“Please, please have gone home,” I said under my breath. The phone rang once, twice, a third time. On the fourth ring, it went to voicemail.
“Cynthia,” I said, “if you come home, if you get this, you’ve got to call me immediately. It’s an emergency.”
I ended the call and then tried her cell. It went to voicemail immediately. I left her pretty much the same message, but added, “You
“Where is she?” Clayton asked.
“I don’t know,” I said uneasily. I considered, briefly, calling Rona Wedmore, decided against it, called another number. I had to let it ring five times before there was an answer.
A pickup, then throat clearing, then, “Hello?” Sleepy.
“Rolly,” I said. “It’s Terry.”
Clayton, hearing the name “Rolly,” blinked.
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Rolly said. “No problem. I’d just turned out the light. You’ve found Cynthia?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ve found someone else.”
“What?”
“Listen, I don’t have time to explain, but I need you to find Cynthia. I don’t know what to tell you, or where to have you start. Go by the house, see if her car’s there. If it is, bang on the door, break in if you have to, see if she and Grace are there. Start calling hotels, I don’t know, anything you can think of.”
“Terry, what’s going on? Who have you found?”
“Rolly, I’ve found her father.”
There was dead silence on the other end of the line.
“Rolly?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I…I can’t believe it.”
“Me neither.”
“What’s he told you? Has he told you what happened?”
“We’re just getting started. I’m north of Buffalo, at a hospital. He’s not in very good shape.”
“Is he talking?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you all about it when I can. But you have to look for Cynthia. If you find her, she has to call me immediately.”
“Right. I’m on it. I’m getting dressed.”
“And Rolly,” I said, “let me tell her. About her father. She’s going to have a million questions.”
“Sure. If I find out anything, I’ll call.”
I thought of one other person who might have seen Cynthia at some point. Pamela had phoned the house often enough that I’d memorized her home number from the caller ID display. I punched in the number, let it ring several times before someone picked up.
“Hello?” Pamela, sounding every bit as sleepy as Rolly. In the background, a man’s voice, saying, “What is it?”
I told Pamela who it was, quickly apologized for calling at such a terrible hour.
“Cynthia’s missing,” I said. “With Grace.”
“Jesus,” Pamela said, her voice quickly become awake. “They been kidnapped or something?”
“No no, nothing like that. She left. She wanted to get away.”
“She told me, like, yesterday, or the day before yesterday-God, what day is this?-she might not come in, so when she didn’t show up, I didn’t think anything of it.”
“I just wanted to tell you to be on the lookout for her, if she calls you, she has to get in touch with me. Pam, I found her father.”
From the other end of the line, nothing for a moment. Then, “Fuck me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He’s alive?”
I glanced at the man in the bed. “Yeah.”
“And Todd? And her mother?”
“That’s another story. Listen, Pamela, I have to go. But if you see Cyn, have her call me. But let me tell her the news.”
“Shit,” Pamela said. “Like I’m gonna be able to keep a lid on that.”
I ended the call, noticed that the phone battery was getting very weak. I’d left home in such a hurry I didn’t have anything to recharge it with, not even in the truck.
“Clayton,” I said, refocusing after all the phone chatter, “why do you think Cynthia and Grace might be in danger? Why are you thinking something might have happened to them?”
“Because of the will,” Clayton said. “I’m leaving everything to Cynthia. It’s the only way I know to make up for what I did. It doesn’t, I know, it doesn’t make up for anything, but what else can I do?”
“But what does that have to do with them being alive?” I asked, but I was already starting to figure it out. The pieces were starting, ever so gradually, to fall into place.
“If she’s dead, if Cynthia’s dead, if your daughter’s dead, then the money can’t go to them. It’ll revert back to Enid, she’ll be the surviving spouse, the only logical heir,” he whispered. “There’s no way Enid’ll let Cynthia inherit. She’ll kill both of them to make sure she gets the money.”
“But that’s crazy,” I said. “A murder-a double murder-that’d draw so much attention, police would reopen the case, they’d start looking into what happened twenty-five years ago, it could end up blowing up in Enid’s face, and then-”
I stopped myself.
A murder would attract attention. No doubt about it.
But a suicide. There wouldn’t be much attention paid to something like that. Especially not when the woman committing suicide had been under so much strain in recent weeks. A woman who had called the police to investigate the appearance of a strange hat in her house. It didn’t get much more bizarre than that. A woman who had called the police because she’d received a note telling her where she could find the bodies of her missing mother and brother. A note that had been composed on a typewriter in her own home.
A woman like that who killed herself, well, it wasn’t hard to figure out what that was about. It was about guilt. Guilt she must have lived with for a very long time. After all, how else did one explain her being able to direct police to that car in the quarry if she hadn’t known, all these years, that it was there? What possible motive would anyone else have for sending along a note like that?
A woman this overwhelmed with guilt, would it be any surprise if she took her daughter’s life along with her own?
Could that be what was in the works?
“What?” Clayton asked me. “What are you thinking?”
What if Jeremy had come to Milford to watch us? What if he’d been spying on us for weeks, following Grace to school? Watching us at the mall? From the street out front of our house? Getting into our home one day when we were careless, then leaving with the spare house key so he could get in whenever he wanted. And on one of those trips-I recalled my discovery during Abagnall’s final visit to our house-tossing the key back into the cutlery drawer so we’d think we’d just misplaced it. Leaving that hat. Learning our e-mail address. Writing a note on my typewriter, leading Cynthia to the bodies of her mother and brother…
All these things could have been accomplished before we had the locks changed, the new deadbolts installed.
I gave my head a slight shake. I felt I was getting ahead of myself. It all seemed so incredible, so diabolical.
Had Jeremy been setting the stage? And was he now returning to Youngstown to pick up his mother, so that he could take her back to Milford to watch the final act?
“I need you to tell me everything,” I whispered to Clayton. “Everything that happened that night.”
“It was never supposed to happen like this…” he said, more to himself than me. “I couldn’t go see her. I promised not to, to protect her… Even after I died, when Enid found out she was getting nothing…there was a sealed envelope, only to be opened after I was dead and buried… It explained everything. They’d arrest Enid, Cynthia would be safe…”
