The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (31 page)

FIFTY-FOUR

ARLENE
Harwood got off the phone and said to her husband, Don, “Good news.”

They were sitting in the living room of their son David’s house. “Lay it on me,” Don said.

“That was Marla.”

Gill was recovering. At the very least, he was holding his own. He’d ended up staying in the Promise Falls hospital instead of being moved to Albany, where so many other patients had been taken.

Most of Gill’s symptoms had receded. He had regained consciousness, although he was somewhat disoriented. He was no longer sick to his stomach and his vision did not seem to be seriously impaired.

“He’s not out of the woods yet,” Arlene said. “They still want to do tests to see if there’s any kind of permanent damage, but this is such good news.”

Derek Cutter and his family had stepped in to help. They’d been chauffeuring Marla back and forth to the hospital for regular visits. Derek’s parents had offered to take Matthew during these periods
so Marla could concentrate on her father. Derek had been with her almost nonstop, and his folks had, with Marla’s permission, stayed overnight in her father’s house, with her, to help out where they could.

“That’s all good news,” Don said.

“You don’t look happy.”

“I am, I really am. That’s all good. You heard anything from David?”

“Nothing since he took off this morning looking for Sam and her boy. What’s Ethan doing?”

“Beats me.”

Arlene called out, “Ethan?”

A shout from upstairs: “Yeah?”

“Where are you?”

“Upstairs!”

“What are you doing?”

“On my computer!”

“Jesus, could you all stop shouting?” Don said, sitting in his recliner.

Arlene looked at him. “You’ve been out of sorts all day.”

“I have not.”

“Oh, please.”

Don picked up an old
People
magazine from the table next to him, leafed through it, put it back down.

“Talk to me,” Arlene said.

Don’s lips moved tentatively. “I’m going to go see him,” he said, finally.

“You’re going to see who?”

“Walden.”

“Walden Fisher?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m going to talk to him.” “Talk to him about what?”

“You know.”

“Don, are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

“The other day, when he came over here, and he went with me to the school to get Ethan, and we got a bite to eat?”

“I remember,” Arlene said. “That was the day I fell.”

“Yeah, well, that was horrible. I felt sick every second I was with him. Couldn’t wait to get home. I just felt . . . I just felt so guilty.”

“You shouldn’t feel that way.”

He looked at his wife. “I did nothing.”

“You weren’t the only one. There were lots of people who reacted the way you did. Everyone probably thought someone else was going to do something.”

“I should have been the one who thought different,” he said. “I can still hear it.”

Arlene winced. She knew what he was referring to.

“I can still hear the scream. Olivia, in the park, screaming her last breath.”

“You weren’t even that close,” Arlene said. “There were lots of people who were closer to the park than you were. And suppose you
had
done something. What would it have been? What could you have done, beyond taking out your phone and calling the police? By that time, the poor girl was gone.”

“I know. That’s not the point. I know it might not have made a difference. But I didn’t know that then. And maybe there were other things I could have done. I could have run in the direction of her scream. Even if I couldn’t save her, I might have gotten a look at who did it. But no, I just stood there, assumed someone else would do something, listened for another scream, and when I didn’t hear one, I got in my car and I came home.” He paused, studied Arlene, his face questioning. “What kind of man does that?”

“You’re a good man,” she said.

He looked away. “I want to tell Walden I’m sorry.”

“All that does is open old wounds for him,” Arlene said. “Are you doing this—this unburdening of yourself—for Walden? Or are you doing it for you? Because if you’re doing it for you, then it’s selfish. Spare Walden the pain.”

“Walden’s been through so much pain he probably doesn’t even feel it anymore,” Don said. “I’d be doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Think on it,” Arlene advised. “It’s been three years. Another day thinking about it one way or the other won’t make any difference.”

“I hear her in my dreams sometimes,” he said. “Screaming.”

Arlene shook her head sadly.

He asked her, “What would you do?”

“Me?”

“If you were me? No, wait. You wouldn’t have gotten yourself in the fix I’m in. You’d have done the right thing. You’d have called the police or run to help. But let’s say you’re me. What would you do today? What would you do now? Wouldn’t you feel it was time to offer an apology? Isn’t a late apology better than no apology at all?”

