No Time for Goodbye

by Linwood Barclay

  Clayton had the passenger door of the Honda open and was slowly getting to his feet. I could see under the car, spotted his shoes, his sockless ankles as he struggled to stand. Granules of windshield glass fell from his trousers to the ground.

  “Get back in the car, Dad,” Jeremy said.

  “What?” Enid said. “He’s here?” She caught sight of him in the passenger door mirror. “For Christ’s sake!” she said. “You stupid old coot! Who let you out of the hospital?”

  Slowly he shuffled his way toward the Impala. When he got to the back of the car, he placed his hands on the trunk, steadied himself, caught his breath. He appeared to be on the verge of collapse. “Don’t do this, Enid,” he wheezed.

  Then Cynthia’s voice: “Dad?”

  “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. He tried to smile. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about all this.”

  “Dad?” she said again. Incredulous. I couldn’t see Cynthia’s face from my position, but I could imagine how shocked she must have looked.

  Evidently, while Jeremy and Enid had somehow managed to abduct Cynthia and Grace and get them up here above the quarry, they had not bothered to bring them up to speed.

  “Son,” Clayton said to Jeremy, “you have to put an end to this. Your mother, she’s wrong to drag you into this, make you do all these bad things. Look at her.” He was telling Jeremy to look at Cynthia. “That’s your sister. Your sister. And that little girl, she’s your niece. If you help your mother do what she wants you to do, you’ll be no better a man than me.”

  “Dad,” said Jeremy, still crouched around the front of the Impala, “why are you leaving everything to her? You don’t even know her. How could you be so mean to me and Mom?”

  Clayton sighed. “It’s not always about the two of you,” he said.

  “Shut up!” Enid snipped.

  “Jeremy!” I called out. “Get rid of the gun. Give it up.” I had both hands wrapped around Vince’s weapon and was lying there in the grass. I didn’t know the first thing about guns, but I knew I needed to hold on to it as tightly as I could.

  He rose up from his hiding spot in front of the Impala, fired. Dirt kicked up just to my right, and I instinctively rolled left.

  Cynthia screamed again.

  I heard fast-moving steps along the gravel. Jeremy was running, closing in on me. I stopped rolling, aimed up at the figure closing in on me, fired. But it went wide and before I could shoot again Jeremy kicked at the gun, the toe of his shoe slamming into the back of my right hand.

  I lost my grip. The gun flew off into the grass.

  His next kick caught me in the side, in my rib cage. The pain shot through me like a bolt of lightning. I’d barely registered that pain when he rammed his foot into me again, this time with enough force that I rolled over onto my back. Bits of dirt and grass stuck to my cheek.

  But that still wasn’t enough for him. There was one last kick.

  I couldn’t catch my breath. Jeremy stood over me, looking down with contempt, as I gasped for air.

  “Shoot him!” Enid said. “If you won’t do it, give me back my gun and I’ll do it myself.”

  He still had the gun in his hand, but he just stood there with it. He could have put a bullet in my brain as easily as dropping a coin into a parking meter, but the resolve was not there.

  I was starting to get some air into my lungs, my breathing was returning to normal, but I was in tremendous pain. A couple of cracked ribs, I was sure of it.

  Clayton, still using the trunk to support himself, looked at me, his eyes filled with sadness. I could almost read his thoughts. We tried, he seemed to be saying. We gave it our best shot. We meant well. And the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  I rolled over onto my stomach, slowly got to my knees. Jeremy found my gun in the grass, picked it up, tucked it into the back of his trousers. “Get up,” he said to me.

  “Are you not listening?” Enid screamed. “Shoot him!”

  “Momma,” he said, “maybe it makes more sense to put him in the car. With the others.”

  She thought about that. “No,” she said. “That doesn’t work. They have to go into the lake without him. It’s better that way. We’ll have to kill him someplace else.”

  Clayton, using his hands, one over the other, was moving up along the side of the Impala. He still appeared on the verge of collapse.

  “I…I think I’m going to pass out,” he said.

