Broken Promise (47 page)

I glanced back at my mother, who appeared to mouth the words “pork chops.”

SEVENTY

David

DAD
must have figured this was his only chance.

While Sturgess was briefly distracted and overwhelmed by the wailing of the smoke detector, Dad wrenched his arm free and bolted—almost fell—in my direction.

Sturgess lurched after Dad, but I managed to get between them, reaching with both hands for the arm that had the syringe. I grabbed hold of his forearm and slammed it up against the wall, but the syringe didn’t fly out of his hand the way I’d hoped it would.

“Drop it!” I yelled.

His left hand reached over to try to take the syringe from his right. I shoved my body up against his, tried to roll over the front of him, block his free arm.

A knee came up out of nowhere and drove hard into my crotch, taking my breath away. The pain was excruciating, and for a second I lost my grip on Sturgess’s right arm. I stumbled back.

Madly he swung the syringe through the air as though it were a knife. I was jumping back and out of his way as we moved toward the stairs.

Dad came up behind Sturgess and kicked him in the back of his right thigh. The doctor dropped to the floor. I noticed that the syringe was no longer in his hand, but in the confusion I had lost sight of where it had gone.

“You son of a bitch!” Dad shouted.

I took advantage of Sturgess while he was down on one knee, and aimed a kick at his chest. I failed to catch him directly, and only knocked him off balance. His shoulder went into the wall. As I closed in on him, he pushed himself off and tackled me around the knees.

I went down.

More smoke began to billow its way upstairs. If those pork chops Mom had left untended on the stove were kicking up some flame, it was a safe bet that the overhanging cabinets and curtain at the window next to the stove were already ablaze.

Sturgess scrambled on top of me, straddled me so that he was sitting on my stomach, and drove a fist at my head. I turned my face away, felt the fist graze my left ear.

He brought his right hand back up to his left, laced his fingers together, getting ready to backhand me hard with a double fist.

This one was going to hurt.

But before he could start the downswing, I caught sight of Agnes standing over him.

Something in her hand.

She plunged the syringe into his back, the needle going through suit jacket and shirt.

“Shit!” Sturgess said, and stumbled off me. He struggled to his feet, looked over his shoulder, trying without success to see the syringe, which was still sticking out of him. He looked at Agnes and said, “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Agnes nodded.

“I haven’t got much time,” he said. “I’ve only got seconds. You have to . . .” He began to waver. “You have to move fast.”

Agnes didn’t move.

“Just die,” she said. “Just hurry up and die.”

Sturgess wavered, stumbled into the wall, back first. We heard a snap, and then the syringe, minus the needle, hit the floor.

I looked back into the bedroom. With Sarita’s help, Mom was struggling to get off the bed.

“Hurry,” I said. “I don’t know how bad the fire is.”

Dad got around to Mom’s other side. The three of them headed for the stairs. Dr. Sturgess was sliding down the wall.

I said to Agnes, “Is there anything you can do?”

She looked at me. “Even if there were . . . I’m sorry there isn’t a second needle. For me.”

“We have to get out.”

Agnes nodded calmly. Sturgess was on the floor now, but he wasn’t dead. His eyelids were fluttering. I leaned over to grab him under the arms so I could drag him down the stairs.

“Trust me,” she said. “He won’t make it to the front door.”

The eyelids stopped moving. I reached for his wrist, felt for a pulse, found nothing.

“Walk me out,” Agnes said.

We went down the stairs together. We could see flames in the kitchen. We found everyone else outside. Dad had grabbed a chair from the front porch and dragged it into the yard so Mom could sit down.

An unmarked police cruiser was screeching to a halt at the curb, Duckworth throwing open the door and getting out. He’d managed to block in the black Audi, where a nervous-looking Bill Gaynor was sitting behind the wheel, looking like a cornered mouse.

There was someone in the passenger seat of the cruiser.

Marla.

Duckworth, seeing the smoke, ran toward us. “Is there anyone still in the house?”

“Sturgess,” I said, propping up my father. “But he’s dead.”

Duckworth blinked. “From the fire?”

