“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 going 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.”
“Okay. I don’t imagine this is something you could have missed, but do you remember whether Ms. Gaynor was pregnant?”
Bottsford laughed. “Yes, I think I’d have remembered something like that, and no, she was not pregnant.” A pause. “There was something on the news about that. That Ms. Gaynor leaves a child? I hadn’t given it much thought until you mentioned it now. I guess they must have adopted. She wasn’t pregnant when she was here, and she wasn’t looking after an infant.”
“Thanks again,” Duckworth said. He ended the call, then sat and stared at his computer monitor.
It just had never come up.
Duckworth had never asked Bill Gaynor whether Matthew was adopted. There was no reason to, really. And suppose the baby was adopted? What difference would it have made, one way or another?
And yet now he had what he would call a “confluence of events.”
Marla Pickens’s baby died around the same time Rosemary Gaynor had hers. And now Duckworth knew that the Gaynor woman had not given birth to a child.
Marla ends up with the Gaynors’ baby.
Somehow.
She’d said it was her baby, although she’d backed away from that pretty quickly. Marla had never seriously argued that she’d given birth to Matthew. Matthew was, in effect, a substitute.
And besides, hadn’t Marla lost a girl?
Still . . .
He pushed himself back from his desk and went looking for Marla. She was being booked, and Natalie Bondurant was waiting for her to be finished.
“I need to talk to Ms. Pickens,” Duckworth said to the officer dealing with Marla. “Right now.”
“What’s going on?” Natalie asked. “You’re not talking to her without me there.”
“That’s fine,” Duckworth said. “Let’s go in here.”
He led them into an interrogation room, waved his arm at two empty chairs on one side of the table. “Please,” he said.
The two women sat down.
“You don’t have enough to charge my client,” Natalie said, “and even if you did, you couldn’t have picked a worse time. Ms. Pickens is in a very delicate state of mind, and if you do insist on keeping her here, you’d better have her on constant suicide watch, because only last night—”
Duckworth held up a hand. “I know. I wanted to ask Ms. Pickens about something that has nothing to do with her charges. Nothing to do with Rosemary Gaynor.”
“Like what?” Natalie said as Duckworth lowered himself into the chair across from them.
“Marla—is it okay if I call you Marla?”
The woman nodded weakly.
“I know this is hard, but I want to ask you about your child. The baby.”
Natalie said, “Really, this is too upsetting to get into.”
“Please,” Duckworth said gently. “Marla, when you were pregnant, did you ever give any thought to putting the child up for adoption?”
She blinked her eyes several times. “Adoption?”
“That’s right.”
Marla shook her head slowly from side to side. “Never, not for a second. I wanted to have a baby. I wanted it more than anything in the world.”
“So it never came up?”
Marla rolled her eyes slowly. “It came up all the time. My mother talked about it. She wanted me to do that. Well, at first she wanted me to have an abortion. But I wouldn’t do that, and then she talked about adoption, but I didn’t
want to do that, either.”
Duckworth lightly strummed his fingers on the tabletop. “You didn’t have the baby in the hospital. Your mother’s hospital.”
“No,” she said. “We went to the cabin.”
“Isn’t that kind of strange? I mean, your mother’s in charge of the hospital, and she doesn’t want you to have the baby there?”
“There was a thing going around. C. diff or something.”
“But still. It seems odd to go so far away to have the child.”
“It was okay,” Marla said, “because Dr. Sturgess was there. Except . . .” She looked down at the table. “Except it wasn’t okay. The cord got wrapped around the baby’s neck, and they couldn’t save it.”
“It must have been . . . horrific,” he said.
Marla nodded slowly. “Yeah. Although I was kind of out of it when the baby was actually born. Dr. Sturgess gave me stuff to kill the pain.”
“Tell me about that.”
Marla shrugged. “That’s kind of all there is to say. I was in pain. It wasn’t that bad, but Dr. Sturgess and my mom said it would get a lot worse, so they gave me something. And I never felt it when the baby came out.”
“But you saw her after.”
Marla nodded. “I did. I don’t . . . I don’t actually remember it . . . but I did see her. I touched her fingers and kissed her head.”
“But if you don’t remember it, how do you know what happened?”
“My mom helped me to remember. Because it was so foggy for me. But she’s told me what happened over and over again, so it’s like I do remember it.”
“Tell me a little more about that.”
“Well, it’s kind of like . . . when I was a baby myself, about one and a half years old, and we were visiting some friends of my parents, and they had a big dog that ran up to me and knocked me down and was about to bite me, right in the face, when the owner kicked the dog away. I guess I was pretty scared, and cried a lot, but I don’t really remember it happening. But my mom and dad have told that story over the years, and I can see it all like a movie, you know? I see myself getting knocked down, the dog jumping on me. I can picture exactly what the dog looks like, even though I really don’t know. It’s a bit like that. Do you know what I mean?”
Duckworth smiled. “I think maybe I do.”
SIXTY-FOUR
David
I didn’t have much time to process what Aunt Agnes had to say. Not that she’d said much. But the implications were immense.
By telling me to run, she must have had some idea where I was, and of my situation.
Agnes seemed to know I’d just met up with Dr. Jack Sturgess.
And she wanted me to get away from him as quickly as I could.
A millisecond after Agnes screamed at me, I turned my head left to look at Dr. Sturgess. That arm he’d been keeping close to his side was moving away from his body. I thought I saw something small and cylindrical in his hand. Like a pencil with a metallic point.