She still had nothing to say.

He moved forward in his chair. “What would you have me tell Ethan?”

“You don’t have to tell Ethan anything.”

“If he ever hears this story, I would hope by then that at least there’d be a postscript, where I tried to make it right.”

“You can’t make it right,” Arlene said. “If you rented one of those skywriting planes and wrote out ‘I’m sorry’ over Walden Fisher’s house, it wouldn’t make anything right. What’s done is done. You can’t change anything. You want to confess? Become a Catholic. They’ve got a place where you can do that sort of thing.”

Don stood up out of his chair. “There’s no talking to you,” he said, and wandered off into the kitchen.

FIFTY-FIVE

Duckworth

“IT
only lasted a second,” I told the female paramedic.

“Describe it for me again,” she said.

“I was running down the driveway, and when the van got hit, I stopped, and that’s when I felt it. But it only hit me for a moment. I’m fine.”

She was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around my arm, then squeezing the bulb. “I want to check you out.”

“How’s the guy in the van?” I asked. “Rooney?”

“They’ve taken him to PFG,” she said. “He wasn’t conscious, but he was alive.”

She was tending to me on the front porch of the house where Victor Rooney rented his room. The fire truck and the van it had crashed into were still there, as were three police cars and the second ambulance to the scene. The first had already left with Rooney. No one in the fire truck had been injured.

“Really, I’m okay,” I said. All I could think about was what was
in the garage. I’d already put in a call for a crime scene unit. They’d go through the place inch by inch, speck by speck. I’d warned them that they might want to bring along their hazmat suits. They’d probably have been wearing them anyway, but now there was the added possibility of sodium azide traces.

The paramedic wasn’t listening to my protests. “Your blood pressure is okay,” she said, “but I think you should come in and get checked out.”

“Later,” I said. “I’ll come in later.”

I was more excited about what we were going to find in that garage than I was worried about my health. “I think it was just muscular,” I told her. “Go. I absolve you.”

She didn’t look very happy with me, but she finally withdrew. By the time she was getting into her ambulance, the crime scene unit had arrived, as well as Wanda Therrieult.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Never better.”

“What are we looking at?”

I pointed to the garage. “One body. I think it may be a missing Thackeray student named George Lydecker.”

An unmarked car raced up the street and squealed to a halt out front of the house. Rhonda Finderman got out.

“Chief,” I said.

“Bring me up to speed.”

I gave her the broad strokes.

“This is our guy? This is the guy that poisoned the water?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not nailed down. If they find traces of sodium azide in there, that’ll help do it. But there’s a lot in that garage that connects to my number-twenty-three theory.”

Finderman said, “What did you find?”

I told her about the squirrel traps, the mannequin parts. I’d even noticed a can of red paint, which I was betting matched the “You’ll be sorry” warning on the Ferris wheel at Five Mountains.

Rooney, I told Finderman, had a motive for harming the people
of Promise Falls. The twenty-two people who’d ignored Olivia Fisher’s cries.

“You’re one short,” Finderman said. “You’re saying all that stuff in the garage links to your Mr. Twenty-three.”

“He’s the twenty-third,” I said. “He blamed himself, too.” I felt a little uneasy as I said it, though. Like trying to squeeze that proverbial square peg through a round hole. I wanted things to fit.

Finderman looked skeptical. “Maybe so. When Rooney wakes up—if he wakes up—let’s hope he’ll fill us in on a few things. At the very least, he’s a major suspect in a series of tragedies in this town.”

“As well as the murder of whoever’s in the garage,” I said.

“We need to set up a news conference,” she said.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I mean, what we’ve found here, it looks promising, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”

“Barry, the town’s completely on edge. We need to give people
something
. We need to let the people know we’ve made a significant discovery.”

I didn’t see any way out of it. Maybe she was right.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s set it up for this afternoon. We’ll know even more then. Like if that’s George Lydecker in there.”

Rhonda thought that was fine. But she would put the word out to the media that something was coming.

“What about the others?” the chief asked me. “Rosemary Gaynor, and this latest one, at Thackeray. Lorraine Plummer?” She was doing better at keeping herself up to speed.

