Linwood Barclay: The Twenty-Three

“Gale.”

“He said something to me last night. Just before we went to sleep. I could tell he was thinking about something. He said he’d been talking to a nurse at the hospital, that she was getting married soon, that they wanted to have kids.” She paused. “How it made him sad.”

I felt my blood starting to run cold. “Did he mention a name?” “No.”

“Anything else about her?”

Gale shook her head. Suddenly, she let out a short scream. Her phone had buzzed in her hand.

“It’s Angus. He says he has to think.”

I’d already stepped out front. I called the hospital, asked to be put through to the emergency ward. Someone picked up and said, “Emergency. Nurse Fielding.”

I identified myself. It took a little convincing, but she finally remembered me from when I was there the day before. “I’m trying to track down someone who works in the ER who was there yesterday-”

“ Everyone was here yesterday,” she said.

“This nurse probably was in her twenties or thirties, dark hair, and she might live on Klondike Street.”

“Oh, that’s probably Sonja,” Nurse Fielding said.

“Sonja? Can you spell that? And do you have a last name?”

She spelled the first name, and then said, “Roper.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Is she there today?”

“No, she did a double and a half yesterday.”

“Do you have a contact number, and an exact address?”

“Hang on a second.”

While I waited, I said to Gale, “Anything else from him?”

“No,” she said.

I had my notepad out, waiting for Nurse Fielding to report back. A few seconds later, she came on.

“Okay, Sonja lives at 31 Klondike,” she said.

Shit.

“And do you have a number for her?”

She gave me one. “I think it’s a cell,” she said. “I don’t think she has a landline.”

I ended the call and said to Gale, “Let’s go.” On the way to the car, I dialed Sonja Roper’s number.

WHENGale texted him the news that she was pregnant, Angus became so fixated on the phone, staring at the words, that he lost track of what he’d come to Sonja Roper’s house to do.

How could she be pregnant?

How could Gale have betrayed him that way?

Angus wondered, first, whether she was telling him the truth. But if she was, how had it happened? Of course, no method of birth control was one hundred percent effective. But he thought they’d been careful, unless Gale was deliberately not being careful.

He slipped the knife back into his pocket, wrote Gale back, accusing her of lying, then said she should have told him as soon as she’d known.

What would he have done had he known? he wondered.

Would he have killed Gale?

No, no, he wouldn’t have done that. That was unthinkable.

He’d have had her go to a clinic. He’d have made her terminate the pregnancy.

He was almost sure that was what he would have done.

Except… now he was overwhelmed with the idea that he might actually be a father. That a child of his was growing inside Gale.

How did that make him feel? In the first few seconds after she’d texted him, he was angry. Then confused. Then-

The bathroom door swung open.

Sonja Roper stepped out, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, hair wet. Her feet were bare.

“Shit!” she said when she realized Angus was hovering right by the door, phone in hand. She jumped, spun around to face him, and backed her way into the living room. “What were you doing there?”

“I was… I was just on my phone. Texting.”

“Why were you hiding outside the door there?”

“I wasn’ t-I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“What kind of creep are you?”

“I didn’t look in. I didn’t try the door.”

“Look, I don’t know what questions you’ve got, but you should leave.”

“My wife is pregnant,” he said.

“What?”

“She just texted me. She’s pregnant.”

Sonja, bewildered, said, “Well… that’s just great. But it doesn’t explain why you were creeping around outside my door.”

“She didn’t tell me. She’s known for three weeks.”

“I guess you should talk to her about that,” Sonja said. “Like, right now would be a good time.”

A cell phone began to ring. The sound was coming from the kitchen.

“Don’t answer that,” Angus said.

“Excuse me?”

“I said don’t answer it. We have to talk.”

“Get out,” she said as the phone continued to ring. “I want you out of here right now.”

Angus slowly started walking down the hall toward her. “What do you think I should do?” he asked her.

“What?” Sonja said, glancing behind her with each backward step she took.

In the distance, the sound of sirens.

“What should I do about my wife being pregnant?” He looked at her plaintively. “I’m not sure how to handle it. It’s all feeling a bit overwhelming. There’s only so much one person can do. I came here to solve one problem, but now another’s overtaken it. But is it a problem?”

“You’re off your nut,” Sonja said, turned, and ran.

She pushed the front door open with both hands and burst out of the house as though there’d been an explosion as two police cars raced up the street, lights flashing, sirens wailing. Sonja waved her arms as she ran across the lawn.

Angus came out the door after her, but once on the front step he stopped. He saw the cars screaming toward the house.

He got out his phone and texted to Gale: Guess I will come home now.

He stared at the screen as the police cars screeched to a halt out front of the house.

Coming to you, Gale wrote back.

A female officer was out of the first car. Sonja Roper was talking to her, pointing to Carlson.

“Detective Carlson!” the officer said. “Are you Detective Carlson?”

He typed: Ok.

Then he looked up and said, “Yes, I’m Carlson.”

Another car, plain black without markings, rounded the corner.

Carlson recognized it immediately as an unmarked Promise Falls police car. He was pretty sure that was Barry Duckworth behind the wheel.

With Gale in the seat next to him.

Gale threw open the door as Duckworth brought the car to a stop.

“Gale!” Duckworth said. “Wait!”

But she wasn’t going to wait. She ran past the marked cars, ignored the female officer’s call to stop, and ran directly to her husband. He stood there, waited. She got to within a foot of him, and when she stopped, he smiled.

“Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t tell me,” Angus said. “I don’t know what I might have had to do.”

Gale suddenly went weak and dropped to her knees in front of him.

Duckworth

RHONDAFinderman sat in on the interrogation.

Angus insisted he did not want a lawyer. Once he’d signed off on that, and we were ready to record his statement, he told us everything, with plenty of corroborating detail.

About Olivia Fisher, and Rosemary Gaynor, and, most recently, Lorraine Plummer. There was a murder in Cleveland, too. Once I had the details on that, I’d be getting in touch with the Cleveland police so they could move that one to the solved column.

Angus explained to us how he was saving unborn children from a life of misery.

“I screwed up with Rosemary Gaynor,” he said. “I didn’t realize she already had a child.”

“And it wasn’t her child,” I pointed out. “Rosemary Gaynor couldn’t have children.”

He grimaced, looking like a kid who’d gotten only an A when he was expecting an A-plus.