No. More like a syringe.
“Shit!” I said, then dropped the phone, threw the column shift into drive, and pressed my foot right to the floor. Mom’s old Taurus was no Ferrari, but it kicked ahead fast enough to push Sarita back in her seat, spray gravel all over the front of Gaynor’s Audi, and make Dr. Sturgess leap backward to keep his feet from getting run over.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop!”
The Taurus fishtailed on the gravel, then lurched and squealed as the left back tire connected with pavement.
“Who was that?” Sarita cried. “Who called you?”
I couldn’t think about answering her question. I glanced back for half a second to make sure we weren’t pulling into the path of a tractor-trailer, and caught a glimpse of Sturgess fiddling with his jacket, possibly reaching into it.
“Get down,” I said to Sarita.
“What?”
“Get down!”
I checked my mirror again, worried that the doctor might be carrying more than a syringe. But he wasn’t standing there with a gun in his hand. He was running back to Bill Gaynor’s Audi.
There was an intersection just ahead. I cut across the lane to make a left, the tires complaining loudly. The car felt as though it had gone up on two wheels for half a second. Sarita threw up her hands, braced herself against the dash as we went around the corner.
“What happened?” she asked. “What did you see?”
“He had some kind of needle,” I said. “He was holding a syringe. Another second and I think he would have jabbed it into my neck.”
There was another cross street only a quarter mile ahead. If I took that, and then the street after that, and even the one after that, I thought I had a good chance of losing them. The Audi could outrun this old clunker, no doubt about it. But if they didn’t know which way we’d gone, it wasn’t going to matter how fast that marvelous piece of German engineering could go.
I reached down beside me, feeling for my cell.
“Where’s my phone?” I shouted.
Sarita looked down between the seats. “I see it!”
“Get it!” I said, keeping up my speed, glancing in the mirror, not seeing any sign of them yet.
The next cross street was too far away. I feared the Audi would round the bend, that Gaynor and Sturgess would catch a glimpse of us before we could make the next turn.
“Hang on,” I said.
I slammed on the brakes, leaving two long strips of rubber on the road. I could smell it, and smoke billowed out from under the wheel wells. I cut the car hard right and sped into the parking lot of a Wendy’s. I drove straight to the back of the property, behind the restaurant, making sure the car was not visible from the street. This fast-food place, and a lot of the other businesses along this stretch, had sprung up to serve spillover customers from Five Mountains, and were probably all feeling the pain, now that the park was toast.
Not that that was a major concern at the moment. I was just glad for a place to hide.
“What are you doing?” Sarita asked. “Are you hungry?”
I sat there for maybe five minutes, then slowly drove down the side of the building and approached the road. I nosed up to the edge, looked both ways.
No sign of the Audi.
I headed back in the direction we’d come from.
“The phone,” I said.
Sarita went back to digging between the seat and the transmission hump. “I can’t quite . . . I got it!”
“Okay,” I said. “Go back to the last call and connect me to that number.”
She pressed the screen a couple of times, then handed me the phone. “It should be ringing.”
Agnes picked up immediately. “David?”
“What the hell’s going on, Agnes?” I shouted. “That fucking doctor of yours was ready to jab some needle into me!”
“Did you get away? Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m heading back into town. How did you know? How did you know what was going to happen?”
“I can’t explain over the phone. I . . . I can’t. I’ll meet you at your parents’ place. I’ll explain. I’ll explain it all. Do you have Sarita with you?”
“Jesus, how did you know that?”
Were we on satellite surveillance? How could Agnes be aware of everything and everywhere we—
Unless she’d been talking to Sturgess. Or Gaynor.
“David, listen to me,” Agnes said. “You have to protect Sarita. I can’t explain why now, but—”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I think I get it. I’ll see you at the house, Agnes. I have to get off the phone. I’m calling Duckworth, whether you like it or not.”
“I can’t stop what you do.” I could hear resignation in her voice.
I ended the call.
“Let me out,” Sarita said. “I’ve told you everything. I have to get away. You can let me out anyplace. I can hitchhike.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Sarita. I really am. There’s no run
ning away from this.”
I glanced down at the phone long enough to hit 911.
“I need to talk to Detective Duckworth,” I said to the operator. “I need to talk to him right fucking now.”
SIXTY-FIVE
SOMETHING had been nagging at Wanda Therrieult.
The Promise Falls medical examiner had been reviewing the pictures she’d taken during her examination of Rosemary Gaynor. Photos of her entire body, with several close-ups of the marks on her neck and the gash across her abdomen. She had transferred them to the computer and was looking at them shot by shot as she sat at her desk, a cup of specialty coffee—a flavor she could not even pronounce—resting next to the keypad.
She kept coming back to the pictures of the bruising on the woman’s neck. The imprint of the thumb on one side, four fingers on the other.
The knife wound that went from one hip to the other. The slight downward curvature toward the center. What Barry Duckworth had said looked like a smile.
She thought back to her very personal demonstration on the detective of how she believed Rosemary Gaynor had been attacked. She recalled how she’d positioned herself behind him, put one hand on his neck, wrapped her other arm around the front of him to illustrate how the knife went in.
Not that easy to reach around Barry.
They’d known each other a long time—long enough that Wanda could do something like this without it having to mean anything. She loved Barry as a friend and colleague. Sometimes, working where she did, it was just nice to touch a live body once in a while.
The dead bodies she’d always thought of as customers. And she treated them with the utmost respect, because they got to visit her shop only once.