“I know you’re hearing me,” I said.
“I’m very tired,” he said. “I normally sleep through the night, you know. Leave me alone for a while, let me catch a few winks.”
“I’ve one other question,” I said. He kept his eyes shut, but I saw his mouth twitch nervously. “Tell me about Connie Gormley.”
His eyes opened suddenly, as though I’d jabbed him with a cattle prod. Clayton tried to recover.
“I don’t know that name,” he said.
“Let me see if I can help,” I said. “She was from Sharon, she was twenty-seven years old, she worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and one night, twenty-six years ago, a Friday night, she was walking along the shoulder of the road near the Cornwall Bridge, this would be on Route 7, when she was hit by a car. Except it wasn’t exactly a hit-and-run. She was most likely dead beforehand, and the accident was staged. Like someone wanted it to look like it was just an accident, nothing more sinister, you know?”
Clayton looked out his window so I couldn’t see his face.
“It was one of your other slips, like the shopping list and the phone bill,” I said. “You’d clipped this larger story about fly-fishing, but there was this story down in the corner about the hit-and-run. Would have been easy to snip it out, but you didn’t, and I can’t figure out why.”
We were nearing the New York-Massachusetts border, heading east, waiting for the sun to rise.
“Did you know her?” I asked. “Was she someone else you met touring the country for work?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Clayton said.
“A relative? On Enid’s side? When I mentioned the name to Cynthia, it didn’t mean anything to her.”
“There’s no reason why it should,” Clayton said quietly.
“Was it you?” I asked. “Did you kill her, then hit her with your car, drag her into the ditch, and leave her there?”
“No,” he said.
“Because if that’s what happened, maybe this is the time to set the record straight. You’ve admitted to a great many things tonight. A double life. Helping to cover up the murder of your wife and son. Protecting a woman who, by your account, is certifiable. But you don’t want to tell me what your interest is in the death of a woman named Connie Gormley, and you don’t want to tell me how you got money to Tess Berman to help pay for Cynthia’s education.”
Clayton said nothing.
“Are those things related?” I asked. “Are they linked somehow? This woman, you couldn’t have used her as a courier for the money. She was dead years before you started making those payments.”
Clayton drank some water, put the bottle back into the cup holder between the seats, ran his hands across the tops of his legs.
“Suppose I told you none of it matters,” he said. “Suppose I acknowledge that yes, your questions are interesting, that there are some things you still do not know, but that in the larger scheme of things, it’s not really that important.”
“An innocent woman gets killed, then her body’s hit by a car, she’s left in the ditch, you think that’s unimportant? You think that’s how her family felt? I spoke to her brother on the phone the other day.”
Clayton’s bushy eyebrows rose a notch.
“Both their parents died within a couple of years after Connie. It’s like they gave up on life. It was the only way to end the grieving.”
Clayton shook his head.
“And you say that it’s not important? Clayton, did you kill that woman?”
“No,” he said.
“Did you know who did?”
Clayton would only shake his head.
“Enid?” I said. “She came to Connecticut a year later to kill Patricia and Todd. Did she come down earlier, did she kill Connie Gormley, too?”
Clayton kept shaking his head, then finally spoke. “Enough lives have been destroyed already. There’s no sense in ruining any more. I don’t have anything else to say about this.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited for the sun to come up.
I didn’t want to lose time stopping for breakfast, but I was also very much aware of Clayton’s weakened condition. Once morning hit, and the car was filled with light, I saw how much worse he looked than when we’d fled the hospital. He’d been hours without his IV, without sleep.
“You look like you need something,” I said. We were going through Winsted, where Route 8 went from a winding, two-lane affair to four lanes. We’d make even better time from here, the last leg of the journey to Milford. There were some fast-food joints in Winsted, and I suggested we hit a drive-through window, get a McMuffin, something like that.
Clayton nodded wearily. “I could eat the egg. I don’t think I could chew the English muffin.”
As we sat in the drive-through line, Clayton said, “Tell me about her.”
“What?”
“Tell me about Cynthia. I haven’t seen her since that night. I haven’t seen her in twenty-five years.”
I didn’t entirely know how to react to Clayton. There were times when I felt sympathy for him, the horrible life he’d led, the misery he’d had to endure living with Enid, the tragedy of losing loved ones.
But who was to blame, really? Clayton had made the point himself. He’d made his choices. And not just the decision to help Enid cover up a monstrous crime, and to leave Cynthia behind, to wonder her whole adult life what had become of her family. There were choices he could have made earlier. He could have stood up to Enid, somehow. Insisted on a divorce. Called the police when she became violent. Had her committed. Something.
He could have walked out on her. Left her a note. “Dear Enid: I’m out of here. Clayton.”
At least it would have been more honest.
It wasn’t as if he was looking to me for sympathy, asking about his daughter, my wife. But there was something in his voice, a bit of “poor me.”
But instead, I said, “She’s wonderful.”
Clayton waited for more.
“Cyn is the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me,” I said. “I love her more than you could ever know. And as long as I’ve known her, she’s been dealing with what you and Enid did to her. Think about it. You wake up one morning and your family is gone. The cars are gone. Everyone fucking gone.” I felt my blood starting to boil, and I gripped the wheel more tightly in anger. “Do you have any fucking idea? Do you? What was she supposed to think? Were you all dead? Had some crazy serial killer gone through town and killed all of you? Or had the three of you decided, that night, to go off and have a new life somewhere else, a new life that didn’t include her?”
Clayton was stunned. “She thought that?”
“She thought a million things! She was fucking abandoned! Don’t you get it? You couldn’t have gotten word to her somehow? A letter? Explained that her family met with a horrible fate, but at least they loved her? That they hadn’t just up and fucking walked out on her one night?”
Clayton looked down into his lap. His hands were shaking.
“Sure, you cut a deal with Enid to keep Cynthia alive by agreeing to never see her again, to never get in touch. So maybe she’s alive today because you agreed to live out the rest of your life with a monster. But do you think that makes you some kind of fucking hero? You know what? You’re no fucking hero. If you’d been a man, from the get-go, maybe none of this shit would ever have happened.”
Clayton put his face into his hands, leaned against the door.
“Let me ask you this,” I said, a kind of calm coming over me. “What kind of man stays with a woman who’s murdered his own son? Can someone like that even be called a man? If it’d been me, I think I’d have killed her myself.”
We were at the window. I handed the guy some cash, took a bag with a couple of Egg McMuffins and hash
