No Time for Goodbye

by Linwood Barclay

  Cynthia beat me home by a couple of minutes. She was standing in the doorway, the envelope in her hand.

  I came inside and she handed it to me. There was one word—“Cynthia”—printed on the front. No stamp. It had not gone through the mail.

  “Now we’ve both touched it,” I said, suddenly realizing we were probably making all kinds of mistakes the police would give us shit for later.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Read it.”

  I took the sheet of plain business paper out of the envelope. It had been folded perfectly in thirds, like a proper letter. The back side of the sheet was a map, crudely drawn in pencil, some intersecting lines representing roads, a small town labeled “Otis,” a rough egg shape labeled “quarry lake,” and an “X” in one corner of it. There were some other notations, but I wasn’t sure what they meant.

  Cynthia, speechless, watched me take it all in.

  I flipped the sheet over and the moment I saw the typed message, I noticed something about it, something that jumped out at me, something that disturbed me very much. Even before I’d read the contents of the note, I wondered about the implications of what had caught my eye.

  But for the moment, I held my tongue, and read what it said:

  Cynthia: It’s time you knew where they were. Where they still ARE, most likely. There’s an abandoned quarry a couple of hours north of where you live, just past the Connecticut border. It’s like a lake, but not a real lake because it’s where they took out gravel and stuff. It’s real deep. Probably too deep for any kids swimming there to have found all these years. You take 8 north, cross into Mass., keep going till you get to Otis, then go east. See the map on the other side. There’s a small lane behind a row of trees that leads to the top of the quarry. You have to be careful when you get up there, because it’s really steep. Down into the quarry there. Right down there, at the bottom of that lake, that’s where you’ll find your answer.

  I flipped the sheet over again. The map showed all the details that were set out in the note.

  “That’s where they are,” Cynthia whispered, pointing to the paper in my hand. “They’re in the water.” She took in a breath. “So…they’re dead.”

  Things seemed almost blurry before my eyes. I blinked a couple of times, focused. I turned the sheet over again, reread the note, then looked at it not for what it said, but from a more technical point of view.

  It had been composed on a standard typewriter. Not on a computer. Not printed off.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, trying very hard to keep my voice controlled.

  “It was in the mail at Pamela’s,” Cynthia said. “In the mailbox. Someone left it there. The mailman didn’t bring it. It doesn’t have a stamp on it or anything.”

  “No,” I said. “Someone put it there.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have to go up there,” she said. “Today, now, we have to find out what’s there, what’s under the water.”

  “The detective, the woman who met us at the dock, Wedmore, she’s coming. We’ll talk to her about that. They’ll have police divers. But there’s something else I want to ask you about. It’s about this note. Look at it. Look at the typing—”

  “They have to get up there immediately,” Cynthia said. It was as if she thought whoever was at the bottom of that quarry might still be alive, that they might still have a bit of air left.

  I heard a car stop out front, looked out the window and saw Rona Wedmore striding up the driveway, her short, stocky frame looking capable of walking straight through the door.

  I felt a sense of panic.

  “Honey,” I said, “is there anything else you want to tell me about this note? Before the police get here? You have to be totally honest with me here.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “Don’t you see something odd about this?” I said, holding the letter in front of her. I pointed, very specifically, to one of the words in the letter. “Right here, at the beginning,” I said, pointing to “time.”

  “What?”

  The horizontal line in the “e” was faded, making it almost look like a “c.” The word almost appeared to be “timc.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cynthia said. “What do you mean, be honest with you? Of course I’m being honest with you.”

  Wedmore was mounting the front step, fist ready to knock.

  “I have to go upstairs for a moment,” I said. “Answer that, tell her I’ll be right down.”

  Before Cynthia could say another thing, I bolted up the stairs. Behind me, I heard Wedmore knock, two sharp knocks, then Cynthia open the door, the two of them exchange greetings. By then I was in the small room I use to mark papers, prepare lessons.

  My old Royal typewriter sat on the desk, beside the computer.

  I had to decide what to do with it.

  It was obvious to me that the note Cynthia was, at that moment, showing to Detective Wedmore had been written on this typewriter. The faded “e” was instantly recognizable.

  I knew that I had not typed that letter.

  I knew Grace could not have done it.

