No Time for Goodbye

by Linwood Barclay

  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 we’d find her there.

  We drove in slowly. It wasn’t much of a road, just gravel and dirt, and when we reached the lane it got even narrower. I turned in, heard tall grass brushing the underside of the car. We were driving uphill now, thick trees on either side, and after about a quarter of a mile the ground leveled off and the trees gave way to an open area that nearly took our breath away.

  We were looking out over what appeared to be a vast canyon. About four car lengths ahead of us the ground dropped away sharply. If there was a lake down there, we couldn’t yet see it from where we sat in the car.

  There were two other vehicles already there. Another Mass. State Police car and an unmarked sedan that I recognized as Wedmore’s. She was leaning up against the fender, talking to the officer from the other car.

  When she saw us, she approached.

  “Don’t get close,” she said to me through the open window. “It’s a hell of a drop.”

  We got out of the car slowly, as if jumping out would cause the ground to give way. But it felt pretty solid, and thank God for that, given that there were now three cars up here.

  “This way,” Wedmore said. “Either of you have trouble with heights?”

  “A bit,” I said. I was speaking more for Cynthia than myself, but she said, “I’m fine.”

  We took a few steps closer to the edge, and now we could see the water. A mini-lake, maybe eight or nine acres in size, at the bottom of a chasm. Years ago, this area had been carved out for rock and gravel, the pit left to fill with rain and springs once the aggregate company had moved on. On an overcast day like this one, it was difficult to tell what color the water might normally be. Today it was gray and lifeless.

  “The map and the letter indicated that if we’re to find anything,” Wedmore said, “it’ll be right down here.” She pointed straight down the cliff we were standing atop. I felt a brief wave of vertigo.

  Down below, crossing the body of water, was a yellow inflatable boat, maybe fifteen feet long with a small outboard attached to the back. In the boat were three men, two dressed in black wetsuits, diving masks, tanks on their backs.

  “They had to come in from another direction,” Wedmore explained. She pointed to the far side of the quarry. “There’s another road that comes in from the north that comes up to the water’s edge, so they were able to launch their boat there. They’re looking for us,” at which point Wedmore waved to the men in the boat—not friendly, just a signal—and they waved back. “They’ll start searching below this point.”

  Cynthia nodded. “What will they be looking for?” she asked.

  Wedmore gave her a look that seemed to say “Duh,” but she was at least sensitive enough to realize she was dealing here with a woman who’d been through a lot. “I’d say a car. If it’s there, they’ll find it.”

  The lake was too small for the wind to whip up much in the way of waves, but the men in the boat dropped a small anchor just the same to keep from drifting away from their spot. The two men in wetsuits dropped backward out of the boat and in another moment disappeared from view, a few bubbles on the surface the only evidence that they’d once been there.

  A cool wind blew over the top of the cliff. I moved closer to Cynthia and slipped my arm around her. To my surprise, and relief, she did not push me away.

  “How long can they stay down there?” I asked.

  Wedmore shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure they have way more air than they need.”

  “If they do find something, what then? Can they bring it up?”

  “Depends. We might need more equipment.”

  Wedmore had a radio that connected her to the man left in the boat. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  In the boat, the man spoke into a small black box. “Not much so far,” a voice crackled through Wedmore’s radio. “It’s about thirty to forty feet here. Some spots, further off, even deeper.”

  “Okay.”

  We stood and watched. Maybe for ten, fifteen minutes. Seemed like hours.

  And then two heads emerged. The divers swam over to the boat, hung their arms over the inflated rubber tube edges for support, lifted up their masks and removed from their mouths the gear that allowed them to breathe underwater. They were telling the man something.

  “What are they saying?” Cynthia asked.

  “Hang on,” Wedmore said, but then we saw the man pick up his radio and Wedmore grabbed hers.

  “Got something,” the radio crackled.

  “What?” Wedmore asked.

  “Car. Been there a long time. Half buried in silt and shit.”

  “Anything inside it?”

  “They’re not sure. We’re going to have to get it out.”

  “What kind of car?” Cynthia asked. “What does it look like?”

  Wedmore relayed the question, and down in the lake, we could see the man asking the divers some questions.

  “Looks sort of yellow,” the man said. “A little compact car. Can’t see the plates, though. The bumpers are buried.”

  Cynthia said. “My mother’s car. It was yellow. A Ford Escort. A small car.” She collapsed against me, held on to me. “It’s them,” she said. “It’s them.”

  Wedmore said, “We won’t know that for a while. We don’t even know if there’s anyone in that car.” Back into the radio, she said, “Let’s do what we have to do.”

  That meant bringing in more equipment. They thought that if they brought in an oversized tow truck from the north, got it right up to the edge of the lake, they could run a cable out into the water, have the divers attach it to the submerged car, and slowly pull it out of the muck at the bottom of the lake and to the surface.

