The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (2 page)

“What has he done?” Hillary kept asking her husband. “What has that damn fool done?”

Josh Lydecker kept shaking his head. For the first two days, he kept saying, “He’ll show up. He will. The dumbass is sleeping it off somewhere, that’s all.”

But by day three, even Josh had come to believe that something serious had happened.

The morning of the first day, Hillary had called all of George’s friends, including Derek Cutter, to see if anyone had seen him. She got George’s sister, Cassandra, to spread the word via social media so that everyone they knew could be on the lookout for George.

Nothing.

By the afternoon, Hillary wanted to bring in the Promise Falls police. Josh had objected at first, still believing George would turn up. He was also worried that whatever was delaying George’s return might not be something they wanted the police to know about. Although he did not share this thought with his wife, it occurred to him that maybe George and his buddies were celebrating the end of the Thackeray school year by engaging the services of prostitutes. Maybe they’d gone to Albany and were doing God knew what.

But Hillary called the police anyway.

They took down all the relevant information. But a young man who liked to party hard, who had a history of mischief, was not exactly a high priority for the local police. And it wasn’t as though they had nothing to do. There’d been some crazy shoot-out at a Laundromat the other day, and it hadn’t even been a week since some nutcase had blown up the drive-in on the outskirts of Promise Falls and killed four people.

Whoever’d done that was still out there.

The Lydeckers had not just sat around doing nothing the last four days. They’d been out every day, driving around town, going
out to the college, popping into local bars, checking back in with George’s friends. They felt they had to be doing something.

They’d been back to the police, too, who were finally starting to take this more seriously. On Thursday, they sent around a detective named Angus Carlson. He sat down with the parents and Cassandra, made notes. He even took Cassandra aside later, said he wondered if she might know anything about her brother that she wouldn’t want to say in front of her parents. Something that might help him find George.

“Well,” she’d said, “he likes to break into people’s garages and look for stuff.”

“Do your parents know about that?”

Cassandra had shaken her head no. Said maybe she should tell them.

Carlson had made a note.

And now here it was, Saturday morning. Hillary and Josh in the kitchen, Cassandra upstairs in bed. Hillary had been down here since five, making a pot of tea, and then drawing up a list of things they should do today in their search for George.

The list, so far, read:

When Josh entered the room, Hillary had turned on the kettle to make another pot of tea. She showed her husband the list.

“Okay,” he said wearily. “I’d been thinking about Five Mountains. I could imagine him looking around there, now that it’s closed down. It’ll probably be all locked up. I could call the management, or maybe get the detective to do that.”

“George would find a way in, even if it was locked. You know what he’s like. He’s always sneaking into things.”

Josh hesitated. “About that. Cassie told me something, last night.”

“Told you what?”

“Sometimes . . . sometimes George breaks into places. Not like a school or something, just goofing around. He looks for unlocked garages, gets in, takes stuff.”

“He does not,” Hillary said angrily. Her face had become flushed, and beads of sweat had sprouted on her forehead.

“I’m just telling you what she said. I think . . . at first I didn’t want the police brought in, in case George had done something stupid, but I’m past that. We should ask them if there have been any break-ins. Of garages. Maybe that would be a lead to finding out what—Hillary, are you okay?”

“Seriously?” Hillary said. “I’ve had three hours’ sleep this week. Now you’re saying my son is a thief, and you ask if I’m okay?”

“I’m just saying, you don’t look good.”

“I can’t sleep, I’m worried sick about what’s happened to my baby, I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack, and—”

Hillary’s cell phone, which was on the table next to her cup of tea, vibrated. A text.

“Oh my God, maybe it’s George!” she said, and dived for the phone, snatched it up, looked at it with puzzlement. “It’s Cassie.”

“Cassie?” Josh said. “She’s upstairs.” He hesitated. “Isn’t she?”

Hillary, her face crumpling, turned the phone to her husband.

