“How about her voice? What did she say to you and what was her voice like?”
“It was pretty. She said, ‘I want you to look after this little man. His name is Matthew. I know you’ll do a good job.’ That was about all. Her voice was kind of singsong? You know what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said.
“And she left me the stroller. She said she was sorry she didn’t have anything else for me. And then she was gone.”
“Did she leave in a car?”
Marla concentrated. “Yeah, there was a car.” She sighed. “I’m even worse with those than faces. It was black, I think.”
“A pickup truck? An SUV? A van? A convertible?”
She bit her lip. “Well, it wasn’t a convertible. A van, maybe. But I wasn’t paying much attention because I had Matthew to look after.”
“Didn’t you think it was kind of strange? Someone just doing that?”
“Sure,” she said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “But it was such a wonderful thing, I didn’t want to question it. I thought, Maybe this is how the universe is supposed to unfold. I lose a child, but then I’m given one to make up for that.”
I thought there was more—or less—to this than the universe trying to make things right.
Knowing a reasonable explanation was unlikely to come from Marla, I tried to figure it out myself. If what Marla believed was really what happened, how did one make sense of it?
For someone to be able to take Matthew’s baby, Rosemary Gaynor must have already been dead. Otherwise she would have tried to stop it from happening.
So someone kills Matthew’s mother. And there’s this baby in the house.
The killer doesn’t harm Matthew. Whatever has motivated him—or her—to murder the woman, it’s not enough to do in the baby, too.
The killer could have just left. The baby would have been found eventually.
But no. The killer—or someone—wants to leave the baby with someone.
Why Marla?
Of all the people in Promise Falls the baby could have been left with, it’s Marla. Who lives clear across town. And who has a history—albeit a short one—of trying to steal a baby out of a hospital.
Oh, shit.
It was perfect.
“David?” Marla asked. “Hello?”
“What?”
“You looked all spaced-out there for a second.” She smiled. “You look like I feel. Like I’m in dreamland or something. They’ve got me on something. I kind of go in and out. Last time I felt like this was when I was at the cabin.”
“I was just thinking,” I said. “That’s all.”
I asked her a bunch of other things. About this student named Derek she’d told me about earlier in the day who’d gotten her pregnant, and where I might be able to find him. I tried asking again whether there was any chance she might have a connection to the Gaynors. I’d brought along one of my reporter’s notebooks and was scribbling down everything Marla said in case something that didn’t seem important now would turn out to be later.
But the entire time, I was thinking about something else.
About how, if I—let’s say—had wanted to kill Rosemary Gaynor, and wanted to pin the crime on someone else, who better than some crazy woman who’d tried to kidnap a baby months earlier? What better way to frame her than to leave the dead woman’s baby with her?
Maybe even leave a little blood on the door.
Was that a reach? Was that totally ridiculous?
To pull off something like that, someone would have to know what Marla had done. And her escapade had been pretty well hushed up by my aunt. There’d been nothing in the news, no charges laid.
For someone to put Rosemary Gaynor’s death on Marla, that person would have to be connected somehow to both Marla and the Gaynors. Otherwise there’d be no way that person would know how to exploit Marla’s history.
But who—
“Excuse me, who are you?”
I turned and saw a man standing in the hospital room doorway. He was wearing a proper suit, was about six feet tall, and looked like he thought he owned the place.
“I’m David Harwood,” I said. “I’m Marla’s cousin. And you . . . ?”
“I’m Marla’s doctor,” he said. “Dr. Sturgess. I don’t believe we’ve ever met, David.”
THIRTY
“I’VE got a good feeling,” Clive Duncomb said. “This is the night we’re going to catch this son of a bitch.”