Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

“I—”

“I simply can’t believe it. What on earth possessed you? What did you do? Did you grab him at the mall? Had she taken the baby out for a stroll?” She put a hand to her own mouth. “Tell me you didn’t snatch him here, at their house. Tell me you had nothing to do with this.”

Marla’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t do anything wrong. He was given to me. Someone came to my door and asked me to look after him.”

“Who?” Agnes snapped. “The mother? This Gaynor woman?”

“I don’t know who she was. She never said.”

“Honestly, Marla, no one in the world is going to believe a story like that.” More to herself than to us, she said, “We’re going to have to come up with something better than that.”

Agnes gave me a look of exasperation. “Have the police talked to her?”

“Briefly,” I said. “They’re trying to sort out the scene, I think, and told us not to leave. There’s a detective here already, and probably a forensics unit, too.”

“She doesn’t say a word, not to anyone,” Agnes said. “Not one word.” She raised a finger to her daughter’s face. “You hear that? You don’t say one thing to the police. If they so much as ask you your birthday, you tell them to talk to your lawyer.”

Agnes rooted through her purse, brought out a phone. She went through her contacts, found a number, and tapped it with her thumb. “Yes, this is Agnes Pickens. Put me through to Natalie. I don’t care if she’s with a client; put her on the phone right this second. ”

Natalie Bondurant was my guess. One of Promise Falls’ sharpest legal minds. She’d helped me in the past.

“Natalie? Agnes Pickens here. Whatever you’re doing, drop it. I have a situation. No, not with the hospital. I’ll explain when you get here.” She told Natalie where she could find her and ended the call before she could get an argument.

Agnes said to me, “That goes for you, too.”

“What?” I asked.

“Not a word to the police. You have nothing to say.”

The first thing that popped into my head was a childish, You’re not the boss of me . But what I said was “I’ll decide what I tell the police, Agnes.”

She didn’t like that. “David,” she said, in a whisper so Marla could not hear, “can’t you see what’s happened here?”

“I don’t think we know that yet.”

“We know enough to know Marla needs to be protected. Whatever she’s done, it’s not her fault. She’s got problems; she’s not responsible for her actions. We all have to look out for her.”

“Of course,” I said.

“She hasn’t been right for a long time, but losing the baby, it did something to her, to her mind.”

“What are you saying?” Marla asked.

“It’s all right, dear. I’m just talking to David.”

“I’ll keep what you have to say in mind,” I told my aunt. “But I don’t think my role in this entitles me to clam up when the police start asking questions.”

Agnes shook her head. “You really are Arlene’s boy, aren’t you? Stubborn to the end.” She scanned the various police vehicles. “I’m going to find out who’s in charge here.”

She went off in search of authority.

My cousin looked at me and said, “You have to help me.”

“Your mom’s doing that,” I said. “That was probably Natalie Bondurant she was talking to on the phone. She’s a good lawyer.”

“Don’t you get it?” Marla asked. “Didn’t you hear what she said? She said ‘I’ have a situation.”

“Marla, she just meant—”

“I know what she meant. She’s worried about her own reputation first.”

“Even if that were true, anything she does to protect herself will end up protecting you.”

Marla’s eyes darted about, as if looking for some safe place to run to, and finding none. “I think... maybe I am in trouble.”

I leaned in close to her, rested my hands on her shoulders. I’d already asked her the big question, but felt it was time to try again. “Marla, look at me. Tell me. Did you do anything to that woman? To Matthew’s mother? Maybe, just for a moment, something snapped? You did something you didn’t mean to do?”

Even as I asked this, I wondered whether I wanted to know the answer. If Marla confessed to me that she’d killed Rosemary Gaynor and then run off with her baby, would that be something I could withhold from the police?

I knew how Agnes would answer that question.

“David, I could never do a thing like that,” she said, a voice barely above a whisper. “Never.”

“Okay, okay, that’s good,” I said.

“You’ll help me, won’t you?”

“Sure, of course. But really, I know you don’t always trust your mother’s motives, but once she gets Natalie on board, then—”

“No, no,” Marla said, her eyes pleading. “You. You have to help me. It’s what you do, right? You ask questions and find out things.”

“Not anymore,” I told her.

“But you know how. Find the woman who gave me Matthew. Find her. She’ll tell you what I’m saying is the truth.”

“Marla, just—”

“Promise,” she said. “Promise you’ll help me.”

I was hunting for the right words. I held her tightly, looked her in the eye, and said, “You know I’m in your corner.”

Her face shattered like a dropped teacup as she slipped her arms around me. “Thank you,” she said, her voice muffled against my chest, clearly not appreciating how totally noncommittal my response had been.

“I wonder what’s going on,” said Arlene Harwood, standing at the top of the stairs to the basement. “I want to phone David, but I figure, if he has something to tell us, he’ll call. What a terrible situation. Just terrible.”

Don Harwood, seated at his workbench, had just tightened the vise on a lawn-mower blade that he wanted to sharpen. His basement workshop — as opposed to the other one he had in the garage — was more crowded that it once was, ever since he’d set up a Lionel train layout on a four-by-eight sheet of plywood for Ethan to play with before he and his father had moved away to Boston. Ethan had lost interest in it in, but Don had not, and could not bring himself to tear it down. He’d put a lot of work into it. The O scale station, the miniature people waiting on the platform, the crossing signal that flashed when the train raced by, even a replica of the town’s water tower, with the words “Promise Falls” printed on the side.

“I don’t know,” he said, not looking in Arlene’s direction, but staring at the blade, wondering where he’d put his grinder. That’d be just the ticket to make this blade sharp enough to shave with. “She’s trouble, that girl. Always has been, always will be. Your sister should have committed her to a mental ward for a while after she tried to run off with that baby in the hospital.”

Arlene descended halfway down the stairs, far enough that Don would be able to see her from the waist down, if he chose to take his eyes off the blade. “That’s a horrible thing to say.”

“Is it? Maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be having more trouble with her today. Damn it, where’s my grinder?”

Don suddenly raised his head, sniffed the air. “Arlene, you got somethin’ on the burner?”

“What?”

“Something sure smells like it’s burning.”

“Oh, Lord!” she said, turned and started running up the stairs. But two from the top, she stumbled, pitched forward, and yelped.

“Shit,” Don said, then hopped off his stool and bolted up the stairs to help her.

“I’m so stupid!” she said, trying to get upright.

Don knelt next to her. “What hurts? What did you hit?”