Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“Let’s go,” Wedmore said, moving past me and up the stairs.

“First door on the left,” Cynthia said. To me, she whispered, “Why do you think she wants to see our typewriter?”

Wedmore disappeared into the room. “I don’t see it,” she said.

Cynthia was up the stairs before me, turned into the room, said, “It’s usually right there. Terry, isn’t it usually right there?”

She was pointing to my desk as I came into the room. She and Wedmore were both looking at me.

“Uh,” I said, “it was in my way, so I tucked it into the closet.”

I opened the closet door, knelt down. Wedmore was peering in, over my shoulder. “Where?” she said.

I pulled away the newspapers and the paint-splattered pants to reveal the old black Royal. I lifted it out, set it back on the desk.

“When did you put it in there?” Cynthia said.

“Just a while ago,” I said.

“Got covered up awful fast,” Wedmore said. “How do you explain that?”

I shrugged. I had nothing.

“Don’t touch it,” she said, and got her phone back out of her jacket.

Cynthia looked at me with a puzzled expression. “What’s with you? What the hell is going on?”

I wanted to ask her the same thing.

Rona Wedmore made severalcalls on her cell, most of them from out on the driveway, where we wouldn’t be able to hear what she had to say.

That left Cynthia and me, and Grace-Cynthia had been permitted by Wedmore to drive over to the school quickly to pick her up-in the house to mull over these latest developments. Grace was in the kitchen, asking who the big woman making phone calls was while she made herself an after-school snack of peanut butter on toast.

“She’s with the police,” I said. “And I don’t think she’ll take kindly to you calling her big.”

“I won’t say it to her face ,” Grace said. “Why is she here? What’s going on?”

“Not now,” Cynthia told her. “Take your snack and go to your room, please.”

Once Grace had left, grumbling the whole way, Cynthia asked, “Why did you hide the typewriter? That note, it was written on your typewriter, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

She studied me a moment. “Did you write that note? Is that why you hid the typewriter?”

“Jesus, Cyn,” I said. “I hid it because I wondered whether you’d written it.”

Her eyes went wide in shock. “Me?”

“Is that any more shocking than thinking I’d written it?”

“I didn’t try to hide the typewriter, you did.”

“I was doing it to protect you.”

“What?”

“In case you had written it. I didn’t want the police to know.”

Cynthia said nothing for a moment, slowly paced the room a couple of times. “I’m trying to get my head around this, Terry. So what are you saying? Are you saying you think I wrote that note? And if I did, that I’ve always known where they were? My family? I’ve always known they’re in this quarry?”

“Not…necessarily,” I said.

“Not necessarily? Then what are you thinking, exactly?”

“Honest to God, Cyn, I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore. But the moment I saw that letter, I knew it had come from my typewriter. And I knew I hadn’t written it. That left you, unless someone else came in here and wrote it on that typewriter to, to, I don’t know, to make it look like one of us had done it.”

“We already know someone else was in here,” Cynthia said. “The hat, the e-mail. But despite that, you’d rather think I did it?”

“I’d rather not think that at all,” I said.

She looked right into my eyes, adopted a deadly serious expression. “Do you think I killed my family?” she asked.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No, I don’t.”

“But it’s crossed your mind, hasn’t it? You’ve wondered, every once in a while, whether it’s possible.”

“No,” I said. “I have not. But I have wondered, lately, whether the stress of what you’ve been through, what you’ve had to carry all these years, has made you…” I could feel the eggshells cracking under my shoes, “…think, or perceive things, or maybe even do things, in a way that’s not been, I don’t know, totally rational.”

“Oh,” Cynthia said.

“Like when I saw that the letter had been done on my typewriter, I thought, could you have done this as a way to get the police interested in the case again, to do something, to try to solve it once and for all?”

“So I’d send them on a wild-goose chase? Why would I pick that spot, that particular place?”

“I don’t know.”

Someone rapped on the wall outside our room and Detective Rona Wedmore stepped into the door. I had no idea how long she had been standing there, how long she might have been listening.

“It’s a go,” she said. “We’re sending in divers.”

It was set up for the following day. A police diving squad was to be on site at 10 a.m. Cynthia walked Grace to school and arranged for one of the neighbors to meet her at the end of the day and take her back to her house in the event we weren’t home in time.

I called the school again, got Rolly, said I would not be in.

“Jesus, what now?” he asked.

I told him where we were off to, that divers were going into the quarry.

“God, my heart goes out to you guys,” he said. “It never ends. Why don’t I get someone to cover your classes for the next week. I know a couple of recently retired teachers who could come in, do a short-term thing.”

“Not the one who stammers. The kids ate her alive.” I paused. “Hey, this is kind of out of the blue, but let me bounce something off you.”

“Shoot.”

“Does the name Connie Gormley mean anything to you?”

“Who?”

“She was killed a few months before Clayton and Patricia and Todd vanished. Upstate. Looked like a hit-and-run, but wasn’t, exactly.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rolly said. “What do you mean, it looked like a hit-and-run but wasn’t? And what could that possibly have to do with Cynthia’s family?”

He almost sounded annoyed. My problems, and the conspiracies whirling around them, were starting to wear him down just as they had me.

“I don’t know that it does. I’m just asking. You knew Clayton. Did he ever mention anything about an accident or anything?”

“No. Not that I can remember. And I’m pretty sure I’d remember something like that.”

“Okay. Look, thanks for getting someone for my classes. I owe you.”

Cynthia and I hit the road shortly after that. It was more than a two-hour drive north. Before the police took away the anonymous letter in a plastic evidence bag, we copied the map onto another piece of paper so we’d know where we were going. Once we were on our way, we didn’t want to stop for coffee or anything else. We just wanted to get there.

You might have thought that we’d have been talking nonstop all the way up, speculating about what the divers might find, what it might mean, but in fact we hardly said anything at all. But I imagined we were both doing a lot of thinking. What Cynthia was thinking, I could only guess. But my mind was all over the place. What would they find in the quarry? If there were actually bodies down there, would they be Cynthia’s family? Would there be anything to indicate who’d put them there?

And was that person, or persons, still walking around?

We headed east once we passed Otis, which really isn’t a town, but a few houses and businesses spaced out along the meandering two-lane road that eventually winds its way up to Lee and the Mass Turnpike. We were hunting for Fell’s Quarry Road, which was supposed to run off to the north, but we didn’t have to look that hard for it. There were two cars with Massachusetts state troopers marking the turnoff for us.