“Mr. Archer!” Detective Wedmore shouted. “Haul it down here, please.”
I acted on impulse. I opened the closet, picked up the typewriter-God, those old machines were heavy-and put it inside, on the floor. Then I draped some other things over it, an old pair of pants I’d used to paint in, a stack of old newspapers.
As I came down the stairs, I saw that Wedmore was now with Cynthia in the living room. The letter was on the coffee table, open, Wedmore leaning over it, reading it.
“You touched this,” she scolded me.
“Yes.”
“You’ve both touched it. Your wife, that I could understand-she didn’t know what it was when she took it out. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I ran my hand over my mouth and chin, tried to wipe away the sweat I was sure would betray my nervousness.
“You can get divers, right?” Cynthia said. “You can get divers to go into the quarry, see what’s there.”
“This could be a crank,” Wedmore said, taking a strand of hair that had fallen in front of her eye and tucking it behind her ear. “Could be nothing.”
“That’s true,” I offered.
“But then again,” the detective said, “we don’t know.”
“If you don’t send in divers, I’ll go in myself,” Cynthia said.
“Cyn,” I said. “don’t be ridiculous. You don’t even swim.”
“I don’t care.”
“Mrs. Archer,” Wedmore said, “calm down.” It was an order. Wedmore had a kind of football coach thing going on.
“Calm down?” said Cynthia, unintimidated. “You know what this person, who wrote this letter, is saying? They’re down there. Their bodies are down there.”
“I’m afraid,” Wedmore said, shaking her head skeptically, “that there might be a lot down there after all these years.”
“Maybe they’re in a car,” Cynthia said. “My mother’s car, my father’s car, they were never found.”
Wedmore took a corner of the letter between two brilliant red-polished fingernails and turned it over. She stared at the map.
“We’ll have to get the Mass. State Police in on this,” she said. “I’ll make a call.” She reached into her jacket for her cell phone, opened it up, prepared to put in a number.
“You’re going to get some divers?” Cynthia said.
“I’m making a call. And we’re going to have to get that letter to our lab, see if they can get anything off it, if it hasn’t already been made pretty useless.”
“I’m sorry,” Cynthia said.
“Interesting,” Wedmore said, “that it was done on a typewriter. Hardly anyone uses typewriters.”
I felt my heart in my mouth. And then Cynthia said something I couldn’t believe I was hearing.
“We have a typewriter,” she said.
“You do?” Wedmore said, holding off before entering the last number.
“Terry still likes to use one, right, honey? For short notes, that kind of thing. It’s a Royal, isn’t it, Terry?” To Wedmore, she said, “He’s had it since his college days.”
“Show it to me,” Wedmore said, slipping the phone back into her jacket.
“I could go get it,” I said. “Bring it down.”
“Just show me where it is.”
“It’s upstairs,” Cynthia said. “Come, I’ll show you.”
“Cyn,” I said, standing at the bottom of the stairs, trying to act as a barrier. “It’s a bit of a mess up there.”
“Let’s go,” Wedmore said, moving past me and up the stairs.
“First door on the left,” Cynthia said. To me, she whispered, “Why do you think she wants to see our typewriter?”
Wedmore disappeared into the room. “I don’t see it,” she said.
Cynthia was up the stairs before me, turned into the room, said, “It’s usually right there. Terry, isn’t it usually right there?”
She was pointing to my desk as I came into the room. She and Wedmore were both looking at me.
“Uh,” I said, “it was in my way, so I tucked it into the closet.”
I opened the closet door, knelt down. Wedmore was peering in, over my shoulder. “Where?” she said.
I pulled away the newspapers and the paint-splattered pants to reveal the old black Royal. I lifted it out, set it back on the desk.
“When did you put it in there?” Cynthia said.
“Just a while ago,” I said.
“Got covered up awful fast,” Wedmore said. “How do you explain that?”
I shrugged. I had nothing.
“Don’t touch it,” she said, and got her phone back out of her jacket.
Cynthia looked at me with a puzzled expression. “What’s with you? What the hell is going on?”
I wanted to ask her the same thing.
27
Rona Wedmore made several calls on her cell, most of them from out on the driveway, where we wouldn’t be able to hear what she had to say.
That left Cynthia and me, and Grace-Cynthia had been permitted by Wedmore to drive over to the school quickly to pick her up-in the house to mull over these latest developments. Grace was in the kitchen, asking who the big woman making phone calls was while she made herself an after-school snack of peanut butter on toast.
“She’s with the police,” I said. “And I don’t think she’ll take kindly to you calling her big.”
“I won’t say it to her face,” Grace said. “Why is she here? What’s going on?”
“Not now,” Cynthia told her. “Take your snack and go to your room, please.”
Once Grace had left, grumbling the whole way, Cynthia asked, “Why did you hide the typewriter? That note, it was written on your typewriter, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
She studied me a moment. “Did you write that note? Is that why you hid the typewriter?”
“Jesus, Cyn,” I said. “I hid it because I wondered whether you’d written it.”
Her eyes went wide in shock. “Me?”
“Is that any more shocking than thinking I’d written it?”
“I didn’t try to hide the typewriter, you did.”
“I was doing it to protect you.”
“What?”
“In case you had written it. I didn’t want the police to know.”
Cynthia said nothing for a moment, slowly paced the room a couple of times. “I’m trying to get my head around this, Terry. So what are you saying? Are you saying you think I wrote that note? And if I did, that I’ve always known where they were? My family? I’ve always known they’re in this quarry?”
“Not…necessarily,” I said.
“Not necessarily? Then what are you thinking, exactly?”
“Honest to God, Cyn, I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore. But the moment I saw that letter, I knew it had come from my typewriter. And I knew I hadn’t written it. That left you, unless someone else came in here and wrote it on that typewriter to, to, I don’t know, to make it look like one of us had done it.”
“We already know someone else was in here,” Cynthia said. “The hat, the e-mail. But despite that, you’d rather think I did it?”
“I’d rather not think that at all,” I said.
She looked right into my eyes, adopted a deadly serious expression. “Do you think I killed my family?” she asked.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No, I don’t.”
“But it’s crossed your mind, hasn’t it? You’ve wondered, every once in a while, whether it’s possible.”
“No,” I said. “I have not. But I have wondered, lately, whether the stress of what you’ve been through, what you’ve had to carry all these years, has made you…” I could feel the eggshells cracking under my shoes, “…think, or perceive things, or maybe even do things, in a way that’s not been, I don’t know, totally rational.”
“Oh,” Cynthia said.
“Like when I saw that the letter had been done on my typewriter, I thought, could you have done this as a way to get the police interested in the case again, to do something, to try to solve it once and for all?”