The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (4 page)

And now it would be warm.

Victor reached for it anyway and took a swig, made a face, put the bottle back on the bedside table but too close to the edge. It hit the floor, spilling beer onto Victor’s socks and the throw rug.

“Oh, shit,” he said, grabbing the bottle before it emptied completely.

He swung his feet out from under the covers and, careful not to
step in the beer, stood up alongside the bed. He was dressed in a pair of blue boxers. He opened the bedroom door, walked five steps down the hall to the bathroom, which was unoccupied, and grabbed a towel off one of the racks.

Victor Rooney paused at the top of the stairs.

There was the smell of freshly brewed coffee, but the house was unusually quiet. Emily was an early riser, and she put the coffee on first thing. She drank at least twenty cups a day, had a pot going almost all the time.

Victor did not hear her stirring in the kitchen or anywhere else in the house.

“Emily?” he called out.

When no one called back, he returned to his room, dropped the bath towel on the floor where the beer had spilled, and tamped it down with his bare foot. Put all his weight on it at one point. When he’d blotted up all the beer he believed was possible, he took the damp towel and placed it in a hamper at the bottom of the hallway linen closet.

Back in his room, he pulled on his jeans, and found a fresh pair of socks and a T-shirt in his dresser.

He descended the stairs in his sock feet.

Emily Townsend was not in the kitchen.

Victor noticed that there was an inch of coffee in the bottom of the pot, but he decided against coffee today. He went to the refrigerator and pondered whether eight fifteen was too early for a Bud.

Perhaps.

Sirens continued to wail.

He took out a container of Minute Maid orange juice and poured himself a glass. Drank it down in one gulp.

Pondered breakfast.

Most days he had cereal. But if Emily was making bacon and eggs or pancakes or French toast—anything that required more effort—he was always quick to get in on that. But it did not appear that his landlady was going to any extra trouble today.

“Emily?” he called out again.

There was a door off the kitchen that led to the backyard. Two if one counted the screen door. The inner door was ajar, which led Victor to think perhaps Emily had gone outside.

Victor refilled his glass with orange juice, then swung the door farther open, took a look at the small backyard through the glass of the screen door.

Well,
there
was Emily.

Face-planted on the driveway, about ten feet away from her cute little blue Toyota, car keys in one hand. She’d probably been carrying her purse with the other, but it was at the edge of the drive, where, presumably, she had dropped it. Her wallet and the small case in which she carried her reading glasses had tumbled out.

She was not moving. From where Victor stood, he couldn’t even see her back rising and falling ever so gently, an indication that she might still be alive.

He put his juice glass on the counter and decided maybe it would be a good idea to go outside and take a closer look.

THREE

Duckworth

I
have a routine for getting on the scale in the morning.

First of all, I have to be in the bathroom alone. If Maureen’s in there and sees me step on the scale, she’ll peer around and take a peek, say something like, “How’s it coming?”

Of course, if it were coming along well, I wouldn’t mind her sneaking a look, but the odds are it won’t be going well at all.

Second, I have to be naked. If I have so much as a towel wrapped around me, once I’ve seen the readout on the scale, I’ll tell myself I should allow five pounds for the towel. It is, after all, a thick one.

I can’t have had anything to eat, either. On rare occasions, I’ll have some breakfast before attending to my morning ablutions. Those days, I do not bother to weigh myself.

Once those three conditions have been met, I’m ready to actually step on the scale.

This must be done very slowly. If I pounce on the thing, I fear
the needle will shoot up too quickly and stick there. Maureen will wander in later and ask if I’m really 320 pounds.

I am not.

But if I’m being honest with you, I’m at 276. Okay, that’s not exactly true. It’s more like 280.

Anyway, I put one hand on the towel rack as I step on, not just to balance myself, but to give the scale a chance to prepare for what’s coming. Once I’ve got both feet planted firmly on it, I carefully release my grip on the bar.

And face the music.

Maureen, in the kindest, most supportive way, has been trying to get me to lose a few pounds. She hasn’t expressed the slightest disapproval about how I look. She claims to love me as much as ever. That I’m still the sexiest man she’s ever known.

I’m grateful for her lies.

But she says more fruit and vegetables and grains, and fewer donuts and ice cream and pie, might be good for me.

She doesn’t know the half of it.