  “You stupid bastard!” Enid shouted at him. “You should have stayed in the hospital and died there.” She was having to move her neck around so much, trying to keep track of what was going on, I thought it might snap. I could see the handles of her wheelchair rising above the sills of the back door windows. The ground was too bumpy, too uneven, to bother getting it out so she could move around.

  Jeremy was forced to choose between keeping an eye on me and running over to help his father. He decided to attempt both.

  “You don’t move,” he said, keeping the gun pointed in my direction as he backstepped over to the Impala. He was about to open the back door so his father could sit down, but it was filled with the wheelchair, so he opened the driver’s door.

  “Sit down,” Jeremy said, glancing from his father to me and back again. Clayton shuffled the extra couple of steps, then slowly dropped himself into the seat.

  “I need some water,” he said.

  “Oh, stop complaining,” Enid said. “For Christ’s sake. It’s always something with you.”

  I’d managed to struggle to my feet now, and was coming up alongside Cynthia’s car. She was in the driver’s seat, Grace next to her. I couldn’t quite tell from where I was standing, but they were sitting so rigidly, they had to be tied in somehow.

  “Honey,” I said.

  Cynthia’s eyes were bloodshot, her cheeks streaked with dried tears. Grace, on the other hand, was still crying. Damp lines ran down her cheek.

  “He said he was Todd,” Cynthia told me. “He’s not Todd.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know. But that is your father.”

  Cynthia looked to her right at the man sitting in the front of the Impala, then back to me.

  “No,” she said. “He might look like him, but he’s not my father. Not anymore.”

  Clayton, who had heard the exchange, let his head fall toward his chest in shame. Without looking at Cynthia, he said, “You’re entitled to feel that way. I know I would, if I was you. All I can tell you is how sorry I am, but I’m not so old and foolish as to think you’ll forgive. I’m not even sure you should.”

  “You get away from the car,” Jeremy warned me, coming around the front of Cynthia’s Corolla, the gun pointed my way. “You stand back over there.”

  “How could you do it?” Enid said to Clayton. “How could you leave everything to that bitch?”

  “I’d told the lawyer you weren’t to see it before I died,” Clayton said. He nearly smiled, and said, “Guess I’m going to have to look for a new lawyer.”

  “It was his secretary,” Enid said. “He was on vacation, I dropped by, said you wanted to take another look at it, up in the hospital. So she shows it to me. You ungrateful son of a bitch. I give up my whole life for you and this is the thanks I get.”

  “Should we do it, Mom?” Jeremy asked. He was standing by Cynthia’s door, preparing, I figured, to lean in through the window, turn the ignition, slap it into drive or neutral, pull himself back through the window, and watch the car roll over the edge.

  “Hey, Mom,” Jeremy said, more slowly this time, “shouldn’t they be untied? Won’t it look funny if they’re tied up in the car? Doesn’t it have to look like my…you know…like she did it on her own?”

  “What are you blathering on about?” Enid shouted.

  “Should I knock them out first?” Jeremy asked.

  I couldn’t think of much else to do but rush him. Try to grab his gun, turn it on him. I might end up getting shot myself, would probably end up dead, but if that meant savi
ng my wife and my daughter, it didn’t seem like that bad a deal. Once Jeremy was out of the way, there wouldn’t be anything Enid could do, not without the use of her legs. Eventually, Cynthia and Grace would be able to free themselves, get away.

  “You know what?” Enid said, ignoring Jeremy and turning her attention to Clayton. “You never appreciated anything I did for you. You were an ungrateful bastard from the moment I first met you. A miserable, useless good-for-nothing. And on top of that, unfaithful.” Enid shook her head disapprovingly. “That’s the worst sin of all.”

  “Mom?” Jeremy said again. He had one hand on Cynthia’s door, the other still pointing the gun at me.

  Maybe when he leaned in, I thought. He’d have to turn his back to me, at least for a second. But what if he managed to knock Cynthia and Grace out, put the car into gear before I got to him? I might get the drop on him but not in time to stop the car from rolling off the edge.

