“What are they saying?” Cynthia asked.
“Hang on,” Wedmore said, but then we saw the man pick up his radio and Wedmore grabbed hers.
“Got something,” the radio crackled.
“What?” Wedmore asked.
“Car. Been there a long time. Half buried in silt and shit.”
“Anything inside it?”
“They’re not sure. We’re going to have to get it out.”
“What kind of car?” Cynthia asked. “What does it look like?”
Wedmore relayed the question, and down in the lake, we could see the man asking the divers some questions.
“Looks sort of yellow,” the man said. “A little compact car. Can’t see the plates, though. The bumpers are buried.”
Cynthia said. “My mother’s car. It was yellow. A Ford Escort. A small car.” She collapsed against me, held on to me. “It’s them,” she said. “It’s them.”
Wedmore said, “We won’t know that for a while. We don’t even know if there’s anyone in that car.” Back into the radio, she said, “Let’s do what we have to do.”
That meant bringing in more equipment. They thought that if they brought in an oversized tow truck from the north, got it right up to the edge of the lake, they could run a cable out into the water, have the divers attach it to the submerged car, and slowly pull it out of the muck at the bottom of the lake and to the surface.
If that didn’t work, they’d have to bring in some sort of barge affair, take it out onto the water, position it over the car and lift it up directly from the bottom.
“Nothing’s going to happen for a few hours,” Wedmore told us. “We’ve got to get some people up here, they’ve got to figure out how they’re going to do this. Why don’t you go someplace, head back to the highway, maybe go up to Lee, get some lunch. I’ll call your cell when it looks like something’s about to happen.”
“No,” Cynthia said. “We should stay.”
“Honey,” I said, “there’s nothing we can do now. Let’s go eat. We both need our strength, we need to be able to handle what may come next.”
“What do you figure happened?” Cynthia asked.
Wedmore said, “I guess someone drove that car right up here, where we’re standing, then ran it right off the edge of this cliff.”
“Come on,” I said again to Cynthia. To Wedmore, “Please keep us posted.”
We drove back down to the main road, back to Otis, then north to Lee, where we found a diner and ordered coffee. I hadn’t had much of an appetite first thing in the morning, so I ordered a midday breakfast of eggs and sausage. All Cynthia could manage was some toast.
“So whoever wrote that note,” Cynthia said, “knew what he was talking about.”
“Yeah,” I said, blowing on my coffee to cool it down.
“But we don’t even know if there’s anyone in the car. Maybe the car was ditched there, to hide it. But it doesn’t mean anyone died in that accident.”
“Let’s wait and see,” I said.
We ended up waiting a couple of hours. I was on my fourth coffee when my cell phone rang.
It was Wedmore. She gave me some directions that would get me to the lake from the north side.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“It’s gone faster than we thought,” she said, bordering on amiable. “It’s out. The car’s out.”
The yellow Escort was already sitting on the back of a flatbed truck by the time we arrived at the site. Cynthia was out of the car before I’d come to a full stop, running toward the truck, shouting, “That’s the car! My mother’s car!”
Wedmore grabbed hold of her before she could get close. “Let me go,” Cynthia said, struggling.
“You can’t go near it,” the detective told her.
The car was covered in mud and slime, and water was seeping out around the cracks of the closed doors, enough so that the interior, at least above the window line, was clear of water. But there was nothing to be seen but a couple of waterlogged headrests.
“It’s going to the lab,” Wedmore said.
“What did they find?” she asked. “Was there anything inside?”
“What do you think they found?” Wedmore asked. I didn’t feel good about the way she’d asked. It was as though she thought Cynthia already knew the answer.
“I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “I’m scared to say.”
“There appear to be the remains of two people in there,” she said. “But as you can understand, after twenty-five years…”
One could only imagine.
“Two?” Cynthia said. “Not three?”
“It’s early yet,” Wedmore said. “Like I said, we have a lot of work before us.” She paused. “And we’d like to take a buccal swab from you.”
Cynthia did a kind of double take. “A what?”
“I’m sorry. It’s Latin, for ‘cheek.’ We’d like to get a DNA sample from you. We take a sample from your mouth. It doesn’t hurt or anything.”
“Because?”
“If we’re fortunate enough to be able to recover any DNA from…what we find in the car, we’ll be able to compare it to yours. If, for example, if one of those bodies is your mother, they can do a kind of reverse maternity test. It’ll confirm if she is, in fact, your mother. Same for the other members of your family.”
Cynthia looked at me, tears forming in her eyes. “For twenty-five years I’ve waited for some answers, and now that I’m about to get some, I’m terrified.”
I held her. “How long?” I asked Wedmore.
“Normally, weeks. But this is a more high-profile case, especially since there was the TV show about it. A few days, maybe just a couple. You might as well go home. I’ll have someone come by later today for the sample.”
Heading back seemed the only logical thing to do. As we turned to walk back to our car, Wedmore called out, “And you’ll need to be available in the meantime, even before the test results come back. I’m going to have more questions.”
There was something ominous about the way she said it.
28
As promised, Rona Wedmore showed up to ask questions. There were things about this case she did not like.
That was certainly something we all had in common, although Cynthia and I didn’t feel that Wedmore was an ally.
She did confirm one thing I already knew, however. The letter that had directed us to the quarry had been written on my typewriter. Cynthia and I had both been requested-as if there were any option-to come down to headquarters and be fingerprinted. Cynthia’s fingerprints apparently were on file. She’d provided them twenty-five years ago when police were combing her house, looking for clues to her family’s disappearance. But the police wanted them again, and I’d never been asked to provide mine before.
They compared our prints against those on the typewriter. They found a few of Cynthia’s on the body of the machine. But the actual keys were covered with mine.
Of course, there wasn’t much to make of that. But it didn’t support our contention, that someone had broken in to our house and written the letter on my typewriter, someone who could have been wearing gloves and left no prints behind.
“And why would someone do that?” asked Wedmore, her hands made into fists and resting on her considerable hips. “Come into your house and use your typewriter to write that note?”
That was a good question.
“Maybe,” Cynthia said, very slowly, kind of thinking out loud, “whoever did it knew the note would most likely be traced back to Terry’s typewriter. They wanted it traced back to him, they wanted you to think he’d written it.”
I thought Cynthia was on to something, with one small change. “Or you,” I said to her.
She looked at me for a moment, not accusingly, but thinking. “Or me,” she said.
“Again, why would anyone do that?” Wedmore, still unconvinced, asked.