The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (36 page)

I needed to take some weight off my feet. I placed my hands on both sides of the sink, and inadvertently knocked something off the side.

I looked down between the sink and the toilet and saw that I had knocked Walden’s metal nail file to the floor. About six inches
long, with a clear blue plastic handle. It had landed next to a plastic wastepaper basket. I was worried the blood would rush to my head when I bent over to pick it up.

I needed a second.

While I was looking down, something in the trash basket caught my eye. Amid a few wadded tissues there was a small bottle, the kind that might contain cough syrup. But a glance at the label told me it was not cough syrup.

Bracing myself against the sink with one hand, I reached down into the basket with the other. Got my fingers around the bottle and brought it up to eye level.

I read the label.

Syrup of Ipecac.

I didn’t even know they still made that stuff. I remembered back when I was a kid, it was in most people’s medicine cabinets. But it had, over the years, fallen out of favor.

I certainly hadn’t forgotten what it was for.

It made you throw up. Violently.

I sensed someone standing just outside the door. I turned, the bottle of ipecac still in my hand.

Walden Fisher, wearing a nice, crisp white shirt, was staring at me.

SIXTY-SIX

OH
, shit.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Duckworth

“I
was feeling dizzy,” I told Walden. “Came in here for a minute to pull myself together.”

Walden said nothing.

I held up the bottle. “What’s the story on this, Walden?”

“That’s ipecac,” he said.

“I know. I can read. I haven’t seen this in a long time. But this looks like a relatively new bottle.” I took a closer look at it, turned it sideways. “Empty, too. Where’d you get this?”

“I bought it. Had to go to a few places before I found it.”

“It makes you throw up,” I said.

“Yeah,” Walden said.

“So why did you want it?”

“In case I ever needed it.”

“You must have used it very recently,” I said. “I mean, it was right there in the trash. So you must have had some in the last day or so.”

“That’s right,” he said hesitantly. “Yesterday morning. When I heard about the water being poisoned.”

His voice lacked conviction. I’d been in this line of work long enough to tell when someone was lying to me.

“At the hospital,” I reminded him, “you said you’d had some coffee? Ran out into the street, throwing up, just as the ambulance was coming by.”

“Is that what I said?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Then maybe I had some of that after I got back home,” he said. “I’m a little cloudy on the details.”

But things were coming into focus for me.

“Walden,” I said, “did you drink this stuff
before
you ran out into the street?”

“Like I said, so much has happened in the last day or so.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked. “Everyone else was sick from the tainted water, but you were sick from
this
. Walden, it’s almost like you wanted people to think you were made ill by the poisoned water, when maybe you weren’t.”

Walden moved his jaw around.

“Why would you do that, Walden? Why did you want everyone to think you’d been poisoned?”

That jaw kept moving around.

“Walden?”

“I took too much of it,” he said. “I just wanted to appear sick, like everyone else. But I swallowed so much, I really did a number on myself. Threw up so violently, my heart started palpitating. Actually thought I might die for a while there.”

“Jesus, Walden, why—”

He came at me fast, palms forward. He slammed them into my chest and I went into the wall hard enough to get the wind knocked out of me. I was about to reach for my gun, but instead I raised my hands to defend myself from the fists that were pounding my head.

Walden was in a blind fury, his fists driving into me faster than
I could deflect them. I felt a cheekbone collapse; then the vision in my left eye went blurry with blood. We weren’t that different in age, but he was in better shape than I was, by a lot.

I started sliding down the wall. When I was on the way down, a fist went into my gut like a piston.

I was close to passing out.

He let me continue my slide until my butt was on the floor, my legs arranged haphazardly in front of me. Walden crouched down, found my gun, and unholstered it. By the time I was able to focus with my right eye—the flesh around my left was already puffing up and obscuring my view—he was standing over me with my own weapon pointed at my head.

I tasted blood in my mouth. My bottom lip was ballooning.

I said, “Walden.”

“You didn’t have to die,” he said. “You got lucky yesterday. You didn’t drink the water. You didn’t have to be one of them.”

“Jesus, Walden . . . put the gun down. . . . Let’s talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said.

I mumbled, “If it was you . . . Victor . . . you must have set up Victor. . . . How could you set up someone who loved your daughter?”

“Just shut up,” Walden said. “I have to think.”

“The squirrel trap, those mannequins . . .”

“I moved it all last night,” Walden said. “When he went to do his run.”

