“Because she’s nice,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean. Marla Pickens is a grown woman. Why does your mother think she needs to send her food? Is Marla out of work? She been sick?”
“She’s had a rough few months.”
“Why?”
“She . . . she lost a child. At birth. A little girl. She hasn’t been quite right since.” I didn’t get into details, and I didn’t volunteer the story about Marla trying to kidnap a baby from Promise Falls General. I had no doubt he’d find that out sooner or later, but I wasn’t going to be the one who told him.
It wasn’t that I feared my aunt’s wrath at divulging that. Okay, maybe a little. But it really was Marla I was looking out for. What she’d done at the hospital was hugely damning in the current circumstances, and I wasn’t sure Duckworth or anyone else with the Promise Falls police would feel the need to pursue a very broad investigation once they had that tidbit. Marla killed Rosemary Gaynor and made off with her baby. Simple as that. Case closed, let’s go get a beer.
I didn’t know that it was that simple. Then again, maybe it was.
There was no denying Marla had Matthew Gaynor. And even though her story of how he’d come into her life seemed unlikely, I wasn’t convinced Marla had it in her to have committed the kind of savagery I’d seen—if only for an instant—inside that house.
I hoped to God she didn’t.
“What do you mean, hasn’t been quite right?” Duckworth asked.
“Depressed, withdrawn. Maybe not taking as good care of herself as she could. Which was why my mom wanted to send some food over.”
“Why you?”
“What do you mean, why me?” I asked.
“Why didn’t she take it over herself?”
I licked my upper lip. “I had the time. I’m back home living with my folks. I’m out of work. Maybe you heard, the Standard went under.”
“And the Gaynors’ baby was there? At Marla’s house?”
I nodded.
“And this didn’t seem right to you? Because you knew she didn’t have a child?”
“That’s right. She told me a woman handed her the baby yesterday.”
“Just out of the blue, someone knocked on the door and said, ‘Here, have a kid.’”
“Yeah.”
Duckworth ran a palm over his mouth. “That’s quite a story.”
“That’s what she says happened.”
He shook his head slowly, then said, “I thought I’d heard you’d moved to Boston.”
“I had.” I guessed it wasn’t that strange that Duckworth would take notice of what I was up to, given that we knew each other from my troubles five years earlier. “But I moved back. Things weren’t working out at the Globe. I was working nights most of the time and never got to see Ethan. You remember Ethan.”
“I do. Good boy.”
Even with everything that was going on, I couldn’t stop worrying about what had happened with Ethan at school.
“I wanted to be close to my parents,” I told Duckworth. “They’re a great help. I got rehired at the Standard just as the paper closed.”
Duckworth wanted to know how I’d made the connection with the Gaynors. I told him, and about arriving at the same time as the husband. Duckworth wanted to know how Bill Gaynor seemed, before we’d found his wife.
“Agitated. He said he’d been trying to raise her on the phone, couldn’t.”
He asked me whether I knew anyone named Sarita.
“No. But I heard Gaynor say the name. That she’s the nanny. Haven’t you talked to her?”
“Not yet.” He paused. “You’re not getting your car back.”
“I kind of figured.”
“Eventually, but not for a while.”
“You’re going to find my prints on that stroller.”
“Uh-huh,” Duckworth said.
“I just thought I should mention it. I put it in the car when we came over here.”
“Okay.”
“And probably in the house, too,” I added. “I was inside, briefly, with the husband. So on the door, maybe some other places. I don’t remember. I might have touched something.”
“Right,” Duckworth said. “Thanks for filling me in.”
I thought maybe, in retrospect, that pointing those things out didn’t do me the service I was hoping it would.
SIXTEEN
JACK Sturgess had two patients currently in the hospital he felt obliged to check in on before he left Promise Falls General and went back to the medical building a few blocks away, where he kept his office. But he couldn’t get his mind off what Agnes had told him at end of the canceled board meeting.
That there was trouble, again, with Marla. Just when you think things are settling down, another bomb goes off.