No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [78]
“Show it to me,” Wedmore said, slipping the phone back into her jacket.
“I could go get it,” I said. “Bring it down.”
“Just show me where it is.”
“It’s upstairs,” Cynthia said. “Come, I’ll show you.”
“Cyn,” I said, standing at the bottom of the stairs, trying to act as a barrier. “It’s a bit of a mess up there.”
“Let’s go,” Wedmore said, moving past me and up the stairs.
“First door on the left,” Cynthia said. To me, she whispered, “Why do you think she wants to see our typewriter?”
Wedmore disappeared into the room. “I don’t see it,” she said.
Cynthia was up the stairs before me, turned into the room, said, “It’s usually right there. Terry, isn’t it usually right there?”
She was pointing to my desk as I came into the room. She and Wedmore were both looking at me.
“Uh,” I said, “it was in my way, so I tucked it into the closet.”
I opened the closet door, knelt down. Wedmore was peering in, over my shoulder. “Where?” she said.
I pulled away the newspapers and the paint-splattered pants to reveal the old black Royal. I lifted it out, set it back on the desk.
“When did you put it in there?” Cynthia said.
“Just a while ago,” I said.
“Got covered up awful fast,” Wedmore said. “How do you explain that?”
I shrugged. I had nothing.
“Don’t touch it,” she said, and got her phone back out of her jacket.
Cynthia looked at me with a puzzled expression. “What’s with you? What the hell is going on?”
I wanted to ask her the same thing.
27
Rona Wedmore made several calls on her cell, most of them from out on the driveway, where we wouldn’t be able to hear what she had to say.
That left Cynthia and me, and Grace—Cynthia had been permitted by Wedmore to drive over to the school quickly to pick her up—in the house to mull over these latest developments. Grace was in the kitchen, asking who the big woman making phone calls was while she made herself an after-school snack of peanut butter on toast.
“She’s with the police,” I said. “And I don’t think she’ll take kindly to you calling her big.”
“I won’t say it to her face,” Grace said. “Why is she here? What’s going on?”
“Not now,” Cynthia told her. “Take your snack and go to your room, please.”
Once Grace had left, grumbling the whole way, Cynthia asked, “Why did you hide the typewriter? That note, it was written on your typewriter, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
She studied me a moment. “Did you write that note? Is that why you hid the typewriter?”
“Jesus, Cyn,” I said. “I hid it because I wondered whether you’d written it.”
Her eyes went wide in shock. “Me?”
“Is that any more shocking than thinking I’d written it?”
“I didn’t try to hide the typewriter, you did.”
“I was doing it to protect you.”
“What?”
“In case you had written it. I didn’t want the police to know.”
Cynthia said nothing for a moment, slowly paced the room a couple of times. “I’m trying to get my head around this, Terry. So what are you saying? Are you saying you think I wrote that note? And if I did, that I’ve always known where they were? My family? I’ve always known they’re in this quarry?”
“Not…necessarily,” I said.
“Not necessarily? Then what are you thinking, exactly?”
“Honest to God, Cyn, I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore. But the moment I saw that letter, I knew it had come from my typewriter. And I knew I hadn’t written it. That left you, unless someone else came in here and wrote it on that typewriter to, to, I don’t know, to make it look like one of us had done it.”
“We already know someone else was in here,” Cynthia said. “The hat, the e-mail. But despite that, you’d rather think I did it?”
“I’d rather not think that at all,” I said.
She looked right into my eyes, adopted a deadly serious expression. “Do you think I killed my family?” she asked.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No, I don’t.”
“But it’s crossed your mind, hasn’t it? You’ve wondered, every once in a while, whether it’s possible.”
“No,” I said. “I have not. But I have wondered, lately, whether the