A five-year-old girl run over by a car.
A forty-eight-year-old roofer who tripped off the top of a church he was reshingling.
A nineteen-year-old Thackeray student from Burlington, Vermont, who’d brought his father’s Porsche 911 to school for a week, lost control of it, and crashed it into a hundred-year-old oak at eighty miles per hour.
A twenty-two-year-old woman who—
Hang on . . .
Wanda clicked on the file.
Opened up the photos.
Took a sip of her coffee as she studied the images.
“Oh, boy,” she said.
SIXTY-SIX
ONCE Agnes Pickens was finished talking to her nephew, she went up the stairs to her second-floor home office and closed the door. She sat down at her desk, fired up her computer, opened Word, and selected the letter format.
She wanted the margins just right. What she had to write was short, so she didn’t want the letter to start too high on the page, which would leave acres of white space at the bottom. It would look unbalanced.
So she wrote what she had to say, then selected “print preview” to make sure it looked presentable. It didn’t. She had pushed the message too far down on the page. She deleted a few indents above the text, then looked at the preview again, and was happy with how it looked.
She hit “print.”
The letter came out, and she read it one more time, looking for typos. That would be so embarrassing, to have a typographical error or a spelling mistake in something of this nature.
Agnes had dated it at the top, then written below: I hereby resign my position as administrator and general manager of the Promise Falls General Hospital, effective immediately.
She had considered, briefly, expanding on it. Perhaps a word about regret. Maybe a line or two about her lifelong commitment to the Promise Falls community and public health. An apology about failing to live up to the high standards she had set for herself. But in the end, a simple, unembellished resignation seemed the way to go.
She signed the letter, folded it, and slipped it into an envelope on which she wrote, To the Promise Falls General Hospital Board.
She left it on the keyboard, then went in search of her husband, Gill. Agnes had thought he was upstairs, perhaps in their bedroom, but she did not find him there. She located him in the basement, standing next to the pool table, holding a cue in hand vertically, the end touching the floor. The balls were racked, but Gill just stood there, staring vacantly across the table.
“Gill,” she said.
He turned. “Yes, Agnes.”
“I have to go out.”
“Have you heard from Natalie?”
“Not since she arrived at the station.” She hesitated. “But everything’s going to be okay.”
Gill set the pool cue on the table. “But if you haven’t heard from Natalie—”
“They’re going to drop the charges against Marla. Before the day is over, I’d guess.”
“How can you know that?”
“I’m just . . . fairly confident.”
Gill said haltingly, “About . . . Carol. I—”
“I don’t care,” Agnes said.
“But—”
She raised a hand. “I don’t care. Your betrayal is . . . nothing, in the overall scheme of things.”
“I don’t understand,” Gill said.
Agnes shook her head ever so slightly. “Be strong for Marla. She’s going to need you. Whatever reservations I may have had about you, there haven’t been any where Marla is concerned. I know you love her very much. The next little while is going to be very difficult for her, but I’m hoping there will be some consolation. That she’ll get what she wanted. What was taken from her.”
“What are you talking about?”
Agnes turned and walked away.
SIXTY-SEVEN
David
“WHO is this?” the 911 operator said.
“David Harwood. Detective Duckworth knows who I am.”
“I’m transferring you to a nonemergency line.”
“This is an—”
But then she was gone. Seconds later a man answered. “Hello?”
“Detective Duckworth?”
“Nope. This is Angus Carlson. You wanna leave a message?”
“Get him. Put him on the phone. Tell him it’s David Harwood.”
“I’m not sure where he is right now. I just got in. Hang on.” Several seconds went by, then: “He’s busy right now. What’s this about?”
“It’s about Marla Pickens. And Rosemary Gaynor. I know what happened.”
“Yeah, well, I’m guessing Detective Duckworth does, too,” Carlson said. “He’s with the Pickens woman right now in interrogation.”
“She’s been arrested?”
“Yup.”
“For the Gaynor thing?”
“No, jaywalking.”
“She didn’t do it. Marla’s innocent.”
“So, wait a second,” Carlson said. “Are you saying we’ve arrested the wrong person? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that happening before.”
“Have you ever heard of a cop being a total asshole?” I asked. “That’s happening right now.”
“Oh, sorry, you’re breaking up,” he said, as clearly as if he were in the car with me. “Try again later.”