“No,” I said. “We need an ambulance for my mom. She can barely walk. My dad may be hurt, too.”

Duckworth whipped out his phone, barked out an address, demanded fire engines and paramedics. Neighbors were pouring out of nearby houses to see what all the commotion was.

Up the street I saw Ethan, backpack over his shoulder, walking home from school. He began to run.

I saw Agnes walking toward Gaynor’s car. She said something to him briefly, pointed a finger of judgment at him, then walked around to the rear passenger door.

Gaynor did nothing to stop her.

Marla was coming out of the passenger side of Duckworth’s cruiser, looking at the smoking house, more with wonder than anything else. She was so busy taking it in, she didn’t notice her mother prying Matthew from the safety seat in the back of the Audi. Once she had the boy in her arms, she started walking toward the unmarked cruiser.

“Dad! Dad!” Ethan cried, running into my arms, a look of horror on his face. “The house!”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “It’s okay.” I wrapped my arms around him, held on to him tightly as I watched a different drama play out before me.

“Marla,” Agnes said.

Marla turned, saw her mother approaching with Matthew in her arms.

“Mama?” she said, her voice breaking.

“You know Matthew, of course,” Agnes said, and held the child out to her.

“What are you doing?” Marla asked.

“Take him. Hold him. He’s yours.”

Marla hesitantly took the boy into her own arms. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s your baby. He’s the baby you carried. The baby you gave birth to.”

“How . . . how . . .”

Marla’s eyes filled instantly with tears. Her expression was one of joy mixed with total bafflement.

“Don’t worry about that right now,” Agnes said, putting her arms around Marla and the child.

“Oh, my God,” Marla whispered. “Oh, my God, it can’t be true.”

“It’s true, child. It’s true.”

Weeping, Marla said, “Thank you, Mom! Thank you so much! Thank you! I love you so much! You’re the best mother in the whole world! Thank you for finding him! I don’t know how you did it, how it can be possible, but thank you! Thank you for believing me!”

Agnes ended the hug, looked at Marla, and said, “I have to go. You take care.”

“Mama?”

I watched Agnes return to her car, the door still open. She got behind the wheel, slowly backed out onto the street, and drove away as Marla took hold of Matthew’s tiny wrist so that he could, along with his mother, wave good-bye.

THE NEXT DAY

SEVENTY-ONE

David

“SO,
you ready to get started?” Randall Finley asked me.

When I’d seen his name pop up on my cell I should have let it go to message. But like a fool, I answered.

“It’s only been twenty-four hours,” I told him.

“Yeah, but from what I hear, your sister’s in the clear.”

“Cousin,” I said.

“Cousin, sister, whatever. She’s innocent, right?”

“Right. But there are a few other things we still have to deal with.”

“Like?”

“A funeral for my aunt, for one,” I said.

“Oh, shit, yeah,” Finley said. “Fucking hell, I heard about that. She jumped off the falls?”

Right after she drove away from my parents’ house.

“Yes,” I said.

“My condolences,” the former mayor said.

“Plus, I have to find a place to live. There was a fire at my parents’ house.”

“That might be a blessing in disguise. Living with your parents at your age, that’s not good.”

“They’ll be moving in with me while they rebuild the kitchen,” I said.

“Ouch. Man, you are the poster boy for shit out of luck. So, what do you think? A couple of days? Because soon I want to announce that I’m running. I need to put together a platform, shit like that. About how empathetic I am, how I feel for the common man.”

“It seems so self-evident,” I said.

“Yeah, but some people don’t pick up the signals. You have to spell it out for them. You know what I’m saying.”

“I think so. Why don’t I call you toward the end of the week.”

Finley sighed. “I suppose. It’s a good thing I’m a soft touch. Most employers, they might not take it so well, someone taking time off before they’ve even started the fucking job.”

He ended the call.

I was parked out front of the Pickenses’ house. Gill and Marla were inside. She’d be looking after Matthew, and no doubt he was busy making funeral arrangements for Agnes.

