Broken Promise: A Thriller Page 3

  This was still the town he’d grown up in, but it was like a suit, once new, that had turned shiny and threadbare.

  Ironically, it had gotten worse since that dickhead Finley had stopped being mayor. For all his embarrassing shenanigans, he was a big booster for the town of forty thousand—actually, more like thirty-six thousand, according to the latest census—and would have fought to keep failing industries afloat like he was hanging on to his last bottle of rye.

  So when Duckworth saw who wanted to talk to him, he opted, with some regret, to take the call.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Barry!”

  “Hey, Randy.”

  If he was going to turn into the doughnut place, he’d have to hit his signal and crank the wheel now, and he knew if he entered the drive-through he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from ordering a soft, doughy circle of heaven. But Finley would hear his exchange at the speaker, and even though the former mayor did not know he’d embarked on a diet, Barry didn’t want anyone gaining insight into his dietary indiscretions.

  So he kept on driving.

  “Where are you?” Finley asked. “You in your car?”

  “I’m on my way in.”

  “Swing by Clampett Park. South end. By the path.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “There’s something here you should see.”

  “Randy, maybe, if you were still mayor, I’d be at your beck and call, and I wouldn’t mind you having my private cell phone number, but you’re not the mayor. You haven’t been for some time. So if there’s something going on, just call it in the way everybody else does.”

  “They’re probably going to send you out here anyway,” Finley said. “Saves you going into the station and then back out again.”

  Barry Duckworth sighed. “Fine.”

  “I’ll meet you at the park entrance. I got my dog with me. That’s how I came across it. I was taking her for a walk.”

  “It?”

  “Just get over here.”

  The trip took Duckworth to the other side of town, where he knew Finley and his long-suffering wife, Jane, still lived. Randall Finley was standing with his dog, a small gray-haired schnauzer. The dog was straining at the leash, wanting to head back into the park, which bordered a forested area and beyond that, to the north, Thackeray College.

  “Took you long enough,” Finley said as Barry got out of his unmarked cruiser.

  “I don’t work for you,” he said.

  “Sure you do. I’m a taxpayer.” Finley was dressed in a pair of comfort-fit jeans, running shoes, and a light jacket that he’d zipped up to his neck. It was a cool May morning. The fourth, to be exact, and the ground was still blanketed with dead leaves from the previous fall that had, up until six weeks ago, been hidden by snow.

  “What did you find?”

  “It’s this way. I could just let Bipsie off the lead and we could follow her.”

  “No,” Duckworth said. “Whatever you’ve found I don’t want Bipsie messing with.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course,” Finley said. “So, how ya been?”

  “Fine.”

  When Duckworth did not ask Finley how he was, the ex-mayor waited a beat, and said, “I’m having a good year. We’re expanding at the plant. Hiring another couple of people.” He smiled. “You might have heard about one of them.”

  “I haven’t. What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind,” Finley said.

  They followed a path that led along the edge of the woods, which was separated from the park by a black chain-link fence about four feet high.

  “You lost weight?” Finley asked. “You’re looking good. Tell me your secret, ’cause I could stand to lose a few pounds myself.” He patted his stomach with his free hand.

  Duckworth had lost all of two pounds in the last two weeks, and was smart enough to know it didn’t show.

  “What’d you find, Randy?”

  “You just have to see it, is all. It must have happened overnight, because I walk along here with Bipsie a couple times a day—early in the morning, and before I go to bed. Now, it was getting dark when I came by last night, so it might have been there then and I didn’t notice, but I don’t think so. I might not have even noticed it this morning, but the dog made a beeline for the fence when she caught a whiff of it.”

  Duckworth decided not to bother asking Finley anymore what it was he wanted to show him, but he steeled himself. He’d seen a few dead people over the years, and figured he’d see plenty more before he retired. Now that he had twenty years in, he was better than halfway there. But you never really got used to it. Not in Promise Falls, anyway. Duckworth had investigated several homicides over the years, most of them straightforward domestics or bar fights, but also a few that had garnered national attention.

  None had been what you’d call a good time.

  “Just up here,” Finley said. Bipsie started to bark. “Stop it! Settle down, you little fucker!”

  Bipsie settled down.

  “Right there, on the fence,” Finley said, pointing.

  Duckworth stopped and studied the scene before him.

  “Yeah, pretty weird, huh? It’s a goddamn massacre. You ever seen anything like this before?”

  Duckworth said nothing, but the answer was no, he had not.

  Randall Finley kept on talking. “If it had been just one body, or even two, sure, I wouldn’t have called. But look how many there are. I counted. There’s twenty-three of them, Barry. What kind of sick fuck does something like that?”

  Barry counted them himself. Randy was right. One short of two dozen.

  Twenty-three dead squirrels. Good-size ones, too. Eleven gray ones, twelve black. Each one with a length of white string, the kind used to secure parcels, knotted tightly around its neck, and hung from the horizontal metal pole that ran across the top of the fence.

  The animals were spaced out along a ten-foot stretch, each of them hanging on about a foot of string.

