No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [79]
“Oh,” Cynthia said.
“Like when I saw that the letter had been done on my typewriter, I thought, could you have done this as a way to get the police interested in the case again, to do something, to try to solve it once and for all?”
“So I’d send them on a wild-goose chase? Why would I pick that spot, that particular place?”
“I don’t know.”
Someone rapped on the wall outside our room and Detective Rona Wedmore stepped into the door. I had no idea how long she had been standing there, how long she might have been listening.
“It’s a go,” she said. “We’re sending in divers.”
It was set up for the following day. A police diving squad was to be on site at 10 a.m. Cynthia walked Grace to school and arranged for one of the neighbors to meet her at the end of the day and take her back to her house in the event we weren’t home in time.
I called the school again, got Rolly, said I would not be in.
“Jesus, what now?” he asked.
I told him where we were off to, that divers were going into the quarry.
“God, my heart goes out to you guys,” he said. “It never ends. Why don’t I get someone to cover your classes for the next week. I know a couple of recently retired teachers who could come in, do a short-term thing.”
“Not the one who stammers. The kids ate her alive.” I paused. “Hey, this is kind of out of the blue, but let me bounce something off you.”
“Shoot.”
“Does the name Connie Gormley mean anything to you?”
“Who?”
“She was killed a few months before Clayton and Patricia and Todd vanished. Upstate. Looked like a hit-and-run, but wasn’t, exactly.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rolly said. “What do you mean, it looked like a hit-and-run but wasn’t? And what could that possibly have to do with Cynthia’s family?”
He almost sounded annoyed. My problems, and the conspiracies whirling around them, were starting to wear him down just as they had me.
“I don’t know that it does. I’m just asking. You knew Clayton. Did he ever mention anything about an accident or anything?”
“No. Not that I can remember. And I’m pretty sure I’d remember something like that.”
“Okay. Look, thanks for getting someone for my classes. I owe you.”
Cynthia and I hit the road shortly after that. It was more than a two-hour drive north. Before the police took away the anonymous letter in a plastic evidence bag, we copied the map onto another piece of paper so we’d know where we were going. Once we were on our way, we didn’t want to stop for coffee or anything else. We just wanted to get there.
You might have thought that we’d have been talking nonstop all the way up, speculating about what the divers might find, what it might mean, but in fact we hardly said anything at all. But I imagined we were both doing a lot of thinking. What Cynthia was thinking, I could only guess. But my mind was all over the place. What would they find in the quarry? If there were actually bodies down there, would they be Cynthia’s family? Would there be anything to indicate who’d put them there?
And was that person, or persons, still walking around?
We headed east once we passed Otis, which really isn’t a town, but a few houses and businesses spaced out along the meandering two-lane road that eventually winds its way up to Lee and the Mass Turnpike. We were hunting for Fell’s Quarry Road, which was supposed to run off to the north, but we didn’t have to look that hard for it. There were two cars with Massachusetts state troopers marking the turnoff for us.
I put down the window and explained to an officer in a trooper hat who we were, and he went back to his car and talked to someone on a radio, then came back and said Detective Wedmore was already at the scene, expecting us. He pointed up the road, told us to look for a narrow grassy lane about one mile up that led to the left and climbed, and that