  It had to be now. I had to rush him—

  And then I heard a car starting.

  It was the Impala.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Enid screamed at Clayton, sitting in the driver’s seat. “Turn that off!”

  But Clayton wasn’t paying any attention to her. He turned, calmly, to his left. He had a small smile on his face. He looked almost serene. The Impala was right alongside Cynthia’s Toyota, and he nodded at his daughter and said, “I never, ever stopped loving you, or ever stopped thinking about you and your mother and Todd.”

  “Clayton!” Enid screamed.

  And then Clayton looked at Grace, her eyes just visible above the door. “I wish I could have gotten to know you, Grace, but I know without a doubt that with a mother like Cynthia, you are very, very special.”

  Then Clayton gave his attention to Enid. “So long, you miserable old cunt,” he said, and dropped the car into gear and hit the gas.

  The engine roared. The Impala bolted forward toward the edge.

  “Momma!” Jeremy screamed, and ran around the front of Cynthia’s car and into the path of the Impala, as if he thought he could stop it with his own body. Maybe Jeremy thought at first that the car was only rolling, as if Clayton had shoved it by accident into neutral.

  But that wasn’t the case at all. Clayton was trying to see how fast he could go from zero to sixty in the thirty feet he had between himself and the quarry’s edge.

  The car threw Jeremy up onto the hood, and that’s where he was when the Impala, with Clayton at the wheel and Enid screaming in the seat next to him, shot out over the edge.

  It was about two seconds before we heard the splash.

  49

  I had to move Clayton’s windshield-shattered Honda out of the way to make room to get out of there in Cynthia’s Toyota. She got in the back so she could sit with her arms around Grace for the long drive back south to Milford.

  I knew we should probably have called the police, waited there at the top of the quarry for them to arrive, but we thought the most important thing was to get Grace home, where she would feel the most safe, as quickly as possible. Clayton and Enid and Jeremy weren’t going anywhere. They’d still be at the bottom of that lake when we gave Rona Wedmore a call.

  Cynthia wanted me to get to a hospital, and there was no doubt in my mind that I needed one. Both my sides were in intense pain, but it was mitigated by an overwhelming sense of relief. Once I had Cynthia and Grace home, I’d head over to Milford Hospital.

  We didn’t talk a lot on the drive back. I think Cynthia and I were on the same page—that we didn’t want to go over what had happened, not just today but twenty-five years ago—in front of Grace. Grace had been through enough. She just needed to get home.

  But I did manage to get the rough details of what had happened. Cynthia and Grace had driven to Winsted, met Jeremy at the McDonald’s lot. He had a surprise, he told them. He had brought along his mother. The inference being, of course, that he had brought along Patricia Bigge.

  Cynthia, dumbstruck, was taken over to the Impala, and once she and Grace were in the car, Enid held her gun on Grace. Told Cynthia to drive the car to the quarry or she’d kill Grace. Jeremy followed in Cynthia’s car.

  Once on the precipice, Cynthia and Grace were tied into the front seats in preparation for their trip over the side.

  Then Clayton and I arrived.

  Almost as briefly, I told Cynthia what I’d learned. About my trip to Youngstown. Finding her father in the hospital. The story of what happened the night her family disappeared.

  Vince Fleming getting shot.

  I would call, the moment I got home, to see how he was doing. I didn’t want to have to go into school and face Jane Scavullo, tell her that the only man in years who’d been decent to her was dead.

  As far as the police were concerned, I hoped to Christ Wedmore believed everything I was going to tell her. I don’t know that I would have, if it hadn’t actually happened to me.

  Something still wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t shake the memory of Jeremy standing over me, gun in hand, unable to pull the trigger. He certainly hadn’t shown that kind of hesitation where Tess Berman was concerned. Or Denton Abagnall.

  They’d both been murdered in, well, “cold blood” I guess the phrase is.

  What was it that Jeremy had said to his mother? While he stood over me? “I’ve never killed anyone before.”

  Yeah, that was it.

