No Time for Goodbye (19 page)

27

Rona Wedmore made several
calls on her cell, most of them from out on the driveway, where we wouldn’t be able to hear what she had to say.

That left Cynthia and me, and Grace—Cynthia had been permitted by Wedmore to drive over to the school quickly to pick her up—in the house to mull over these latest developments. Grace was in the kitchen, asking who the big woman making phone calls was while she made herself an after-school snack of peanut butter on toast.

“She’s with the police,” I said. “And I don’t think she’ll take kindly to you calling her big.”

“I won’t say it to her
face,
” Grace said. “Why is she here? What’s going on?”

“Not now,” Cynthia told her. “Take your snack and go to your room, please.”

Once Grace had left, grumbling the whole way, Cynthia asked, “Why did you hide the typewriter? That note, it was written on your typewriter, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

She studied me a moment. “Did you write that note? Is that why you hid the typewriter?”

“Jesus, Cyn,” I said. “I hid it because I wondered whether
you’d
written it.”

Her eyes went wide in shock. “Me?”

“Is that any more shocking than thinking I’d written it?”

“I didn’t try to hide the typewriter, you did.”

“I was doing it to protect you.”

“What?”

“In case you had written it. I didn’t want the police to know.”

Cynthia said nothing for a moment, slowly paced the room a couple of times. “I’m trying to get my head around this, Terry. So what are you saying? Are you saying you think I wrote that note? And if I did, that I’ve always known where they were? My family? I’ve always known they’re in this quarry?”

“Not…necessarily,” I said.

“Not necessarily? Then what are you thinking, exactly?”

“Honest to God, Cyn, I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore. But the moment I saw that letter, I knew it had come from my typewriter. And I knew I hadn’t written it. That left you, unless someone else came in here and wrote it on that typewriter to, to, I don’t know, to make it look like one of us had done it.”

“We already know someone else was in here,” Cynthia said. “The hat, the e-mail. But despite that, you’d rather think I did it?”

“I’d rather not think that at all,” I said.

She looked right into my eyes, adopted a deadly serious expression. “Do you think I killed my family?” she asked.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No, I don’t.”

“But it’s crossed your mind, hasn’t it? You’ve wondered, every once in a while, whether it’s possible.”

“No,” I said. “I have not. But I have wondered, lately, whether the stress of what you’ve been through, what you’ve had to carry all these years, has made you…” I could feel the eggshells cracking under my shoes, “…think, or perceive things, or maybe even do things, in a way that’s not been, I don’t know, totally rational.”

“Oh,” Cynthia said.

“Like when I saw that the letter had been done on my typewriter, I thought, could you have done this as a way to get the police interested in the case again, to do something, to try to solve it once and for all?”

“So I’d send them on a wild-goose chase? Why would I pick that spot, that particular place?”

“I don’t know.”

Someone rapped on the wall outside our room and Detective Rona Wedmore stepped into the door. I had no idea how long she had been standing there, how long she might have been listening.

“It’s a go,” she said. “We’re sending in divers.”

It was set up for the following day. A police diving squad was to be on site at 10 a.m. Cynthia walked Grace to school and arranged for one of the neighbors to meet her at the end of the day and take her back to her house in the event we weren’t home in time.

I called the school again, got Rolly, said I would not be in.

“Jesus, what now?” he asked.

I told him where we were off to, that divers were going into the quarry.

“God, my heart goes out to you guys,” he said. “It never ends. Why don’t I get someone to cover your classes for the next week. I know a couple of recently retired teachers who could come in, do a short-term thing.”

“Not the one who stammers. The kids ate her alive.” I paused. “Hey, this is kind of out of the blue, but let me bounce something off you.”

“Shoot.”

“Does the name Connie Gormley mean anything to you?”

“Who?”

“She was killed a few months before Clayton and Patricia and Todd vanished. Upstate. Looked like a hit-and-run, but wasn’t, exactly.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rolly said. “What do you mean, it looked like a hit-and-run but wasn’t? And what could that possibly have to do with Cynthia’s family?”

He almost sounded annoyed. My problems, and the conspiracies whirling around them, were starting to wear him down just as they had me.

“I don’t know that it does. I’m just asking. You knew Clayton. Did he ever mention anything about an accident or anything?”

“No. Not that I can remember. And I’m pretty sure I’d remember something like that.”

“Okay. Look, thanks for getting someone for my classes. I owe you.”

Cynthia and I hit the road shortly after that. It was more than a two-hour drive north. Before the police took away the anonymous letter in a plastic evidence bag, we copied the map onto another piece of paper so we’d know where we were going. Once we were on our way, we didn’t want to stop for coffee or anything else. We just wanted to get there.

You might have thought that we’d have been talking nonstop all the way up, speculating about what the divers might find, what it might mean, but in fact we hardly said anything at all. But I imagined we were both doing a lot of thinking. What Cynthia was thinking, I could only guess. But my mind was all over the place. What would they find in the quarry? If there were actually bodies down there, would they be Cynthia’s family? Would there be anything to indicate who’d put them there?

And was that person, or persons, still walking around?

