Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“Do you think it is?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly. “No.”

Neither did I.

But it didn’t stop me from going upstairs with the clipping and sitting in front of the computer and looking for any information about a twenty-six-year-old hit-and-run accident that left Connie Gormley dead.

I came up with nothing.

So then I started looking up Gormleys in that part of Connecticut, using the online phone listings, wrote down names and numbers onto a scratch pad, stopped when I had half a dozen, and was about to start calling them when Cynthia poked her head into the room. “What are you doing?” she asked.

I told her.

I don’t know whether I was expecting her to protest, or offer encouragement, to grasp onto any thread no matter how slender. Instead, she said, “I’m going to go lie down for a while.”

When someone actually answered, I identified myself as Terrence Archer from Milford, said that I probably had the wrong number, but I was trying to track down anyone who might have information about the death of Connie Gormley.

“Sorry, never heard of her,” said the person at the first number.

“Who?” said an elderly woman at the second. “I never knew no Connie Gormley, but I have a niece goes by Constance Gormley, and she’s a real estate agent in Stratford. She’s terrific and if you’re looking for a house, she could find you a good one. I’ve got her number right here if you’ll hold on a second.” I didn’t want to be rude, but after I’d held for five minutes, I hung up.

The third person I reached said, “Oh God, Connie? It was so long ago.”

It turned out that I had managed to reach Howard Gormley, her sixty-five-year-old brother.

“Why would anyone want to know about that, after all these years?” he asked, his voice hoarse and tired.

“Honestly, Mr. Gormley, I don’t quite know what to tell you,” I said. “My wife’s family had some trouble a few months after your sister’s accident, stuff that we’ve still been trying to sort out, and an article about Connie was found among some mementos.”

“That’s kind of strange, isn’t it?” Howard Gormley said.

“Yes, it is. If you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, it might clear things up, at least allow me to eliminate any connection between your family’s tragedy and ours.”

“I suppose.”

“First of all, did they ever find out who ran your sister down? I don’t have any other information. Was someone finally charged?”

“Nope, never. Cops never found out a thing, never put anyone in jail for it. After a while, they just gave up, I guess.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, it just about killed our parents. Grief ate away at them. Our mother died a couple years after that, and our dad went a year later. Cancer, both of them, but you ask me, it was the sorrow that overtook them.”

“Did the police ever have any leads? Did they ever find out who was driving?”

“Just how up-to-date was that article you found?”

I had it next to the computer, and read it to him.

“That was pretty early on,” he said. “That was before they found out the whole thing had kind of been staged.”

“Staged?”

“Well, at first, they figured it was a hit-and-run, plain and simple. Maybe a drunk, or just a bad driver. But when they did the autopsy, they noticed something kind of funny.”

“What do you mean, funny?”

“I’m no expert, you know? I’ve been a roofer all my life. Don’t really know much about that forensic stuff. But what they told us was, a lot of what happened to Connie, the damage done to her from the car? That happened after she was already dead.”

“Wait a sec,” I said. “Your sister was already dead when the car hit her.”

“That’s what I just said. And…”

“Mr. Gormley?”

“It’s just, this is hard to talk about, even after all this time. I don’t like to say things that reflect badly on Connie, even after all these years, if you understand.”

“I do.”

“But they said, well, that she might have been with someone shortly before she got left in that ditch.”

“You mean…”

“They’re not saying she was raped, exactly, although that might have happened, I suppose. But my sister, she kind of got around, if you understand, and they say she met up with someone that evening, most likely. And I’ve always wondered if that’s who it was, who set it up to look like she got hit by a car, dumped her into that ditch.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Connie and me was close. I didn’t approve of the way she lived her life, but then, I was never no angel myself and was never in any position to point a finger. After all these years, I’m still angry, and wish they’d find the bastard who did it, but the thing is, it was so long ago, there’s a pretty good chance that son of a bitch may be dead himself by now.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s very possible.”

When I was done talking to Howard Gormley, I just sat there at my desk for a while, staring off into space, trying to figure out whether it meant anything.

Then, reflexively as I often do, I hit the Mail button on the computer keyboard to see whether we had any messages. As usual, there were a bunch, most of them offering deals on Viagra or stock tips or places to get a Rolex cheap or solicitations from widows of wealthy Nigerian gold mine owners looking for assistance transferring their millions to a North American account. Our anti-spam filter caught only a fraction of these annoyances.

But there was one e-mail, from a Hotmail address that was nothing but numbers-05121983-with the words “It won’t be much longer” in the subject line.

I clicked on it.

The message was short. It read: “Dear Cynthia: As per our earlier conversation, your family really does forgive you. But they can’t ever stop asking themselves: Why?”

I must have read it five times, then went back up to the subject line. It wouldn’t be much longer till what?

“How could someone get oure-mail address?” I asked Cynthia. She was sitting in front of the computer, staring at the screen. At one point, she reached toward the monitor, as if touching the message might somehow reveal more about it.

“My father,” she said.

“What about your father?”

“When he got in here, when he left the hat,” Cynthia said. “He could have come up here and looked around, got on the computer, figured out our e-mail address.”

“Cyn,” I said cautiously, “we still don’t know that your father left that hat. We don’t know who left that hat.”

I thought back to Rolly’s theory, and my own briefly held suspicion, that Cynthia could have placed the hat there herself. And for an instant, no longer, I thought about how easy it would be to set up a Hotmail address and send an e-mail to yourself.

Knock it off, I told myself.

I could sense Cynthia bristling at my comment of a moment ago, so I added, “But you’re right. Whoever got in here, they could have come upstairs and nosed around, turned on the computer, gotten our e-mail address.”

“So it’s the same person,” Cynthia said. “The person who phoned me, the one you said was just a crank, is the same person who sent this e-mail, and the same person who snuck into our house and left the hat. My father’s hat.”

That made sense to me. The part I was having trouble with was, who was that person? Was it the same person who’d murdered Tess? Was it the man I’d spotted through Grace’s telescope the other night, watching our house?

“And he’s still talking about forgiveness,” Cynthia said. “That they forgive me. Why does he say that? And what does it mean, that it won’t be much longer?”