No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [132]
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