“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “It’s very possible all these dots connect, but I don’t know how.”

“Okay. I’ll let you know when we set a time to face the cameras.” She smiled and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Nice work, Barry. Really, really nice.”

I got back to the station two hours later. By that time, we’d pretty much confirmed that the deceased was, indeed, George Lydecker. I
knew Angus Carlson was on leave, but I put in a call to him anyway, since he’d investigated the student’s disappearance.

I got him on his cell.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said.

“It’s okay.”

“We found George Lydecker. And very possibly our water poisoner.”

Angus told me Lydecker had a reputation for sneaking into unlocked garages and snooping around, stealing things. That got me wondering whether George had simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Victor had discovered him in that garage, and feared George might tell the police what he’d seen—even at the risk of getting himself into trouble for the break-in—Victor might have seen no option but to kill him.

One small tumbler falling into place.

“How you managing?” I asked Angus.

“Okay. I just want them to realize I had a good reason to shoot that guy.”

“I haven’t heard anything that suggests anyone feels you didn’t. This is just how it is in an officer-involved shooting. Things have to run their course.”

“Got it.”

“What are you doing today?” I asked. “I mean, look at the bright side. The whole town’s going to hell and you got yourself a day off.” When Angus didn’t say anything right away, I said, “Okay, not funny.”

“Might visit my mom,” he said.

“Well, hang in there,” I said.

“Barry?” Angus said quickly before I ended the call.

“Yeah?”

“Why’d he do it? Why’d Victor want to kill the whole town?”

“Not sure,” I said. “My guess is payback.”

“What do you mean, payback?”

“For Olivia Fisher. The town wasn’t there for her.”

“Jesus Christ,” Angus said.

“Yeah, I know.”

When we were done talking, I leaned back in my chair. Rubbed my chest. I was pretty sure it was nothing, what had happened in Victor’s driveway. A sharp pain that had lasted only a second. Probably cramped up somehow when I started running. I’d get myself checked out when the dust settled.

If it ever did.

The phone rang. I snatched up the receiver. It was reception.

“There’s a Cal Weaver here to see you.”

“Send him in,” I said.

I got up, leaving my sport jacket on the back of my chair, and met him coming down the hall. We shook hands. “Good to see you’re okay,” I said.

“Never had a chance to drink the water yesterday,” he said. “Had a fire at my place a few nights ago and was staying out of town.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Got somewhere we can talk?”

I led him into an interrogation room and closed the door. We sat down opposite each other.

“I remember this room,” he said.

“Feeling wistful?”

“I didn’t spend much time in here. Never made it to detective.” “Until you left.”

“Yeah,” he said. He put his palms flat down on the table’s cold, metal surface. “You haven’t closed the Miriam Chalmers thing.”

“No,” I said. “I like Clive Duncomb for it, but he’s dead. So we’re not exactly in a position to lay charges. Why?”

Cal gave that some thought. “You know my involvement. I’d been working for Adam Chalmers’s daughter after that thing at the drive-in.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Lucy Brighton.”

“That’s right. Lucy.”

“Does she have some information that might help us?”

“She’s dead,” Cal said. “Yesterday. The water.”

“Shit,” I said. “I haven’t seen a complete list of casualties yet.”

“Her daughter phoned me after she found her mother on the floor of the kitchen. Crystal. She’s eleven. She’s been through a lot.”

I shook my head. “I still don’t know why you’re here.”

He ran his hand across the surface of the table. “Like I said, I wondered if you had enough on Duncomb to satisfy you he was the one. He was bad news. He was a bad cop before he became a bad security chief.”

“Yeah,” I said. “No argument there.”

“It’s not going to hurt his reputation any if he gets saddled with Miriam’s murder.”

I leaned in. “What’s going on?”

“I just wanted to know if the investigation was more or less at an end.”

“Not if there’s someone else out there who needs to be brought to justice,” I said.

“There isn’t,” Cal said. “If Duncomb’s a good fit for this, that’s fine. I wouldn’t want to do anything that messes that up.”

“Cal.”