“And the boy,” I said. “That Lydecker kid.”

“That wasn’t supposed to happen. I caught him snooping.”

I swallowed, felt blood trickling down my throat. “You did it . . . for the same reason you had me believe Victor did it. Same motive, different person.”

“We felt the same way,” Walden said. “I just felt it more. This town failed Olivia. It had to be taught a lesson.”

“Twenty-two bystanders, and Victor . . .”

“I hoped he’d drink the water,” Walden said. “He was late. He
was late and Olivia died. I wanted him to die, too. But now they’ll think he did it. At least . . . at least for a while.”

“What . . . what do you mean, for a while?”

Walden took several breaths before he spoke. “I thought . . . I thought I’d feel some satisfaction. That I would feel . . . vindicated. Something. But I don’t. I don’t think enough have been made to pay. I’m thinking . . . You know the Promise Falls Autumn Fair?”

Blood obscured my view of Walden. I blinked a few times, and said, “The fair?”

“In October,” he said. “I’m thinking, by then, everyone will feel safe again. They’ll have let their guard down. They’ll all believe it was Victor. Maybe a bomb . . . at the fair.”

“Walden . . . listen to me. You can’ t—”

“You know I have to kill you,” he said. “I think you’re a good man, but that doesn’t matter. There was a time, back when I started planning this, when I thought, once I’d made my point, I’d turn myself in. But now I see there’s more to do.”

I gurgled something.

“What?”

“Twenty-three,” I said. “All of that was you.”

“I was sending a message,” he said. “That justice was coming.

I wanted people to be afraid. I was so pleased when I saw you were figuring it out. That’s why I phoned you that time.”

“You’re an engineer,” I said. “You had the smarts for everything. The Ferris wheel, the bus, blowing up the drive-in. But Mason Helt . . .” For a moment there, things had gone dark. “Helt,” I said.

“He took theater. I approached him, said he was going to be part of a study, something sanctioned by the college. About fear and paranoia. He was skeptical, but a thousand bucks went a long way to convincing him. After, I knew it was a mistake, actually meeting with a third party, bringing someone else into this. I caught a break when he ended up dead. I might have had to kill him myself if that hadn’t happened.”

I mumbled something else.

“What’s that?” Walden said.

“Tate. Tate Whitehead.”

Walden nodded. “I knew there’d only be one person at the water plant, and that it would be him. I couldn’t be interrupted. It took a long time to bring in what I needed.”

“Sodium something.”

“Azide,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

“It took a long time to acquire what I needed. More than two years. I was stockpiling it, knowing I’d use it someday. I just didn’t know when. I knew I’d never do it while Beth was alive. I couldn’t run the risk of being sent away while she was still with me. But when she passed away, I knew it was time to move forward.”

“Walden . . . please don’t kill me. . . . Turn yourself in. Your first instinct was the right one. Tell everyone why you did what you did. Make them understand how they failed you, how they failed Olivia.”

He looked at me solemnly. “I’m sorry. But no.”

“Walden, listen to me. You—”

There was the sound of a loud knocking.

Walden’s head whipped around. “Jesus.” Panic washed over his face.

“Walden?” someone shouted. “You home?”

I thought I recognized the voice, even with blood finding its way into my ears. I had a feeling that if I could stand, and look in the mirror, I’d be horrified by what I saw.

“Walden? It’s Don! Don Harwood!”

I was right. I did know the voice. David’s father.

Walden shouted: “Just a second!”

He leaned in close to me, the gun inches from my bloodied nose. “I’m going to talk to him,” he whispered. “If you make one sound, even a peep, I will kill him. I’ll shoot him with your gun. Do you understand me?”

I nodded.

“You have those cuffs,” he said.

“What?”

“Don’t you carry those plastic cuffs around?”

I barely managed a nod.

“Get them out,” he said. Then, shouting: “Be right there, Don!”

I struggled to get a hand into my pocket. I brought out one plastic cuff. Walden took one step back, keeping the gun trained on me. He was afraid to cuff me himself, probably fearing I’d try something. Which I would have.

“Put your hand up against the leg,” he said. He was pointing to the thick porcelain leg that supported the pedestal sink. “Cuff your wrist to that.”

That would keep me here in the bathroom, as opposed to cuffing my wrists together.

I did as I was instructed, and secured my right hand to the leg. Both my hands were bloody, and I was leaving red handprints on the floor as I shifted my body. I had gone from a sitting position to being stretched out on the floor, my head between the sink and the toilet.