I’ve been to the doctor. Our regular GP, Clara Moorehouse. Dr. Moorehouse says I am borderline diabetic. That my blood pressure is dangerously high. That I am carrying extra weight in the worst place a man can—on my gut.

It really hit home for me the other day, at the drive-in. A woman who served over in Iraq as a bomb deactivator was helping us out, trying to figure out how the explosive charges had been rigged to bring the screen down, and it was all I could do to keep up with her as she moved about the rubble like a mountain goat scaling a cliffside.

I was out of breath. My heart was pounding.

Which I told Dr. Moorehouse yesterday.

“You have to make a decision,” she told me. “No one can make it for you.”

“I know,” I said.

“Do you know why you do it?” she asked.

“I like to eat,” I said. “And I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

That made her smile. “Lately?” she said, looking at me. “Did this just happen in the last week or so?”

She had me there.

The truth was, I
had
been under a lot of stress lately. Not that it had anything to do with what I was or was not eating. But in the twenty years I’d worked for the Promise Falls police—the anniversary had slipped by this month largely unnoticed—I had never had a month like this one.

It had started with the horrific murder of Rosemary Gaynor. And then there were some strange goings-on around town. Everything from dead squirrels and a Ferris wheel coming to life all on its own to a college predator and a flaming bus.

As if all that weren’t enough, that bombed drive-in.

And then there was Randall Finley, the son of a bitch.

He was running for mayor again and looking for whatever dirt he could get on anybody. The current mayor, the chief of police,
anybody
. I’d learned that he’d gone so far as to blackmail our son, Trevor, who was driving a truck for Finley’s bottled water company, into telling him things Trevor might have heard me talking about around the house.

I wanted to kill the asshole.

Maybe, I told myself, I’d be better equipped to deal with all this bullshit if I weren’t lugging so much weight around.

Today had to be the day.

After I’d weighed myself, I shaved. I don’t always bother on a Saturday, but I decided to make an effort. Either my blade was too dull or the shaving cream too loaded with menthol, because my cheeks and neck felt like they’d been set ablaze. I patted my cheeks thoroughly with a towel, which helped. I dug an oversized red T-shirt out of one drawer, and some old purple sweatpants I hadn’t worn in years out of another. Then I went into the closet for my running shoes. When Maureen came upstairs and into the room and saw me, she said, “What’s going on? You look like a down-on-his-luck superhero.”

“I’m going to do a walk this morning,” I said. “A mile or two. I don’t have to go in this morning. I’m taking a day.”

I needed a month.

“I just put on the coffee,” Maureen said.

“I’ll have some when I get back. And don’t bother making me any breakfast. I’ll just have a banana or something.”

She eyed me slyly. “You can’t do it this way.”

“Can’t do what?”

“I mean, the walk, that’s a good idea. Go. But you have to eat more than a banana for breakfast. You have nothing more than that and by ten you’ll be inhaling six Egg McMuffins. I can help you with this. I can—”

“I know what I’m doing,” I said.

“Okay, okay, but if you try to do too much too fast, you’ll get discouraged. You have to do these things gradually.”

“I don’t have time to do them gradually,” I said. I hadn’t meant to say that.

“What do you mean?” Maureen asked.

“I’m just saying, I need to make a change. I might as well do it.”

“What happened between yesterday and today?”

“Nothing.”

“No, something’s happened.”

Maureen had acquired over the years, as if by osmosis, some of my skill at spotting a lie when it was being told.

“I said, nothing.” I looked away.

“Did you go see Dr. Moorehouse?”

“Did I what?” God, I was terrible at this.

“What did she say?”

I hesitated. “Not a lot. Just, you know, a few things.”

“Why did you go see her? What prompted it?”

“I . . . the other day, I felt—I was a little, you know, short of breath. At the drive-in. Climbing over stuff.” Also, recently, at Burger King, but I did not see the point in mentioning that particular incident.

“Okay,” Maureen said slowly.

“And she said that maybe I might want to start thinking about maybe considering some slight changes to, you know, my lifestyle, as such.”

“As such,” Maureen repeated.

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “So, that’s what I’m doing.”

Maureen nodded slowly. “Okay. Terrific.” She surveyed me, head to toe. “But you’re not going out like that.”

“Like what?”

“Those pants. Dear God, you look like you were shot and left to die in a vat of grapes.”