  That left only two other possibilities. The stranger we had reason to believe had entered our home had used my typewriter to write that note, or Cynthia had typed it herself.

  But we’d had the locks changed. I was as sure as I could be that no one had been in this house in the last few days who wasn’t supposed to be here.

  It seemed unthinkable that Cynthia had done this. But what if…what if, under what could only be described as unimaginable stress, Cynthia had written this note, which was directing us to a remote location where supposedly we would learn the fate of the members of Cynthia’s family?

  What if Cynthia had typed it up, and what happened if it turned out to be right?

  “Terry!” Cynthia shouted. “Detective Wedmore is here!”

  “In a minute!” I said.

  What would that mean? What would it mean if Cynthia somehow actually knew, all these years, where her family could be found?

  I was breaking into a sweat.

  Maybe, I told myself, she’d repressed memories. Maybe she knew more than she was aware. Yes, that could be it. She saw what happened, but forgot it. Didn’t that happen? Didn’t the brain sometimes decide, Hey, what you’re seeing is so horrible, you have to forget it, otherwise you’ll never be able to get on with your life? Wasn’t there an actual syndrome they talked about that covered this sort of thing?

  And then again, what if it wasn’t a repressed memory? What if she’d always known—

  No.

  No, it had to be another explanation altogether. Someone else had used our typewriter. Days ago. Planning ahead. That stranger who’d come into the house and left the hat.

  If it was a stranger.

  “Terry!”

  “Right there!”

  “Mr. Archer!” Detective Wedmore shouted. “Haul it down here, please.”

  I acted on impulse. I opened the closet, picked up the typewriter—God, those old machines were heavy—and put it inside, on the floor. Then I draped some other things over it, an old pair of pants I’d used to paint in, a stack of old newspapers.

  As I came down the stairs, I saw that Wedmore was now with Cynthia in the living room. The letter was on the coffee table, open, Wedmore leaning over it, reading it.

  “You touched this,” she scolded me.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve both touched it. Your wife, that I could understand—she didn’t know what it was when she took it out. What’s your excuse?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran my hand over my mouth and chin, tried to wipe away the sweat I was sure would betray my nervousness.

  “You can get divers, right?” Cynthia said. “You can get divers to go into the quarry, see what’s there.”

  “This could be a crank,” Wedmore said, taking a strand of hair that ha
d fallen in front of her eye and tucking it behind her ear. “Could be nothing.”

  “That’s true,” I offered.

  “But then again,” the detective said, “we don’t know.”

  “If you don’t send in divers, I’ll go in myself,” Cynthia said.

  “Cyn,” I said. “don’t be ridiculous. You don’t even swim.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Mrs. Archer,” Wedmore said, “calm down.” It was an order. Wedmore had a kind of football coach thing going on.

  “Calm down?” said Cynthia, unintimidated. “You know what this person, who wrote this letter, is saying? They’re down there. Their bodies are down there.”

  “I’m afraid,” Wedmore said, shaking her head skeptically, “that there might be a lot down there after all these years.”

  “Maybe they’re in a car,” Cynthia said. “My mother’s car, my father’s car, they were never found.”

  Wedmore took a corner of the letter between two brilliant red-polished fingernails and turned it over. She stared at the map.

  “We’ll have to get the Mass. State Police in on this,” she said. “I’ll make a call.” She reached into her jacket for her cell phone, opened it up, prepared to put in a number.

  “You’re going to get some divers?” Cynthia said.

  “I’m making a call. And we’re going to have to get that letter to our lab, see if they can get anything off it, if it hasn’t already been made pretty useless.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cynthia said.

  “Interesting,” Wedmore said, “that it was done on a typewriter. Hardly anyone uses typewriters.”

  I felt my heart in my mouth. And then Cynthia said something I couldn’t believe I was hearing.

  “We have a typewriter,” she said.

  “You do?” Wedmore said, holding off before entering the last number.

  “Terry still likes to use one, right, honey? For short notes, that kind of thing. It’s a Royal, isn’t it, Terry?” To Wedmore, she said, “He’s had it since his college days.”

  “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 stress of what you’ve been through, what you’ve had to carry all these years, has made you…” I could feel the eggshells cracking under my shoes, “…think, or perceive things, or maybe even do things, in a way that’s not been, I don’t know, totally rational.”

  “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?