The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) by Linwood Barclay

the sense, right now, of a voice mail. All Sam would have to do was look at her phone to see she’d missed several calls from him. “You can hang up.”
    Marla ended the call and was about to return the phone when it started to ring in her hand. It startled her and she let out a short scream.
    “Is it Sam?” David asked.
    “I don’t think—hello? No, no, you have the right number. This is David’s phone. He’s driving. This is Marla.” She said to David, “Someone wants to talk to you.”
    “Who is it?”
    Marla said, “Who’s calling? Randy who?”
    “No,” David said angrily.
    “He can’t talk to you,” Marla said. “We’re on our way to the hospital. My father is—” Marla listened a few more seconds, then handed the phone to David. “He says it’s really important.”
    “Jesus,” David hissed as he grabbed the phone. “This has to wait, Randy.”
    “Listen! This is big! The town’s water may be—”
    “I know!”
    “—poisoned. David, do what you have to do. Help that woman’s father.”
    “It’s my uncle,” David said.
    “Christ, I’m sorry,” Randall Finley said. “How is he?”
    David glanced in the mirror again. “Not great.”
    “What can I do?”
    For once, David thought his employer sounded sincere. But then again, Randy was good at pretending to care when he didn’t give a shit.
    “Nothing,” David said.
    “I want to help. Not just you, but everyone. It’s in my power to make a difference here, to do something good.”
    “What are you—”
    “I’m calling everyone in. I’m cranking up production. We’re going to distribute thousands of bottles of water. We’ll drop them off in the middle of town. In the park, next to the falls. There’s a crisis and we’re going to—”
    “Exploit it,” David said.
    “No!” Was that genuine hurt David was hearing? “I just wantto do the right thing. I swear. Go. Save your uncle and call me later. In the meantime, I’m moving forward on—”
    David didn’t hear the rest of it. He’d ended the call, but instead of putting the phone away, he gave it back to Marla.
    “Go into the contacts. Hit ‘home,’ then hand it to me.”
    Marla did so.
    David listened for the rings. His mother picked up before the third.
    “Mom,” David said, “I need you to get yourself to Promise Falls General.”
    “I’m fine,” Arlene said. “I didn’t drink anything from the tap and I didn’t let your father have that pot of coffee he made.”
    “That’s good, that’s good, but that’s not it. I may need your help. Dad can stay home, be there when Ethan wakes up, tell him not to drink anything. Or take a bath. Like I’d need to talk him out of that.”
    “Oh, okay. I’m on my way.”
    “What kind of help?” Marla asked once David had put the phone away.
    “It’s crazy there,” he told her. “There may be questions to answer, forms to fill out, and you’ve got your hands full with Matthew. She can help with that.”
    He didn’t have the heart to tell her what he was really thinking: that if Gill wasn’t already dead in the backseat of the car, he very likely would be by the time they got to the hospital, and David was going to need his mother there to help Marla get through it. She was going to go to pieces. If she couldn’t pull herself together, she wasn’t going to be able to look after Matthew.
    Arlene would be a great help there.
    And David didn’t want to spend a moment longer at the hospital than he had to. He had to get to Samantha Worthington’s place.
    He had to know whether the woman he was falling in love with and her young son, Carl, were already dead.

NINE
     
    Duckworth
     
    IN the car, heading toward the town’s water pumping and treatment center, I called home again. No answer. But I had asked Maureen to start banging on the neighbors’ doors to warn them about possible water contamination, so it made sense she wasn’t in the house.
    I was betting she’d taken her cell with her. I tried