Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“And the police, they never questioned you, never suspected a thing.”

“Never. I kept waiting. The first year, that was the worst. Every time I heard a car pull into the drive, I figured this was it. And then a second year went by, and a third, and before you knew it, it had been ten years. You think, if you’re dying a little each day, how does life manage to stretch out so long?”

“You must have done some traveling,” I said.

“No, never again.”

“You were never back in Connecticut?”

“I’ve never set foot in that state since that night.”

“Then how did you get the money to Tess? To help her look after Cynthia, to help pay for her education?”

Clayton studied me for several seconds. He’d told me so much on this trip that had shocked me, but this appeared to be the first time I’d been able to surprise him.

“And who did you hear that from?” he asked.

“Tess told me,” I said. “Only recently.”

“She couldn’t have told you it was from me.”

“She didn’t. She told me about receiving the money, and while she had her suspicions, she never knew who it was from.”

Clayton said nothing.

“It was from you, wasn’t it?” I asked. “You squirreled some money away for Cynthia, kept Enid from finding out, just like you did when you were setting up a second household.”

“Enid got suspicious. Years later. Looked like we were going to get audited, Enid brought in an accountant, went through years of old returns. They found an irregularity. I had to make up a story, tell them I’d been siphoning off money because of a gambling problem. But she didn’t believe it. She threatened to go to Connecticut, kill Cynthia like she should have years ago, if I didn’t tell her the truth. So I told her, about sending money to Tess, to help with Cynthia’s education. But I’d kept my word, I said. I never got in touch with her, so far as Cynthia knew, I was dead.”

“So Enid, she’s nursed a grudge against Tess all these years, too.”

“She despised her for getting money she believed belonged to her. The two women she hated most in the world, and she’d never met either one of them.”

“So,” I said, “this story of yours, that you’ve never been back to Connecticut, even if you didn’t actually see Cynthia, that’s bullshit then.”

“No,” he said. “That’s the truth.”

And I thought about that for a while as we continued to drive on through the night.

Finally, I said, “I know you didn’t mail the money to Tess. It didn’t show up in her mailbox with a stamp on it. And you didn’t FedEx it. There’d be an envelope stuffed with cash in her car, another time she found it tucked into her morning newspaper.”

Clayton acted as though he couldn’t hear me.

“So if you didn’t mail it, and you didn’t deliver it yourself,” I said, “then you must have had someone do it for you.”

Clayton remained impassive. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back on the headrest, as though sleeping. But I wasn’t buying it.

“I know you’re hearing me,” I said.

“I’m very tired,” he said. “I normally sleep through the night, you know. Leave me alone for a while, let me catch a few winks.”

“I’ve one other question,” I said. He kept his eyes shut, but I saw his mouth twitch nervously. “Tell me about Connie Gormley.”

His eyes opened suddenly, as though I’d jabbed him with a cattle prod. Clayton tried to recover.

“I don’t know that name,” he said.

“Let me see if I can help,” I said. “She was from Sharon, she was twenty-seven years old, she worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and one night, twenty-six years ago, a Friday night, she was walking along the shoulder of the road near the Cornwall Bridge, this would be on Route 7, when she was hit by a car. Except it wasn’t exactly a hit-and-run. She was most likely dead beforehand, and the accident was staged. Like someone wanted it to look like it was just an accident, nothing more sinister, you know?”

Clayton looked out his window so I couldn’t see his face.

“It was one of your other slips, like the shopping list and the phone bill,” I said. “You’d clipped this larger story about fly-fishing, but there was this story down in the corner about the hit-and-run. Would have been easy to snip it out, but you didn’t, and I can’t figure out why.”

We were nearing the New York-Massachusetts border, heading east, waiting for the sun to rise.

“Did you know her?” I asked. “Was she someone else you met touring the country for work?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Clayton said.

“A relative? On Enid’s side? When I mentioned the name to Cynthia, it didn’t mean anything to her.”

“There’s no reason why it should,” Clayton said quietly.

“Was it you?” I asked. “Did you kill her, then hit her with your car, drag her into the ditch, and leave her there?”

“No,” he said.

“Because if that’s what happened, maybe this is the time to set the record straight. You’ve admitted to a great many things tonight. A double life. Helping to cover up the murder of your wife and son. Protecting a woman who, by your account, is certifiable. But you don’t want to tell me what your interest is in the death of a woman named Connie Gormley, and you don’t want to tell me how you got money to Tess Berman to help pay for Cynthia’s education.”

Clayton said nothing.

“Are those things related?” I asked. “Are they linked somehow? This woman, you couldn’t have used her as a courier for the money. She was dead years before you started making those payments.”

Clayton drank some water, put the bottle back into the cup holder between the seats, ran his hands across the tops of his legs.

“Suppose I told you none of it matters,” he said. “Suppose I acknowledge that yes, your questions are interesting, that there are some things you still do not know, but that in the larger scheme of things, it’s not really that important.”

“An innocent woman gets killed, then her body’s hit by a car, she’s left in the ditch, you think that’s unimportant? You think that’s how her family felt? I spoke to her brother on the phone the other day.”

Clayton’s bushy eyebrows rose a notch.

“Both their parents died within a couple of years after Connie. It’s like they gave up on life. It was the only way to end the grieving.”

Clayton shook his head.

“And you say that it’s not important? Clayton, did you kill that woman?”

“No,” he said.

“Did you know who did?”

Clayton would only shake his head.

“Enid?” I said. “She came to Connecticut a year later to kill Patricia and Todd. Did she come down earlier, did she kill Connie Gormley, too?”

Clayton kept shaking his head, then finally spoke. “Enough lives have been destroyed already. There’s no sense in ruining any more. I don’t have anything else to say about this.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited for the sun to come up.

I didn’t want to lose time stopping for breakfast, but I was also very much aware of Clayton’s weakened condition. Once morning hit, and the car was filled with light, I saw how much worse he looked than when we’d fled the hospital. He’d been hours without his IV, without sleep.

“You look like you need something,” I said. We were going through Winsted, where Route 8 went from a winding, two-lane affair to four lanes. We’d make even better time from here, the last leg of the journey to Milford. There were some fast-food joints in Winsted, and I suggested we hit a drive-through window, get a McMuffin, something like that.

Clayton nodded wearily. “I could eat the egg. I don’t think I could chew the English muffin.”