It was an envelope. A standard letter-sized envelope, dirtied and stained, held in place by some yellowed strips of Scotch tape. With my other hand I peeled the envelope off. It didn’t take much.
“You see it?” Clayton called down wheezily from the top of the stairs.
“Yeah,” I said. I set the freed envelope on the bench, put the tray back into the toolbox, and relocked it. I picked up the sealed envelope, turned it over in my hands. There was nothing written on it, but I could feel what I guessed was a single piece of paper folded inside.
“It’s okay,” Clayton said. “If you want to, you can look inside.”
I tore open the envelope at one end, blew into it, reached in with my thumb and forefinger, gently pulled out the piece of paper, opened it.
“It’s old,” Clayton said from the top of the stairs. “Be careful with it.”
I looked at it, read it. I felt as though my last breath was slipping away.
When I got to the top of the stairs, Clayton explained the circumstances surrounding what I’d found in the envelope, and told me what he wanted me to do with it.
“You promise?” he said.
“I promise,” I said, slipping the envelope into my sport coat.
I had one last conversation with Vince. “The ambulance has to be here anytime now,” I said. “Are you going to make it?”
Vince was a big man, a strong man, and I thought he had a better chance than most of hanging on. “Go save your wife and girl,” he said. “And if you find that bitch in the wheelchair, shove her into traffic.” He paused. “Gun in the truck. Should have had it on me. Stupid.”
I touched his forehead. “You’re going to make it.”
“Go,” he whispered.
To Clayton, I said, “That Honda in the driveway. It runs?”
“Sure,” Clayton said. “That’s my car. I haven’t driven much since I took sick.”
“I’m not sure we should take Vince’s truck,” I said. “The cops are going to be looking for it. People saw me drive away from the hospital. The cops’ll have a description, a license plate.”
He nodded, pointed to a small decorative dish on a buffet near the front door. “Should be a set of keys there,” he said.
“Give me a second,” I said.
I ran around to the back of the house and opened up the Dodge pickup. There were quite a few storage compartments in the cab. In the doors, between the seats, plus the glove box. I started looking through all of them. In the bottom of the center console unit, under a stack of maps, I found the gun.
I didn’t know a lot about guns, and I certainly didn’t feel confident tucking one into the waistband of my pants. I already had enough problems to deal with without adding a self-inflicted injury to the list. Using Clayton’s key, I unlocked the Honda, got into the driver’s seat, and put the gun in the glove compartment. I started up the car, drove it right up onto the lawn, getting the car as close to the front door as I could.
Clayton emerged from the house, took tentative steps toward me. I leapt out, ran around the car, got the passenger door open, and helped him get inside. I pulled out the seat belt, leaned over him and buckled it into place.
“Okay,” I said, getting back into the driver’s seat. “Let’s go.”
I drove right across the yard and onto the road, turned right onto Main, heading north. “Just made it,” Clayton said. An ambulance, followed closely by two police cars, lights flashing but sirens silent, sped south. Just past the bar where Vince and I had stopped earlier, I headed east to get us back on the Robert Moses.
Once on the highway, I was tempted to floor it, but was still worried about getting pulled over. I settled on a comfortable speed, above the limit, but not high enough to attract that much attention.
I waited until we were past Buffalo, heading due east to Albany. I can’t say that by then I was relaxed, but once we’d put some distance between ourselves and Youngstown, I felt the likelihood that we would get pulled over for what happened at the hospital, or what the police found at the Sloan home, diminishing.
That was when I turned to Clayton, who’d been sitting very quietly, his head leaned back and resting on the headrest, and said, “So let’s hear it. All of it.”
“Okay,” he said, and cleared his throat in preparation.
44
The marriage was predicated on a lie.
The first marriage, Clayton explained. Well, the second one, too. He’d get to that one soon enough. It was a long drive back to Connecticut. Plenty of time to cover everything.
But he talked about his marriage to Enid first. A girl he’d known in high school, in Tonawanda, a Buffalo suburb. Then he went to Canisius College, the one founded by the Jesuits, took business courses with a sprinkling of philosophy and religious studies. Wasn’t that far away; of course, he could have lived at home and commuted, but he got a cheap room just off campus, figured even if you didn’t go far away for college, you at least had to get out from under your parents’ roof.
When he finished, who was waiting for him in the old neighborhood but Enid. They started dating, and he could see that she was a strong-willed girl, used to getting what she wanted from those around her. She used what she had to her advantage. She was attractive, possessed a terrific body, had a strong sexual appetite, at least during their early courtship.
One night, teary-eyed, she tells him she’s late. “Oh no,” Clayton Sloan says. He thinks first of his own parents, how ashamed they will be of him. So concerned about appearance, and then something like this, their boy getting a girl pregnant, his mother would want to move out so she wouldn’t have to hear the neighbors talking.
So there wasn’t much else to do but get married. And right away.
A couple of months after that, she says she’s not feeling well, says she’s making an appointment to see her physician, Dr. Gibbs was his name. She goes to the doctor alone, comes home, says she lost it. The baby’s gone. Lots of tears. One day, Clayton’s in the diner, sees Dr. Gibbs, goes over to him and says, “I know I shouldn’t be asking you this here, that I should make an appointment, but Enid, losing the baby and all, she’ll still be able to have another one, right?”
And Dr. Gibbs says, “Huh?”
So now he has an idea what he’s dealing with. A woman who’ll say anything, tell any kind of lie, to get what she wants.
He should have left then. But Enid tells him she’s so sorry, that she thought she was pregnant, but was afraid to go to the doctor to have it confirmed, and then she turned out to be wrong. Clayton doesn’t know whether to believe her, and again worries about the shame he will bring on himself and his family by leaving Enid, starting divorce proceedings. And for a while there, Enid takes sick, is bedridden. Real or feigned, he’s not sure, but knows he can’t leave her when she is like this.
The longer he stays, the harder it seems to be to leave. He learns quickly that what Enid wants, Enid gets. When she doesn’t, there’s hell to pay. Screaming fits, smashing things. One time, he’s sitting in the bathtub, Enid’s in there with her electric hair dryer, starts joking around about dropping it into the water. But there’s something in her eyes, something that suggests that she could do it, just like that, wouldn’t have to think twice.
He puts his business education to use, gets a job in sales, supplying machine shops and factories. It’s going to have him driving all over the country, a corridor running between Chicago and New York that skirts past Buffalo. He’s going to be away a lot, his prospective employer warns him. That’s the clincher for Clayton. Time away from the harping, the screaming, the odd looks she sometimes gives him that suggest the gears inside her head aren’t always meshing the way they’re supposed to. He always dreads the drive home after a sales trip, wondering what list of grievances Enid will have prepared for him the moment he walks through the door. How she doesn’t have enough nice clothes, or he’s not working hard enough, or the back door squeaks when you open it, it’s driving her mad. The only thing that makes returning home worthwhile is seeing his Irish setter, Flynn. He always comes running out to greet Clayton’s car, like he’s been sitting on the porch from the moment he left, waiting for the second he returns.