Linwood Barclay: The Twenty-Three

For one thing, her heart was starting to race.

She placed a hand on her chest, just above the swell of her breasts, to see if she could feel what she already knew she was feeling.

Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-tha-thump.

Her heart wasn’t just picking up the pace. It was doing so in an irregular fashion.

Patricia moved her hand from her chest to her forehead. Her skin was cold and clammy.

She wondered whether she could be having a heart attack. But she wasn’t old enough for one of those, was she? And she was in good shape. She worked out. She often rode her bike to work. She had a personal trainer, for God’s sake.

The pills.

Patricia figured she must have taken the wrong pills. But was there anything in that pill container that could do something like this to her?

No.

She stood, felt the floor move beneath her as though Promise Falls were undergoing an earthquake, which was not the sort of thing that happened often in upstate New York.

Maybe, she thought, I should just get my ass to Promise Falls General.

Gill Pickens, already in the kitchen, standing at the island, reading the New York Times on his laptop while he sipped on his third cup of coffee, was not overly surprised when his daughter, Marla, appeared with his ten-month-old grandson, Matthew, in her arms.

“He wouldn’t stop fussing,” Marla said. “So I decided to get up and give him something to eat. Oh, thank God, you’ve already made coffee.”

Gill winced. “I just killed off the first pot. I’ll make some more.”

“That’s okay. I can-”

“No, let me. You take care of Matthew.”

“You’re up early,” she said to her father as she got Matthew strapped into his high chair.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“Still?”

Gill Pickens shrugged. “Jesus, Marla, it’s only been a little over two weeks. I didn’t sleep all that well before, anyway. You telling me you’ve been sleeping okay?”

“Sometimes,” Marla said. “They gave me something.”

Right. She’d been on a few things to help ease the shock of her mother’s death earlier that month, and learning that the baby she’d thought she lost at birth was actually alive.

Matthew.

But even if her prescriptions had allowed her to sleep better than her father some nights, there was still a cloud hanging over the house that showed no signs of moving off soon. Gill had not returned to work, in part because he simply wasn’t up to it, but also because child welfare authorities had allowed Marla to take care of Matthew only so long as she was living under the same roof as her father.

Gill had felt a need to be present, although he wondered how much longer that would be necessary. All the evidence suggested Marla was a wonderful, loving mother. And the other good news was her acceptance of reality. In the days immediately following Agnes’s jump off Promise Falls, Marla maintained the belief that her mother was actually alive, and would be returning to help her with her child.

Marla now understood that that was not going to happen.

She filled a pot with hot water from the tap, set it on the counter instead of the stove, then took a bottle of formula she’d made up the day before from the refrigerator and placed it in the pot.

Matthew had twisted himself around in the chair to see what was going on. His eyes landed on the bottle and he pointed.

“Gah,” he said.

“It’s coming,” Marla said. “I’m just letting it warm up some. But I have something else for you in the meantime.”

She turned a kitchen chair around so she could sit immediately opposite Matthew. She twisted the lid on a tiny jar of pureed apricots and, with a very small plastic spoon, aimed some at the baby’s mouth.

“You like this, don’t you?” she said, glancing in her father’s direction as he scanned his eyes over the laptop screen. He appeared to be squinting.

“Need glasses, Dad?”

He looked up. Gill suddenly looked very pale to her. “What?”

“You looked like you were having trouble looking at the screen.”

“Why are you doing that?” he asked her.

Matthew swatted at the spoon, knocked some apricots onto his chair.

“Why am I doing what?” Marla asked.

“Moving around like that.”

“I’m just sitting here,” she said, getting more apricot onto the spoon. “You want to bring that bottle over?”

The pot with the bottle in it was sitting immediately to the right of the laptop, but Gill appeared unable to focus on it.

“Is it funny in here?” he asked, setting down his mug of coffee too close to the edge of the island. It tipped, hit the floor, and shattered, but Gill did not look down.

“Dad?”

Marla got out of the chair and moved quickly to her father’s side. “Are you okay?”

“Need to get Matthew to the hospital,” he said.

“Matthew? Why would Matthew have to go to the hospital?”

Gill looked into his daughter’s face. “Is something wrong with Matthew? Do you think he has what I have?”

“Dad?” Marla struggled to keep the panic out of her voice. “What’s going on with you? You’re breathing really fast. Why are you doing that?”

He put a hand on his chest, felt his heart beating through his robe.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” he said.

But he did not. Instead, he dropped to the floor.

Hillary and Josh Lydecker had been frantic for four days.

They had not seen their son, twenty-two-year-old George Lydecker, since late Tuesday. Now here it was Saturday morning, and they still had no idea where he was.

Early Wednesday morning the family was supposed to have flown out to Vancouver to visit Josh’s relatives. When George left the house Tuesday evening, he had promised to be home early so that he could get in at least a few hours of sleep before the taxi came for everyone.

His parents were not shocked when he failed to get home at a decent hour, but they were surprised he didn’t make it home at all. It would have been just like George to show up at the house as the rest of his family was putting their bags into the cab, grinning stupidly, weaving slightly, saying something like, “Told ya I’d be here.”

But that had not happened.

George had always been their wild child-their daughter, Cassandra, sixteen, was a perfect angel, at least so far-with a reputation for getting into trouble, most recently at Thackeray College, where he had, among other things, turned a professor’s Smart car onto its roof (no real damage done, but still) and put a baby alligator into Thackeray Pond. He drank too much, even by the standards of college-age boys, and often acted impulsively without considering the consequences. He thrived on risk. Back when he was in his teens, he was caught twice wandering the halls of his high school in the middle of the night when the facility was supposedly all locked up.

“What has he done?” Hillary kept asking her husband. “What has that damn fool done?”

Josh Lydecker kept shaking his head. For the first two days, he kept saying, “He’ll show up. He will. The dumbass is sleeping it off somewhere, that’s all.”

But by day three, even Josh had come to believe that something serious had happened.

The morning of the first day, Hillary had called all of George’s friends, including Derek Cutter, to see if anyone had seen him. She got George’s sister, Cassandra, to spread the word via social media so that everyone they knew could be on the lookout for George.

Nothing.

By the afternoon, Hillary wanted to bring in the Promise Falls police. Josh had objected at first, still believing George would turn up. He was also worried that whatever was delaying George’s return might not be something they wanted the police to know about. Although he did not share this thought with his wife, it occurred to him that maybe George and his buddies were celebrating the end of the Thackeray school year by engaging the services of prostitutes. Maybe they’d gone to Albany and were doing God knew what.