We headed east once we passed Otis, which really isn’t a town, but a few houses and businesses spaced out along the meandering two-lane road that eventually winds its way up to Lee and the Mass Turnpike. We were hunting for Fell’s Quarry Road, which was supposed to run off to the north, but we didn’t have to look that hard for it. There were two cars with Massachusetts state troopers marking the turnoff for us.

I put down the window and explained to an officer in a trooper hat who we were, and he went back to his car and talked to someone on a radio, then came back and said Detective Wedmore was already at the scene, expecting us. He pointed up the road, told us to look for a narrow grassy lane about one mile up that led to the left and climbed, and that we’d find her there.

We drove in slowly. It wasn’t much of a road, just gravel and dirt, and when we reached the lane it got even narrower. I turned in, heard tall grass brushing the underside of the car. We were driving uphill now, thick trees on either side, and after about a quarter of a mile the ground leveled off and the trees gave way to an open area that nearly took our breath away.

We were looking out over what appeared to be a vast canyon. About four car lengths ahead of us the ground dropped away sharply. If there was a lake down there, we couldn’t yet see it from where we sat in the car.

There were two other vehicles already there. Another Mass. State Police car and an unmarked sedan that I recognized as Wedmore’s. She was leaning up against the fender, talking to the officer from the other car.

When she saw us, she approached.

“Don’t get close,” she said to me through the open window. “It’s a hell of a drop.”

We got out of the car slowly, as if jumping out would cause the ground to give way. But it felt pretty solid, and thank God for that, given that there were now three cars up here.

“This way,” Wedmore said. “Either of you have trouble with heights?”

“A bit,” I said. I was speaking more for Cynthia than myself, but she said, “I’m fine.”

We took a few steps closer to the edge, and now we could see the water. A mini-lake, maybe eight or nine acres in size, at the bottom of a chasm. Years ago, this area had been carved out for rock and gravel, the pit left to fill with rain and springs once the aggregate company had moved on. On an overcast day like this one, it was difficult to tell what color the water might normally be. Today it was gray and lifeless.

“The map and the letter indicated that if we’re to find anything,” Wedmore said, “it’ll be right down here.” She pointed straight down the cliff we were standing atop. I felt a brief wave of vertigo.

Down below, crossing the body of water, was a yellow inflatable boat, maybe fifteen feet long with a small outboard attached to the back. In the boat were three men, two dressed in black wetsuits, diving masks, tanks on their backs.

“They had to come in from another direction,” Wedmore explained. She pointed to the far side of the quarry. “There’s another road that comes in from the north that comes up to the water’s edge, so they were able to launch their boat there. They’re looking for us,” at which point Wedmore waved to the men in the boat—not friendly, just a signal—and they waved back. “They’ll start searching below this point.”

Cynthia nodded. “What will they be looking for?” she asked.

Wedmore gave her a look that seemed to say “Duh,” but she was at least sensitive enough to realize she was dealing here with a woman who’d been through a lot. “I’d say a car. If it’s there, they’ll find it.”

The lake was too small for the wind to whip up much in the way of waves, but the men in the boat dropped a small anchor just the same to keep from drifting away from their spot. The two men in wetsuits dropped backward out of the boat and in another moment disappeared from view, a few bubbles on the surface the only evidence that they’d once been there.

A cool wind blew over the top of the cliff. I moved closer to Cynthia and slipped my arm around her. To my surprise, and relief, she did not push me away.

“How long can they stay down there?” I asked.

Wedmore shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure they have way more air than they need.”

“If they do find something, what then? Can they bring it up?”

“Depends. We might need more equipment.”

Wedmore had a radio that connected her to the man left in the boat. “What’s happening?” she asked.

In the boat, the man spoke into a small black box. “Not much so far,” a voice crackled through Wedmore’s radio. “It’s about thirty to forty feet here. Some spots, further off, even deeper.”

“Okay.”

We stood and watched. Maybe for ten, fifteen minutes. Seemed like hours.

And then two heads emerged. The divers swam over to the boat, hung their arms over the inflated rubber tube edges for support, lifted up their masks and removed from their mouths the gear that allowed them to breathe underwater. They were telling the man something.

“What are they saying?” Cynthia asked.

“Hang on,” Wedmore said, but then we saw the man pick up his radio and Wedmore grabbed hers.

“Got something,” the radio crackled.

“What?” Wedmore asked.

“Car. Been there a long time. Half buried in silt and shit.”

“Anything inside it?”

“They’re not sure. We’re going to have to get it out.”

“What kind of car?” Cynthia asked. “What does it look like?”

Wedmore relayed the question, and down in the lake, we could see the man asking the divers some questions.

“Looks sort of yellow,” the man said. “A little compact car. Can’t see the plates, though. The bumpers are buried.”

Cynthia said. “My mother’s car. It was yellow. A Ford Escort. A small car.” She collapsed against me, held on to me. “It’s them,” she said. “It’s them.”

Wedmore said, “We won’t know that for a while. We don’t even know if there’s anyone in that car.” Back into the radio, she said, “Let’s do what we have to do.”

That meant bringing in more equipment. They thought that if they brought in an oversized tow truck from the north, got it right up to the edge of the lake, they could run a cable out into the water, have the divers attach it to the submerged car, and slowly pull it out of the muck at the bottom of the lake and to the surface.