“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 chance 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?”