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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