David
“LET’S go,” I said to Sarita, sitting next to me in the bus terminal. “The police might come looking for you here.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we just drive. And talk.”
I wondered whether she would try to run. Hoping she wouldn’t want to take off without her luggage, I stood and grabbed the handle of her bag. “I’ll take this for you,” I said. “I’m just parked outside.”
Slowly, resignedly, she stood. We walked in measured paces toward the door. I didn’t want her to fall behind, didn’t want her out of my sight for a second. Once we were outside, I pointed to my mother’s car. “I’m just up here.”
I opened the front passenger door, got her settled in, watched her do up her seat belt, then dropped her bag into the trunk. I got in next to her, started the engine, and headed off.
“You said we would just drive, right?”
I nodded.
“No going to the police station.”
Another nod.
“I want you to tell me what happened. I want you to tell me why you’ve been on the run, why you’ve disappeared.”
Sarita said nothing.
I decided to start with the big question. “Did you kill Rosemary Gaynor?”
Her eyes went wide with shock. “Is that what people think? Is that what the police think?”
“They think Marla did it,” I said. “But I don’t. So I’m asking you if you did it.”
“No!” she said. “I did not kill Ms. Gaynor! I loved her! She was good to me. She was a very good lady. I loved working for her. It’s a horrible thing what happened to her.”
“Do you know who did kill her?”
Sarita hesitated. “I don’t.”
“But do you have an idea?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was just . . . it was so awful.”
The way she said it told me something. “You found her. You were there.”
“I found her,” she said, nodding. “But I wasn’t there when it happened. I must have gotten there right after.”
“Tell me.”
“I got there in the afternoon. I had done an early morning shift at Davidson Place. I have two jobs. Many days I work a shift at one and a shift at the other, although at the Gaynors’, I do not call it a shift. A shift is when you work for a company, but they’re a family, so it is different. But I did my shift at Davidson, then took the bus to the Gaynors’. I have a key, but I always ring the bell. It is courtesy. You do not walk straight into a person’s house. But I rang the bell and no one answered. I thought maybe Ms. Gaynor was out. Maybe she was shopping or something like that. Or maybe she was in the bathroom, or changing Matthew’s diaper and could not come to the door right away. So in a case like that, I use my key to open the door.”
“So you went inside.”
“Yes, but it turns out the door was open. I come in, and I call for her. I figure she must be home because the door is not locked. I call a few times, and she does not answer, and then I go into . . .”
She turned her head down and toward the window. Her shoulders shook. While I waited, I took a left, followed by a right, taking a route that would lead us out of downtown.
Sarita lifted her head, but did not glance my way as she continued. “I go into the kitchen and she is there, and there is blood everywhere, and even though I am afraid to, I touch her, just in case maybe she is not dead, maybe she is breathing, maybe there is a pulse, but she is dead.”
“What did you do then?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“You did not call the police.”
She shook her head. “I did not. I could not do that. I am in this country illegally and no one knows about me. Not officially. Someone like me, the police don’t care what happens to me. They would find a way to charge me with something, maybe even think that I did it, that I killed Ms. Gaynor, because that is what they will do. But I called Marshall so he could come get me.”
She paused, caught her breath. “You asked me if I had any idea who did it.”
“That’s right.”
“I had to wonder . . . I had to wonder if it was Mr. Gaynor.”
“Why?”
“I wondered if he knew that his wife was starting to figure things out. That he’d never been honest with her about everything. I wondered if maybe she had confronted him and he’d gotten angry with her. But even so, I mean, I didn’t like him; I never liked him, but he didn’t seem like a man who would do something like that.”
“Sarita, what are you talking about?”
“It’s all my fault,” she said, and started to cry. “If that’s what happened, it’s all my fault. I should have kept quiet. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
We were heading north out of Promise Falls. With lighter traffic, it was easier to concentrate on what Sarita was saying. Although I was having a hard time figuring out what she was talking about.
“Said anything about what?”
“I knew about Marla,” she said. “I knew about your cousin. I knew what had happened at the hospital.”