Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

“On the night shift, I think,” Walden said. “Where he can do the least damage.”

“Yeah, well, Tate has a good heart but he’s no nuclear physicist,” Don said. “The school’s just up here.”

“I’ll wait in the car,” Walden said.

“Sure.”

Don found a parking spot, left the keys so Walden could listen to the radio if he wanted, and went into the building, following the signs to the office. As soon as he walked in, he saw his grandson seated in a chair this side of a raised counter. Ethan’s face was scraped, and there was a tear in one knee of his jeans. His eyes were red.

The boy was startled. “I didn’t know you were coming,” Ethan said. “I thought it would be Dad.”

“He’s got his hands full,” Don said.

“A job interview?”

Don shook his head. “I wish.”

A woman seated at a desk behind the counter got up and approached. “May I help you?”

“I’m Ethan’s grandfather. Who are you?”

“I’m Ms. Harrow. I’m the vice principal.”

“There was some kind of trouble?”

“He and another boy got into a fight. They’re both suspended for the rest of the day.”

“Who’s the other kid? Where’s he?” Don asked.

“That’d be Carl Worthington.”

“Who started it?” Don asked.

“That’s not really the issue,” Harrow said. “We have a zero-tolerance policy about fighting. So they’re both being disciplined.”

“You start it?” Don asked his grandson.

“No,” Ethan said meekly.

“There,” he said to the vice principal. “If he didn’t start it, why’s he being suspended?”

“Carl says it was Ethan who started it. I just got off the phone with Sam Worthington having this very same discussion.”

“That’s the father of the kid that started it?”

The vice principal started to speak but Don held up his hand. “Save it. I’ll take him home. In my day, we’d just let the kids sort it out and didn’t get so goddamn involved. Let’s go, Ethan.”

Don tried to get some details out of Ethan on the way to the car, but he didn’t want to talk about it. But when he saw someone sitting in the front seat of the Crown Victoria, he asked, “Who’s that?”

“Friend of mine. Well, sort of. Someone I worked with a long time ago, before I retired. Don’t be asking him anything about anybody.”

“What would I ask him?”

“I don’t know. But just don’t, okay?”

Ethan got into the back of the car. Walden Fisher turned in his seat and extended a hand.

“I’m Walden,” he said.

Ethan accepted the handshake warily. “I’m Ethan. I don’t have anything else to say.”

“Okay, then,” Walden said.

When they got back home, Ethan burst out of the car like it was rigged to explode and ran in ahead of his grandfather. He found Arlene on the living room couch watching CNN, an ice pack on her leg. She tried to ask him what had happened, but he ran up to his room and closed the door.

Don asked his wife how she was doing, said he didn’t have to go have a coffee with Walden if she needed his help, but she said she was fine, which was not the answer he was hoping for.

So, with some reluctance, Don Harwood went to Kelly’s, where he had a coffee and a piece of cherry pie with whipped cream on top, and spent the better part of an hour talking to Walden about blueprints and water-main bursts and buried electrical lines, and when it was all over he came home and plunked down in his reclining chair with the intention of taking a nap.

But he could not sleep.

“How are you involved in all this?” Barry Duckworth asked me.

We’d moved to his unmarked cruiser. He was behind the wheel and I was up front next to him.

“Marla’s my cousin,” I explained. I told him about dropping by that morning with some food my mother had prepared.

“Why would your mother do that?”

“Because she’s nice,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean. Marla Pickens is a grown woman. Why does your mother think she needs to send her food? Is Marla out of work? She been sick?”

“She’s had a rough few months.”

“Why?”

“She... she lost a child. At birth. A little girl. She hasn’t been quite right since.” I didn’t get into details, and I didn’t volunteer the story about Marla trying to kidnap a baby from Promise Falls General. I had no doubt he’d find that out sooner or later, but I wasn’t going to be the one who told him.

It wasn’t that I feared my aunt’s wrath at divulging that. Okay, maybe a little. But it really was Marla I was looking out for. What she’d done at the hospital was hugely damning in the current circumstances, and I wasn’t sure Duckworth or anyone else with the Promise Falls police would feel the need to pursue a very broad investigation once they had that tidbit. Marla killed Rosemary Gaynor and made off with her baby. Simple as that. Case closed, let’s go get a beer.

I didn’t know that it was that simple. Then again, maybe it was.

There was no denying Marla had Matthew Gaynor. And even though her story of how he’d come into her life seemed unlikely, I wasn’t convinced Marla had it in her to have committed the kind of savagery I’d seen — if only for an instant — inside that house.

I hoped to God she didn’t.

“What do you mean, hasn’t been quite right?” Duckworth asked.

“Depressed, withdrawn. Maybe not taking as good care of herself as she could. Which was why my mom wanted to send some food over.”

“Why you?”

“What do you mean, why me?” I asked.

“Why didn’t she take it over herself?”

I licked my upper lip. “I had the time. I’m back home living with my folks. I’m out of work. Maybe you heard, the Standard went under.”

“And the Gaynors’ baby was there? At Marla’s house?”

I nodded.

“And this didn’t seem right to you? Because you knew she didn’t have a child?”

“That’s right. She told me a woman handed her the baby yesterday.”

“Just out of the blue, someone knocked on the door and said, ‘Here, have a kid.’”

“Yeah.”

Duckworth ran a palm over his mouth. “That’s quite a story.”

“That’s what she says happened.”

He shook his head slowly, then said, “I thought I’d heard you’d moved to Boston.”

“I had.” I guessed it wasn’t that strange that Duckworth would take notice of what I was up to, given that we knew each other from my troubles five years earlier. “But I moved back. Things weren’t working out at the Globe . I was working nights most of the time and never got to see Ethan. You remember Ethan.”

“I do. Good boy.”

Even with everything that was going on, I couldn’t stop worrying about what had happened with Ethan at school.

“I wanted to be close to my parents,” I told Duckworth. “They’re a great help. I got rehired at the Standard just as the paper closed.”

Duckworth wanted to know how I’d made the connection with the Gaynors. I told him, and about arriving at the same time as the husband. Duckworth wanted to know how Bill Gaynor seemed, before we’d found his wife.

“Agitated. He said he’d been trying to raise her on the phone, couldn’t.”

He asked me whether I knew anyone named Sarita.

“No. But I heard Gaynor say the name. That she’s the nanny. Haven’t you talked to her?”

“Not yet.” He paused. “You’re not getting your car back.”

“I kind of figured.”

“Eventually, but not for a while.”

“You’re going to find my prints on that stroller.”

“Uh-huh,” Duckworth said.