The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls)

by Linwood Barclay

  Two horrific shrieks.

  The assailant immediately fled the scene. He did not sexually assault his victim. He did not take her purse, or remove anything from it.

  The primary on the case had been former detective and now chief Rhonda Finderman. The incident had happened when I was out of the country, and I had not been involved in the initial investigation.

  Rhonda’s notes, however, were thorough. I could find no fault with them. My problem with Rhonda had been her failure to bring to my attention the similarity between the Fisher murder and that of Rosemary Gaynor. But I’d been over that before, and concluded I had to carry the can for that as much as anyone else.

  I had learned things about Olivia on my own.

  As with Lorraine Plummer, she had been a participant in the sex games of three couples: Adam and Miriam Chalmers, Peter and Georgina Blackmore, and Clive and Liz Duncomb. Excited to meet a published author—Chalmers—she had accepted an invitation to the man’s house for dinner, where everyone else was present. While other young women who’d been brought to the home to be sexually exploited had been drugged, Olivia, at least according to Blackmore, had been a more willing participant.

  That had been a month before she died.

  I’d considered that one of those six had been involved in Olivia’s death, but nothing had panned out. Following Duncomb’s death, I’d brought in for questioning his wife, Liz—a real piece of work—reasoning that she could have had the same motive as her husband for killing Olivia: the fear that she might talk about what had gone on in that house.

  But I didn’t believe Liz had the physical bearing to do what had been done to Olivia.

  I’d briefly considered a doctor named Jack Sturgess—whom I’d once suspected in the Rosemary Gaynor murder—in Olivia’s death, but that had been a dead end as well. And Bill Gaynor didn’t look good for it, either.

  And neither of them could have had anything to do with Lorraine Plummer’s death.

  So I was back where I’d started.

  There were other issues with the Fisher crime.

  The witnesses. Or, at least, the potential witnesses. There’d been so many of them. Twenty-two, according to Rhonda Finderman’s notes.

  Twenty-two people who heard Olivia Fisher’s screams.

  And did nothing.

  Finderman tracked down more than half of them herself. The others, perhaps motivated by guilt and a wish to get things off their chest, came forward. Some were in other areas of the park.

  Two were on the bridge that spanned the falls.

  Several others were in an open-window coffee shop across the street from the park. Others were strolling along the sidewalk.

  It was a lovely spring evening. The days had grown longer; winter was a quickly fading memory. The sun had set, but the air remained warm enough to manage without a jacket. There was the persistent dull roar of the falls in the background, but sounds carried.

  Everyone would have heard Olivia.

  There was a consistency to the interviews with those who had heard her cries.

  “I figured a call to 911 would already have been made.”

  “I would have done something, but I assumed someone closer would have.”

  “I thought it was probably just kids goofing around.”

  “I didn’t hear anything after the first two screams, so I guessed it was nothing.”

  “I leave this kind of thing to the professionals.”

  And so on.

  Promise Falls had, on that particular evening, suffered a collective lack of responsibility. A wave of not-my-problem.

  For a period of time, it brought shame on the town. Promise Falls, in the words of one CNN commentator, was “the town that didn’t care.”

  The town was smeared across social media. We earned our own Twitter hashtag: #brokenpromise.

  We were, indeed, broken.

  But as with all targets of social outrage, we were soon forgotten as the world found others. A flip tweet from a PR person about AIDS in Africa. A comedian making a joke about tsunami victims. A congressman saying blacks were lazy.

  Luckily for the twenty-two people who heard but did not act, their names were never made public. Police feared there might be reprisals. But they were all here in the files.

  One, I recognized. It was, coincidentally, the father of someone I’d spoken to in the last couple of hours.

  Don Harwood. Father of David.

  Finderman hadn’t tracked him down on her own. He came into the station to confess his sin.

  “I was one of them,” he told Rhonda. “I was one of the people who did nothing.”

  Finderman, in her notes, described how the man had wept as he told her what he’d heard.

  “I was just getting into my car. I’d gone into the smoke shop there to look for something on the newsstand.” He had built a model train layout in his basement for his grandson, Ethan, and was looking for the latest issue of a magazine about Lionel Trains. “I found it, and when I came out, I heard the screams. They sounded like they were coming from the park, and I looked that way, and I thought about whether to do something, but I looked up and down the street and no one else was doing anything or calling anybody, so I guessed there was nothing to worry about. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

  There was other fallout from the Fisher murder.

  Victor Rooney started drinking heavily. He lost his job with the fire department and had been in and out of work ever since. He was racked with guilt, according to Rhonda’s notes, over not being on time to meet Olivia. I had wondered, when I started looking into the case, whether the source of his guilt might be something different.

  Like, maybe he’d killed Olivia. Nine times out of ten, it was the boyfriend or the husband.

  But Rhonda had checked out his alibi. She had interviewed his drinking buddies at Knight’s. He’d been there at the time of Olivia’s death.

  All of which left me nowhere.

