No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [70]
Then, “Oh, sorry.”
Cynthia smiled at our girl. “How about a tuna sandwich?”
“With celery?”
“If we have any,” Cynthia said.
Grace went into the fridge, opened up the crisper. “There’s some celery, but it’s kind of soft.”
“Bring it out,” Cynthia said. “We’ll have a look.”
I hung my suit jacket on the back of a kitchen chair, loosened my tie. I didn’t have to dress this well to teach high school, and the formal attire made me feel constricted and awkward. I sat down, put everything that had happened so far that day on the back burner for a moment, and watched my two girls. Cynthia hunted up a tin of tuna and a can opener while Grace put the celery on the counter.
Cynthia drained the oil from the tuna can, dumped it into a bowl, and asked Grace to get the Miracle Whip. She went back to the fridge, brought out the jar, got the lid off, and put it on the counter. She broke off a celery stalk, waved it in the air. It was a piece of rubber.
Playfully, she hit her mother on the arm with it.
Cynthia turned and looked at her, reached over very deliberately and broke off a rubbery stalk of her own, and hit Grace back. Then they used the stalks as swords. “Take that!” said Cynthia. Then they both started to laugh, and slipped their arms around each other.
And I thought, I’ve always wondered what sort of mother Patricia was like, and the answer’s always been here right in front of me.
Later, after Grace had eaten and gone upstairs to get back into some regular clothes, Cynthia said to me, “You looked nice today.”
“You too,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Hmm?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t blame you. For Tess. I was wrong to say what I said.”
“It’s okay. I should have told you everything. Earlier.”
She looked at the floor.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, and she nodded. “Why do you think your father would have saved a clipping about a hit-and-run accident?”
“What are you talking about?” she said.
“He saved a clipping about a hit-and-run accident.”
The shoeboxes were still on the kitchen table, the clipping about fly-fishing, which included the one about the woman from Sharon who was killed by a passing motorist, her body dragged and dumped into the ditch, sitting on top.
“Let me see,” Cynthia said, rinsing off her hands and drying them off. I handed her the clipping and she accepted it delicately, like parchment. She read it. “I can’t believe I’ve never noticed it before.”
“You thought your dad saved the clipping because of the fly-fishing piece.”
“Maybe he did save it because of the fly-fishing piece.”
“I think, in part, he did,” I said. “But what I’m wondering is which came first. Did he see the story about the accident and go to clip it out, but then given his interests, he clipped the fly-fishing story with it? Or did he see the fly-fishing story, then spotted the other one, and, for some reason, clipped it, too? Or,” and I paused for a moment, “did he want to clip the hit-and-run story, but worried that clipping it alone would lead to questions should someone, like your mother, find it, but clipping it with the other story, well, that was like camouflaging it?”
Cynthia had handed the clipping back to me and said, “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“God, I don’t know,” I said.
“Every time I look through those boxes,” Cynthia said, “I keep hoping I’ll find something I’ve never noticed before. It’s frustrating, I know. You want to find an answer but it’s not there. And yet,” she said, “I keep thinking I’ll find it. Some tiny clue. Like that one piece in a jigsaw puzzle, the one that helps you place all the others.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
“This accident, this woman who got killed—what was her name again?”
“Connie Gormley,” I said. “She was twenty-seven.”
“I’ve never heard that name in my life. It doesn’t mean a thing. And what if that