“Remember,” he said. “One peep, and Don has to die, too. As it is, it only has to be you.”

He turned on the tap and rinsed his and my blood from his hands, dried them off, then slipped out into the hall and closed the door.

I lay there, 280 pounds of pain. With my free hand, I reached into my jacket and found my phone. I turned onto my side, blinked several times to get the blood out of my eyes so I could see the screen.

The door reopened.

Walden reached down and snatched the device from me. “I can’t believe I forgot that,” he said, and shut the door again.

I closed my eyes, rested my head on the cold tile floor. My ear was not far from the crack at the bottom of the door, allowing me to hear what was going on.

“Don, hey, how are you?” Walden said. “Sorry it took me so long.”

“No, it’s okay. Am I catching you at a bad time?”

“Well, I’m about to head out. Otherwise I’d invite you in.”

“Oh, okay, well,” said Don, “I’ll try to make this quick, although it’s kind of a hard thing to say in a hurry.”

“What’s hard to say?”

A long pause. “Well, Walden, the thing is . . . I wanted to tell you this when you came by the other day. When I had to go to the school and pick up my grandson? It’s something that’s been eating at me for a long time.”

“What?”

“You see—God, this is hard to say—but you see, I was one of them.”

Now it was Walden’s turn to pause. “One of them?”

“I was down by the park that night. The night, you know, that Olivia . . . that she died.”

“You were there?”

“I heard what was happening. I don’t even know that there’s anything I could have done. I wasn’t close. But I could have done
something
. I could’ve called the cops, or I could’ve run into the park. I keep playing it over and over in my head, wondering what I could have done that might have made a difference. I don’t honestly think I could have saved her, Walden, but maybe, if I’d been a better person, if I’d done
something
, maybe I’d have seen the son of a bitch who did it.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I have to get it off my chest. It’s eating me up, Walden.”

I thought about screaming. I thought about calling out for help. But I’d be killing Don Harwood. I couldn’t do that to him.

Although I wondered, given what Don was confessing to, whether Walden would decide to kill him anyway. I was hurting so much on my side that I shifted to my stomach, my free hand sliding across the tile, coming into contact with something.

I pulled on the leg of the sink, testing it, thinking maybe I could make it break free, that I could slip my hand out from the bottom. But the sound of the sink crashing to the floor was going to get Don killed as quickly as if I cried for help.

Walden said, “It’s okay.”

“No, Walden, it’s not okay. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’ll understand if you don’t, but I—”

“Really, it’s okay. It was good of you to come by, Don.”

“That’s it?” Don Harwood said.

“Don’t give it another thought.”

“Seriously? All this time, I’ve felt sick about this, and you don’t care?”

“They caught the man today,” Walden said.

“They did?”

“I just—I just got a call from the police. They’ve caught someone.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. I had no—”

A cell phone started ringing. Don said, “Hang on.” Then, “Hello?
David?
David, slow down. . . . What happened? You got
what
? You got shot? . . . No,
you
shot someone? Oh God, David, no . . . They couldn’t do anything? . . . Where are you? Tell me where you are. I’ll get your mother, and we’ ll—”

“Don,” Walden said.

“David, hang on a second.” A pause, and then, “Walden, I have to go. Something awful’s happened.”

“Sure. It was good of you to come by.”

“Yeah, well,” Don said. “I have to go.”

I heard the door close.

I had no idea what Don’s phone call was about, but whatever it was, it wasn’t a priority for me.

Would Walden shoot me? Would he kill me with my own gun? Unlikely, I thought. It would make too much noise. It would leave a bullet hole in the bathroom to be repaired. He’d have to do it another way. Strangle me, maybe. Suffocate me. Disable my other arm and hold his hand over my mouth and nose until I was dead.

There’d be less mess that way.

The real challenge would be getting rid of me. I was probably a hundred pounds heavier—at least—than George Lydecker. If this bathroom had a bathtub, he could dump me into it once I was dead
and cut me into pieces. But if he wanted to treat me like a side of beef, he was going to have to move me someplace else to do it.

Plus, there was the matter of my car out front. What was he going to do with that? I was hoping Don might have recognized it, asked Walden where I was. Then again, that probably would have gotten him killed. And now it sounded like Don had something else to worry about.

I heard steps coming back down the hall. The door opened.

“Did you hear that?” Walden asked. The gun was in his right hand. He must have hidden it when he was talking to Don.