“Not now,” Cynthia said. “She’s been through enough. She’s exhausted.”
Wedmore nodded silently. Then, “I’ll make some calls, see about the divers, be back later this afternoon.” To me, “You get over to Milford Hospital. I could drop you off if you like.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go in a little while, call a cab if I have to.”
Wedmore left, and Cynthia said she was heading upstairs to try to make herself look half respectable again. Wedmore’s car had only been gone a minute when I heard another one pull into the drive. I opened the front door as Rolly, wearing a long jacket over a blue plaid shirt and blue slacks, reached the step.
“Terry!” he said.
I put a finger to my lips. “Grace is sleeping,” I said. I motioned for him to follow me into the kitchen.
“So you found them?” he said. “Cynthia too?”
I nodded as I went hunting for Advils in the pantry. I found the container, shook some out into my hand, and ran a glass of cold water from the tap.
“You look hurt,” Rolly said. “Some people will do anything to get a long-term leave.”
I almost laughed, but it hurt too much. I popped three pills into my mouth, had a long drink of water.
“So,” Rolly said. “So.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So you found her father,” he said. “You found Clayton.”
I nodded.
“That’s amazing,” he said. “That you found him. That Clayton’s still around, still alive, after all these years.”
“Isn’t it, though,” I said. I held back telling Rolly that while Clayton had been alive all these years, he was no longer.
“Just amazing.”
“Aren’t you wondering about Patricia, too?” I asked. “Or Todd? Aren’t you curious to know what happened to them?”
Rolly’s eyes danced. “Of course, yes, I am. I mean, I already know they were found in the car, in the quarry.”
“Yeah, that’s true. But everything else, who killed them, I figure you must already know about that,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d have asked.”
Rolly’s look grew grim. “I just, I don’t want to bombard you with questions. You’ve only been home a couple of minutes.”
“Do you want to know how they died? What actually happened to them?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Maybe in a minute.” I took another drink of water. I hoped the Advils would kick in soon. “Rolly,” I said, “were you the one who delivered the money?”
“What?”
“The money. For Tess. To spend on Cynthia. It was you, wasn’t it?”
He licked his lip nervously. “What did Clayton tell you?”
“What do you think he told me?”
Rolly ran his hand over the top of his head, turned away from me. “He’s told you everything, hasn’t he?”
I said nothing. I decided it was better for Rolly to think I knew more than I actually did.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, shaking his head. “The son of a bitch. He swore he’d never tell. He thinks it was me that somehow led you to him, doesn’t he? That’s why he’s reneged on our arrangement.”
“Is that what you call it, Rolly? An arrangement?”
“We had a deal!” He shook his head in anger. “I’m so close. So close to retirement. All I want is some peace, to get out of that fucking school, to get away, to get out of this goddamn town.”
“Why don’t you just tell me about it, Rolly? See if your version matches Clayton’s.”
“He’s told you about Connie Gormley, hasn’t he? About the accident.”
I didn’t say anything.
“We were coming back from a fishing trip,” Rolly said. “It was Clayton’s idea to stop for a beer. I could have done the drive home without stopping, but I said okay. We went into this bar, we were just going to have a beer and go, and this girl, she starts coming on to me, you know?”
“Connie Gormley.”
“Yeah. I mean, she’s sitting with me, and she’s had a few beers, and I ended up having a few more. Clayton, he’s kind of taking it easy, tells me to do the same, but I don’t know what the hell happened. This Connie and I, we both slip out of the bar while Clayton’s taking a leak, end up out back of the bar in the backseat of her car.”
“You and Millicent, you were married then,” I said. It wasn’t really a judgment, I simply wasn’t sure. But Rolly’s scowl made clear how he’d taken it.
“Once in a while,” he said, “I’d slip.”
“So you slipped with Connie Gormley. How’d she end up going from that backseat to that ditch?”
“When we…when we were done, and I was heading back to the bar, she asked me for fifty bucks. I told her if she was a hooker she should have made that clear from the outset, but I don’t know if she even was a hooker. Maybe she just needed the fifty. Anyway, I wouldn’t pay her, and she said maybe she’d look me up sometime, at my home, get the money from my wife.”
“Oh.”
“She started scrapping with me by the car, and I guess I shoved back, a little too hard, and she tripped and her head came down right on the bumper, and that was it.”
“She was dead,” I said.
Rolly swallowed. “People had seen us, right? In the bar? They might remember me and Clayton. I figured, if she got hit by a car instead, the police would think it was some sort of accident, that she’d gone walking, that she was drunk, they wouldn’t be looking for some guy she picked up in the bar.”
I was shaking my head.
“Terry,” he said, “if you’d been in that situation, you’d have been panicking, too. I got Clayton, told him what I’d done, and there was something in his face, like he felt he was as trapped by the situation as I was, he didn’t want to be talking to any cops. I didn’t know then, about the kind of life he was living, that he wasn’t who he claimed to be, that he was living a double life. So we put her in the car, took her down the highway, then Clayton held her up at the side of the road, tossed her in front of the car as I drove past. Then we put her in the ditch.”
“My God,” I said.
“Isn’t a night goes by I don’t think about it, Terry. It was a horrible thing. But sometimes, you have to be in a situation to appreciate what has to be done.” He shook his head again. “Clayton swore he’d never tell. The son of a bitch.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “I tried to get him to, but he didn’t give you up. But let me see if I can guess how the rest of this goes. One night, Clayton and Patricia and Todd, they disappear off the face of the earth, nobody knows what happened to them, not even you. Then one day, a year later, maybe a few years later, you get a call. It’s Clayton. Quid pro quo time. He covered up for you, for killing Connie Gormley, now he wanted you to do something for him. Be a courier, basically. Deliver money. He’d send it to you, maybe to a postal box or something. And then you’d slip it to Tess, drop it in her car, hide it in her newspaper, whatever.”
Rolly stared at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s more or less what happened.”
“And then, like an idiot,” I said, “I told you what Tess had revealed to me. When we had lunch. About getting the money. About how she still had the envelopes and the letter, the one warning her never to try to find out where the money came from, to never tell anyone about it. How, after all these years, she’d saved them.”
Now Rolly had nothing to say.
I came at him from another direction. “Do you think a man who was prepared to murder two people to please his mother would lie to her about whether he’d ever killed anyone before?”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m kind of thinking out loud here. I don’t think he would. I think a man who was about to kill for his mother, I don’t think he’d mind admitting to her if he’d already killed before.” I paused. “And the thing is, up until the
