Broken Promise: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

  “Great. So, I was trying to confirm whether Mr. Gaynor was at the hotel Saturday midday through Monday morning.”

  “Yeah. Terrible thing, what happened to his wife. Anyway, he checked out of the hotel at six in the morning on Monday. I even checked the security footage, and he was there at the front desk bright and early yesterday morning.”

  A six a.m. checkout sounded about right. If he’d stopped once or twice to get a coffee or hit the bathroom, that departure would have seen him getting home at the very time he did.

  But that didn’t nail it down for Duckworth. It was conceivable Gaynor could have left the hotel sometime during the previous forty-eight hours, driven home, killed his wife, then returned to Boston. His wife had clearly been dead at least a day when her body was discovered. Which meant whoever had killed her had done it more than twenty-four hours earlier. Duckworth was still waiting to hear back from the Mass Pike authorities to see whether Gaynor’s car’s license plate had been picked up entering or exiting the toll road in the two days before he’d officially returned home.

  A round trip would have taken him the better part of five to six hours, but it could be done if he used the interstate highway. His attendance at the hotel conference could serve as his alibi.

  Duckworth pressed on. “I’d asked you, I think, if you had anything else that would confirm Mr. Gaynor’s presence at the hotel for most of the weekend.”

  “Yes,” said Bottsford, “you’d mentioned that. There were seminars most of Saturday and Sunday, and the conference dinner at five on Sunday, and he was seen at that. There was a charge from the bar at ten p.m., Sunday, and he’s visible on the security camera again, crossing the lobby at around eleven. Around midnight there was a call from his room down to the desk to ask for a wake-up call at five, which was done. The call was answered.”

  That covered Sunday. But Rosemary Gaynor was already dead then.

  “What about Saturday, and into Sunday morning?”

  “The thing is, Detective, Mr. Gaynor is a regular here. He has stayed here for weeks, sometimes months at a time. Last year his wife was even with him for a very long stay. Everyone here knows the Gaynors. I asked around in the bar and the restaurant, and they saw him quite regularly all through the weekend. And his car did not leave the hotel. I talked to the valet, and he remembers bringing his car up for him at six, and it was the only time the car was asked for in the preceding forty-eight hours.”

  Duckworth said, “Thanks very much for getting back to me.”

  “Mr. Gaynor’s always been very kind and courteous to everyone here,” the manager added. “We feel very bad for his loss.”

  “Of course. Good-bye.”

  Duckworth hung up the phone. Just as well to scratch Gaynor from the list of suspects, he guessed, considering that they’d made an arrest. But he’d had to be sure.

  He picked up the phone and called Wanda.

  “How’s it going,” she said.

  “I got your e-mail. What’s up?”

  “I finished the autopsy on Rosemary Gaynor.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not that much to add about the cause of death. And there was no sign of sexual assault. Things are pretty much the way I laid them out for you yesterday. But there was one thing, and it may not be important, but I figured I should let you know. I mean, you’ll get the full report, but I wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was thinking about her baby, what’s his name?”

  “Matthew,” Duckworth said.

  “I was thinking about how lucky it was whoever killed the Gaynor woman didn’t kill the kid, too. Not because he’d be a witness, but because people who do things like this are just out of their heads. Right?”

  “Often.”

  “Well,” Wanda continued, “that was on my mind when I stumbled upon some curious scar formation in the woman’s pelvis. These scars were whitish in color and had shrunk over time, which indicated to me that a procedure she underwent was more than a year ago, maybe a couple of years. It’s called maturing, when the scars go like that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just bear with me. Also, it struck me as kind of funny that there was no sign of fibrous bands in this woman’s breasts. Considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “When a woman is pregnant, because of the hormonal enlargement that takes place in the breasts, you see these fibrous bands. So now I was even more curious, so I took a gander at the back side of the pubic ramus.”

  “The who?”

  “The bone in front of the pelvis near the urinary bladder. You’d expect to see scarring from the growth of the uterus, and—”

  “Stop,” Duckworth said. “What are you telling me?”

  “Rosemary Gaynor had a hysterectomy a few years ago. Everything I know tells me this woman has never been pregnant.”

  “Say that again.”

  “She’s never had a kid, Barry.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  AGNES Pickens had just finished talking to Natalie Bondurant on her home phone in the kitchen when her cell—definitely hers, not Gill’s—rang. She snatched it off the countertop, saw who it was, and took the call.

  “What?” she said. “Wait, hang on a second.”

  Gill had gone upstairs, but she didn’t want to take a chance he might hear any of this conversation, so she went over to the sliding glass doors that led to the backyard deck. Once outside, she closed the door behind her.

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “We have a problem,” Jack Sturgess said. There was road noise in the background.

  “So do I. They just arrested Marla.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “Yeah. So I’ve got problems, too. Huge problems. I don’t need any more from you. You just called me with one. Are you telling me you didn’t solve it?”

  “The old lady’s dealt with, but yeah, there’s a new problem. I’ve found Sarita.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a problem. That sounds good.”

