an end to all the madness then and there.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I already felt like a guilty man. I was leading a double life. I’d have been ruined. I’d have been disgraced. I’m sure I would have been charged. Not in the deaths of Patricia and Todd. But being married to more than one woman, unless you’re a Mormon or something, I think they have laws against that. I had false ID, that probably constituted fraud or misrepresentation somewhere along the line, although I never meant to break the law. I always tried to live right, to be a moral man.”
I glanced over at him.
“And of course, the other thing was, she could probably tell what I was thinking, and she said if I called the police, she’d tell them she was only helping me. That it was my idea, that I forced her to go along. And so I helped her. God forgive me, I helped her. We put Patricia and Todd back into the car, but left the driver’s seat empty. I had an idea. About a place where we could put the car, with them inside. A quarry. Just off the route I often took going back and forth. One time, heading back to Youngstown, I started driving around aimlessly, not wanting to go back, found this road that led to the top of the cliff that looked down into this abandoned gravel pit. There was this small lake. I stood there for quite a while, thought about throwing myself off the edge. But in the end, I continued on. I thought, given that I’d be falling into water, there was a chance I might survive.”
He coughed, took a sip.
“We had to leave one car in the lot. I drove Patricia’s Escort, drove the two and a half hours north in the middle of the night, Enid following me in her car. Took a while, but I found that road to the quarry again, got the car up there, jammed a rock up against the accelerator with the car in neutral, reached in and put it in drive and jumped back, and the car went over the edge. Heard it hit the water a couple of seconds later. Wasn’t much I could see. Looking down, it was so dark I couldn’t even see the car disappear beneath the surface.”
He was winded, gave himself a few seconds to catch his breath.
“Then we had to drive back, pick up the other car. Then we turned around again, both of us, in the two cars, headed back to Youngstown. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to Cynthia, to leave her a note, anything. I just had to disappear.”
“When did she find out?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“When did Enid find out she’d missed one? That she hadn’t totally wiped out your other family?”
“A few days later. She’d been watching the news, hoping to catch something, but the story wasn’t covered much by the Buffalo stations or papers. I mean, it wasn’t a murder. There were no bodies. There wasn’t even any blood in the alley by the drugstore. There was a rainstorm later that morning, washed everything away. But she went to the library-there wasn’t that Internet then, of course-and started checking out-of-town and out-of-state papers, and she spotted something. ‘Girl’s Family Vanishes,’ I think the headline was. She came home, I’d never seen her so mad. Smashing dishes, throwing things. She was completely insane. Took her a couple of hours to finally settle down.”
“But she had to live with it,” I said.
“She wasn’t going to at first. She started packing, to go to Connecticut, to finish her off. But I stopped her.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I made a pact with her. A promise. I told her I would never leave her, never do anything like this again, that I would never, ever, attempt to get in touch with my daughter, if she would just spare her life. ‘This is all I ask,’ I said to her. ‘Let her live, and I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you, for betraying you.’”
“And she accepted that?”
“Grudgingly. But I think it always niggled at her, like an itch you can’t reach. A job not done. But now, there’s an urgency. Knowing about the will, knowing that if I die before she can kill Cynthia, she’ll lose everything.”
“So what did you do? You just went on?”
“I stopped traveling. I got a different job, started up my own company, worked from home or just down the road in Lewiston. Enid made it very clear that I was not to travel anymore. She wasn’t going to be made a fool of again. Sometimes I’d think about running away, going back, grabbing Cynthia, telling her everything, taking her to Europe, hiding out there, living under different names. But I knew I’d screw it up, probably end up leaving a trail, getting her killed. And it’s not so easy, getting a fourteen-year-old to do what you want her to do. And so I stayed with Enid. We had a bond now that was stronger than the best marriage in the world. We’d committed a heinous crime together.” He paused. “Till death do us part.”
“And the police, they never questioned you, never suspected a thing.”
“Never. I kept waiting. The first year, that was the worst. Every time I heard a car pull into the drive, I figured this was it. And then a second year went by, and a third, and before you knew it, it had been ten years. You think, if you’re dying a little each day, how does life manage to stretch out so long?”
“You must have done some traveling,” I said.
“No, never again.”
“You were never back in Connecticut?”
“I’ve never set foot in that state since that night.”
“Then how did you get the money to Tess? To help her look after Cynthia, to help pay for her education?”
Clayton studied me for several seconds. He’d told me so much on this trip that had shocked me, but this appeared to be the first time I’d been able to surprise him.
“And who did you hear that from?” he asked.
“Tess told me,” I said. “Only recently.”
“She couldn’t have told you it was from me.”
“She didn’t. She told me about receiving the money, and while she had her suspicions, she never knew who it was from.”
Clayton said nothing.
“It was from you, wasn’t it?” I asked. “You squirreled some money away for Cynthia, kept Enid from finding out, just like you did when you were setting up a second household.”
“Enid got suspicious. Years later. Looked like we were going to get audited, Enid brought in an accountant, went through years of old returns. They found an irregularity. I had to make up a story, tell them I’d been siphoning off money because of a gambling problem. But she didn’t believe it. She threatened to go to Connecticut, kill Cynthia like she should have years ago, if I didn’t tell her the truth. So I told her, about sending money to Tess, to help with Cynthia’s education. But I’d kept my word, I said. I never got in touch with her, so far as Cynthia knew, I was dead.”
“So Enid, she’s nursed a grudge against Tess all these years, too.”
“She despised her for getting money she believed belonged to her. The two women she hated most in the world, and she’d never met either one of them.”
“So,” I said, “this story of yours, that you’ve never been back to Connecticut, even if you didn’t actually see Cynthia, that’s bullshit then.”
“No,” he said. “That’s the truth.”
And I thought about that for a while as we continued to drive on through the night.
46
Finally, I said, “I know you didn’t mail the money to Tess. It didn’t show up in her mailbox with a stamp on it. And you didn’t FedEx it. There’d be an envelope stuffed with cash in her car, another time she found it tucked into her morning newspaper.”
Clayton acted as though he couldn’t hear me.
“So if you didn’t mail it, and you didn’t deliver it yourself,” I said, “then you must have had someone do it for you.”
Clayton remained impassive. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back on the headrest, as though sleeping. But I wasn’t buying it.
