No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [117]
“Terry, what’s going on? Who have you found?”
“Rolly, I’ve found her father.”
There was dead silence on the other end of the line.
“Rolly?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I…I can’t believe it.”
“Me neither.”
“What’s he told you? Has he told you what happened?”
“We’re just getting started. I’m north of Buffalo, at a hospital. He’s not in very good shape.”
“Is he talking?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you all about it when I can. But you have to look for Cynthia. If you find her, she has to call me immediately.”
“Right. I’m on it. I’m getting dressed.”
“And Rolly,” I said, “let me tell her. About her father. She’s going to have a million questions.”
“Sure. If I find out anything, I’ll call.”
I thought of one other person who might have seen Cynthia at some point. Pamela had phoned the house often enough that I’d memorized her home number from the caller ID display. I punched in the number, let it ring several times before someone picked up.
“Hello?” Pamela, sounding every bit as sleepy as Rolly. In the background, a man’s voice, saying, “What is it?”
I told Pamela who it was, quickly apologized for calling at such a terrible hour.
“Cynthia’s missing,” I said. “With Grace.”
“Jesus,” Pamela said, her voice quickly become awake. “They been kidnapped or something?”
“No no, nothing like that. She left. She wanted to get away.”
“She told me, like, yesterday, or the day before yesterday—God, what day is this?—she might not come in, so when she didn’t show up, I didn’t think anything of it.”
“I just wanted to tell you to be on the lookout for her, if she calls you, she has to get in touch with me. Pam, I found her father.”
From the other end of the line, nothing for a moment. Then, “Fuck me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He’s alive?”
I glanced at the man in the bed. “Yeah.”
“And Todd? And her mother?”
“That’s another story. Listen, Pamela, I have to go. But if you see Cyn, have her call me. But let me tell her the news.”
“Shit,” Pamela said. “Like I’m gonna be able to keep a lid on that.”
I ended the call, noticed that the phone battery was getting very weak. I’d left home in such a hurry I didn’t have anything to recharge it with, not even in the truck.
“Clayton,” I said, refocusing after all the phone chatter, “why do you think Cynthia and Grace might be in danger? Why are you thinking something might have happened to them?”
“Because of the will,” Clayton said. “I’m leaving everything to Cynthia. It’s the only way I know to make up for what I did. It doesn’t, I know, it doesn’t make up for anything, but what else can I do?”
“But what does that have to do with them being alive?” I asked, but I was already starting to figure it out. The pieces were starting, ever so gradually, to fall into place.
“If she’s dead, if Cynthia’s dead, if your daughter’s dead, then the money can’t go to them. It’ll revert back to Enid, she’ll be the surviving spouse, the only logical heir,” he whispered. “There’s no way Enid’ll let Cynthia inherit. She’ll kill both of them to make sure she gets the money.”
“But that’s crazy,” I said. “A murder—a double murder—that’d draw so much attention, police would reopen the case, they’d start looking into what happened twenty-five years ago, it could end up blowing up in Enid’s face, and then—”
I stopped myself.
A murder would attract attention. No doubt about it.
But a suicide. There wouldn’t be much attention paid to something like that. Especially not when the woman committing suicide had been under so much strain in recent weeks. A woman who had called the police to investigate the appearance of a strange hat in her house. It didn’t get much more bizarre than that. A woman who had called the police because she’d received a note telling her where she could find the bodies of her missing mother and brother. A note that had been