No Time for Goodbye (20 page)

If that didn’t work, they’d have to bring in some sort of barge affair, take it out onto the water, position it over the car and lift it up directly from the bottom.

“Nothing’s going to happen for a few hours,” Wedmore told us. “We’ve got to get some people up here, they’ve got to figure out how they’re going to do this. Why don’t you go someplace, head back to the highway, maybe go up to Lee, get some lunch. I’ll call your cell when it looks like something’s about to happen.”

“No,” Cynthia said. “We should stay.”

“Honey,” I said, “there’s nothing we can do now. Let’s go eat. We both need our strength, we need to be able to handle what may come next.”

“What do you figure happened?” Cynthia asked.

Wedmore said, “I guess someone drove that car right up here, where we’re standing, then ran it right off the edge of this cliff.”

“Come on,” I said again to Cynthia. To Wedmore, “Please keep us posted.”

We drove back down to the main road, back to Otis, then north to Lee, where we found a diner and ordered coffee. I hadn’t had much of an appetite first thing in the morning, so I ordered a midday breakfast of eggs and sausage. All Cynthia could manage was some toast.

“So whoever wrote that note,” Cynthia said, “knew what he was talking about.”

“Yeah,” I said, blowing on my coffee to cool it down.

“But we don’t even know if there’s anyone in the car. Maybe the car was ditched there, to hide it. But it doesn’t mean anyone died in that accident.”

“Let’s wait and see,” I said.

We ended up waiting a couple of hours. I was on my fourth coffee when my cell phone rang.

It was Wedmore. She gave me some directions that would get me to the lake from the north side.

“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.

28

As promised, Rona Wedmore
showed 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.

Wedmore smiled. “Well, there’s a shocker.”

“I think we’ve had enough for now,” I said.

“I’m sure we’ll be talking again,” Wedmore said.

Very soon, as it turned out. Right after they found the body of Denton Abagnall.

I guess I’d thought, if there were any developments in the hunt for the man we’d hired to find Cynthia’s family, we would have heard about them first from the police. But I was listening to the radio in our sewing room/study, not paying that much attention, really, but when the words “private detective” came out of the speaker, I reached over and turned up the volume.

“Police found the man’s car in a parking garage near the Stamford Town Center,” the news reader said. “Management noticed the car had been there for several days, and when they notified police they said its registration matched that of a man police had been searching for, for about as long as the car had been there. When the trunk was forced open, the body of Denton Abagnall, who was fifty-one years old, was found inside. He died of blunt trauma to the head. Police are reviewing security video as part of their investigation. Police refused to speculate as to motive, or whether the slaying might be in any way gang related.”

Gang related. If only.

I found Cynthia at the far end of the backyard, just standing there, hands tucked into the pockets of her windbreaker, looking back at the house.

“I just needed to get out,” she said as I approached. “Is everything okay?”

I told her what I’d heard on the radio.

I didn’t know what sort of reaction to expect, and wasn’t all that surprised when Cynthia didn’t have much of one. She said nothing for a moment, then, “I’m starting to feel numb, Terry. I don’t know what to feel anymore. Why’s all this happening to us? When’s all of this going to stop? When are we going to get our normal lives back?”

“I know,” I said, putting my arms around her. “I know.”

The thing was, Cynthia hadn’t really had a normal life since she was fourteen.

When Rona Wedmore showed up again, she was direct and to the point. “Where were you the night Denton Abagnall went missing? The night he left here, the last night anyone ever heard from him. Say around eight.”

“We had dinner,” I said. “And then we went to visit Cynthia’s aunt. She was dead. We called the police. We were with the police pretty much the entire evening. So I guess the police would be our alibi, Detective Wedmore.”

For the first time, Wedmore appeared embarrassed, and off her game. “Of course,” she said. “I should have realized that. Mr. Abagnall drove into that parking garage at 8:03, according to the ticket that was sitting on the dash.”

“So,” Cynthia said coldly, “I guess at least we’re off the hook for that one.”

Heading out the door, I asked Wedmore, “Did they find any papers with Mr. Abagnall? A note, some empty envelopes?”

“Far as I know,” Wedmore said, “there was nothing. Why?”

“Just wondering,” I said. “You know, one of the last things Mr. Abagnall told us was that he was going to be checking out Vince Fleming, who was with my wife the night her family disappeared. You know about Vince Fleming?”

“I know the name,” she said.

And Wedmore showed up again, the following day.

When I saw her walking up the drive, I said to Cynthia, “Maybe she’s tied us in to the Lindbergh kidnapping.”

I opened the door before she knocked.

“Yes?” I said. “What now?”

“I have news,” she said. “May I come in?” Her tone was less abrasive today. I didn’t know whether that was good news, or meant she was setting us up for something.

I showed Wedmore into the living room and invited her to take a seat. Cynthia and I both sat down.

“First of all,” she said, “you need to know I’m no scientist. But I understand the basic principles, and will do my best to explain them to you.”

I looked at Cynthia. She nodded for Wedmore to continue.

“The chances of being able to extract any DNA from the remains in your mother’s car—and there were just two bodies, not three—were always slim, but not nonexistent. Over the years, the natural process of decay had eaten away all of the—” She stopped herself. “Mrs. Archer, may I be straightforward here? It’s not pleasant to listen to, I understand.”

“Go ahead,” Cynthia said.

Wedmore nodded. “As you might guess, the decay over the years—enzymes being released from human cells as they die, human bacteria, environmental and in this case aquatic microorganisms—had pretty much destroyed all the flesh on the bodies. The bone decomposition would have been even worse had this been saltwater, but it wasn’t, so we caught a bit of a break there.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, we had bones, and we had teeth, so we attempted to get dental records for your family, but struck out. Your father, from what we could tell, had no dentist, although the coroner determined pretty quickly, based on the bone structure of the two people in the car, neither was an adult male.”

Cynthia blinked. So Clayton Bigge’s body was not one of the two in that car.

“As for the dentist your brother and mother went to, he passed away many years ago, the practice closed down, and all the records were destroyed.”

I glanced at Cynthia. She seemed to be steeling herself for disappointment. Maybe we weren’t going to learn anything definitive.

“But the thing was, even if we didn’t have dental records, we still had teeth,” Wedmore said. “From each of the two bodies. The enamel on the outside, there’s no DNA there, nothing to test, but deep in the center of the tooth, in the root, it’s so protected in there, they can find nucleated cells.”

Cynthia and I must have both looked lost, so Wedmore said, “Well, the bottom line is, if our forensic people can get in there, and get to those cells, and extract sufficient DNA, the results will show a unique profile for each individual, including sex.”

“And?” Cynthia asked, holding her breath.

“It was a male, and a female,” Wedmore said. “The coroner’s analysis, even before DNA testing, suggests a male in his midteens, most likely, and a woman probably in her late thirties, maybe early forties.”

Cynthia glanced at me, then back to Wedmore.

Wedmore continued. “So, a very young man and a woman were in that car. Now the question becomes whether there’s a connection between them.”

Cynthia waited.

“The two DNA profiles suggest a close relatedness, possibly parent-child. The forensic results, coupled with the coroner’s findings, do suggest a mother-and-son relationship.”