Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this anymore.
We rolled on the parking lot, a couple of overweight-Randy, less so, I admit-middle-aged guys duking it out. Not the sort of fight you could sell a lot of tickets to.
I was worried he’d go for my gun, which was holstered and attached to my belt on my left side. It wasn’t that I believed Randall Finley actually wanted to murder me, but in heated moments, sometimes people lose their heads. So I had to deal with this quickly before things spiraled even more out of control.
He’d lost his grip on me when we went down, so my arms were no longer pinned. I made a fist with my right hand, swung it as fast and as hard as I could, and aimed it where I thought it would do the most good.
At Randall Finley’s nose.
Our former mayor’s nose was something of a legend in Promise Falls. It had been punched before-at least two times that I knew of-and both times by his former driver, Jim Cutter. The second time, Cutter had broken it.
I connected. Not quite dead center, I’m afraid. A little off to one side. And I didn’t hear the crunch of broken cartilage that I was hoping for. But it did the trick.
Finley yelped in pain, put both hands over his face. Blood trickled out from under them and from between his fingers.
“Jesus!” he screamed. “Not my nose!”
“Should be used to it by now,” I said, getting to my knees, and then forcing myself back up onto two feet. Finley lay on the pavement, writhing.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Did you do it?”
“You’re crazy, you know that?” he said, taking his hands from his face, looking at the blood as he drew himself up into a sitting position. “Batshit crazy!”
“You know your way around this water treatment plant,” I said. “Ottman told me. You drop by here regularly.” I dusted myself off. “Is that what you did with Tate Whitehead? Jumped him? Before you went in there and poisoned the water?”
I didn’t know that I believed what I was saying, but as the words came out of my mouth, I realized the man I was looking at was not just an asshole that I’d had more than enough of.
He was a suspect.
“It was for the summer!” Finley said.
“What was for the summer?”
“The increase in production! Demand goes up in summer, just when we have people off on holidays! We up production in the spring to be ready, you dumb fuck!”
“That’s a good story,” I said. “I guess we’ll see how that holds up.”
I didn’t offer to help him to his feet. And I didn’t have the energy to charge him with assaulting a police officer. I could always do that later. So I left him there on the pavement and headed for my car.
I was going to take a short break from the Promise Falls water tragedy and go three years into the past.
It was time to think about Olivia Fisher. It was time to go back to the beginning. I just hoped Walden Fisher, whom I’d last seen in the emergency ward of Promise Falls General, was well enough to talk about what had happened to her.
THIRTY
THERESA and Ron Jones were already living in the house next to Samantha Worthington’s when she moved in with her son, Carl. Theresa and Ron had bought their place fifteen years ago, but the owner of the property next door rented it out, so they had seen people come and go over the years. There was a couple about ten years ago Theresa and Ron were pretty sure were dealing drugs out of the house, and they thanked God when that crew moved out after two years. There was that father and son who lived there for a while, who liked to repair motorcycles in the front yard. They sure weren’t sorry to see them go, either.
But they had liked Sam and her boy. The most noise they ever heard coming through the shared wall was when Carl and his mother carried on conversations between floors, shouting at each other-not in an angry way, just trying to be heard-or when Carl was playing some war-type video game, explosions and machine-gun fire rattling the dishes in their cupboards.
Their front doors were not much more than thirty feet apart, so they ended up seeing one another quite often, making small talk, chatting about the weather. But Sam Worthington never revealed much about herself, other than that she was raising her boy on her own, and that she managed a Laundromat. The little they knew about her life before Promise Falls, they had learned from short conversations with Carl.
The most interesting tidbit being that his dad was in jail back in Boston.
They also knew the two had been through quite a lot lately. There’d been something on the news about an attempted abduction, and a shoot-out-a shoot-out, for crying out loud!-at her place of work.
But even after all that, they saw Sam and Carl going in and out of the house, like, hey, life goes on.
Until two nights ago. Thursday night.
That was when they saw Samantha Worthington running in and out with three suitcases, jamming them into her car. Carl was lugging a heavy bag made of canvas that looked to Theresa like a rolled-up tent.
Ron Jones, watching some of this from the upstairs bedroom window, was pretty sure he saw a shotgun among the items Sam slipped into the car. She had tried to disguise it by rolling it up in a blanket, but he saw the tip of what looked like a barrel poking out the end.
“I’m going to just step outside and see what’s going on,” Theresa said.
She acted as though she’d forgotten something in the glove compartment of her old Chevy Astro van. She had the passenger door open, was rooting around in the folder that held her ownership and insurance, when Sam came by with another suitcase.
“You heading away early for the long weekend?” Theresa asked, just being neighborly.
Sam, hair hanging over her eyes, the base of her neck glistening with sweat, forced the case into the open trunk and glanced over. “What?”
“I said, you going away for the weekend?”
Sam nodded. “Yeah. We’re off for a while.”
At which point Carl came out with a sleeping bag under one arm, a pillow under the other.
“Where you going?” she asked.
“Oh, we’ll see where the road takes us,” Sam said, heading back into the house for another load.
But as was often the case, it was Carl who was a little freer with information. While he was dumping an overstuffed backpack into the car, and his mother was still in the house, he said to Theresa, “We haven’t gone camping in years, but Mom says we can do that till things die down.”
“Die down?” Theresa said.
Carl might have said more, but Sam was coming back out of the house with bags of groceries. It looked like she’d emptied out a cupboard. “Go get the cooler,” she told her son.
“Did you put some Coke in it?” he asked.
“A couple. But I don’t want you drinking soda nonstop.”
Carl ran into the house and emerged seconds later with a cheap white Styrofoam cooler with a blue lid. He got it into the backseat. Sam locked up the house, the two of them got into the car, and they were gone.
Just like that.
So Theresa was not shocked when someone showed up at the door Saturday morning wondering where the neighbors had gone. Word was just starting to get around about the poisoned water, but luckily for Ron and Theresa, they’d slept in-ever since Ron had retired from teaching high school in Albany, and Theresa had finally decided to stop working in the accounting department at General Electric, they were no longer waking up every day at six, or earlier-and had tuned the radio to the local news before heading downstairs to put on the coffee.
When the chimes rang, she went to the front door, since Ron was out back doing battle with the dandelions.
“Hi. Sorry to bother you,” said the man on their front step. “I’m looking for the folks from next door. Samantha and Carl?”