Linwood Barclay - Far From True

She went to a drawer in the kitchen, pulled out several old date books with wire spines. “Three years ago?”

Duckworth nodded.

She found the right one, opened it, fanned the pages until she got to May. “Here we go,” she said, and handed the book to him.

It wasn’t like he was looking for a notation for the day Olivia Fisher died with a note that read: “Jack kills girl, home late for dinner.” But knowing what the doctor was up to that week might help.

He scanned the week’s entries. On Tuesday evening, she’d written down “dinner Mannings.” Friday at eleven, “mani-pedi.” Wednesday: “Dry cleaning.”

He saw an entry for Monday at ten thirty a.m. that caught his eye. “What’s this, Dr. Gleber?”

“Dentist,” she said. “That would have been my semiannual cleaning.”

“Okay.”

“Really, what’s this about?” she asked.

He ignored the question and continued to study the days leading up to the day Olivia had been murdered: May 25. Duckworth noticed an appointment for the twenty-second that appeared to be something medical: “1 p.m. Seward clinic.”

Duckworth showed it to Jack Sturgess’s wife. “What would this be? Is Dr. Seward your doctor?”

“Seward’s not a doctor. He’s a physiotherapist.”

“You were seeing a physio?”

“Let me see that,” she said, taking back the book. She went back a couple of weeks. “I remember this.”

“What?”

“This was when Jack got hurt.”

“Hurt?”

“Two weeks before. Yes, here it is. We went to see friends in Maine, and Jack was hiking in the woods and twisted his ankle. His right ankle. Hurt so much he couldn’t drive home. Had to use a cane for a few weeks, and went to the Seward clinic for physio. It was a couple of months before he could walk normally again.”

“So all through this period, this week here,” Duckworth said, taking the book back and pointing to the two pages, “your husband was basically disabled? He had trouble getting around?”

The dead doctor’s wife nodded.

Did a guy with a bum ankle attack a woman in a park? And run away after he’d killed her?

“Thank you,” Duckworth said, and handed the book back to Tanya Sturgess.

He’d want to confirm the doctor’s injury with the Seward clinic, but he felt, with some confidence, that he could rule out Jack Sturgess in the murder of Olivia Fisher, and because the modus operandi was identical, the death of Rosemary Gaynor, too.

“Tell me about the Gaynors,” Duckworth said.

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

“What am I trying to do, Mrs. Sturgess?”

“You’re trying to find a way to blame Jack for that, too. For what happened to her. That’d really help you out, wouldn’t it? Find a way to prove Jack killed Rosemary. Well, he didn’t do that, and I won’t help you frame him for it. You want to pin everything you can on him. He’s not here to defend himself. Have you found a way to connect him to the Lindbergh kidnapping? The Kennedy assassination?”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Duckworth said. “I don’t think he killed Rosemary Gaynor any more than you do. But I want to find out who did.”

She eyed him dubiously. “You’re trying to trick me.”

Duckworth shook his head. “No. Let me ask you again about the Gaynors. How well did you know them?”

“Bill and Jack were friends. I didn’t really know Rosemary. We went out for dinner once or twice a year.”

“Did Bill and Rosemary get along?”

“I suppose. They did when we were all together. The four of us never socialized after the baby came, or even in the months before that. When Bill and Rosemary were in Boston.”

“But you saw Bill occasionally in the period before his wife died?”

“I did. The odd time.”

“What was he like?”

“I guess, looking back, I’d say he was on edge.” Bitterly, she said, “I didn’t like him then and I hate him even more now. He’s as much to blame as Agnes Pickens. He was a horrible person, dragging Jack into a scheme to get that baby for him and his wife. Jack devoted his life to helping others and look what he got for it.”

That didn’t quite line up with the facts as Duckworth knew them. Jack Sturgess needed money to pay off gambling debts. He saw Bill and Rosemary’s quest for a child as an opportunity to get it. And as far as Duckworth could tell, no one had forced Sturgess to murder Marshall Kemper or Doris Stemple. Or threaten to plunge a syringe into the neck of David Harwood’s father.

But Duckworth thought it best to keep those thoughts to himself for the moment.

“What do you mean by ‘on edge’?”

“Nervous. Anytime I’d walk into the room where the two were huddled together, he’d suddenly clam up.”

“When was the last time you found them doing that?”

She thought. “Just before Bill went to Boston on that last conference. When Rosemary was killed. He seemed very worried.”

Around that time, Duckworth had learned from his interviews with the Gaynors’ nanny, Sarita Gomez, Bill had come to realize that his wife knew the adoption of Matthew was not legal.

She remembered something. “One time I walked in on him when he was in Jack’s study, waiting for him to get back from a hospital call. Bill was looking at one of Jack’s old medical books about surgical technique. When he realized I was there, he closed it and put it back on the shelf, his face red as a beet. You’d have thought I’d caught him looking at porn.”

Duckworth was still thinking about Tanya Sturgess’s comments as he got back behind the wheel of his car, and his phone started to ring.

“Duckworth.”

“It’s me,” Rhonda Finderman said. “You called.”

Duckworth had to think for a moment about why he’d been trying to get in touch with her.

“Right,” he said. “I’ve got a story I want to tell you, and you’re going to think I’m crazy, but you need to hear it right to the end.”

I bolted from Clive Duncomb’s office, down a flight of stairs, out of the Thackeray College admin building, and straight to my car. I had the phone to my ear the entire time, trying to get Samantha Worthington to explain to me what had happened.

“His parents came to visit... They stalled me... trying to make me late to pick up Carl,” she said. The pauses were her catching her breath. It sounded like she was running, too.

“But you don’t know for sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my keys with my other hand, “that Ed’s going to get Carl.”

“He’s here! You saw him this morning! They’re working together.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Putting you on speaker.”

I got the car open, tossed my phone onto the passenger seat, keyed the ignition. Backing out of the spot, I nearly broadsided a FedEx truck.

“Asshole!” someone yelled.

I got the car aimed for downtown. I didn’t even know where I was going.

“Sam?” I shouted. “You still there?”

“Yes!”

“Where are you?”

“I’m running to the school! They slashed my tires! Those bastards!”

“Where’s the school?”

“It’s Clinton Public!”

I thought back to my days as a Promise Falls cop, when I could walk this town blindfolded and always know where I was. I knew Clinton. After accessing the GPS in my brain for a second, I could picture the location of the school.

But the school was quite a hike from Thackeray. Even breaking every speed limit and running every light, I was a good fifteen minutes away.

“Where are you?” I shouted. I was wondering if I should swing by and grab her along the way, but if we were both going to get there at the same time, I’d just head straight for the school.