Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

So I parked Mom’s Taurus out front of his Breckonwood house, and made the trip to the front door. You wouldn’t know anything had happened here earlier in the day. No police cruisers, no yellow crime-scene tape, no news vans. Everyone had been and gone.

The street was quiet, and most of the houses were dark, including this one, save for the light over the front door. At the house next door, however, several lights were still on.

I rang the bell.

I could sense steps within the house, someone approaching the door from the other side. The curtain at the window immediately left of the door opened, and I saw Bill Gaynor take a quick peek at me.

“Go away,” he said. Not shouting, but just loud enough for me to hear through the glass.

“Please,” I said.

The light over my head went out.

And that was that. I wasn’t going to ring that bell a second time. Not after what this man had been through.

I could think of only one other place I might drive by this late at night before I went home to bed. A place I’d been thinking about for a while now.

But before I made it back to the car, I heard the door open on the neighboring house that was still lit up. A man I guessed to be in his eighties, thin and elderly, wearing a plaid housecoat, had taken a step outside.

“Something going on out here?” he asked.

I said, “I’d come by to see Mr. Gaynor, but he’s not in the mood for visitors right now.”

“His wife got killed today,” the man said.

“I know. I was here when he found her.”

The man took another step out of his house, squinted in my direction. “I saw you this morning. I was watching from the window. There was a fight on the lawn, a woman with their baby.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What the hell’s been going on? I asked the police but they didn’t tell me a damn thing. They had plenty of questions, but weren’t interested in answering mine.”

I cut across the lawn and met him at his front step. “What do you want to know?” I asked him. “My name is David, by the way.”

“I’m Terrence,” he said, nodding. “Terrence Rodd. I’ve lived here twenty years. My wife, Hillary, passed away four years ago, so it’s just me here. But I’m not moving out unless I have to. Guess how old I am.”

“I’m not good at ages,” I said. “Sixty-eight.”

“Don’t mess with me,” Terrence said. “Really, how old do you think I am?”

I pondered. “Seventy-nine,” I said. I really thought eighty, but it was like when you put a four-dollar item on sale for three ninety-nine. It looks better.

“Eighty-eight,” Terrence said. He tapped his temple with the tip of his index finger. “But I’m still as sharp up here as I ever was. So you tell me, what happened there?”

“Someone stabbed Rosemary Gaynor to death,” I said. “It was pretty horrible.”

“Who did it?”

I shook my head. “Far as I know, there hasn’t been an arrest.”

“So it wasn’t Bill, then,” he said, nodding.

That threw me. “If it had been, would you have been surprised?” I asked.

“Well, yes and no. Yes, because he sure doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d do it, but no, because isn’t it usually the husband who does it when a wife gets killed? I spent a lifetime analyzing statistics, so you kind of look at what’s most likely to happen. What’s your interest in this?”

“Like I said, I was here when Mr. Gaynor found her.”

That seemed to be enough for him. He nodded. “Nice couple. Hell of a thing. Everybody on the street’s probably making damn sure their doors are locked tonight, but most of these things, it’s somebody you know that does it. Even if it wasn’t Bill, which I’m not saying I think it is.”

“I get that.”

“Cute little baby, too. Baby’s okay, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank God. I’m freezing out here in my bathrobe. Nice talking to ya.”

“You mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

He hesitated. He’d have to invite me in if he wanted to warm up. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

“No,” I said.

“Hang on one second.” He went back into the house, closed the door. It reopened in ten seconds. Now he had a phone in his hand.

He held it up in front of me. “Smile.”

I smiled. There was a flash. He turned his attention to the phone, tapped away.

“I’m just gonna e-mail this to my daughter in Des Moines. If I end up dead, they’ll have your picture.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

There was a whoosh as the e-mail was sent. “Come on in,” he said.

I followed him into the house. He said, “I keep a lot of lights on until I go to bed. I don’t sleep too well, wander the house a lot. Don’t usually go to bed till about one in the morning. Try watching one of those classic movies on Turner, then I go to bed, but I wake up early.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Usually can’t sleep in past six. Used to read the paper in the morning, but the goddamn assholes shut the Standard down.”

“I heard,” I said.

“Come into the kitchen. Want some hot chocolate? I usually make some hot chocolate at night.”

“That’d be nice.”

The place was done in lots of wood: wood cabinets, wood floor, even wood panels over the fridge and other appliances. Not one thing out of place, either. Nothing in the sink, no piles of bills and envelopes by the phone. A real estate photographer could have walked in and not had to do a moment’s prep.

“Beautiful home,” I said.

He filled two mugs with milk from the fridge and put them into the microwave. Set it for ninety seconds. “I’ll give it a stir halfway through,” he said.

“Did you know the Gaynors well?”

Terrence shrugged. “Said hi coming in and out, that kind of thing. And they have a nanny, too, comes by most days. Name of Sarita. She was the nicest of the bunch, really.”

“Yeah?”

“Sweet girl. I know you’re not supposed to call them girls anymore. She was a woman. Tough little thing. Went from one job to the other. I think she was sending money back to family in Mexico. Don’t think she was here legally, but hey, people do what they have to do.”

“Do you know what her other job was?”

“Nursing home. I was trying to remember the name of it earlier, when the cops were here asking questions, couldn’t think of it. There’s only about fifty of them in the area. Reason I know she worked at one is, I asked her what it was like there, in case I get to the point I can’t look after myself here on my own, and it sounds like an okay joint, but truth is, I hope one day, when it’s my time, I just go.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. I go to bed one night and just don’t wake up the next day. What do you think about that?”

“Who was it who said, ‘I expect to die at one hundred and ten, shot by a jealous husband’?”

“Thurgood Marshall, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court,” Terrence said, and chuckled. “That sounds good, too.” The microwave beeped. He took out the mugs, gave each a stir, and put them back into the oven for another minute and a half.

“I think I had more conversations with Sarita in the last ten months she’s been coming over than I’ve had with the Gaynors since they moved in. Although, a year back or so, they weren’t around much anyway.”

“Where were they?”

“Boston. Bill, he works for some insurance company based there, and he had to be away for several months, so Rosemary went and lived with him. Did the last few months of her pregnancy there; first time I saw them after they came back, she had the baby.”

The oven beeped again. He took out the mugs, handed one to me. I blew on it before taking a sip. It was good hot chocolate.