  If that didn’t work, they’d have to bring in some sort of barge affair, take it out onto the water, position it over the car and lift it up directly from the bottom.

  “Nothing’s going to happen for a few hours,” Wedmore told us. “We’ve got to get some people up here, they’ve got to figure out how they’re going to do this. Why don’t you go someplace, head back to the highway, maybe go up to Lee, get some lunch. I’ll call your cell when it looks like something’s about to happen.”

  “No,” Cynthia said. “We should stay.”

  “Honey,” I said, “there’s nothing we can do now. Let’s go eat. We both need our strength, we need to be able to handle what may come next.”

  “What do you figure happened?” Cynthia asked.

  Wedmore said, “I guess someone drove that car right up here, where we’re standing, then ran it right off the edge of this cliff.”

  “Come on,” I said again to Cynthia. To Wedmore, “Please keep us posted.”

  We drove back down to the main road, back to Otis, then north to Lee, where we found a diner and ordered coffee. I hadn’t had much of an appetite first thing in the morning, so I ordered a midday breakfast of eggs and sausage. All Cynthia could manage was some toast.

  “So whoever wrote that note,” Cynthia said, “knew what he was talking about.”

  “Yeah,” I said, blowing on my coffee to cool it down.

  “But we don’t even know if there’s anyone in the car. Maybe the car was ditched there, to hide it. But it doesn’t mean anyone die
d in that accident.”

  “Let’s wait and see,” I said.

  We ended up waiting a couple of hours. I was on my fourth coffee when my cell phone rang.

  It was Wedmore. She gave me some directions that would get me to the lake from the north side.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “It’s gone faster than we thought,” she said, bordering on amiable. “It’s out. The car’s out.”

  The yellow Escort was already sitting on the back of a flatbed truck by the time we arrived at the site. Cynthia was out of the car before I’d come to a full stop, running toward the truck, shouting, “That’s the car! My mother’s car!”

  Wedmore grabbed hold of her before she could get close. “Let me go,” Cynthia said, struggling.

  “You can’t go near it,” the detective told her.

  The car was covered in mud and slime, and water was seeping out around the cracks of the closed doors, enough so that the interior, at least above the window line, was clear of water. But there was nothing to be seen but a couple of waterlogged headrests.

  “It’s going to the lab,” Wedmore said.

  “What did they find?” she asked. “Was there anything inside?”

  “What do you think they found?” Wedmore asked. I didn’t feel good about the way she’d asked. It was as though she thought Cynthia already knew the answer.

  “I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “I’m scared to say.”

  “There appear to be the remains of two people in there,” she said. “But as you can understand, after twenty-five years…”

  One could only imagine.

  “Two?” Cynthia said. “Not three?”

  “It’s early yet,” Wedmore said. “Like I said, we have a lot of work before us.” She paused. “And we’d like to take a buccal swab from you.”

  Cynthia did a kind of double take. “A what?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s Latin, for ‘cheek.’ We’d like to get a DNA sample from you. We take a sample from your mouth. It doesn’t hurt or anything.”

  “Because?”

  “If we’re fortunate enough to be able to recover any DNA from…what we find in the car, we’ll be able to compare it to yours. If, for example, if one of those bodies is your mother, they can do a kind of reverse maternity test. It’ll confirm if she is, in fact, your mother. Same for the other members of your family.”

  Cynthia looked at me, tears forming in her eyes. “For twenty-five years I’ve waited for some answers, and now that I’m about to get some, I’m terrified.”

  I held her. “How long?” I asked Wedmore.

  “Normally, weeks. But this is a more high-profile case, especially since there was the TV show about it. A few days, maybe just a couple. You might as well go home. I’ll have someone come by later today for the sample.”

  Heading back seemed the only logical thing to do. As we turned to walk back to our car, Wedmore called out, “And you’ll need to be available in the meantime, even before the test results come back. I’m going to have more questions.”

  There was something ominous about the way she said it.

  28

  As promised, Rona Wedmore showed up to ask questions. There were things about this case she did not like.

  That was certainly something we all had in common, although Cynthia and I didn’t feel that Wedmore was an ally.

  She did confirm one thing I already knew, however. The letter that had directed us to the quarry had been written on my typewriter. Cynthia and I had both been requested—as if there were any option—to come down to headquarters and be fingerprinted. Cynthia’s fingerprints apparently were on file. She’d provided them twenty-five years ago when police were combing her house, looking for clues to her family’s disappearance. But the police wanted them again, and I’d never been asked to provide mine before.

  They compared our prints against those on the typewriter. They found a few of Cynthia’s on the body of the machine. But the actual keys were covered with mine.

  Of course, there wasn’t much to make of that. But it didn’t support our contention, that someone had broken in to our house and written the letter on my typewriter, someone who could have been wearing gloves and left no prints behind.

