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 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 chan
ce 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.
“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.
“A
re 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.