Broken Promise (3 page)

Marla had once shown me one she’d written for a roofing company in Austin, Texas. “A tree hit our house and put a good-size hole in the roof. Marchelli Roofing came within the hour, fixed the roof, and reshingled it, and all for a very reasonable cost. I cannot recommend them highly enough.”

Marla had never been to Austin, did not know anyone at Marchelli Roofing, and had never, in her life, hired a contractor of any kind to do anything.

“Pretty good, huh?” she’d said. “It’s kind of like writing a really, really short story.”

I didn’t have the energy to get into it with her at the time.

I took the bypass to get from one side of town to the other, passing under the shadow of the Promise Falls water tower, a ten-story structure that looked like an alien mother ship on stilts.

When I got to Marla’s, I pulled into the driveway beside her faded red, rusting, mid-nineties Mustang. I opened the rear hatch of my Mazda 3 and grabbed two reusable grocery bags Mom had filled with frozen dinners. I felt a little embarrassed doing it, wondering whether Marla would be insulted that her aunt seemed to believe she was too helpless to make her own meals, but what the hell. If it made Mom happy . . .

Heading up the walk, I noticed weeds and grass coming up between the cracks in the stone.

I mounted the three steps to the door, switched all the bags to my left hand, and, as I rapped on it with my fist, noticed a smudge on the door frame.

The whole house needed painting or, failing that, a good power-washing, so the smudge, which was at shoulder height and looked like a handprint, wasn’t that out of place. But something about it caught my eye.

It looked like smeared blood. As if someone had swatted the world’s biggest mosquito there.

I touched it tentatively with my index finger and found it dry.

When Marla didn’t answer the door after ten seconds, I knocked again. Five seconds after that, I tried turning the knob.

Unlocked.

I swung it wide enough to step inside and called out, “Marla? It’s Cousin David!”

Nothing.

“Marla? Aunt Arlene wanted me to drop off a few things. Homemade chili, some other stuff. Where are you?”

I stepped into the L-shaped main room. The front half of the house was a cramped living room with a weathered couch, a couple of faded easy chairs, a flat-screen TV, and a coffee table supporting an open laptop in sleep mode that Marla had probably been using to say some nice things about a plumber in Poughkeepsie. The back part of the house, to the right, was the kitchen. Off to the left was a short hallway with a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom.

As I closed the door behind me, I noticed a fold-up baby stroller tucked behind it, in the closed position.

“What the hell?” I said under my breath.

I thought I heard something. Down the hall. A kind of . . . mewing? A gurgling sound?

A baby. It sounded like a baby. You might think, seeing a stroller by the door, that wouldn’t be all that shocking.

But here, at this time, you’d be wrong.

“Marla?”

I set the bags down on the floor and moved across the room. Started down the hall.

At the first door I stopped and peeked inside. This was probably supposed to be a bedroom, but Marla had turned it into a landfill site—disused furniture, empty cardboard boxes, rolls of carpet, old magazines, outdated stereo components. Marla appeared to be an aspiring hoarder.

I moved on to the next door, which was closed. I turned the knob and pushed. “Marla, you in here? You okay?”

The sound I’d heard earlier became louder.

It was, in fact, a baby. Nine months to a year old, I guessed. Not sure whether it was a boy or girl, although it was wrapped in a blue blanket.

What I’d heard were feeding noises. The baby was sucking contentedly on a rubber nipple, its tiny fingers attempting to grip the plastic feeding bottle.

Marla held the bottle in one hand, cradling the infant in her other arm. She was seated in a cushioned chair in the corner of the bedroom. On the bed, bags of diapers, baby clothes, a container of wipes.

“Marla?”

She studied my face and whispered, “I heard you call out, but I couldn’t come to the door. And I didn’t want to shout. I think Matthew’s nearly asleep.”

I stepped tentatively into the room. “Matthew?”

Marla smiled, nodded. “Isn’t he beautiful?”

Slowly, I said, “Yes. He is.” A pause, then: “Who’s Matthew, Marla?”

“What do you mean?” Marla said, cocking her head in puzzlement. “Matthew is Matthew.”

“What I mean . . . Who does Matthew belong to? Are you doing some babysitting for someone?”

Marla blinked. “Matthew belongs to me, David. Matthew’s my baby.”

I cleared a spot and sat on the edge of the bed, close to my cousin. “And when did Matthew arrive, Marla?”

“Ten months ago,” she said without hesitation. “On the twelfth of July.”

“But . . . I’ve been over here a few times in the last ten months, and this is the first chance I’ve had to meet him. So I guess I’m a little puzzled.”

