Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”

I told them I had to go out, and asked Mom if I could borrow her old Taurus. She didn’t drive much anymore, but she still had her car, and the plates were up-to-date.

“Keys are in the drawer,” she said.

I knew this was probably a bad idea. Getting involved in your kids’ disputes, especially when it brought you face-to-face with other parents, wasn’t always such a good move.

I felt the best way to handle Mr. Worthington when I saw him would be to tell him there was a misunderstanding. I wouldn’t accuse Carl of stealing anything. I’d say something along the lines that Ethan had agreed to let Carl hang on to the watch for a while, but the watch wasn’t his to lend. I’d explain that it was a family heirloom, that it had been Ethan’s great-grandfather’s. I’d embellish. I’d say that once Ethan’s grandfather found out it was missing, the boy was going to be in for a good whoopin’.

No, I could not say that. That was ridiculous.

The important thing was not to lay blame. Be nice. Just get the damn watch back.

I opened the address app and looked for S. WORTHINGTON. There was one, on Sycamore.

It wasn’t that far from where my parents lived, which made sense, since Ethan and Carl were going to the same school, but it seemed a great distance. The block where the Worthingtons lived was a stretch of low-income town houses jammed together like upended shoe boxes on a shelf. Cars in varying stages of disrepair were parked in short driveways, back ends hanging over the sidewalk.

This might not have been something I’d ordinarily have felt up to, but after the morning I’d had, there was a part of me that just didn’t give a shit. I’d be nice, but I was going to get back that damn watch that little bastard had stolen from my son.

I found the right door, climbed the three cement steps, one hand on the rusted metal railing, and knocked.

From behind the door, a muffled shout.

“Who is it?” Didn’t sound like a man to me.

“I’m looking for Sam Worthington!” I shouted back. “I’m Ethan’s dad!”

“Who?”

“Ethan’s a friend of my son! I just came by to—”

Suddenly the door swung wide.

It was a woman.

“I’m Samantha,” she said flatly. “Most people call me Sam.” About thirty, short brown hair, wearing a tight white tee and jeans just as snug. They fit her well.

She was a nice-looking woman, but if I’m honest, I’d have to say the first thing I noticed was the shotgun she had in her hands, and the fact that it was pointed right between my eyes.

“What would it take to get you to get Five Mountains up and running again?” Randall Finley asked Gloria Fenwick as they sat in the offices of Finley Springs Water. It was a far cry from the office he had when he presided over the small empire of Promise Falls as its mayor. Back then he had a broad oak desk, leather armchairs for guests, velvet drapes at the windows. Well, at least they looked like velvet.

But his office at the Finley Springs bottling plant, five miles north of Promise Falls on a tract of land that had been in his family for five generations, lacked charm. A cheap metal desk topped with chipped fake-wood laminate. Plastic stackable chairs. He’d rehung a few framed photos that had adorned the walls of his mayoral office. Shaking hands with Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly. Fake fisticuffs with former wrestler and onetime governor Jesse Ventura.

There’d never been a Penthouse calendar on the wall of the mayor’s office, however. Finley was thinking maybe he should have taken that down before inviting Fenwick to drop by. What the hell. It wasn’t like it showed anything she hadn’t already seen herself. In the mirror.

Gloria Fenwick, forty, pencil thin, blond hair to her shoulders and decked out in Anne Klein, had been the general manager of the theme park, and was still in charge of the place, winding things down for the parent corporation. That meant dealing with creditors, selling off bits and pieces of the place, entertaining offers for the property. As far as that went, there had been none.

“I don’t even know why I agreed to this meeting,” Fenwick said, standing, looking at the closest plastic chair. The seat was cracked, and looked as though it would pinch her in a delicate place if she dared sit in it.

“You agreed to it because you know if an opportunity presented itself that would make you look good to your superiors, you’d go for it.”

Fenwick picked up a plastic bottle of Finley Springs Water that was sitting on the man’s desk. She held it up to a flickering overhead fluorescent light and squinted. “This looks a little cloudy to me.”

“We had a few quality issues with the last batch,” Finley said. “Perfectly safe to drink despite a few contaminants.”

“You should put that on the label,” she said.

Finley’s desk phone rang. He glanced at who the caller was, but ignored it. “Won’t you sit down?”

“This chair is cracked.”

Finley came from behind his desk and found another chair that looked less likely to pinch Fenwick’s very pleasant butt. She sat, and Finley returned to the chair behind his desk.

“Your park was a huge shot in the arm for Promise Falls.”

“Five Mountains is not reopening,” she said.

“I think your corporate overlords are not taking the long view. A park like that, it needs time to develop, build an audience, as it were.”

“What’s this to you?”

He leaned back, laced his fingers behind his head, a posture that made his stomach loom in front of him like an upturned wok.

“I’m looking to get back into politics,” Finley said. “I want back in the game. Promise Falls has hit the skids. This town is broken. Businesses closing, people moving away. Paper’s gone under. That private prison — which would have meant a shitload of jobs — didn’t get built here. A plant that was making parts for GM and Ford lost its contract to Mexico. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, the local theme park has folded up its tent. That’d be you.”

“It was not a viable operation,” Gloria Fenwick said. “Building in that location was a miscalculation. Traffic patterns were misjudged. Promise Falls is too far north of Albany. There are no other attractions, like a discount outlet mall, to make this a logical destination point. People had to go too far out of their way to get here. People don’t pass Promise Falls on their way from point A to point B. So the place has been mothballed.”

“Every time I drive by, it kind of freaks me out,” Finley said. “Seeing that Ferris wheel, the roller coaster, everything just sitting there, not moving. Abandoned like that. It’s creepy.”

“Try being there,” Fenwick said. “My office is still on the property. It’s like living in a ghost town. Especially late at night.”

“Anyway, when I get back in,” Finley said, putting his hands on his desk and leaning forward, “I can make it so Five Mountains pays no local business taxes or property taxes for five years. And in five years’ time, if the park is still not financially viable, that could be reexamined. Make it ten years. People having jobs is more important than filling local tax coffers.”

The phone rang again. He let it go, but seconds after it stopped ringing, his cell went off. “Goddamn it,” he said. “It’s like having flies buzzing around your head all the time.”

“Maybe you need an assistant,” Fenwick said.

“Interested?”

“No,” she said.

“Because I’ve actually been scouting around, getting some names. What with running a business, restarting my political career, I’m kind of drowning.”