The text read:

• • •

Ali Brunson said, “Hang in there, Audrey. You’re going to be fine. You just have to keep it together a little bit longer.”

Of course, Ali had said that many times in his career as a paramedic, and there were many of those times when he hadn’t believed
it for a second. This looked as though it was turning into one of those times.

Audrey McMichael, age fifty-three, 173 pounds, black, an insurance adjuster, resident of 21 Forsythe Avenue for the last twenty-two years, where she lived with her husband, Clifford, was showing every indication of giving up the fight.

Ali called up to Tammy Fairweather, who was behind the wheel of the ambulance, and racing it to Promise Falls General. The good news was, it was early Saturday morning and there was hardly anyone on the road. The bad news was, it probably wasn’t going to matter. Audrey’s blood pressure was plummeting like an elevator with snapped cables. Barely sixty over forty.

When Ali and Tammy had arrived at the McMichael home, Audrey had been vomiting. For the better part of an hour, according to her husband, she had been complaining of nausea, dizziness, a headache. Her breathing had been growing increasingly rapid and shallow. There had been moments when she’d said she could not see.

Her condition continued to deteriorate after they loaded her into the ambulance.

“How we doing back there?” Tammy called.

“Don’t worry about me. Just get us to church on time,” Ali told her, keeping his voice even.

“I know people,” Tammy said over the wail of the siren, trying to lighten the mood. “You need a ticket fixed, I’m the girl to know.”

The radio crackled. Their dispatcher.

“Let me know the second you clear PFG,” the male voice on the radio said.

“Not even there yet,” Tammy radioed back. “Will advise.”

“Need you at another location ASAP.”

“What’s the deal?” Tammy asked. “All the other units take off sick? They go fishing for the weekend?”

“Negative. All engaged.”

“What?”

“It’s like an instant flu outbreak all over town,” the dispatcher
said. “Let me know the second you’re available.” The connection ended.

“What’d he say?” Ali asked.

Tammy swung the wheel hard. She could see the blue
H
atop Promise Falls General in the distance. No more than a mile away.

“Something going around,” Tammy said. “Not the kind of Saturday morning I was expecting.”

Whenever Tammy and Ali got the weekend morning shifts, they usually started them with coffee at Dunkin’s, chilling out until their first call.

There’d been no coffee today. Audrey McMichael, it turned out, was their second call of the day. The first had been to the Breckonwood Drive home of Terrence Rodd, an eighty-eight-year-old retired statistician who’d called 911 after experiencing dizziness and chest pains. Tammy had pointed out that he lived right next door to where that Gaynor woman had been murdered a few weeks ago.

Terrence never made it alive to the ER.

Hypotension,
Ali thought.
Low blood pressure.

And here they were again, with another patient experiencing, among other things, dangerously low blood pressure.

Ali raised his head far enough to see out the front window just as Tammy slammed on the brakes and screamed, “Jesus!”

There was a man standing in the path of the ambulance, halfway into their lane. “Standing” was not quite accurate. More like stooping, with one hand on his chest, the other raised, palm up, asking the ambulance to stop. Then the man doubled over, and vomited onto the street.

“Goddamn it!” Tammy said. She grabbed her radio. “I need help!”

“Drive around him!” Ali said. “We don’t have time to help some geezer cross the road.”

“I can’t just—he’s on his knees, Ali. Jesus fucking Christ!”

Tammy threw the shift lever into park, said, “Be right back!” and jumped out of the ambulance.

The dispatcher said, “What’s happening?”

Ali couldn’t leave Audrey McMichael to tell him.

“Sir!” Tammy said, striding briskly toward the man, who looked to be in his late fifties, early sixties. “What’s wrong, sir?”

“Help me,” he whispered.

“What’s your name, sir?”

The man mumbled something.

“What’s that?”

“Fisher,” he said. “Walden Fisher. I don’t feel . . . something’s . . . not right. My stomach . . . just threw up.”

