No Time for Goodbye (30 page)

I helped Clayton shuffle into the men’s room, waited for him to do his business at the urinal, assisted him back to the car. The short trip drained him. “You stay here and I’ll get some water,” I said.

I bought a six-pack of water, ran it back out to the car, cracked open the plastic cap on one of them and handed it to Clayton. He took a long drink, then took the four Tylenols I’d put into his hand and downed them one at a time. Then I drove over to the gas pumps and filled up, using almost all of the cash in my wallet. I was worried about using a credit card, fearful that police had figured out who’d taken Clayton out of the hospital, and that they’d be watching for any transactions by my credit card.

As I got back into the car, I thought that maybe it was time to let Rona Wedmore know what was going on. I felt, the more Clayton talked, the closer I was getting to the truth that would, once and for all, end Wedmore’s suspicions about Cynthia. I dug around in the front pocket of my jeans and found the card she’d given me during her surprise visit to the house the previous morning, before I’d gone looking for Vince Fleming.

There was an office and cell number, but not a home phone. Chances were she’d be asleep this time of the night, but I was betting she kept her cell next to the bed, and that it was on 24/7.

I started the car, pulled away from the pumps, but pulled over to the side for a minute.

“What are you doing?” Clayton asked.

“I’m just going to make a couple of calls.”

Before I tried Wedmore, however, I wanted to give Cynthia another try. I called her cell, tried home. No luck.

I took some comfort from that, strangely enough. If I didn’t know where she was, then there was no way Jeremy Sloan or his mother could, either. Disappearing with Grace turned out to be, at this moment, the smartest thing Cynthia could have done.

But I still needed to know where she was. That she was okay. That Grace was okay.

I thought about calling Rolly, but figured that if he knew anything, he would have called, and I didn’t want to use the phone any more than I had to. The battery didn’t run down that quickly with the phone on, but once you started talking on it, the power drained in a hurry.

I entered Detective Rona Wedmore’s cell phone number. She answered on the fourth ring.

“Wedmore,” she said. Trying very hard to sound awake and alert, although it came out more like “Wed. More.”

“It’s Terry Archer,” I said.

“Mr. Archer,” she said, already sounding more focused. “What is it?” “I’m going to tell you a few things very quickly. I’m on a dying cell. You need to be on the lookout for my wife. A man named Jeremy Sloan, and his mother, Enid Sloan, are heading to Connecticut, from the Buffalo area. I think they intend to find Cynthia and kill her. Cynthia’s father is alive. I’m bringing him back with me. If you find Cynthia and Grace, hold on to them, don’t let them out of your sight until I get back.”

I had expected a “What?” or, at the very least, “Huh?” But instead, I got, “Where are you?”

“Along the New York Thruway, coming back from Youngstown. You know Vince Fleming, right? You said you did.”

“Yes.”

“I left him in a house in Youngstown, north of Buffalo. He was trying to help me. He was shot by Enid Sloan.”

“This isn’t making any sense,” Wedmore said.

“No shit. Just look for her, okay?”

“What about this Jeremy Sloan, and his mother? What are they driving?”

“A brown…”

“Impala,” Clayton whispered. “Chevy Impala.”

“A brown Chevy Impala,” I said. To Clayton, I said, “Plate?” He shook his head. “I don’t have a plate number.”

“Are you coming back here?” Wedmore asked.

“Yes. In a few hours. Just look for her. I’ve already got my principal, Rolly Carruthers, looking for her, too.”

“Tell me what—”

“Gotta go,” I said, then folded the phone shut and slipped it into my jacket. I pulled the automatic transmission back to Drive and got back onto the thruway.

“So,” I said, taking us back to where Clayton had left off before we got off the highway. “Were there moments? When you were happy?”

Clayton takes himself back again.

If there are moments of happiness, they only ever happen when he is Clayton Bigge. He loves being a father to Todd and Cynthia. As best he can tell, they love him in return, maybe even look up to him. They seem to respect him. They aren’t being taught, each and every day, that he’s worthless. Doesn’t mean they always do as they’re told, but what kids do?

Sometimes, at night in bed, Patricia will say to him, “You seem someplace else. You get this look, like you’re not here. And you look sad.”

And he takes her in his arms and he says to her, “This is the only place I want to be.” It isn’t a lie. He’s never said anything more truthful. There were times when he wants to tell her, because he doesn’t want his life with her to be a lie. He doesn’t like having that other life.

Because that’s what life with Enid and Jeremy has become. That’s the
other
life. Even though it’s the one he started with, even though it’s the one where he can use his real name, show his real license to a police officer if he’s pulled over, it’s the life he can’t bear to return to, week after week, month after month, year after year.

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.”

45

The first part of the story
I 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.

“She followed them to the drugstore. Got out of her car, followed them into the store, pretended to be shopping for stuff herself while she kept an eye on them. She must have been stunned when she got a good look at Todd. He looked so much like Jeremy. That had to be the clincher.”

Enid left the store before Patricia and Todd. She strode back to her car. There were hardly any vehicles in the lot, no one around. Just as Enid, in later years, kept a gun at hand in the case of an emergency, back then she kept a knife in the glove compartment. She reached in and got it, ran back in the direction of the drugstore, hid around the corner, which, at that hour, was shrouded in darkness. It was a broad alleyway, used by delivery trucks.

Todd and Patricia emerged from the store. Todd had his sheet of bristol board rolled up into a huge tube and was carrying it over his shoulder like a soldier carries a rifle.

Enid emerged from the darkness. She said, “Help!”

Todd and Patricia stopped, looked at Enid.

“My daughter!” Enid said. “She’s been hurt!”

Patricia ran over to meet her, Todd followed.

Enid led them a few steps into the alley, turned to Patricia and said, “You wouldn’t happen to be Clayton’s wife, would you?”