He smiled. “They talk a lot about victims of crime, and with good reason. The family members who have to deal with the loss of a loved one. They give victim impact statements at sentencing hearings. They get to tell the judge how their lives have changed. But there are other victims of crime, ones you don’t hear about so much. The relatives of perpetrators. Their lives get turned upside down, too. They’re not responsible for what happened, but they get blamed. They get shunned. They have to live with the shame of what someone with their blood did. They have to move away, start over again. Even though they go through a tremendous amount of pain, no one much gives a shit about them.”

I waited.

“Sometimes,” Cal said, “in a perfect world, under the right circumstances, it would be better if they never knew in the first place.”

He pushed his chair back, stood. “It was good to see you, Barry.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We should grab a beer sometime.”

He smiled, slipped past me, and left the interrogation room.

When I got back to my desk, I noticed the ends of two envelopes sticking out from the inside pocket of my sport jacket. They’d been jammed in there since yesterday. I grabbed them, tossed them onto my desk. They were the reminders from the Promise Falls police to Olivia Fisher to pay her speeding tickets. I’d taken them from Walden with the hope that I could get the town to stop sending them after all this time.

I slit the envelopes, pulled out the notices, and tossed them onto my desk as the phone rang again.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, dropping into my chair and grabbing the receiver at the same time.

“Ten minutes,” Rhonda Finderman said. “Presser’s going to be out front of the building.”

“Got it,” I said.

That meant making myself presentable, and that meant finding a mirror. I stood, threw on my jacket, and opened my bottom desk drawer to find a tie. I usually wore one to work but hadn’t bothered today. I found a blue-and-silver-striped one that looked more or less clean, if wrinkled, and took it with me into the men’s room.

I stood before the mirror, did up the tie, folded my collar back down over it. Ran my fingers through my hair. Checked for anything between my teeth. I wished Maureen were here. Not in the actual men’s room, but at the station, to give me the once-over before I went before the cameras. A few years ago, she’d recorded me on the six o’clock news when I’d made a statement for the press about the death of Thackeray College’s president.

She’d played it for me when I got home, paused it at just the right moment.

“You see that?” she’d said.

“See what?”

She’d gone right up to the screen and pointed to my mouth.

“That,” she said, “is a donut sprinkle.”

So ever since, I’d made an effort when I went before the cameras.

I came back to my desk. I still had another five minutes before I had to go outside. I sat down and unfolded the two notices to Olivia Fisher. As I was reading through them, I picked up the phone and entered the extension that would connect me to the traffic department’s fine collection office.

“Traffic, Harrigan.”

“Hey,” I said. “It’s Detective Barry Duckworth. I’m wondering if you can do a favor for me.”

“Let me guess. You got a parking ticket.”

“No,” I said. I explained that notices of an unpaid fine were still being sent out to a homicide victim.

“Oh, shit, that’s awful,” Harrigan said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“There should be a number on the top of the notice there—that’d be the ticket number. You see that?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to read that off to me?”

I did. “Will that cover both notices?”

“Yeah, we can put a stop to those.”

“That’s terrific,” I said, my eye scanning down the page at the other information that had been included. The make and model and year of Olivia’s vehicle, which happened to be a 2004 Nissan Sentra.

“I hardly knew what to say when this person’s father showed me these—”

I stopped midsentence. I’d come upon another bit of information from the original ticket that stopped me cold.

“You there?” Harrigan said.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

My mind had suddenly kicked into overdrive. I was trying to bring up a conversation from a few weeks ago.

When I’d been talking to Bill Gaynor.

Right after the discovery of his wife’s body.

What was it I’d asked him? Right. Had his wife ever been in any kind of trouble with the law? Was she in any way known to the police?

What was it he’d said?

“Are you serious? Of course not. Okay, she got a speeding ticket a week or so ago, but I’d hardly call that being in trouble with the law.”

Yeah, that was what he’d said.

“Detective Duckworth?” Harrigan said.

“Yeah, I’m here. Listen, can you find a more recent ticket in the system if I give you a name? I haven’t got the ticket number or anything like that. But it would have been for driving over the posted speed limit.”

“Sure.”

“Rosemary Gaynor.”

“Spell it.”

I did. In the background I could hear several keystrokes.