And when she thought she had enough, she decided to take a trip of her own the next time her husband Clayton went out of town. One day she drove to Milford, Connecticut. This was back, of course, before she ended up in the wheelchair. When she was mobile.
She arranged for someone to look after Jeremy for a couple of days. “Going to join my husband on the road this time,” she said. In separate cars.
“Which brings us,” Clayton said, sitting next to me, parched and taking another sip from his water bottle, “to the night in question.”
45
The first part of the story I knew from Cynthia. How she ignored her curfew. Told her parents she was at Pam’s house. How Clayton went to look for her, found her in the car with Vince Fleming, brought her home.
“She was furious,” Clayton said. “Told us she wished we were dead. Stormed up to her room, never heard another peep out of her. She was drunk. God knows what she’d had to drink. Must have fallen asleep instantly. She never should have been hanging around with a guy like Vince Fleming. His father was nothing but a common gangster.”
“I know,” I said, my hands on the wheel, driving on through the night.
“So like I said, it was quite a row. Todd, sometimes he enjoyed it when his sister got into trouble, you know how kids can be. But not this time. It was all pretty ugly. Just before I’d come back with Cynthia, he’d been asking me or Patricia to take him out to get a sheet of bristol board or something. Like every other kid in the world, he’d left some project to the very last minute, needed a sheet of this stuff for some presentation. It was already late, we didn’t know where the hell we could get something like that, but Patricia, she remembered they sold it at the drugstore, the one that was open twenty-four hours, so she said she’d take him over to get it.”
He coughed, took a sip of water. He was getting hoarse.
“But first, there was that thing Patricia had to do.” He glanced over at me. I patted my jacket, felt the envelope inside it. “And then she and Todd left, in Patricia’s car. I sat down in the living room, exhausted. I was going to have to leave in a couple of days, hit the road, spend some time in Youngstown. I always felt kind of depressed around those times, before I had to leave and go back to Enid and Jeremy.”
He looked out his window as we passed a tractor trailer.
“It seemed like Todd and his mom were gone a long time. It had been about an hour. The drugstore wasn’t that far. Then the phone rang.”
Clayton took a few breaths.
“It was Enid. Calling from a pay phone. She said, ‘Guess who.’”
“Oh God,” I said.
“It was a call that I guess, in some way, I’d always been expecting. But I couldn’t have imagined what she’d done. She told me to meet her, in the Denny’s parking lot. She told me I’d better hurry. She said there was a lot of work to be done. Told me to bring a roll of paper towels. I flew out of the house, drove over to Denny’s, thought maybe she’d be in the restaurant, but she was sitting in her car. She couldn’t get out.”
“Why?” I asked.
“She couldn’t walk around covered in that much blood and not attract attention.”
I suddenly felt very cold.
“I ran over to her window, it looked at first like her sleeves were covered in oil. She was so calm. She rolled down the window, told me to get in. I got in, and then I could see what was all over her, that it was blood. All over the sleeves of her coat, down the front of her dress. I was screaming at her, ‘What the hell have you done? What have you done?’ But I already knew what it had to be.
“Enid had been parked out front of our house. She must have gotten there a few minutes after I came home with Cynthia. She had the address from the phone bill. She would have seen my car in the driveway, but with a Connecticut plate on it. She was putting it all together. And then Patricia and Todd came out, drove off, and she followed them. By this point, she must have been blind with rage. She’d figured out that I had this whole other life, this other family.
“She followed them to the drugstore. Got out of her car, followed them into the store, pretended to be shopping for stuff herself while she kept an eye on them. She must have been stunned when she got a good look at Todd. He looked so much like Jeremy. That had to be the clincher.”
Enid left the store before Patricia and Todd. She strode back to her car. There were hardly any vehicles in the lot, no one around. Just as Enid, in later years, kept a gun at hand in the case of an emergency, back then she kept a knife in the glove compartment. She reached in and got it, ran back in the direction of the drugstore, hid around the corner, which, at that hour, was shrouded in darkness. It was a broad alleyway, used by delivery trucks.
Todd and Patricia emerged from the store. Todd had his sheet of bristol board rolled up into a huge tube and was carrying it over his shoulder like a soldier carries a rifle.
Enid emerged from the darkness. She said, “Help!”
Todd and Patricia stopped, looked at Enid.
“My daughter!” Enid said. “She’s been hurt!”
Patricia ran over to meet her, Todd followed.
Enid led them a few steps into the alley, turned to Patricia and said, “You wouldn’t happen to be Clayton’s wife, would you?”
“She must have been dumbstruck,” Clayton told me. “First this woman asks for help, then, out of the blue, asks her something like that.”
“What did she say?”
“She said yes. And then the knife came up and slashed her right across the throat. Enid didn’t wait a second. While Todd was still trying to figure out what had happened-it was dark, remember-she was on him, slashing his throat as quickly as she’d slashed his mother’s.”
“She told you all this,” I said. “Enid.”
“Many, many times,” Clayton said quietly. “She loves to talk about it. Even now. She calls it reminiscing.”
“Then what?”
“That’s when she found her way to a nearby phone booth, called me. I show up and find her in the car, and she tells me what she’s done. ‘I’ve killed them,’ she says. ‘Your wife and your son. They’re dead.’”
“She doesn’t know,” I said quietly.
Clayton nodded silently in the darkness.
“She doesn’t know you also have a daughter.”
“I guess,” Clayton said. “Maybe there was something about the symmetry of it. I had a wife and son in Youngstown, and a wife and son in Milford. A second son, who looked like the first one. It all seemed so perfectly balanced. A kind of mirror image. It led her to make certain assumptions. I could tell, the way she was talking, that she had no idea that Cynthia was still in the house, that she even existed. She hadn’t seen me come home with her.”
“And you weren’t about to tell her.”
“I was in shock, I think, but I had that much presence of mind. She started up her car, drove over to the alley, showed me their bodies. ‘You’re going to have to help me,’ she said. ‘We have to get rid of them,’ she said.”
Clayton stopped for a moment, rode the next half a mile or so without saying a word. For a second, I wondered if he had died.
Finally, I said, “Clayton, you okay?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What is it?”
“That was the moment when I could have made a difference. I had a choice I could have made, but maybe I was in too much shock to realize it, to know what was the right thing to do. I could have put an end to things right there. I could have refused to help her. I could have gone to the police. I could have turned her in. I could have put