  “She’s with your nephew,” Sturgess said. When Agnes said nothing for several seconds, he said, “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you. She’s with David? Where? Where are they?”

  “They’re in a car ahead of us. Just driving around. We’re following them. Sarita was ready to hop a bus out of town. David must have found her there. We saw him driving away with her in the car.”

  Agnes said, “I told him . . . I gave him my blessing to ask around on Marla’s behalf. What else could I say? I didn’t want him to think I didn’t want to know what might have happened. . . . I just . . . I just didn’t expect him to make any real progress.” Panic was rising in her voice. “How the hell did he find her?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” the doctor fired back. “Maybe you should talk to him.”

  “Talk to him?”

  “I don’t know. Call him; tell him to back off. Leave this alone. You’re his goddamn aunt, for Christ’s sake. Talk some kind of sense into him.”

  “I’m thinking,” she said.

  “Well, you’d better think fast, because it looks like they’re having a real gabfest.”

  Another silence from Agnes.

  “If you don’t want to give me any direction,” Sturgess said, “I’m just going to have to deal with this as best I can.”

  “Don’t you see the problem here?” Agnes asked. “We know it had to be Sarita who took the baby to Marla’s house. So she had to have figured out what really happened. To save ourselves we’d have to . . . we’d have to keep Sarita from ever talking to anyone.”

  “Yeah,” Sturgess said.

  “But . . . I need Sarita.”

  “What?”

  “I need Sarita to save Marla. If they’ve got enough to arrest her, they may have enoug
h to send her away. They’re going to send my girl to jail, Jack. Sarita can clear her. When they hear what she has to say, they’ll have to drop the charges against Marla.”

  “Agnes,” Sturgess said slowly. “You need to think about what you’re saying.”

  “That’s all I’m doing is thinking! My daughter’s not going to prison.”

  “Would you like to go there?” the doctor asked. “I know I don’t want to go there. Because that’s where this conversation is going. Think about this, Agnes. Even if Marla were convicted, you could mount a pretty convincing insanity defense. Diminished capacity, something like that. Out of her head as a result of a traumatic incident. Odds are, if she went to jail, it wouldn’t be for long. They might even just commit her for psychiatric care until such time as they deemed her cured. But—”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “But if they come after us, if they find out what we did—Agnes, if they find out what I’ve done just today, with your blessing—we’ll be going away forever. Are you hearing me? If you let Marla take the blame, she’s out in a year or two and you can look after her. But if you go to jail, you’ll never be able to look after Marla. You’ll see her once a month on visiting day and that’ll be it. Is that what you want?”

  “Jack, just shut up.”

  “You want to be a good mother, Agnes? Let Marla go to jail. Let them treat her. And when she gets out, you’ll be there for her. Let me take care of Sarita.”

  “I . . . I can’t . . . I don’t know what—”

  “And, Agnes, forgive me, but Marla’s not the same kind of issue for me as she is for you. She’s your daughter, not mine. I know what I have to do to save myself.”

  “God, why did I ever go along with you on—”

  “You sound like Bill. We’re in this together, Agnes. You got something out of this and so did I.”

  “It was all about money for you,” she said. “It was never about money for me.”

  “Motivations mean fuck-all now. Just don’t try coming back at me like you had nothing to do with this.”

  Agnes was quiet for another moment. Finally she asked, “Where are you?”

  “David’s driving north out of town. I can see the Five Mountains Ferris wheel in the distance.”

  “How much do you think she’s told him?”

  “Who knows? We don’t even know how much she knows.”

  In the background, the sound of an infant crying.

  “What’s that?” Agnes asked. “Who’s that?”

  “It’s Matthew. He’s been screaming almost the whole time.”

  “You have the baby with you?” Agnes asked.

  “I’m with Bill. I’ve already been through this with him. I thought it was a bad idea, too, bringing the kid, but like he says, what the hell’s he going to do? He needs a new nanny.”

  “Jack, seriously, we need to think about this. What about—just give me a second—what about if there’s a way to pin it on Sarita, but . . . silence her at the same time?”

  “Go on.”

  “She . . . she confesses to you what she did, but then she attacks you, and you have to act in self-defense. Maybe something like that?”

  “You’re grasping at straws, Agnes. And besides, what if she’s already told David everything? Have you thought about that? He may already know the whole story.”

  Before Agnes could respond, the doctor said to Bill Gaynor, “It’s pretty isolated here. Flash your lights; hit the horn; get them to pull over.”

  “Jack?” Agnes said.

  “I have to go,” he said. “I’ll check in with you later. Think about what I said, Agnes. Think about being a good mother.”

  “Don’t you hurt my nephew,” she warned. And then, “Or my grandson.”

  “Oh,” said the doctor. “Now he’s your grandson.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  David

  “A good thing,” Sarita Gomez repeated, sitting in the car next to me. “I wanted to do what was right.”

  The black car behind us was still honking and flashing its lights.