  “And why would someone do that?” asked Wedmore, her hands made into fists and resting on her considerable hips. “Come into your house and use your typewriter to write that note?”

  That was a good question.

  “Maybe,” Cynthia said, very slowly, kind of thinking out loud, “whoever did it knew the note would most likely be traced back to Terry’s typewriter. They wanted it traced back to him, they wanted you to think he’d written it.”

  I thought Cynthia was on to something, with one small change. “Or you,” I said to her.

  She looked at me for a moment, not accusingly, but thinking. “Or me,” she said.

  “Again, why would anyone do that?” Wedmore, still unconvinced, asked.

  “I have no idea,” Cynthia said. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. But you know someone was here. You must have a record of it. We called the police and they came out here, they must have made a report.”

  “The hat,” Wedmore said, unable to keep the skepticism out of her voice.

  “That’s right. I can get it for you if you’d like,” Cynthia offered. “Would you like to see it?”

  “No,” Wedmore said. “I’ve seen hats before.”

  “The police thought we were nuts,” Cynthia said.

  Wedmore let that one go. It must have taken some effort on her part.

  “Mrs. Archer,” she said, “have you ever been up to the Fell’s Quarry before?”

  “No, never.”

  “Not as a girl? Not even when you were a teenager?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you were up there, and didn’t even realize it was that location. Driving around with someone, you might have gone up there to, well, to park, that kind of thing.”

  “No. I have never been up there. It’s a two-hour drive up there, for Christ’s sake. Even if some boy and I were going to go parking, we’d hardly drive two hours to get there.”

  “What about you, Mr. Archer?”

  “Me? No. And twenty-five years ago, I never even knew anyone in the Bigge family. I’m not from the Milford area. It wasn’t until college that I met Cynthia, and learned about what had happened to her, to her family.”

  “Okay, look,” Wedmore said, shaking her head. “I’m having a bit of trouble with this. A note, written in this home, on your typewriter”—she looked at me—“leads us to the very spot where your mother’s car”—she looked at Cynthia—“was found, some twenty-five years after it disappeared.”

  “I told you,” Cynthia said. “Someone was here.”

  “Well, whoever that someone was, he didn’t try to hide that typewriter. Your husband’s the one who did that.”

  I said, “Should we have a lawyer here when you’re asking these questions?”

  Wedmore pushed her tongue around the inside of her cheek. “I suppose you’d have to ask yourself whether you believe you need one.”

  “We’re the victims here,” Cynthia said. “My aunt has been murdered, you’ve found my mother’s car in a lake. And you’re talking to us—talking to me—like we’re the criminals. Well, we’re not the criminals.” She shook her head in exasperation. “It’s like, it’s like someone else has planned this all out, planned it to make it look like I’m going crazy or something. That phone call, someone putting my father’s hat in the house, that letter being written on our typewriter. Don’t you see? It’s like someone wants you to think that maybe I’m losing it, that all these things that happened in the past are making me do these things, imagine these things now.”

  That tongue moved from the inside of one cheek to the other. Finally, Wedmore said, “Mrs. Archer, have you ever thought about talking to someone? About this conspiracy that seems to be swirling around you?”

  “I am seeing a
psy—” Cynthia stopped herself.

  Wedmore smiled. “Well, there’s a shocker.”

  “I think we’ve had enough for now,” I said.

  “I’m sure we’ll be talking again,” Wedmore said.

  Very soon, as it turned out. Right after they found the body of Denton Abagnall.

  I guess I’d thought, if there were any developments in the hunt for the man we’d hired to find Cynthia’s family, we would have heard about them first from the police. But I was listening to the radio in our sewing room/study, not paying that much attention, really, but when the words “private detective” came out of the speaker, I reached over and turned up the volume.

  “Police found the man’s car in a parking garage near the Stamford Town Center,” the news reader said. “Management noticed the car had been there for several days, and when they notified police they said its registration matched that of a man police had been searching for, for about as long as the car had been there. When the trunk was forced open, the body of Denton Abagnall, who was fifty-one years old, was found inside. He died of blunt trauma to the head. Police are reviewing security video as part of their investigation. Police refused to speculate as to motive, or whether the slaying might be in any way gang related.”

  Gang related. If only.

  I found Cynthia at the far end of the backyard, just standing there, hands tucked into the pockets of her windbreaker, looking back at the house.

  “I just needed to get out,” she said as I approached. “Is everything okay?”

  I told her what I’d heard on the radio.

  I didn’t know what sort of reaction to expect, and wasn’t all that surprised when Cynthia didn’t have much of one. She said nothing for a moment, then, “I’m starting to feel numb, Terry. I don’t know what to feel anymore. Why’s all this happening to us? When’s all of this going to stop? When are we going to get our normal lives back?”

  “I know,” I said, putting my arms around her. “I know.”