“It’s hard . . . to explain,” Marla said. “An angel brought him to me.”

“I need a little more than that,” I said softly.

“That’s all I can say. It’s like a miracle.”

“Marla, your baby—”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she whispered, turning her head away from me, studying the baby’s face.

I pressed on gently, as if I were slowly driving onto a rickety bridge I feared would give way beneath me. “Marla, what happened to you . . . and your baby . . . was a tragedy. We all felt so terrible for you.”

Ten months ago. It had been a sad time for everyone, but for Marla it had been devastating.

She lightly touched a finger to Matthew’s button nose. “You are so adorable,” she said.

“Marla, I need you to tell me whose baby this really is.” I hesitated. “And why there’s blood on your front door.”

THREE

DETECTIVE
Barry Duckworth, on this, the twentieth anniversary of his joining the Promise Falls Police Department, was thinking he was facing the greatest challenge of his career.

Would he be able to drive past the doughnut shop on his way to the station without hitting the drive-through for a coffee and a chocolate frosted?

After all, if there was ever a day where he felt entitled to a treat, this was it. Twenty years with the department, nearly fourteen of them as a detective. Wasn’t that a cause for celebration?

Except this was only the second week of his latest attempt to lose weight. He’d tipped the scales at two hundred and eighty pounds in the past month and decided maybe it was time to finally do something about it. Maureen, bless her, had stopped nagging him about his size, figuring the choice to cut back had to be his. So, two weeks earlier, he decided the first step would be to forgo the doughnut he inhaled every morning. According to the doughnut chain’s Web site, his favorite pastry was about three hundred calories. Jesus. So if you cut out that doughnut, over five days you were eliminating fifteen hundred calories from your diet. Over a year, that was seventy-two thousand calories.

It would be like going without food for something on the order of three weeks.

It wasn’t the only step he was trying to take. He’d cut out dessert. Okay, that wasn’t exactly right. He’d cut out his
second
dessert. Whenever Maureen made a pie—especially if it was lemon meringue—he could never limit himself to one slice. He’d have one regular wedge after dinner, then go back and tidy up the edge of the last cut. That was usually just a sliver, and how many calories could there be in a sliver? So he would have a second sliver.

He’d been making a concerted effort to give up the slivers.

He was a block away from the doughnut place.

I won’t pull in.

But Duckworth still wanted a coffee. He could drive through and just order a beverage, couldn’t he? Was there any harm in that? He could drink it black, no sugar, no cream. The question would be, once he was in the line for the coffee, would he be able to resist the—

His cell phone rang.

This car was equipped with Bluetooth, so he didn’t have to go reaching into his jacket pocket for the phone. All he had to do was touch a button on the dash. Another bonus was that the name of the caller came up on the screen.

Randall Finley.

“Shit,” Duckworth said under his breath.

The former mayor of Promise Falls. Make that the former
disgraced
mayor of Promise Falls. A few years back, when he was making a run for a Senate seat, it came out that he had, on at least one occasion, engaged the services of an underage prostitute.

That didn’t play so well with the electorate.

Not only did he lose his bid to move up the political food chain, he got turfed as mayor in the next election. Didn’t take it well, either. He made his concession speech after downing the better part of a bottle of Dewar’s, and referred to those who had abandoned him as “a cabal of cocksuckers.” The local news stations couldn’t broadcast what he said, but the uncensored YouTube version went viral.

Finley vanished from public view for a time, nursed his wounds, then started up a water-bottling company after discovering a spring on a tract of land he owned north of Promise Falls. While not quite as big as Evian—he had named it, with typical Randall Finley modesty, Finley Springs Water—it was one of the few around here that was doing any hiring, mainly because they did a strong export business. The town was in economic free fall of late. The
Standard
had gone out of business, throwing about fifty people out of work. The amusement park, Five Mountains, had gone bankrupt, the Ferris wheel and roller coasters standing like the relics of some strange, abandoned civilization.

Thackeray College, hit by a drop in enrollment, had laid off younger teaching staff who’d yet to make tenure. Kids finishing school were leaving town in droves to find work elsewhere, and those who stayed behind could be found hanging around local bars most nights of the week, getting into fights, spray-painting mailboxes, knocking over gravestones.

The owners of the Constellation Drive-in, a Promise Falls–area landmark for fifty years that had engaged in combat with the VCR, DVD player, and Netflix, were finally waving the white flag. A few more weekends and a small part of local history would be toast. Word had it that the screen would be dropped, and the land turned into some kind of housing development by developer Frank Mancini, although why anyone wanted to build more homes in a town where everyone wanted to leave was beyond Duckworth’s comprehension.

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.