Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

My phone was dead.

“Shit!” I looked around for a pay phone, spotted one down the street and started running. From the car, Clayton called out wheezily, “What?”

I ignored him, reaching for my wallet as I ran, digging out a phone card I rarely used. At the phone, I swiped the card, followed the instructions, dialed Cynthia’s cell. Not in service. It went immediately to voicemail. “Cynthia,” I said, “don’t meet with your brother. It’s not Todd. It’s a trap. Call me-no, wait, my phone’s dead. Call Wedmore. Hang on, I’ve got her number.” I fumbled around in my pocket for her business card, found it, recited the number. “I’ll check in with her. But you have to trust me on this. Don’t go to this meeting! Don’t go!”

I replaced the receiver, leaned my head against the phone, exhausted, frustrated.

If she’d come to Winsted, she might still be around.

Where would be an easy place to rendezvous? The McDonald’s, where we were parked, certainly. There were a couple of other fast-food joints. Simple, modern, iconic landmarks. Hard to miss.

I ran back to the car, got in. Clayton hadn’t tried to eat anything. “What’s happening?” he asked.

I backed the Honda out of the spot, whipped through the McDonald’s lot, looking for Cynthia’s car. When I couldn’t find it there, I got back on the main road and sped down the street to the other fast-food outlets.

“Terry, tell me what’s going on,” Clayton said.

“There was a message from Cynthia. Jeremy called her, said he was Todd, asked her to meet him. Right here, in Winsted. She probably would have gotten here an hour ago, maybe not even that long.”

“Why up here?” Clayton asked.

I pulled into another lot, scanned it for Cynthia’s car. No luck. “The McDonald’s,” I said. “It’s the first big thing you see when you come off the highway coming north. If Jeremy was going to arrange to meet anyplace, that would have to be it. It’s the most obvious choice.”

I spun the Honda around, sped back down the street to the McDonald’s, jumped out of the car with the engine running, ran over to the drive-through window, cutting in front of someone trying to pay.

“Hey, pal, you can’t be there,” the man at the window said.

“In the last hour or so, did you see a woman in a Toyota, she’d have had a small girl with her?”

“You kidding me?” the man said, handing a bag of food to a motorist. “You know how many people go through here?”

“You mind?” said the driver as he reached for the bag. The car sped out, the side mirror brushing against my back.

“What about a man with an elderly woman?” I said. “A brown car.”

“You have to get away from this window.”

“She’d have been in a wheelchair. No, there might have been a wheelchair in the backseat. Folded up.”

A light went on. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Actually, that does kind of ring a bell, but it was a long time ago, maybe an hour. Kind of tinted windows, but I remember seeing the chair. They got coffees, I think. Pulled over there.” He pointed in the general direction of the lot.

“An Impala?”

“Man, I don’t know. You’re in the way.”

I ran back to the Honda, got in next to Clayton. “I think Jeremy and Enid were here. Waiting.”

“Well, they’re not here now,” Clayton said.

I squeezed the steering wheel, let go, squeezed again, banged it with my fist. My head was ready to explode.

“You know where we are, right?” Clayton asked.

“What? Of course I know where we are.”

“You know what we passed on the way down. North of here, few miles. I recognized the road when we went past it.”

The road to the Fell’s Quarry. Clayton knew, from my expression, that I had figured out what he was talking about.

“Don’t you see?” Clayton said. “You’d have to know how Enid thinks, but it makes perfect sense. Cynthia, along with your daughter, she finally ends up in the place Enid believes she should have been all these years. And, this time, Enid wants the car and bodies inside to be found right away. Let the police find them. Maybe people’ll think Cynthia was distraught, that somehow she felt responsible, was in despair over what had happened, the death of her aunt. So she drives up there and goes right over the edge.”

“But that’s crazy,” I said. “That might have worked at one time, but not now. Not with other people knowing what’s going on. Us. Vince. It’s insane.”

“Exactly,” Clayton said. “That’s Enid.”

I nearly rammed the car into a Beetle as I drove out of the lot, heading back in the direction we’d come from.

I had the car going over ninety, and as we approached some of the hairpin turns heading north to Otis, I had to slam on the brakes to keep from losing control. Once I had us through the turns, I put my foot to the floor again. We nearly killed a deer that ran across our path, almost took off the front end of a tractor as a farmer came out the end of his driveway.

Clayton barely winced.

He had his right hand wrapped tight around the door handle, but he never once told me to slow down or take it easy. He understood that we might already be too late.

I’m not sure how long it took us to get to the road heading east out of Otis. Half an hour, an hour maybe. It felt like forever. All I could see in my mind’s eye were Cynthia and Grace. And I couldn’t stop picturing them in a car, plunging over the side of the cliff and into the lake below.

“The glove box,” I said to Clayton. “Open it up.”

He reached forward with some effort, opened the compartment, revealing the gun I’d taken from Vince’s truck. He took it out, inspected it briefly.

“Hang on to that till we get there,” I said. Clayton nodded silently, but then went into a coughing fit. It was a deep, raspy, echoing cough that seemed to come all the way up from his toes.

“I hope I make it,” he said.

“I hope we both make it,” I said.

“If she’s there,” he said, “if we’re in time, what do you think Cynthia will say to me?” He paused. “I have to tell her I’m sorry.”

I glanced over at him, and the look he gave me suggested he was sorry that there was nothing more he could do than offer an apology. But I could tell, from his expression, no matter how late it would be in coming, how inadequate it might be, his apology would be genuine.

He was a man who needed to apologize for his entire life.

“Maybe,” I said, “you’ll have a chance.”

Clayton, even in his condition, saw the road to the quarry before I did. It was unmarked and so narrow, it would have been easy to drive right past it. I had to hit the brakes, and our shoulder straps locked as we pitched forward.

“Give me the gun,” I said, holding the wheel with my left hand as we rolled down the lane.

The road started its steep climb up, the trees began to open up, and the windshield was filled with blue, cloudless sky. Then the road started leveling out into a small clearing, and at the far end of it, parked facing the cliff edge, were the brown Impala on the right and Cynthia’s old silver Corolla on the left.

Standing between them, looking back at us, was Jeremy Sloan. He had something in his right hand.

When he raised it, I could see that it was a gun, and when the windshield of our Honda shattered, I knew that it was loaded.

I slammed on the brakesand threw the car into park in one fluid motion, undid my seat belt, opened the door, and dived out. I knew I was leaving Clayton to fend for himself, but at this point, I was thinking only of Cynthia and Grace. In the couple of seconds I’d had to survey the situation, I’d been unable to spot either of them, but the fact that Cyn’s car was still on the precipice and not in the lake seemed to me a hopeful sign.