I looked down. “They are a bit purple.”

“There must be something else. Let me look.” She brushed past me and went into the closet. I could hear her moving clothes back and forth on the racks. “What about—no, not that. Maybe—”

My cell phone rang. It was plugged in next to the bed, still charging. I went over, saw who was calling, detached the cord, and put the phone to my ear.

“Duckworth.”

“Carlson.”

Angus Carlson. Our new detective, bumped up from uniform because we were shorthanded. As I recalled, he was working today.

“Yeah,” I said.

Maureen stepped out of the closet, a pair of gray sweats in her hand. How could I have missed those?

“You need to come in,” Carlson said. “Everybody and his dog is getting dragged in here.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The end of the world,” Carlson said. “More or less.”

FOUR

WHENEVER
David Harwood dismissed something his father heard, he regretted it later. If Don heard an odd rattle under the hood of David’s car, he got it checked out. That time, years ago, when David was just a kid, and Don heard something in the ceiling no one else had noticed, it turned out they had raccoons in the attic.

So when Don said he’d been hearing a lot of sirens, David walked out of the kitchen, through the living room, and out onto the front step of the house.

There was, in the distance, not just a siren but a chorus of sirens. At least two, maybe three. Maybe even more than three.

He scanned above the trees, looking for smoke, but they soared too high in his older part of town for him to see very far. But something was up. Even though David no longer worked for a newspaper, he still had a reporter’s instincts. He had to know what was going on.

He ran back into the house, grabbed his car keys from the hall table. Arlene spotted him, asked, “Where you off to?”

“Out,” he said.

Before he dropped into the seat of his Mazda, he stood and
listened, trying to pinpoint just where the sirens were coming from. One sounded as though it was off to the east, but another seemed to be coming from the west.

Did that make any sense? If there’d been a major accident, wouldn’t all the sirens be coming from one place? Had two or more accidents happened almost simultaneously in different parts of the town? But then again, ambulances could be on their way to a single scene, approaching from disparate locations.

Didn’t matter, he decided. If what he was hearing was, in fact, ambulances, they’d all be headed to the same place: Promise Falls General.

That’s where he would go.

He did a quick glance up and down the street before he started backing the car out of the driveway. He had the rear wheels on the street when he heard a blaring horn. A blue van, coming out of nowhere, swerved, tires squealing, and went screaming past at, David guessed, nearly seventy miles per hour on a residential street where the limit was thirty.

The van was headed the same way David was going. It made a fast left turn at the next intersection, nearly going around on two wheels.

David tromped on the accelerator. As he was coming out of the neighborhood, the hospital a couple of miles ahead of him, he saw smoke. Rounding another corner, he saw three fire engines and flashing lights at the Exxon station, which was ablaze, the charred remains of a car visible straddling the island where the pumps stood. It looked to David as though the car had plowed straight into one of them. Was this what all the fuss was about? An explosion at the gas station?

He heard a siren approaching from behind him. He glanced in the mirror, saw an ambulance bearing down on him. He swerved over to the curb, screeched to a halt, figuring the emergency vehicle would be stopping a safe distance from the gas station.

But it raced right past the fire.

David took chase.

As the hospital came looming into view, he saw, crammed outside the emergency entrance, at least a dozen ambulances and enough flashing lights to give someone with photosensitive epilepsy a seizure. David ditched the car along a No Parking stretch on a street that bordered the hospital, and ran.

Back in the day, he’d have had a notebook in one hand and very likely a camera in the other. In a strange way, he felt naked. But even without those tools of his trade, he still had his observational skills, and one thing immediately struck him.

It was generally accepted procedure for paramedics to bring a patient into the ER, confer with admitting staff, make sure the person they’d brought in was being looked after, before departing.

That wasn’t what David was seeing.

Two paramedics from the ambulance that had passed him moments earlier were pulling out a woman on a stretcher, taking a few seconds to tell a doctor standing at the back of the vehicle what was wrong with her, then jumping back into the ambulance and taking off, tires squealing, siren engaged.

David ran past the cluster of ambulances into the emergency ward.

Bedlam.

All seats were taken, half with people waiting to be seen, the others occupied by desperately worried family members. There were moans, people crying, others shouting for help.

A man in his sixties struggled to stand and vomited on the floor in front of him. Several seats to the left of him, a woman in her thirties who’d been breathing rapidly suddenly stopped. A man with his arm around her screamed, “Help! Help!”