  “I got no love for them,” Finley said. “Tree rats, I call them, although I guess they don’t do that much harm. But there’s gotta be a law against that, right? Even though they’re just squirrels?”

  FOUR

  David

  “MARLA, I’m serious. You need to talk to me here,” I said.

  “I should put him down for a nap,” she said, cradling the baby in her arms, lightly touching the nipple of the baby bottle to his lips. “I think he’s had all he’s going to have for now.”

  She set the bottle on the bedside table. The baby, eyes closed, made soft gurgling noises of contentment.

  “He wasn’t like this at first,” Marla said. “He cried a lot yesterday. Making strange and all.”

  I was going to ask why a baby who she would have me believe had been with her for months would make strange, but let it pass.

  She continued. “I sat with him all night and we’ve made a strong bond, the two of us.” She gave a weak laugh. “I must look a fright. I haven’t had a shower this morning or put on my makeup or anything. Last night I put him down for a sleep once he stopped crying, and ran out to the store to get a few things. I know I shouldn’t have left him alone, but there was no one I felt I could call, not just yet, and I was desperate for supplies. The angel only brought a few things.”

  “Who else knows about Matthew?” I asked. “Does Aunt Agnes—does your mother know?”

  “I haven’t told her the good news yet. It’s all happened pretty quickly.”

  The inconsistencies persisted. “How quickly?”

  Marla, her eyes still on the baby, said, “Okay, I haven’t exactly had Matthew for ten full months. Yesterday, late in the afternoon, around the time Dr. Phil comes on, I was doing some reviews for an air-conditioning company in Illinois when the doorbell rang.”

 
“Who was it?”

  A weak smile. “I told you. The angel.”

  “Tell me about this angel.”

  “Well, okay, she wasn’t a real angel, but it’s hard not to think of her that way.”

  “It was a woman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The mother?”

  Marla looked at me sharply. “I’m the mother now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But up until the moment she gave you Matthew, she was the mother?”

  Hesitantly, as though unwilling to make the admission, she said, “Maybe.”

  “What did she look like? How did she seem? Was she injured? Did you see any blood? Was there blood on her hand?”

  Marla shook her head slowly. “You know I’m not good with faces, David. But she was very nice, this woman. All dressed in white. That’s why, when I picture her, all I see is an angel.”

  “Did she say who she was? Did she give you her name? Did she leave any way for you to contact her?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t ask? You didn’t think it was strange? A woman just coming to your door and handing you a baby?”

  “She was in a hurry,” she said. “She said she had to go.” Her voice drifted off. She put Matthew in the middle of the bed and surrounded him with pillows, creating a kind of berm around him.

  “Until I get a crib, I have to do this. I don’t want him rolling off the bed and hitting the floor. Would you be able to help me with that? Getting a crib? Is there an IKEA in Albany? Or maybe Walmart would have one. They’re closer. I don’t think I could fit a crib, even one that wasn’t put together, into the Mustang, and I don’t think I’d be very good at putting it together. I’m pretty clueless about that sort of thing. I don’t even have a screwdriver. Well, I might in one of the kitchen drawers, but I’m not sure. Doesn’t IKEA put a little thingy in with the pieces? So you can build it even if you don’t have a bunch of tools? I don’t want to get a used crib at a secondhand shop or an antique store, because all kinds of safety improvements have been made on them. I saw this thing on TV once where you could make the side of the crib go up and down, and this one dropped by accident on the baby’s neck.” She trembled. “I don’t want anything like that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So is that something you could help me with? Getting a crib?”

  “I imagine so. But there are a few things we need to sort out first.”

  Marla wasn’t paying much attention to me. I wondered whether she was on any kind of medication, whether that would explain her apparent detachment from reality. If she’d been seeing a psychiatrist since losing her baby, and been prescribed anything to deal with depression or anxiety, I wasn’t aware of it. There was no reason why I would be. And I wasn’t about to start rooting about in her medicine cabinet, because I wouldn’t know what to make of what I might find.

  Maybe she wasn’t on anything, and this was just the way she’d been since giving birth to a lifeless child. Dad had more or less nailed it, in his own tactless way, when he said she’d gone “a bit crackers.” I’d only heard bits and pieces of the story. How Marla’s mother, Agnes, who way back in her twenties had been a midwife before becoming a nurse, had been there at her side, along with the family physician, a doctor named Sturgess, if I remembered right. Mom had talked about their sense of horror when they realized something was wrong. How Marla had been able to hold the child, briefly, before it had to be taken away.

  How it had been a girl.

  “Such a sad, sad thing,” Mom said whenever her niece crossed her mind. “It did something to her. Something just snapped; that’s what I think happened. And where was the father? Where was he? Did he help her through this at all? No, not one bit.”

  The father was a Thackeray College student. Seven or eight years younger than Marla. I didn’t know much else about him. Not that any of that mattered now.

  Did the police have any reports of a missing baby? If the paper were still in existence, if I still carried around press credentials, I’d just call headquarters, ask if they’d heard anything. But for a private citizen it was a little trickier. Did I want to alert the authorities to anything before I’d found out what, exactly, was going on? It was possible Marla really was babysitting for someone, but had allowed some kind of fantasy to envelop her.

