Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“It’s gone faster than we thought,” she said, bordering on amiable. “It’s out. The car’s out.”

The yellow Escort was already sitting on the back of a flatbed truck by the time we arrived at the site. Cynthia was out of the car before I’d come to a full stop, running toward the truck, shouting, “That’s the car! My mother’s car!”

Wedmore grabbed hold of her before she could get close. “Let me go,” Cynthia said, struggling.

“You can’t go near it,” the detective told her.

The car was covered in mud and slime, and water was seeping out around the cracks of the closed doors, enough so that the interior, at least above the window line, was clear of water. But there was nothing to be seen but a couple of waterlogged headrests.

“It’s going to the lab,” Wedmore said.

“What did they find?” she asked. “Was there anything inside?”

“What do you think they found?” Wedmore asked. I didn’t feel good about the way she’d asked. It was as though she thought Cynthia already knew the answer.

“I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “I’m scared to say.”

“There appear to be the remains of two people in there,” she said. “But as you can understand, after twenty-five years…”

One could only imagine.

“Two?” Cynthia said. “Not three?”

“It’s early yet,” Wedmore said. “Like I said, we have a lot of work before us.” She paused. “And we’d like to take a buccal swab from you.”

Cynthia did a kind of double take. “A what?”

“I’m sorry. It’s Latin, for ‘cheek.’ We’d like to get a DNA sample from you. We take a sample from your mouth. It doesn’t hurt or anything.”

“Because?”

“If we’re fortunate enough to be able to recover any DNA from…what we find in the car, we’ll be able to compare it to yours. If, for example, if one of those bodies is your mother, they can do a kind of reverse maternity test. It’ll confirm if she is, in fact, your mother. Same for the other members of your family.”

Cynthia looked at me, tears forming in her eyes. “For twenty-five years I’ve waited for some answers, and now that I’m about to get some, I’m terrified.”

I held her. “How long?” I asked Wedmore.

“Normally, weeks. But this is a more high-profile case, especially since there was the TV show about it. A few days, maybe just a couple. You might as well go home. I’ll have someone come by later today for the sample.”

Heading back seemed the only logical thing to do. As we turned to walk back to our car, Wedmore called out, “And you’ll need to be available in the meantime, even before the test results come back. I’m going to have more questions.”

There was something ominous about the way she said it.

As promised, Rona Wedmoreshowed up to ask questions. There were things about this case she did not like.

That was certainly something we all had in common, although Cynthia and I didn’t feel that Wedmore was an ally.

She did confirm one thing I already knew, however. The letter that had directed us to the quarry had been written on my typewriter. Cynthia and I had both been requested-as if there were any option-to come down to headquarters and be fingerprinted. Cynthia’s fingerprints apparently were on file. She’d provided them twenty-five years ago when police were combing her house, looking for clues to her family’s disappearance. But the police wanted them again, and I’d never been asked to provide mine before.

They compared our prints against those on the typewriter. They found a few of Cynthia’s on the body of the machine. But the actual keys were covered with mine.

Of course, there wasn’t much to make of that. But it didn’t support our contention, that someone had broken in to our house and written the letter on my typewriter, someone who could have been wearing gloves and left no prints behind.

“And why would someone do that?” asked Wedmore, her hands made into fists and resting on her considerable hips. “Come into your house and use your typewriter to write that note?”

That was a good question.

“Maybe,” Cynthia said, very slowly, kind of thinking out loud, “whoever did it knew the note would most likely be traced back to Terry’s typewriter. They wanted it traced back to him, they wanted you to think he’d written it.”

I thought Cynthia was on to something, with one small change. “Or you,” I said to her.

She looked at me for a moment, not accusingly, but thinking. “Or me,” she said.

“Again, why would anyone do that?” Wedmore, still unconvinced, asked.

“I have no idea,” Cynthia said. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. But you know someone was here. You must have a record of it. We called the police and they came out here, they must have made a report.”

“The hat,” Wedmore said, unable to keep the skepticism out of her voice.

“That’s right. I can get it for you if you’d like,” Cynthia offered. “Would you like to see it?”

“No,” Wedmore said. “I’ve seen hats before.”

“The police thought we were nuts,” Cynthia said.

Wedmore let that one go. It must have taken some effort on her part.

“Mrs. Archer,” she said, “have you ever been up to the Fell’s Quarry before?”

“No, never.”

“Not as a girl? Not even when you were a teenager?”

“No.”

“Maybe you were up there, and didn’t even realize it was that location. Driving around with someone, you might have gone up there to, well, to park, that kind of thing.”

“No. I have never been up there. It’s a two-hour drive up there, for Christ’s sake. Even if some boy and I were going to go parking, we’d hardly drive two hours to get there.”

“What about you, Mr. Archer?”

“Me? No. And twenty-five years ago, I never even knew anyone in the Bigge family. I’m not from the Milford area. It wasn’t until college that I met Cynthia, and learned about what had happened to her, to her family.”

“Okay, look,” Wedmore said, shaking her head. “I’m having a bit of trouble with this. A note, written in this home, on your typewriter”-she looked at me-“leads us to the very spot where your mother’s car”-she looked at Cynthia-“was found, some twenty-five years after it disappeared.”

“I told you,” Cynthia said. “Someone was here.”

“Well, whoever that someone was, he didn’t try to hide that typewriter. Your husband’s the one who did that.”

I said, “Should we have a lawyer here when you’re asking these questions?”

Wedmore pushed her tongue around the inside of her cheek. “I suppose you’d have to ask yourself whether you believe you need one.”

“We’re the victims here,” Cynthia said. “My aunt has been murdered, you’ve found my mother’s car in a lake. And you’re talking to us-talking to me-like we’re the criminals. Well, we’re not the criminals.” She shook her head in exasperation. “It’s like, it’s like someone else has planned this all out, planned it to make it look like I’m going crazy or something. That phone call, someone putting my father’s hat in the house, that letter being written on our typewriter. Don’t you see? It’s like someone wants you to think that maybe I’m losing it, that all these things that happened in the past are making me do these things, imagine these things now.”

That tongue moved from the inside of one cheek to the other. Finally, Wedmore said, “Mrs. Archer, have you ever thought about talking to someone? About this conspiracy that seems to be swirling around you?”

“I am seeing a psy-” Cynthia stopped herself.