  Which was why I wanted to pay another visit to Walden Fisher. To see whether there was something we’d all overlooked.

  The last time I’d seen Olivia’s father, he’d been waiting at Promise Falls General for a doctor to have a look at him. Considering how many patients were up there, he might still be waiting.

  If he wasn’t dead.

  Last I’d heard, Angus Carlson was still at the hospital talking to people. I phoned him, aware that if he was still in the ER, the call might not get through to him.

  He answered.

  “Hey,” he said. He sounded subdued, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me, given what we’d all been dealing with.

  “Hey,” I said back. “I need you to do something for me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You haven’t even heard what it is.”

  “Don’t you know?” Carlson asked.

  “Know what?” I wondered if Carlson himself had taken ill.

  “Some shit went down here at the hospital. I’m outside now, giving a statement.”

  “What happened?”

  “I shot a guy.”

  “What?”

  He filled me in.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know. What next, right? A zombie apocalypse?”

  It was a typical Carlson attempt at a joke, but I heard no levity in his voice. For maybe the first time, I felt for him.

  “It sounds like you did the right thing,” I said. “And you got lucky. You brought him down without taking a life. There’s no telling what that guy might have done once he started firing.”

  “Yeah, well. What was it you wanted, anyway?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, go ahead.”

  “I want to talk to Walden Fisher. He was up there in the ER when I left. You seen him lately?”

  A pause. “No,” he said. “I remember when you were talking to him, but I didn’t see him around later.”

  “Maybe he was admitted.”

  “Maybe. An
d they’re moving a lot of people out of here.” A pause. It sounded as though Carlson was talking to someone else. “I’m going to have to go,” he said when he got back. “What did you want to talk to Mr. Fisher for?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’ve got enough to deal with right now. Hang in there, okay, Angus?”

  “Yeah,” Carlson said. “Thanks, Barry.”

  I could have returned to the hospital and hunted for Walden Fisher, but it would still be chaotic there—especially now that there had been a shooting there—and even if he was in the building, it could take a long time to locate him. I decided it might be more expedient to go by his house first, in the event that he’d been treated and released.

  When I parked out front of his place, I could see through the porch’s screen door straight into the house, the main door wide open. It didn’t necessarily mean he was home. He probably hadn’t taken time to lock up the house when he came running out, sick. What had he told me at the hospital? That he’d nearly been run over by an ambulance.

  I scanned the surface of the road, and sure enough, I saw what looked like the remains of someone’s stomach contents. The kind of deposit one often saw on the sidewalk outside any Promise Falls bar on a Friday or Saturday night.

  I went up to the door, rapped lightly, and called through the screen, “Mr. Fisher?”

  The sound of a chair being pushed back. I could see down a short hallway to the kitchen, and several seconds later, Walden appeared. He walked very slowly to the screen door, pushed it open.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hey.”

  “You’re home,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I threw up a cow. They kicked me out of the ER, wanted me to go to Albany to get checked out.”

  “You’re back already?”

  “Didn’t go,” he said wearily. “Didn’t have it in me. I hadn’t died yet, so I figured I wasn’t going to, but I’m still kind of shaky.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure. I was just sitting in the kitchen staring out the window. I’d offer you a coffee, but I think that’s what got me in trouble in the first place.”

  As I followed him back into the kitchen, I asked, “Did a doctor even look at you?”

  “Some lady gave me the once-over. But there were people way worse than me, people keeling over dead, and she had to go tend to them.”

  “You’re feeling better?”

  Walden nodded. “Yeah. I only had a couple of sips of the coffee I’d made myself. Guess that’s what saved me. I make kind of lousy coffee anyway, never drink all that much of it.” A weak grin. “Bad coffee saved my life, I guess.” He waved his hand at the kitchen, the dirty dishes in the sink, an open cereal box on the counter. “Place is a bit of a mess.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I got beer in the fridge if you’d like that, maybe a can of pop or something. Some lemonade? In a carton, not something with tap water in it.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Do you know how long it’ll be before we can drink the water again?”

  I shook my head. “No. Mind if I sit?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I pulled out a chair and dropped myself into it. Walden Fisher sat opposite me. A metal nail file sat on the table. He picked it up, slipped it into his shirt pocket. His fingernails looked ragged from biting. He’d said something to me once about his nerves being all shot to hell these last few years. Not very surprising.

  “How’d you get home from the hospital?”

  “Victor gave me a lift,” he said. “So, did you come by just to see if I was okay, or is there something else on your mind?”

  “We talked the other day, about Olivia,” I said. “I wanted to talk some more.”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “We haven’t given up trying to find out who killed your daughter.”

  Walden shrugged. “So you say,” he said.

  “I can’t get into specifics, but there’ve been times when I thought I had an idea who it might be. Individuals who were already in custody, or possibly even deceased.”

  “Like who?”

  “As I said, I can’t get into that. But I’m less sure of that now.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Just that. That he’s not someone we’ve picked up for some other offense.”

  Walden leaned in. “Has he done it again?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry. The reason I’ve come to see you is to learn more about Olivia. Tell me about her.”