  When we passed through Winsted again, we asked Grace whether she wanted something to eat, but she shook her head no. She wanted to go home. Cynthia and I exchanged worried glances. We would take Grace to see a doctor. She’d been through a traumatic incident. She might be suffering from mild shock. But before long, she was asleep, and gave no indication that she was having nightmares.

  A couple of hours later, we were home. As we made the turn into our street, I saw Rona Wedmore’s car in front of our house, parked at the curb, with her behind the wheel. When she spotted our car, she got out, eyeing us sternly with arms folded as we turned in to the driveway. She was waiting for me by the car when I opened my door, ready, I suspected, to start peppering me with questions.

  Her expression softened when she saw me wince as I slowly got out of the driver’s seat. I hurt like hell.

  “What happened to you?” she asked. “You look awful.”

  “That’s pretty much how I feel,” I said, touching one of my wounds gingerly. “I took a few kicks from Jeremy Sloan.”

  “Where is he?” Wedmore asked.

  I smiled to myself and opened the back door and, even though a couple of my ribs felt as though they were about to snap, took a sleeping Grace into my arms to carry her into the house.

  “Let me,” Cynthia said, now out of the car herself.

  “It’s okay,” I said, taking Grace to the front door as Cynthia ran ahead to unlock it. Rona Wedmore was trailing us into the house.

  “I can’t carry her anymore,” I said, the pain becoming excruciating.

  “The couch,” Cynthia said.

  I managed to set her down there gently, even though I felt I was going to drop her, and despite all the jostling and talking, she didn’t wake up. Once she was on the couch, Cynthia tucked some throw pillows under her head and found an afghan to throw over her.

  Wedmore was still just watching, courteously giving us a moment. Once Cynthia had tucked the afghan around Grace, the three of us rendezvoused in the kitchen.

  “You look like you need to see a doctor,” Wedmore said.

  I nodded.

  “Where’s Sloan?” she asked again. “If he assaulted you, we’ll have him arrested.”

  I leaned up against the counter. “You’re going to need to call in your divers again,” I said.

  I told her pretty much all of it. How Vince had spotted what was wrong with that old newspaper clipping, how that had led us to Sloan and Youngstown, my finding Clayton Sloan in the hospital, Jeremy and Enid’s abduction of Cynthia and Grace.

  The car going over the cliff and down int
o the quarry, taking Clayton and Enid and Jeremy along for the ride.

  There was only one small part I’d left out, because it was still troubling me, and I wasn’t sure what it meant. Although I had an inkling.

  “Well,” Rona Wedmore said, “that’s quite a story.”

  “It is,” I said. “If I were going to make something up, trust me, I’d have come up with something more believable.”

  “I’ll want to talk to Grace about this, too,” Wedmore said.

  “Not now,” Cynthia said. “She’s been through enough. She’s exhausted.”

  Wedmore nodded silently. Then, “I’ll make some calls, see about the divers, be back later this afternoon.” To me, “You get over to Milford Hospital. I could drop you off if you like.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go in a little while, call a cab if I have to.”

  Wedmore left, and Cynthia said she was heading upstairs to try to make herself look half respectable again. Wedmore’s car had only been gone a minute when I heard another one pull into the drive. I opened the front door as Rolly, wearing a long jacket over a blue plaid shirt and blue slacks, reached the step.

  “Terry!” he said.

  I put a finger to my lips. “Grace is sleeping,” I said. I motioned for him to follow me into the kitchen.

  “So you found them?” he said. “Cynthia too?”

  I nodded as I went hunting for Advils in the pantry. I found the container, shook some out into my hand, and ran a glass of cold water from the tap.

  “You look hurt,” Rolly said. “Some people will do anything to get a long-term leave.”

  I almost laughed, but it hurt too much. I popped three pills into my mouth, had a long drink of water.

  “So,” Rolly said. “So.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So you found her father,” he said. “You found Clayton.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s amazing,” he said. “That you found him. That Clayton’s still around, still alive, after all these years.”

  “Isn’t it, though,” I said. I held back telling Rolly that while Clayton had been alive all these years, he was no longer.