Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay Read Free Book Online Page B

knees. Before him, stretched out on the floor, was a woman.
    She lay on her back, one leg extended, the other bent awkwardly. Her blouse, which from the collar appeared to be white, was awash in red, and ripped roughly straight across near the bottom.
    A few feet away, a kitchen knife with a ten-inch blade. Blade and handle covered in blood.
    The blood, Jesus, it was everywhere. Smudged bloody footprints led toward a set of sliding glass doors at the back of the kitchen.
    “God oh God Rose oh my God Rose oh God!”
    Suddenly the man’s head jerked, as though something horrible had just occurred to him. Something even more horrible than the scene before him.
    “The baby,” he whispered.
    He sprang to his feet, his pant legs stained with blood that had gone thick and tacky, and ran from the kitchen, trailing bloody shoeprints in his wake. He nearly skidded on the marble flooring in the foyer as he turned to run up the stairs.
    I shouted, “Wait! Mr. Gaynor!”
    He wasn’t listening. He was screaming: “Matthew! Matthew!”
    He tore up the stairs two steps at a time. I stayed by the bottom of the stairs. I had a feeling he’d be back in a matter of seconds.
    Gaynor disappeared down a second-floor hallway. Another anguished cry: “ Matthew! ”
    When he reappeared at the top of the stairs, his face was awash with panic. “Gone. Matthew’s gone. The baby’s gone.” He wasn’t looking at me. It was as if he were speaking more to himself, trying to take it in.
    “The baby’s gone,” he said again, nearly breathless.
    Trying to keep my voice calm, I said, “Matthew’s okay. We have Matthew. Matthew is fine.”
    He glanced back over his shoulder, out the front door that remained wide-open, to my car parked at the curb.
    Marla had remained in the backseat, Matthew still in her arms. She was looking at the house now instead of him.
    No expression on her face whatsoever.
    “What do you mean, we ?” Gaynor said. “Why do you have Matthew? What have you done?” His head turned toward the kitchen. “You did that? You? Did you—”
    “No!” I said quickly. “I can’t explain what happened here, but your son, he’s okay. I’ve been trying to find out—”
    “Matthew’s in the car? Is that Sarita with him? He’s with the nanny?”
    “Sarita?” I said. “Nanny?”
    “That’s not Sarita,” he said. “Where’s Sarita? What’s happened to her?”
    And then he started running toward my car.

SEVEN
    AGNES Pickens was very not happy with the muffins.
    There were two dozen, arranged on the platter in the center of the massive boardroom table. Coffee and tea had been set up on a table along the wall, and everything there looked fine. Decaf, cream, sugar, milk, sweeteners. Plus, copies of the hospital’s latest progress report had been distributed around the table where everyone would be sitting. But when Agnes scanned the muffin selection, she did not find bran. She found blueberry and banana and chocolate—and let’s face it, a chocolate muffin was just cake shaped like a muffin—but bran was noticeable by its absence. At least there was fruit.
    When you were a hospital administrator and called an early morning board meeting, you had to at least make an effort to offer healthy choices. Even if the bran muffins were passed over in favor of the chocolate, she could at least say they had been made available.
    The meeting was set to begin in five minutes, and Agnes had stopped in here to make sure everything was as it was supposed to be. Finding it was not, she went to the door and shouted, “Carol!”
    Carol Osgoode, Agnes’s personal assistant, popped her head out a room down the hall. “Yes, Ms. Pickens?”
    “There are no bran muffins.”
    Carol, a woman in her late twenties with shoulder-length brown hair and eyes to match, blinked hurriedly. “I just asked the kitchen to send up a selection of—”
    “I specifically told you to make sure that there were some bran muffins.”
    “I’m sorry; I