  He leaned back. “She was wonderful. She was smart. She was everything to me and Beth. She would have been somebody. She already was. But she’d have shown the world how amazing she could be if she’d been given the chance.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Olivia was never mean to anyone. She never held a grudge. She was always happy when something good happened for someone else. You know how some people, they don’t like it when someone else has a success. They’re bitter or jealous or whatever. But she wasn’t like that.”

  “She grew up here?” I said, casting my eye about the kitchen.

  “Yup. Beth and I were living here when we had her. This was the only place she ever lived. She didn’t bunk in at Thackeray. Didn’t make any sense, and it was a heck of a lot cheaper to live at home when she went to school.”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s still got her room upstairs,” Walden said. “Haven’t touched it.”

  “Really?” I asked. I might have sounded surprised, but I wasn’t. Grieving families often left the rooms of those they’d lost untouched. It was too painful to go in there. Cleaning out a bedroom was a final acknowledgment of what had happened. And even if the bedroom could be used by another family member, who wanted to be the relative that moved into it?

  “Beth wouldn’t touch a thing in there, and since she’s died, well, I haven’t felt the need, either.”

  I couldn’t imagine that seeing the room would help me any, but I wanted to just the same. So I asked.

  “Sure, why not?” Walden said. “You might want to lead the way up the stairs. I’m still feeling pretty weak. I’ll catch up to you. It’s the first door on the left.”

  I found my way.

  The door was closed. I turned the knob, opened it slowly. The air inside was stale. Olivia’s bedroom was maybe ten by ten, a double bed taking center stage. The walls were pale green, what Sherwin-Williams would probably call “foam green” or “seaweed.” Puffy yellow spread on the bed. One wall was dominated by a magnificent framed photo of a whale breaking the surface of the water.

  “When she was a little girl,” said Walden, who’d caught up to me and was standing in the hall, “she loved that movie Free Willy. You know the one? About this little boy who wants to free a killer whale from an aquarium because they’re going to kill it?”

  “I know it.”

  “She cried every time she saw it. Had it on videotape, then on a DVD. Had the sequels, too, but even Olivia had to admit they were pretty lame. That was her word for them. ‘Lame.’”

  The other pictures on the wall were not as large as that one, but they all featured sea creatures. Photos of a pod—I think that’s what they call them—of dolphins. A sea horse, an octopus, a photo of Jacques Cousteau.

  “She hated Jaws,” Walden said. “Just hated it. That shark, she said, was just being a shark. It was just doing what it naturally does. It wasn’t a monster. That’s what she said. Made her mad when people said they loved that movie.”

  I noticed several unopened envelopes on the desk, some with the Promise Falls municipal logo in the corner.

  “What’s all this?” I asked, picking them up, leafing through them.

  “She still gets mail,” he said. “Like a credit card statement, or an ad, something like that. Companies that don’t know what happened. Beth got so upset when something for Olivia came in the mail, she’d just put it there on her dresser like Olivia was going to co
me home one day and deal with it. And I haven’t got the energy to tell those idiots that it’s been three years. What really gets me is that the town doesn’t even know.”

  I held up one of the envelopes. “What are these?”

  “Warnings about paying a speeding ticket.” His face went red with anger. “How can one part of the police department be trying to figure out who killed her, and another department is busy nagging her about a ticket?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry. It shouldn’t happen, but it does.” There were three such envelopes, unopened. “I’ll take these, if you like, and make sure they stop.”

  “I’d be grateful,” he said. “Last time you were here, you sounded like you were going to talk to Victor.”

  “I popped by,” I said.

  “He’s not in a good frame of mind. I think he’s taking the anniversary harder than I am.”

  I knew that in two days it would be three years since Olivia’s murder.

  “He’s just so angry,” Walden said.

  “Of course he is,” I said. “It’s a natural reaction to an act of senseless violence.”

  “It’s not the killer he’s angry with,” Walden Fisher said.

  I had a feeling where this was going. “The others,” I said.

  “The ones that heard her screams and couldn’t be bothered to do a thing. That’s what really eats at Victor. You know all about that.”

  “I do.”

  “He nearly started a fight with complete strangers in a bar the other night, accusing them of being cowards.”

  “Were they some of the people? Who did nothing?”

  “Hell, no. No one even knows who those people were. But the way Victor sees it, the whole town’s guilty. If those random citizens of Promise Falls would turn their backs on Olivia, maybe anyone in this town would have. Sometimes I think the anger’s just going to consume Victor. He’s drinking a lot. I worry about him.”

  “You said he drove you home?” I asked.

  “That’s right. He came by the hospital, to see what was going on. Saw me there. The doctor said if I wanted someone to look at me, maybe I should go to Albany. I figured, I wasn’t dead yet, so I might as well come home.”

  “Was Victor sick?”

  “No,” Walden said. “He got lucky. He hadn’t had any of the water to drink. But he was telling me his landlady died. Spotted her dead in the backyard.”