Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

Another twenty seconds went by. Nothing. I got out my phone, reopened the app that had brought up the phone number for the Gaynors, tapped the number, and put the phone to my ear. Inside the house, I could hear an accompanying ring.

No answer.

Nobody home.

I heard a car approaching and turned around. A black four-door Audi sedan. It turned, quickly, into the driveway and stopped within an inch of the closed garage door, the brakes giving out a loud, sharp squeal.

A slim man in his late thirties, dressed in an expensive suit, jacket open, tie askew, threw open the door and stepped out.

“Who are you?” he snapped, striding toward me, his keys hanging from his index finger.

“I was looking for Rosemary Gaynor. Are you Mr. Gaynor?”

“Yeah, I’m Bill Gaynor, but who the hell are you?”

“David Harwood.”

“Did you ring the bell?”

“Yes, but no one—”

“Jesus,” Gaynor said, fiddling with his keys, looking for the one that would open the front door. “I’ve been calling all the way back from Boston. Why the hell hasn’t she been answering the goddamn phone?”

He had the key inserted, turned it, and was shouting, “Rose!” as he pushed the door open. “Rose!”

I hesitated a moment at the front door, then followed Gaynor inside. The foyer was two stories tall, a grand chandelier hanging down from above. To the left and right, a dining room and living room. Gaynor was heading straight for the back of the house.

“Rose! Rose!” he continued shouting.

I was four steps behind the man. “Mr. Gaynor, Mr. Gaynor, do you have a baby, about—”

“Rose!”

This time, when he called out her name, it was different. His voice was filled with anguish and horror.

The man dropped to his knees. Before him, stretched out on the floor, was a woman.

She lay on her back, one leg extended, the other bent awkwardly. Her blouse, which from the collar appeared to be white, was awash in red, and ripped roughly straight across near the bottom.

A few feet away, a kitchen knife with a ten-inch blade. Blade and handle covered in blood.

The blood, Jesus, it was everywhere. Smudged bloody footprints led toward a set of sliding glass doors at the back of the kitchen.

“God oh God Rose oh my God Rose oh God!”

Suddenly the man’s head jerked, as though something horrible had just occurred to him. Something even more horrible than the scene before him.

“The baby,” he whispered.

He sprang to his feet, his pant legs stained with blood that had gone thick and tacky, and ran from the kitchen, trailing bloody shoeprints in his wake. He nearly skidded on the marble flooring in the foyer as he turned to run up the stairs.

I shouted, “Wait! Mr. Gaynor!”

He wasn’t listening. He was screaming: “Matthew! Matthew!”

He tore up the stairs two steps at a time. I stayed by the bottom of the stairs. I had a feeling he’d be back in a matter of seconds.

Gaynor disappeared down a second-floor hallway. Another anguished cry: “ Matthew! ”

When he reappeared at the top of the stairs, his face was awash with panic. “Gone. Matthew’s gone. The baby’s gone.” He wasn’t looking at me. It was as if he were speaking more to himself, trying to take it in.

“The baby’s gone,” he said again, nearly breathless.

Trying to keep my voice calm, I said, “Matthew’s okay. We have Matthew. Matthew is fine.”

He glanced back over his shoulder, out the front door that remained wide-open, to my car parked at the curb.

Marla had remained in the backseat, Matthew still in her arms. She was looking at the house now instead of him.

No expression on her face whatsoever.

“What do you mean, we ?” Gaynor said. “Why do you have Matthew? What have you done?” His head turned toward the kitchen. “You did that? You? Did you—”

“No!” I said quickly. “I can’t explain what happened here, but your son, he’s okay. I’ve been trying to find out—”

“Matthew’s in the car? Is that Sarita with him? He’s with the nanny?”

“Sarita?” I said. “Nanny?”

“That’s not Sarita,” he said. “Where’s Sarita? What’s happened to her?”

And then he started running toward my car.

Agnes Pickens was very not happy with the muffins.

There were two dozen, arranged on the platter in the center of the massive boardroom table. Coffee and tea had been set up on a table along the wall, and everything there looked fine. Decaf, cream, sugar, milk, sweeteners. Plus, copies of the hospital’s latest progress report had been distributed around the table where everyone would be sitting. But when Agnes scanned the muffin selection, she did not find bran. She found blueberry and banana and chocolate — and let’s face it, a chocolate muffin was just cake shaped like a muffin — but bran was noticeable by its absence. At least there was fruit.

When you were a hospital administrator and called an early morning board meeting, you had to at least make an effort to offer healthy choices. Even if the bran muffins were passed over in favor of the chocolate, she could at least say they had been made available.

The meeting was set to begin in five minutes, and Agnes had stopped in here to make sure everything was as it was supposed to be. Finding it was not, she went to the door and shouted, “Carol!”

Carol Osgoode, Agnes’s personal assistant, popped her head out a room down the hall. “Yes, Ms. Pickens?”

“There are no bran muffins.”

Carol, a woman in her late twenties with shoulder-length brown hair and eyes to match, blinked hurriedly. “I just asked the kitchen to send up a selection of—”

“I specifically told you to make sure that there were some bran muffins.”

“I’m sorry; I don’t recall—”

“Carol, I told you. I remember quite clearly. Call Frieda and tell her to send up half a dozen. I know they have some. I saw them down in the cafeteria twenty minutes ago. Steal them from there if you have to.”

Carol’s head disappeared.

Agnes set her purse on the table, removed her phone, and realized it was not on. Her HuffPost app had been loading slowly that morning, as well as some of her other programs, so she’d turned the phone off with the intention of turning it back on immediately. A quick reboot. But then her rye toast had popped, and she’d neglected to restart it. So now she pressed and held the button at the top right, but flipped the tiny switch on the left side to mute the ring.

Agnes set the phone on the table, then tapped her red fingernails impatiently on the polished surface. This was not going to be a pleasant meeting. She had not been looking forward to it. The news was distressing. The latest hospital rankings were in, and Promise Falls General had come in below average for the upstate New York region. The closest hospitals in Syracuse and Albany had ranked in the high seventies and low eighties, but PFG had been saddled with a sixty-nine. A totally unfair and arbitrary figure, in Agnes’s estimation. Much of it had to do with perception. The locals figured that if you needed top-quality health care, you had to go to a hospital in a big city. Bigger, at least, than Promise Falls. That meant Syracuse or Albany, or even New York.

Sure, PFG had some trouble eleven months ago with an outbreak of C. difficile . Four elderly patients contracted the bacterial infection, and one of them had died. (Too bad the Promise Falls Standard was still printing at the time; it was front-page material for the better part of two weeks.) But that was the sort of thing that could happen to any hospital, and almost invariably did. Agnes Pickens had instituted even more rigorous hand-washing and cleaning procedures, and had gotten the outbreak under control. And where was the Standard ’s front-page story on that?