The Promise Falls Department of Child and Family Services, pending a more formal review later, decided to let Marla look after Matthew for now, so long as she was living with Gill. Even though the child was hers, and a terrible crime had been perpetrated against her, there was still the issue of her mental stability. She had, after all, tried to kidnap a baby from the hospital. In addition, she’d tried to take her own life. But Marla had agreed to intensive counseling and regular visitations from a caseworker.

While Marla was the only one getting professional help, that didn’t mean she was the only one who needed it.

My mother was devastated.

Her sister was dead. And Agnes might have had her sister’s last words to her in mind as she plunged to her death off Promise Falls.

You’ve always been hard, Agnes, but I never knew you were a monster.

Despite the monstrous things Agnes had done, Mom wished she had said something else.

At some level, I think Mom blamed herself. That maybe if she’d been a better older sibling, none of this would have happened.

They found Agnes downriver, her body lodged on a rock where the rapids get shallow. She wasn’t the first person to die from going off the bridge that spans that rushing cliff of water, and she probably wouldn’t be the last. But I doubted anyone before or after had done it with the same sense of purpose.

According to witness accounts, Agnes walked calmly along the sidewalk to the center of the bridge, set down her purse, perched her butt on the railing, and gracefully swung both legs around and over.

Before anyone else could even react, she was gone.

I couldn’t decide whether there was courage in what she did, or colossal cowardice. Maybe some of both. The fact that she never told Marla what she’d done to her tipped me toward the latter.

She’d left that for Gill and others to explain.

Considering everything, Ethan was riding this out okay. Moving to a motel for a few nights while I looked for a place for us to live was an adventure. The fire’d been contained before it spread upstairs and destroyed any of his things. The model railroad Dad had built in the basement had gotten soaked, but the engines and boxcars and the Promise Falls water tower would dry out eventually.

My son had been through worse. We’d get through this together.

I was about to get out of the car to see how Marla and Gill were doing when my cell phone rang. I didn’t immediately recognize the number, but at least it wasn’t Finley’s, so I answered.

“Hello?”

“You son of a bitch.”

A woman’s voice.

“Sam?” I said. “Is this Samantha?”

“You suckered me right in, didn’t you? Nicely done. I should have known you were working for them. I knew they wanted Carl back, but I never thought they’d stoop this low.”

“Sam, I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That was good, fucking me right there in the kitchen where they could look in through the window, get some nice pics. Talk about getting screwed in more ways than one.”

Even as my heart pounded, I tried to figure out what had happened.

The blue pickup truck with the tinted windows.

“Sam, listen to me—I didn’t do anything. I never—”

“I’ll get you for this. I will. Don’t come knocking on my door again. Next time I’ll pull the trigger.”

And then she hung up.

I called her back immediately but she wouldn’t answer. When it went to voice mail, I said, “Whatever you’re thinking I did, I did not do it. I swear. If I’ve caused you trouble, I’m sorry, but I did not set you up.” I hesitated. “The truth is, I want to see you again.”

I tried to think of anything else I could say and came up blank. So I ended the call and pocketed the phone.

“Shit,” I said under my breath.

Gill opened the door ten seconds after I rang the bell. “David,” he said, his voice flat, empty. “Come in.”

“I wanted to see how Marla was doing,” I said.

“Of course. She’s in the kitchen with Matthew. I’m just on the phone, sorting out the details. For Agnes.”

I nodded.

“I hope you’re not expecting me to thank you,” Gill said.

“I’m sorry.”

“You were instrumental in getting to the truth. I suppose that’s something. But now my wife is dead, and I’m looking after my daughter and a grandson. That’s what the truth brought me.”

There was nothing I could say.

I followed him into the kitchen. A high chair had been acquired in the last day. Matthew was secured into it with a tiny safety belt that ran around his waist. Marla was sitting in a kitchen chair opposite him, feeding him with a tiny red plastic spoon some green pureed stuff from a small glass jar.

“David!” she said. She put down the baby food, jumped to her feet, and threw her arms around me. She planted a kiss on my cheek. “It’s so good to see you.”

“You, too,” I said.