No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [130]
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