“No, that’s okay, I can head straight down. It’s three-oh-nine, right?”
“Yes, but—”
I gave her a friendly wave as I continued on down the hallway. I entered Marla’s room — a private one, no surprise there — tentatively, in case she might be sleeping. I peered around the corner, and there she was, eyes shut, wrist bandaged, the bed propped up at a forty-five-degree angle.
I bumped a chair, which set off the smallest squeak, but it was enough to make Marla open her eyes. She looked at me blankly for a second, so I said, “Hi, it’s David,” remembering her problem with faces, even those you’d figure she would know best.
“Hey,” she said groggily.
I came up alongside the bed and took hold of her hand, the one not connected to the bandaged wrist.
“I heard,” I said.
“I guess I kind of lost it for a second,” she said, glancing at the bandages. “Mom wants them to keep me overnight.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m worried they’re going to move me to the psych ward. I do not need to go to the psych ward.”
“Well, what you did, it’s got everyone worried.”
“I’m fine. Really.” She looked at me. “The policeman was very mean to me.”
“What policeman?”
“The one asking all the questions. Duck something.”
“Duckworth.”
“He made a big deal out of what I do. Like just because I make up reviews I’d lie about what’s going on with that woman who died.”
“He has to ask tough questions,” I said. “It’s his job.”
“Mom says she’s going to try and get him fired.”
“I’m sure she’d like to,” I said, giving her hand a little squeeze. “My mom gave me a little history lesson today.”
“About what?”
“About when I hit my head on the raft. How if it hadn’t been for you, I’d have been a goner.”
The corners of her mouth went up a fraction of an inch. “No problem.”
“I want to help, Marla. You’re in a jam. The baby thing, your having Matthew—”
“I told you, someone came to the door and—”
“I know. What I was going to say was, Matthew being with you, it doesn’t look good in connection with what happened to Mrs. Gaynor. You get that, right?”
She nodded.
“So I’m going to start asking around. Find out how Matthew could have ended up with you. Find your angel.”
She smiled. “You believe me.”
What I had come to believe was that Marla believed it. “Yes,” I said. “I want you to answer a few questions so I can get started. You up to that?”
A weary nod.
“I know your face blindness makes it hard to describe people, but the woman who came to the door with Matthew, is there anything you can tell me about her? Hair color?”
“Uh, black?” she said, as if she was asking me.
“I wasn’t there,” I said. “But you think it was black?”
She nodded. Rosemary Gaynor had black hair, but if it had been her at the door it would have meant she’d handed off her own baby to Marla. That didn’t make a lot of sense.
And plenty of women had black hair.
“I know the smaller details are tough, but how about skin color? Black, white?”
“Kind of... in between.”
“Okay. Anything else? Eye color?”
She shook her head.
“Moles or scars, anything like that?”
Another shake.
“How about her voice? What did she say to you and what was her voice like?”
“It was pretty. She said, ‘I want you to look after this little man. His name is Matthew. I know you’ll do a good job.’ That was about all. Her voice was kind of singsong? You know what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said.
“And she left me the stroller. She said she was sorry she didn’t have anything else for me. And then she was gone.”
“Did she leave in a car?”
Marla concentrated. “Yeah, there was a car.” She sighed. “I’m even worse with those than faces. It was black, I think.”
“A pickup truck? An SUV? A van? A convertible?”
She bit her lip. “Well, it wasn’t a convertible. A van, maybe. But I wasn’t paying much attention because I had Matthew to look after.”
“Didn’t you think it was kind of strange? Someone just doing that?”
“Sure,” she said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “But it was such a wonderful thing, I didn’t want to question it. I thought, Maybe this is how the universe is supposed to unfold. I lose a child, but then I’m given one to make up for that.”
I thought there was more — or less — to this than the universe trying to make things right.
Knowing a reasonable explanation was unlikely to come from Marla, I tried to figure it out myself. If what Marla believed was really what happened, how did one make sense of it?
For someone to be able to take Matthew’s baby, Rosemary Gaynor must have already been dead. Otherwise she would have tried to stop it from happening.
So someone kills Matthew’s mother. And there’s this baby in the house.
The killer doesn’t harm Matthew. Whatever has motivated him — or her — to murder the woman, it’s not enough to do in the baby, too.
The killer could have just left. The baby would have been found eventually.
But no. The killer — or someone — wants to leave the baby with someone.
Why Marla?
Of all the people in Promise Falls the baby could have been left with, it’s Marla. Who lives clear across town. And who has a history — albeit a short one — of trying to steal a baby out of a hospital.
Oh, shit.
It was perfect.
“David?” Marla asked. “Hello?”
“What?”
“You looked all spaced-out there for a second.” She smiled. “You look like I feel. Like I’m in dreamland or something. They’ve got me on something. I kind of go in and out. Last time I felt like this was when I was at the cabin.”
“I was just thinking,” I said. “That’s all.”
I asked her a bunch of other things. About this student named Derek she’d told me about earlier in the day who’d gotten her pregnant, and where I might be able to find him. I tried asking again whether there was any chance she might have a connection to the Gaynors. I’d brought along one of my reporter’s notebooks and was scribbling down everything Marla said in case something that didn’t seem important now would turn out to be later.
But the entire time, I was thinking about something else.
About how, if I — let’s say — had wanted to kill Rosemary Gaynor, and wanted to pin the crime on someone else, who better than some crazy woman who’d tried to kidnap a baby months earlier? What better way to frame her than to leave the dead woman’s baby with her?
Maybe even leave a little blood on the door.
Was that a reach? Was that totally ridiculous?
To pull off something like that, someone would have to know what Marla had done. And her escapade had been pretty well hushed up by my aunt. There’d been nothing in the news, no charges laid.
For someone to put Rosemary Gaynor’s death on Marla, that person would have to be connected somehow to both Marla and the Gaynors. Otherwise there’d be no way that person would know how to exploit Marla’s history.
But who—
“Excuse me, who are you?”
I turned and saw a man standing in the hospital room doorway. He was wearing a proper suit, was about six feet tall, and looked like he thought he owned the place.
“I’m David Harwood,” I said. “I’m Marla’s cousin. And you...?”
“I’m Marla’s doctor,” he said. “Dr. Sturgess. I don’t believe we’ve ever met, David.”
Thirty
“I’ve got a good feeling,” Clive Duncomb said. “This is the night we’re going to catch this son of a bitch.”