  “Explain that,” I said, holding my speed, debating whether to pull over.

  “I wanted to return Matthew to his real mother,” she said.

  I glanced over at her. Not once, but twice. “Marla’s baby didn’t die.”

  Sarita nodded. “I’m pretty sure. I knew Ms. Gaynor had never been pregnant, that they had adopted Matthew. She couldn’t breast-feed; she never went through all the things a woman goes through. But she didn’t want people to know. She wanted them to think she’d been pregnant. The last couple of months before they got Matthew she spent in Boston so the neighbors wouldn’t think something funny was going on. They’d never see that she was never actually pregnant.”

  “Rosemary told you all this?”

  “Not exactly. Bits and pieces came out. I was there so much, I figured out what had happened. Dr. Sturgess, he’d come over a lot and talk to Mr. Gaynor and I heard things. And I knew from my friends at the hospital that your cousin . . . her baby died around the same time that the Gaynors had Matthew. One time—they didn’t know I was there—I heard them talking about when she tried to steal the baby from the hospital, the doctor saying he couldn’t have predicted something like that happening. That’s when I knew what they’d done. That Ms. Gaynor’s baby was really your cousin’s baby.”

  “But . . .” I was trying to get my head around this. “But Marla didn’t have a son. She had a girl.”

  “They lied to her,” Sarita said. “You wrap up a baby, how are you going to know one way or the other? I think they told her it was a girl just to make everything very different. Does that make sense?”

  “None of this makes any sense. I mean, Marla told me she held the baby. That it was dead.”

  Sarita looked at me blankly. “I can’t explain that.”

  The car was still honking. Sarita shifted in her seat, looked back. “That is Mr. Gaynor. That is his car. And I’m pretty sure that’s the doctor next to him.”

  “Why the hell are they following us?”

  “They must be looking for me.”

  When had they spotted us? At the bus station?

  “I’ve got a few questions for both of them,” I said, putting on my blinker, easing my foot off the gas.

  “Wait,” Sarita said.

  “What?” I hadn’t put my foot on the brake yet, but as the car slowed, Gaynor stopped honking his horn.

  “Where is Marshall?”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “He was going to meet Mr. Gaynor. He was going to get him to pay money. And there is Mr. Gaynor, but I don’t know what has happened to Marshall.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But I have a bad feeling.”

  “Sarita, nothing’s going to happen. We’re right out in the open here. With what you’ve told me, I’ve got a few questions for both of those assholes. I want answers.”

  Now I put my foot on the brake, steered the car over to the shoulder. It was then that I realized we were on the back side of the decommissioned Five Mountains amusement park. Alongside the road was about sixty feet of tall grass, then a perimeter fence. I noticed that just up from where we were, a section of fence had been cut, the chain link pried back.

  I shifted my eyes to the mirror, watched Gaynor steer his black Audi over to the shoulder and park a couple of car lengths behind me. I felt like I was getting a speeding ticket.

  The passenger door opened.

  Sarita was right. It was Dr. Sturgess getting out.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Sarita. “How would they pull it off? I mean, the paperwork alone. How do you—”

  Sarita cut me off. “He is a doctor. And rich, and white. He could fake it all. Death certificates, birth certificates, all of it. Who is g
oing to question him?” She shook her head angrily. “It is why I took the baby to your cousin. When I found out what they’d done, I looked up her address, drove by her house many times, wondering if I should tell her. But I never did. Not until Matthew had no one to care for him.”

  The doctor was coming up to my side of the car. I saw his image looming larger by the second in the driver’s-door mirror.

  He seemed to be holding one arm pressed closed to his side.

  I powered down the window.

  “Dr. Sturgess,” I said, once he was even with the door.

  He smiled. “Mr. Harwood. I was pretty sure that was you.” He leaned over slightly so he could see my passenger. “Hello, Sarita. How are you doing?”

  Sarita said nothing.

  “I wondered if we could have a talk,” Sturgess asked.

  “That’s Mr. Gaynor back there, isn’t it?” I said.

  “It is.”

  “We all going to have a chat together?”

  “That would be ideal,” the doctor said.

  “Where would you like to do that?”

  “If you two would like to get out, I think we could have it right here.”

  I hadn’t yet killed the engine, and was reaching for the key when my cell rang.

  “One sec,” I said to Sturgess, holding up a finger.

  “We really need to talk now,” he said.

  I waved that finger again, went into my pocket for the phone with my other hand. Pulled it out.

  Saw who it was.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Aunt Agnes screamed, “Run!”

  SIXTY-THREE

  BARRY Duckworth made a call back to Boston. The hotel patched him through for a second time to manager Sandra Bottsford.

  “You were telling me,” he said, “that Mr. Gaynor’s wife, Rosemary, spent a couple of months with him at your hotel. When was this?”

  The woman thought a moment. “Well, it would have been a year ago. I can check the records, but I’m pretty sure she came about thirteen months ago, and they were here for a three-month stay together.”