Natalie Bondurant was my guess. One of Promise Falls’ sharpest legal minds. She’d helped me in the past.
“Natalie? Agnes Pickens here. Whatever you’re doing, drop it. I have a situation. No, not with the hospital. I’ll explain when you get here.” She told Natalie where she could find her and ended the call before she could get an argument.
Agnes said to me, “That goes for you, too.”
“What?” I asked.
“Not a word to the police. You have nothing to say.”
The first thing that popped into my head was a childish, You’re not the boss of me. But what I said was “I’ll decide what I tell the police, Agnes.”
She didn’t like that. “David,” she said, in a whisper so Marla could not hear, “can’t you see what’s happened here?”
“I don’t think we know that yet.”
“We know enough to know Marla needs to be protected. Whatever she’s done, it’s not her fault. She’s got problems; she’s not responsible for her actions. We all have to look out for her.”
“Of course,” I said.
“She hasn’t been right for a long time, but losing the baby, it did something to her, to her mind.”
“What are you saying?” Marla asked.
“It’s all right, dear. I’m just talking to David.”
“I’ll keep what you have to say in mind,” I told my aunt. “But I don’t think my role in this entitles me to clam up when the police start asking questions.”
Agnes shook her head. “You really are Arlene’s boy, aren’t you? Stubborn to the end.” She scanned the various police vehicles. “I’m going to find out who’s in charge here.”
She went off in search of authority.
My cousin looked at me and said, “You have to help me.”
“Your mom’s doing that,” I said. “That was probably Natalie Bondurant she was talking to on the phone. She’s a good lawyer.”
“Don’t you get it?” Marla asked. “Didn’t you hear what she said? She said ‘I’ have a situation.”
“Marla, she just meant—”
“I know what she meant. She’s worried about her own reputation first.”
“Even if that were true, anything she does to protect herself will end up protecting you.”
Marla’s eyes darted about, as if looking for some safe place to run to, and finding none. “I think . . . maybe I am in trouble.”
I leaned in close to her, rested my hands on her shoulders. I’d already asked her the big question, but felt it was time to try again. “Marla, look at me. Tell me. Did you do anything to that woman? To Matthew’s mother? Maybe, just for a moment, something snapped? You did something you didn’t mean to do?”
Even as I asked this, I wondered whether I wanted to know the answer. If Marla confessed to me that she’d killed Rosemary Gaynor and then run off with her baby, would that be something I could withhold from the police?
I knew how Agnes would answer that question.
“David, I could never do a thing like that,” she said, a voice barely above a whisper. “Never.”
“Okay, okay, that’s good,” I said.
“You’ll help me, won’t you?”
“Sure, of course. But really, I know you don’t always trust your mother’s motives, but once she gets Natalie on board, then—”
“No, no,” Marla said, her eyes pleading. “You. You have to help me. It’s what you do, right? You ask questions and find out things.”
“Not anymore,” I told her.
“But you know how. Find the woman who gave me Matthew. Find her. She’ll tell you what I’m saying is the truth.”
“Marla, just—”
“Promise,” she said. “Promise you’ll help me.”
I was hunting for the right words. I held her tightly, looked her in the eye, and said, “You know I’m in your corner.”
Her face shattered like a dropped teacup as she slipped her arms around me. “Thank you,” she said, her voice muffled against my chest, clearly not appreciating how totally noncommittal my response had been.
ELEVEN
“I wonder what’s going on,” said Arlene Harwood, standing at the top of the stairs to the basement. “I want to phone David, but I figure, if he has something to tell us, he’ll call. What a terrible situation. Just terrible.”