But Duckworth thought it best to keep those thoughts to himself for the moment.
“What do you mean by ‘on edge’?”
“Nervous. Anytime I’d walk into the room where the two were huddled together, he’d suddenly clam up.”
“When was the last time you found them doing that?”
She thought. “Just before Bill went to Boston on that last conference. When Rosemary was killed. He seemed very worried.”
Around that time, Duckworth had learned from his interviews with the Gaynors’ nanny, Sarita Gomez, Bill had come to realize that his wife knew the adoption of Matthew was not legal.
She remembered something. “One time I walked in on him when he was in Jack’s study, waiting for him to get back from a hospital call. Bill was looking at one of Jack’s old medical books about surgical technique. When he realized I was there, he closed it and put it back on the shelf, his face red as a beet. You’d have thought I’d caught him looking at porn.”
Duckworth was still thinking about Tanya Sturgess’s comments as he got back behind the wheel of his car, and his phone started to ring.
“Duckworth.”
“It’s me,” Rhonda Finderman said. “You called.”
Duckworth had to think for a moment about why he’d been trying to get in touch with her.
“Right,” he said. “I’ve got a story I want to tell you, and you’re going to think I’m crazy, but you need to hear it right to the end.”
Twenty-seven
I bolted from Clive Duncomb’s office, down a flight of stairs, out of the Thackeray College admin building, and straight to my car. I had the phone to my ear the entire time, trying to get Samantha Worthington to explain to me what had happened.
“His parents came to visit... They stalled me... trying to make me late to pick up Carl,” she said. The pauses were her catching her breath. It sounded like she was running, too.
“But you don’t know for sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my keys with my other hand, “that Ed’s going to get Carl.”
“He’s here! You saw him this morning! They’re working together.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Putting you on speaker.”
I got the car open, tossed my phone onto the passenger seat, keyed the ignition. Backing out of the spot, I nearly broadsided a FedEx truck.
“Asshole!” someone yelled.
I got the car aimed for downtown. I didn’t even know where I was going.
“Sam?” I shouted. “You still there?”
“Yes!”
“Where are you?”
“I’m running to the school! They slashed my tires! Those bastards!”
“Where’s the school?”
“It’s Clinton Public!”
I thought back to my days as a Promise Falls cop, when I could walk this town blindfolded and always know where I was. I knew Clinton. After accessing the GPS in my brain for a second, I could picture the location of the school.
But the school was quite a hike from Thackeray. Even breaking every speed limit and running every light, I was a good fifteen minutes away.
“Where are you?” I shouted. I was wondering if I should swing by and grab her along the way, but if we were both going to get there at the same time, I’d just head straight for the school.
“It’s a few blocks,” she said, sounding very winded. “Not... too... long.”
“When does school officially let out?”
“Now, right now!”
“Hang up, call the school, see if they can call Carl to the office!”
“I tried that! I can’t” — a pause to catch her breath — “get through!”
“Then call the police!”
“They won’t care!”
“What?”
“They never care about this shit!”
If she meant custody disputes, she was half-right. There were some things a cop in a patrol car couldn’t solve. But what she was talking about now seemed to suggest an outright kidnapping that was about to take place.
My heart was pounding, my hands slippery with sweat on the steering wheel. Ahead of me, cars were stopped at a light.
“I’m a long way away!” I shouted. “I don’t know if I can get there in time!”
I didn’t know whether Samantha had heard me. I grabbed the phone, put it to my ear. Said, “You there?”
Nothing.
The light turned green up ahead, but the cars were moving ahead slowly. I laid on the horn, swerved around two cars, narrowly missing a pickup truck coming in the opposite lane. Floored it.
As I sped into town, I realized I didn’t know the whole story. For all I knew, Sam had abducted her own kid and what was going on now was payback. Maybe she’d been in the midst of a custody dispute and run off with Carl without the court’s permission.
But if that was the case, the courts didn’t usually send thugs around to your place of work and threaten you. Ed did not come across as an officer of the court.
So I gambled that the angels were with Sam and her boy. My gut told me that Ed taking Carl away was very, very wrong. Even if it turned out Sam didn’t have the law on her side, kidnapping a kid from school was no way to resolve custody disputes.
“Come on, come on,” I said, seeing another set of cars bunching up ahead of me at the next intersection. I was looking for an opening. Too many cars coming the other way for me to pass. I wondered whether, if I took the next right, I could make up some time on less-traveled residential streets.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” I shouted at the drivers ahead of me.
I made the decision. When I got to the intersection, I’d hang a right. Find another way to get to Clinton Public.
An old Volkswagen inched far enough ahead that I could make the turn. I cranked the wheel, put my foot down on the gas.
Just as a jogger crossed my path.
“Shit!” I said, slamming my foot on the brake pedal so hard I was surprised it didn’t snap off.
The jogger, a shirtless man in shorts and running shoes who was probably in his midthirties, stopped as abruptly as I had, turned, and looked at me. He slapped both hands onto the hood of the Accord.
“The fuck!” he screamed, spraying spit.
Had I hit him? I was pretty sure I hadn’t. But if I was going to be any help to Sam and Carl, I was going to have to run him down anyway.
I powered down the window. “You ran right in front of me!”
He pointed to the WALK sign. “You see that! Are you blind?”
He wasn’t moving. If I could get him to move from the front of the car, if I could get him to approach my window, I could boot it.
“Yeah!” I said. “It says walk, not run!”
The man shook his head, started coming around the fender. Good, good. Come give me shit face-to-face, so my way is clear and I can floor it.
He came up alongside the car. But as he did, several other people started walking through the intersection, blocking my way.
“You fucking think you own the road?” he asked, at my window now, hands on the sill, close enough that I could smell his sweat. “Is what you got to do so important it justifies running people over? That what you think?”
I didn’t think I was going to make it.
I didn’t think I was going to make it in time to help Carl.
Twenty-eight
Ed idled his pickup truck down the street from Clinton Public Elementary School. He figured that Carl Worthington’s route to his mother’s work, or their home, would take him this way, right past where he was parked. It was a good thing the little guy had never seen him. It’d be easier to pull off what he had planned that way.
Of course, there was a chance he wouldn’t be walking this way, if he decided to go to a friend’s house, say, before going home. But Ed’s information was that his mother picked him up most days. He’d probably be looking for her, standing around, wondering why she was late.