In addition to paramedics and hospital staff, there were uniformed police pitching in, but David could see a kind of helplessness in their eyes, as though they were overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do.

He spotted a woman with a child no more than six who was doubled over in pain. “What’s happened?” he asked.

The woman’s eyes brightened briefly with hope. “Are you a doctor?”

“No.”

“We need the doctor. When are we going to see the doctor? How long do we have to wait? My girl is sick.
Look
at her!”

“What’s wrong with her?” David asked.

The woman shook her head frantically, ran her words together hurriedly. “I don’t know. Kathy seemed fine, and then all of a sudden she just started feeling faint and she started breathing really fast and getting dizzy and—”

“Mommy,” Kathy whimpered, “I think I’m going to be . . . The room is all weird.”

“How fast?” David asked.

“It was, like, out of nowhere. She’s a perfectly healthy child! I’ve made sure she’s had all her shots and—” She stopped herself, as if she’d just thought of something. She reached into her purse and came out with her phone. “Why can’t I get service in here? My husband is in New York on business and I can’ t—”

“Which part of town do you live in?” David asked.

“What?” she said.

“Where do you live?”

“On Clinton,” she said. “Near the school.”

David definitely knew where that was. His girlfriend, Samantha Worthington, sent her son, Carl, to that school.

“I hope the doctor comes soon,” he said, and moved down a few seats to where a man was sitting, leaning over, elbows on knees.

“Sir?” he said.

The man looked up. His eyes were glassy and lacked focus.

“What?”

“What’s your name?” David asked, thinking he recognized the man.

“Fisher,” he said, struggling to swallow. “Walden Fisher.”

David hadn’t worked on the Olivia Fisher murder case but followed it closely online while he was working at the
Boston
Globe
. There’d been several pictures of the dead woman’s parents, and he believed this man was Olivia’s father. Not that he was going to bring up the fact.

“You need to give me something,” Fisher said. “I think . . . I think maybe I’m gonna pass out.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not a doctor.”

“. . . throat’s raw . . . throwing up . . . heart going a hundred miles an hour.”

“When did this happen?”

“. . . morning . . . breakfast. I felt okay. Had some coffee . . . started feeling funny. Stomach feels like it’s doing backflips.” He gave David a desperate look. “Why aren’t you a doctor?”

“I’m just . . . not,” he said. David asked him the same thing he’d asked the mother of Kathy. “Where do you live?”

Fisher mumbled an address, which was nowhere near where Kathy and her mother lived.

“Do you know any of these people?” he asked, pointing to all the others waiting to be seen. Maybe, he thought, they’d all been to the same fast-food restaurant the night before. Some mass case of food poisoning.

Someone collapsed onto the floor. A woman wailed.

Fisher said, “Should I? Is it my birthday?”

David was no epidemiologist, but it wasn’t stopping him from trying to figure out how all these people from all corners of Promise Falls would come down with similar symptoms at exactly the same time. Something in the air, maybe?

Had some coffee . . . started feeling funny.

Bad coffee? How could everyone in town suddenly get bad coffee? David glanced back at the sick girl.

She was too young to drink coffee. But—

David went back to the little girl’s mother, who was trying
again to get reception for her phone. “What did she have for breakfast this morning?”

The woman, who was busily scratching her hand, looked up, tears in her eyes. “What?”

“What did Kathy have?”

“Nothing. She never eats breakfast. I try to get her to eat something, but she won’t.”

“Nothing to drink?”

The woman’s eyes danced. “Orange juice.”

David hadn’t asked Fisher whether he’d had orange juice in addition to his coffee. Had the town’s grocery stores taken in a shipment of contaminated juice? Was it like that scandal years ago when someone tampered with some headache medicine? But even if that was the case, was it likely that everyone would start drinking it at the same time?

But David still asked, “What brand?”

“I don’t . . . remember. It was frozen.”

“Frozen?”

“Concentrate. I mixed it up this morning.”

Water. Water to mix up the orange juice. Water to make the coffee.

David spun around, looked for someone in authority. There were so many nurses and doctors attending to people it was difficult to tell who was running the show. Maybe no one was.

Agnes would have been.