  I mean, an angel coming to the door?

  “Marla, did you hear me? There are things to sort out.”

  “What things?” Marla said.

  I decided to play along, as if this were a normal situation we were dealing with here. “Well, I’m sure you want everything to be legal and aboveboard. So if Matthew is going to be yours, there will be some papers to sign. Legal matters to resolve.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said. “When he gets older, like when he goes to school, or even older than that, and has to get a driver’s license or something, I’ll just tell them I lost his birth certificate, that I can’t find it. They’ll just have to deal with that.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Marla. The town keeps records, too.”

  She looked unfazed. “They’ll just have to accept that he’s mine. You’re making it into a much bigger deal than it is. Society’s too wrapped up in documenting every little thing.”

  “But we still need to know who bore this child,” I persisted. “Like, medical history. You need to know about his real mother and father, what diseases or conditions they might have.”

  “Why don’t you want me to be happy, David? Don’t you think, after all I’ve been through, I deserve some happiness?”

  I didn’t know what to say, but it turned out I didn’t have to come up with something. Marla said, “I’m going to freshen up. Now that you’re here, I can have a shower, put on some clean clothes. I was thinking Matthew and I would go out and get a few things.”

  “The stroller, behind the door,” I said. “Did you buy that yesterday?”

  “No, the angel brought that,” she said. “Did your mom send over some more goodies for me?”

  “She did,” I said. “I’ll put everything into the freezer for you.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I won’t be long.” She slipped into the bathroom and closed the door.

  I took a quick look at the child, saw that he was sleeping peacefully and unlikely to roll out of his pillow prison. I put the frozen food Mom had sent with me into Marla’s freezer—I am nothing if not practical—and then went to the living room to check out the stroller. It was in the folded position, making it easy to drop into a car trunk, or stow away in a closet.

  On the right handle were more smudges that looked like the one I had seen on the doorjamb.

  I opened up the contraption, tapped a small lever with my foot to make sure it was locked into position. The stroller had seen some use. The once-black rubber wheels were rough with wear. Stale, dry Cheerios were stuck in the crevices of the seat pad. A small zippered pouch was attached to the back. I opened it, reached inside. I found three rattles, a small wooden car with thick wooden wheels, a flyer for a store that sold baby supplies, a half-full package of predampened wipes, and some tissues.

  Something about the flyer caught my eye. A few words printed on one side, on a label.

  It was an address. This was not a general piece of junk mail, but a targeted flyer for Baby Makes Three, a Promise Falls clothing store for infants. And even more important, the label had a name attached to the address.

  Rosemary Gaynor. She lived at 375 Breckonwood Drive. I knew the street. It was in an upscale neighborhood—certainly nicer than Marla’s—a couple of miles from here.

  I got out my cell, tapped on the app that would allow me to find a number for the Gaynor household. But once I had it under my thumb, I considered whether making the call was the smartest thing to do.

  Maybe it made more sense to go over there.
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  Right fucking now.

  I heard water running in the bathroom. The shower. The phone still in my hand, I called home.

  It picked up on the first ring. “Yeah?”

  “Dad, I need to talk to Mom.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Just put her on.”

  A fumbling sound, a muted “He wants to talk to you.” And then: “What is it, David?”

  “Something’s happened here at Marla’s.”

  “Did you give her the chili?”

  “No. I mean, I brought it. But . . . Mom, there’s a baby here.”

  “What?”

  “She’s got a baby. She says it’s hers. She says some woman came to the door and just gave it to her. But the story, it’s just not holding water. Mom, I’m starting to wonder . . . I hate to say this, but I’m wondering—God, this sounds totally crazy—but I’m wondering if she snatched this kid from someone.”

  “Oh, no,” Mom said. “Not again.”

  FIVE

  BARRY Duckworth wanted officers dispatched to the neighborhoods surrounding the park to canvass residents in case anyone had noticed anything suspicious the night before. A person carrying a heavy sack, maybe, hanging around the fence long enough to string up nearly two dozen squirrels.

  The first uniformed cop on the scene, a six-footer by the name of Angus Carlson, saw the assignment as an opportunity to perfect his stand-up act.

  “This case could be a tough nut to crack,” Carlson said to Duckworth. “But I’m feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to get at it. But if we don’t find a witness soon I’m gonna go squirrelly.”

  Duckworth had encountered Carlson at several crime scenes in recent months. He seemed to think he’d been assigned the role of Lennie Briscoe, the Law & Order detective played by Jerry Orbach, who always had some clever quip to make before the opening credits. From the few conversations Duckworth had had with the man, he knew that he’d come here four years ago after working as a cop in some Cleveland suburb.

  “Spare me,” Duckworth told him.

  He put in a call to the town’s animal welfare department, spoke to a woman named Stacey, brought her up to speed. “I got a feeling this may fall more into your bailiwick, but I’ve got some people working the scene right now. The type of person who does this, it’d be kind of nice to know who it is before people’s cats and dogs start hanging from the streetlights.”