Tammy put a hand on his shoulder. “Talk to me, Mr. Fisher. What other symptoms have you been experiencing?” The man’s breaths were rapid and shallow, just like those of Audrey McMichael and Terrence Rodd.

This is one serious clusterfuck. That’s what this is,
Tammy thought.

“Dizzy. Sick to my stomach. Something’s not right.” He looked fearfully into the paramedic’s face. “My heart. I think there’s something wrong with my heart.”

“Come with me, sir,” she said, leading him to the back of the ambulance. She’d put him in there with Audrey.

The more the merrier,
she thought, shaking her head, then wondering,
What next?

Which was when she heard the explosion.

When Emily Townsend had her first sip of coffee, she thought it tasted just a tiny bit off.

So she dumped out the entire pot—six cups’ worth—as well as the filter filled with coffee grounds, and started over.

Ran the water for thirty seconds from the tap to make sure it was fresh before adding it to the machine. Put in a new filter and six scoops of coffee from the tin.

Hit the button.

Waited.

When the machine beeped, she poured the coffee into a cup—a clean one; she’d already put the first one into the dishwasher—added one sugar and just a titch of cream, and gave it a stir.

Brought the warm mug to her lips and tentatively sipped.

Must have been her imagination. This tasted just fine.

Maybe it was her toothpaste. Made that first cup taste funny.

Cal Weaver was having breakfast—if you could call it that—in a room adjacent to the lobby of the BestBet Inn, which sat on Route 9 a quarter mile from the exit off 87, halfway between Promise Falls and Albany.

He’d been here most of the week.

It wasn’t a surveillance or any other kind of private detecting gig that had brought him to the lovely accommodations of the Best-Bet (
Free Wi-Fi!
). It was, however, the only affordable hotel close to Promise Falls that had any rooms available. He’d booked himself in here while he looked for a new place to live. Someone had firebombed the bookstore below his apartment and while his place had not burned to the ground, it was not a place where anyone could stay. The smell of smoke was overwhelming, and power had been cut to the building.

Cal was not going to stay with his sister, Celeste, and her husband, Dwayne. His presence would aggravate the tensions that already existed between his sister and his brother-in-law. The man did road repairs for the town, and with all the recent budget cuts, he was getting very little work.

So Cal found a hotel.

The BestBet advertised a free breakfast, and it was true what they said. You get what you pay for. The first day, when Cal came down, he was thinking he’d get a ham and cheddar omelet with home fries and brown toast. So he was dismayed when he found that his breakfast choices consisted of single-serving cereals in
sealed plastic containers, hard-boiled eggs (preshelled, which he supposed was at least something), day-old muffins and donuts, bananas and oranges, containers of yogurt, and—praise the Lord—coffee.

The only time any hotel employee showed up was to make sure there was coffee in the tall, aluminum urn.

Miracle of miracles, it was drinkable.

He’d grabbed a free copy of the Albany paper in the lobby and was leafing through it, sitting at a table by the window so he could watch the traffic go by on 9, washing down a dry blueberry muffin with his paper cup of coffee. He’d already refilled it twice.

He hadn’t expected to find any Promise Falls apartment-for-rent listings in the paper, and he was not disappointed. And since there was no longer a
Promise Falls
Standard
, he’d turn to the Net after breakfast to see whether any new places had come online.

His cell rang.

He reached into his pocket, checked out the caller.

Lucy Brighton.

It was not the first time she’d tried to reach him since he’d last seen her earlier in the week. He’d taken a couple of her calls, but had ignored the more recent ones. He knew what Lucy was going to say, what she was going to ask him. It would be the same thing she had asked him the time before.

What was he going to do?

He still didn’t know.

Should he tell the police what he knew? Should he call up his old friend Promise Falls police detective Barry Duckworth, and tell him he knew who had murdered Miriam Chalmers?

Cal knew he probably should. But he wasn’t sure that it was the right thing to do.