David thought briefly of his aunt, Agnes Pickens, who used to be in charge of this hospital, right up until she took her own life a couple of weeks earlier by jumping off Promise Falls.

Agnes, sadly, had turned out to be a pretty bad person. But right now, David conceded, this place needed her.

Someone nudged David out of the way. A man in his late twenties, pale green operating scrubs top and bottom, stethoscope around his neck. And a surgical mask over his mouth to protect him from whatever everyone in here might have.

David suddenly felt very exposed. Why hadn’t it occurred to
him that what everyone in this room had could be extremely contagious? God, maybe some airborne contagion had been dropped on the town that morning. Promise Falls was already on edge about a possible terrorist attack after the drive-in came crashing down earlier in the week. There’d been no real evidence so far to suggest terrorists had done it—Promise Falls, a terrorist target,
really
?—but only a few days later, this?

The man knelt down before Kathy and said, “I’m Dr. Blake. What’s your name?”

Kathy, who appeared to be fading, did not answer. Her mother said, “Kathy. Her name is Kathy. I’m her mother. What’s happening? What does everyone have?”

The doctor, at least for now, ignored the question. He was looking into Kathy’s eyes, then putting his stethoscope to her chest.

“Hypotension,” Dr. Blake said.

“Hypertension? High blood pressure? That’s ridiculous in a child her age that—”

“
Hypo
, not hyper. Low blood pressure.”

“Why?” David asked.

The doctor whirled his head around. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Could it be the water?” David asked. “Some sort of contaminant?”

The doctor hesitated a moment, thinking, his eyes taking in the room. “It’s the best explanation I’ve heard so far,” he said. “That might account for the rashes.”

“Rashes?”

“A lot of people are complaining of skin irritation.” He said to the mother, “Bring your girl this way.”

“How many?” David asked.

“How many what?” the doctor said. Turning his head away from the child and her mother, he said, “Sick or dead?”

David had meant sick, but whispered, “Dead.”

“More than I can count,” he said under his breath. “Dozens, more every minute.”

The woman scooped Kathy into her arms and followed the doctor to one of the curtained examining areas.

“Jesus,” David said, and dug into his pocket for his own phone. He wasn’t surprised to see that he had no bars.

He ran out of the emergency ward, where ambulances and private cars continued to arrive with a steady stream of patients. He dialed home.

“Yes?” his mother said.

“Don’t drink the water,” David told her.

“What are you talking about? I thought the bottled water was way better than the other—”

“No, from the tap! Don’t drink it! It may be poisonous!”

Arlene shouted, not to David, “Don’t drink that! It’s David! Don’t drink that!”

David said, “Tell me Dad hasn’t had any of it.”

“He just made a new pot of coffee to make a point, the old fool.”

“Don’t drink anything out of the tap. Don’t even brush your teeth with it. In fact, don’t even let it get on your skin. Tell Ethan! Start phoning everyone you know and tell them not to drink the water.”

“What is it? What’s in the water?”

“I don’t even know if I’m right,” he said, “but right now, it’s the one thing that makes sense.”

“Are you going—”

“Mom! Call people!”

He ended the call, stayed on his list of contacts, thumbed through them.

Marla Pickens. His cousin. Newly reunited with the baby she had not known she had.

Matthew.

David had a mental image of Marla making up formula for the child. He called the home number.

It rang several times. David was about to give up when someone picked up, then dropped the receiver.

“Hello?” he said.

More fumbling, then, “Where are you?” Marla said, her voice shaking. “I called ten minutes ago!”

“You called me?”

A half-second pause. “David?”

“Yeah. Marla, listen, I might be wrong about this, but I think there may be something wrong with the—”

“I think he’s dead!” she screamed.

Dear God, Matthew.

“Marla, I’ll hang up. You call 911 and—”

“I called ages ago! No one’s showed up! I can’t wake him up!”

Why couldn’t David’s uncle Gill just drive Matthew to the hospital? “Get your dad to drive Matthew to the hospital! Don’t wait for the—”

“It’s not Matthew! It’s Dad!”

Just then, as if on cue, David could hear a baby crying in the background. He felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Judging by what he’d just seen in the hospital, if Gill looked dead to Marla, he probably was. David didn’t know what he could do for Gill if he were there, but he could at least give Marla, who’d already been through so much this month, some support. And along the way, stay on the phone and tell anyone else he could think of that they should not—