“She must have been dumbstruck,” Clayton told me. “First this woman asks for help, then, out of the blue, asks her something like that.”

“What did she say?”

“She said yes. And then the knife came up and slashed her right across the throat. Enid didn’t wait a second. While Todd was still trying to figure out what had happened—it was dark, remember—she was on him, slashing his throat as quickly as she’d slashed his mother’s.”

“She told you all this,” I said. “Enid.”

“Many, many times,” Clayton said quietly. “She loves to talk about it. Even now. She calls it reminiscing.”

“Then what?”

“That’s when she found her way to a nearby phone booth, called me. I show up and find her in the car, and she tells me what she’s done. ‘I’ve killed them,’ she says. ‘Your wife and your son. They’re dead.’”

“She doesn’t know,” I said quietly.

Clayton nodded silently in the darkness.

“She doesn’t know you also have a daughter.”

“I guess,” Clayton said. “Maybe there was something about the symmetry of it. I had a wife and son in Youngstown, and a wife and son in Milford. A second son, who looked like the first one. It all seemed so perfectly balanced. A kind of mirror image. It led her to make certain assumptions. I could tell, the way she was talking, that she had no idea that Cynthia was still in the house, that she even existed. She hadn’t seen me come home with her.”

“And you weren’t about to tell her.”

“I was in shock, I think, but I had that much presence of mind. She started up her car, drove over to the alley, showed me their bodies. ‘You’re going to have to help me,’ she said. ‘We have to get rid of them,’ she said.”

Clayton stopped for a moment, rode the next half a mile or so without saying a word. For a second, I wondered if he had died.

Finally, I said, “Clayton, you okay?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What is it?”

“That was the moment when I could have made a difference. I had a choice I could have made, but maybe I was in too much shock to realize it, to know what was the right thing to do. I could have put an end to things right there. I could have refused to help her. I could have gone to the police. I could have turned her in. I could have put an end to all the madness then and there.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I already felt like a guilty man. I was leading a double life. I’d have been ruined. I’d have been disgraced. I’m sure I would have been charged. Not in the deaths of Patricia and Todd. But being married to more than one woman, unless you’re a Mormon or something, I think they have laws against that. I had false ID, that probably constituted fraud or misrepresentation somewhere along the line, although I never meant to break the law. I always tried to live right, to be a moral man.”

I glanced over at him.

“And of course, the other thing was, she could probably tell what I was thinking, and she said if I called the police, she’d tell them she was only helping me. That it was my idea, that I forced her to go along. And so I helped her. God forgive me, I helped her. We put Patricia and Todd back into the car, but left the driver’s seat empty. I had an idea. About a place where we could put the car, with them inside. A quarry. Just off the route I often took going back and forth. One time, heading back to Youngstown, I started driving around aimlessly, not wanting to go back, found this road that led to the top of the cliff that looked down into this abandoned gravel pit. There was this small lake. I stood there for quite a while, thought about throwing myself off the edge. But in the end, I continued on. I thought, given that I’d be falling into water, there was a chance I might survive.”

He coughed, took a sip.

“We had to leave one car in the lot. I drove Patricia’s Escort, drove the two and a half hours north in the middle of the night, Enid following me in her car. Took a while, but I found that road to the quarry again, got the car up there, jammed a rock up against the accelerator with the car in neutral, reached in and put it in drive and jumped back, and the car went over the edge. Heard it hit the water a couple of seconds later. Wasn’t much I could see. Looking down, it was so dark I couldn’t even see the car disappear beneath the surface.”

He was winded, gave himself a few seconds to catch his breath.

“Then we had to drive back, pick up the other car. Then we turned around again, both of us, in the two cars, headed back to Youngstown. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to Cynthia, to leave her a note, anything. I just had to disappear.”

“When did she find out?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“When did Enid find out she’d missed one? That she hadn’t totally wiped out your other family?”

“A few days later. She’d been watching the news, hoping to catch something, but the story wasn’t covered much by the Buffalo stations or papers. I mean, it wasn’t a murder. There were no bodies. There wasn’t even any blood in the alley by the drugstore. There was a rainstorm later that morning, washed everything away. But she went to the library—there wasn’t that Internet then, of course—and started checking out-of-town and out-of-state papers, and she spotted something. ‘Girl’s Family Vanishes,’ I think the headline was. She came home, I’d never seen her so mad. Smashing dishes, throwing things. She was completely insane. Took her a couple of hours to finally settle down.”

“But she had to live with it,” I said.

“She wasn’t going to at first. She started packing, to go to Connecticut, to finish her off. But I stopped her.”

“How did you manage that?”

“I made a pact with her. A promise. I told her I would never leave her, never do anything like this again, that I would never, ever, attempt to get in touch with my daughter, if she would just spare her life. ‘This is all I ask,’ I said to her. ‘Let her live, and I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you, for betraying you.’”

“And she accepted that?”

“Grudgingly. But I think it always niggled at her, like an itch you can’t reach. A job not done. But now, there’s an urgency. Knowing about the will, knowing that if I die before she can kill Cynthia, she’ll lose everything.”

“So what did you do? You just went on?”

“I stopped traveling. I got a different job, started up my own company, worked from home or just down the road in Lewiston. Enid made it very clear that I was not to travel anymore. She wasn’t going to be made a fool of again. Sometimes I’d think about running away, going back, grabbing Cynthia, telling her everything, taking her to Europe, hiding out there, living under different names. But I knew I’d screw it up, probably end up leaving a trail, getting her killed. And it’s not so easy, getting a fourteen-year-old to do what you want her to do. And so I stayed with Enid. We had a bond now that was stronger than the best marriage in the world. We’d committed a heinous crime together.” He paused. “Till death do us part.”

“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.