Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

But in some strange way, he gets used to it. Used to the stories, used to the juggling, used to coming up with fanciful tales to explain why he has to be away on holidays. If he’s in Youngstown on December 25, he sneaks off to a pay phone, weighted down with change, so he can call Patricia and wish her and the kids a merry Christmas.

One time, in Youngstown, he found a private spot in the house, sat down, and let the tears come. Just a short cry, enough to ease the sadness, take the pressure off. But Enid heard him, slipped into the room, sat down next to him on the bed.

He wiped the tears from his cheeks, pulled himself together.

Enid rested a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be a baby,” she said.

Looking back, of course, life in Milford was not always idyllic. Todd came down with pneumonia when he was ten. Came through that okay. And Cynthia, once she was in her teens, she started to be a handful. Rebellious. Hanging out with the wrong crowd at times. Experimenting with things she was too young for, like booze and God knows what else.

It fell to him to be the disciplinarian. Patricia, she was always more patient, more understanding. “She’ll get through this,” she’d tell him. “She’s a good kid. We just have to be there for her.”

It was just that, when Clayton was in Milford, he wanted life to be perfect. Often it came close to being that way.

But then he would have to get back in the car, pretend to head off on business, and make the drive to Youngstown.

From the beginning, he wondered how long he could keep it up.

There were times when the bridge abutments looked like a solution again.

Sometimes he’d wake up in the morning and wonder where he was today. Who he was today.

He’d make mistakes.

Enid had written him out a grocery list once, he’d driven down to Lewiston to pick up a few things. A week later, Patricia was doing the laundry, comes into the kitchen with the list in her hand, says, “What’s this? I found it in your pants pocket. Not my handwriting.”

Enid’s shopping list.

Clayton’s heart was in his mouth. His mind raced. He said, “I found that in the cart the other day, must have been the last person’s list. I thought it was kind of funny, comparing what we get to what other people buy, so I saved it.”

Patricia glanced at the list. “Whoever they are, they like shredded wheat same as you.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “Well, I didn’t figure they were making all those millions of boxes of it just for me.”

There evidently was at least one time when he put a clipping from a Youngstown area newspaper, a picture of his son with the basketball team, into the wrong drawer. He clipped it because, no matter how hard Enid worked to turn Jeremy against him, he still loved the boy. He saw himself in Jeremy, just as he did in Todd. It was amazing how much Todd, as he grew up, looked like Jeremy at similar stages. To look at Jeremy and hate him was to hate Todd, and he couldn’t possibly do that.

So at the end of one very long day, after a very long drive, Clayton Bigge of Milford emptied his pockets and tossed a clipping of his Youngstown son’s basketball team into the drawer of his bedside table. He kept the clipping because he was proud of the boy, even though he’d been poisoned against him.

Never noticed it was the wrong drawer. In the wrong house, in the wrong town, in the wrong state.

He made a mistake like that in Youngstown. For the longest time, he didn’t even know what it was. Another clipping, maybe. A shopping list written out by Patricia.

Turned out to have been a phone bill for the address in Milford. In Patricia’s name.

It caught Enid’s attention.

It raised her suspicions.

But it wasn’t like Enid to come straight out and ask what it was about. Enid would conduct her own little investigation first. Watch for other signs. Start collecting evidence. Build a case.

And when she thought she had enough, she decided to take a trip of her own the next time her husband Clayton went out of town. One day she drove to Milford, Connecticut. This was back, of course, before she ended up in the wheelchair. When she was mobile.

She arranged for someone to look after Jeremy for a couple of days. “Going to join my husband on the road this time,” she said. In separate cars.

“Which brings us,” Clayton said, sitting next to me, parched and taking another sip from his water bottle, “to the night in question.”

The first part of the storyI knew from Cynthia. How she ignored her curfew. Told her parents she was at Pam’s house. How Clayton went to look for her, found her in the car with Vince Fleming, brought her home.

“She was furious,” Clayton said. “Told us she wished we were dead. Stormed up to her room, never heard another peep out of her. She was drunk. God knows what she’d had to drink. Must have fallen asleep instantly. She never should have been hanging around with a guy like Vince Fleming. His father was nothing but a common gangster.”

“I know,” I said, my hands on the wheel, driving on through the night.

“So like I said, it was quite a row. Todd, sometimes he enjoyed it when his sister got into trouble, you know how kids can be. But not this time. It was all pretty ugly. Just before I’d come back with Cynthia, he’d been asking me or Patricia to take him out to get a sheet of bristol board or something. Like every other kid in the world, he’d left some project to the very last minute, needed a sheet of this stuff for some presentation. It was already late, we didn’t know where the hell we could get something like that, but Patricia, she remembered they sold it at the drugstore, the one that was open twenty-four hours, so she said she’d take him over to get it.”

He coughed, took a sip of water. He was getting hoarse.

“But first, there was that thing Patricia had to do.” He glanced over at me. I patted my jacket, felt the envelope inside it. “And then she and Todd left, in Patricia’s car. I sat down in the living room, exhausted. I was going to have to leave in a couple of days, hit the road, spend some time in Youngstown. I always felt kind of depressed around those times, before I had to leave and go back to Enid and Jeremy.”

He looked out his window as we passed a tractor trailer.

“It seemed like Todd and his mom were gone a long time. It had been about an hour. The drugstore wasn’t that far. Then the phone rang.”

Clayton took a few breaths.

“It was Enid. Calling from a pay phone. She said, ‘Guess who.’”

“Oh God,” I said.

“It was a call that I guess, in some way, I’d always been expecting. But I couldn’t have imagined what she’d done. She told me to meet her, in the Denny’s parking lot. She told me I’d better hurry. She said there was a lot of work to be done. Told me to bring a roll of paper towels. I flew out of the house, drove over to Denny’s, thought maybe she’d be in the restaurant, but she was sitting in her car. She couldn’t get out.”

“Why?” I asked.

“She couldn’t walk around covered in that much blood and not attract attention.”

I suddenly felt very cold.

“I ran over to her window, it looked at first like her sleeves were covered in oil. She was so calm. She rolled down the window, told me to get in. I got in, and then I could see what was all over her, that it was blood. All over the sleeves of her coat, down the front of her dress. I was screaming at her, ‘What the hell have you done? What have you done?’ But I already knew what it had to be.

“Enid had been parked out front of our house. She must have gotten there a few minutes after I came home with Cynthia. She had the address from the phone bill. She would have seen my car in the driveway, but with a Connecticut plate on it. She was putting it all together. And then Patricia and Todd came out, drove off, and she followed them. By this point, she must have been blind with rage. She’d figured out that I had this whole other life, this other family.