Right now.”

“What’s going on?” Natalie asked. “You’re not talking to her without me there.”

“That’s fine,” Duckworth said. “Let’s go in here.”

He led them into an interrogation room, waved his arm at two empty chairs on one side of the table. “Please,” he said.

The two women sat down.

“You don’t have enough to charge my client,” Natalie said, “and even if you did, you couldn’t have picked a worse time. Ms. Pickens is in a very delicate state of mind, and if you do insist on keeping her here, you’d better have her on constant suicide watch, because only last night—”

Duckworth held up a hand. “I know. I wanted to ask Ms. Pickens about something that has nothing to do with her charges. Nothing to do with Rosemary Gaynor.”

“Like what?” Natalie said as Duckworth lowered himself into the chair across from them.

“Marla—is it okay if I call you Marla?”

The woman nodded weakly.

“I know this is hard, but I want to ask you about your child. The baby.”

Natalie said, “Really, this is too upsetting to get into.”

“Please,” Duckworth said gently. “Marla, when you were pregnant, did you ever give any thought to putting the child up for adoption?”

She blinked her eyes several times. “Adoption?”

“That’s right.”

Marla shook her head slowly from side to side. “Never, not for a second. I wanted to have a baby. I wanted it more than anything in the world.”

“So it never came up?”

Marla rolled her eyes slowly. “It came up
all the time
. My mother talked about it. She wanted me to do that. Well, at first she wanted me to have an abortion. But I wouldn’t do that, and then she talked about adoption, but I didn’t want to do that, either.”

Duckworth lightly strummed his fingers on the tabletop. “You didn’t have the baby in the hospital. Your mother’s hospital.”

“No,” she said. “We went to the cabin.”