The thing was, Cynthia hadn’t really had a normal life since she was fourteen.
When Rona Wedmore showed up again, she was direct and to the point. “Where were you the night Denton Abagnall went missing? The night he left here, the last night anyone ever heard from him. Say around eight.”
“We had dinner,” I said. “And then we went to visit Cynthia’s aunt. She was dead. We called the police. We were with the police pretty much the entire evening. So I guess the police would be our alibi, Detective Wedmore.”
For the first time, Wedmore appeared embarrassed, and off her game. “Of course,” she said. “I should have realized that. Mr. Abagnall drove into that parking garage at 8:03, according to the ticket that was sitting on the dash.”
“So,” Cynthia said coldly, “I guess at least we’re off the hook for that one.”
Heading out the door, I asked Wedmore, “Did they find any papers with Mr. Abagnall? A note, some empty envelopes?”
“Far as I know,” Wedmore said, “there was nothing. Why?”
“Just wondering,” I said. “You know, one of the last things Mr. Abagnall told us was that he was going to be checking out Vince Fleming, who was with my wife the night her family disappeared. You know about Vince Fleming?”
“I know the name,” she said.
And Wedmore showed up again, the following day.
When I saw her walking up the drive, I said to Cynthia, “Maybe she’s tied us in to the Lindbergh kidnapping.”
I opened the door before she knocked.
“Yes?” I said. “What now?”
“I have news,” she said. “May I come in?” Her tone was less abrasive today. I didn’t know whether that was good news, or meant she was setting us up for something.
I showed Wedmore into the living room and invited her to take a seat. Cynthia and I both sat down.
“First of all,” she said, “you need to know I’m no scientist. But I understand the basic principles, and will do my best to explain them to you.”
I looked at Cynthia. She nodded for Wedmore to continue.
“The chances of being able to extract any DNA from the remains in your mother’s car—and there were just two bodies, not three—were always slim, but not nonexistent. Over the years, the natural process of decay had eaten away all of the—” She stopped herself. “Mrs. Archer, may I be straightforward here? It’s not pleasant to listen to, I understand.”
“Go ahead,” Cynthia said.
Wedmore nodded. “As you might guess, the decay over the years—enzymes being released from human cells as they die, human bacteria, environmental and in this case aquatic microorganisms—had pretty much destroyed all the flesh on the bodies. The bone decomposition would have been even worse had this been saltwater, but it wasn’t, so we caught a bit of a break there.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, we had bones, and we had teeth, so we attempted to get dental records for your family, but struck out. Your father, from what we could tell, had no dentist, although the coroner determined pretty quickly, based on the bone structure of the two people in the car, neither was an adult male.”
Cynthia blinked. So Clayton Bigge’s body was not one of the two in that car.
“As for the dentist your brother and mother went to, he passed away many years ago, the practice closed down, and all the records were destroyed.”
I glanced at Cynthia. She seemed to be steeling herself for disappointment. Maybe we weren’t going to learn anything definitive.
“But the thing was, even if we didn’t have dental records, we still had teeth,” Wedmore said. “From each of the two bodies. The enamel on the outside, there’s no DNA there, nothing to test, but deep in the center of the tooth, in the root, it’s so protected in there, they can find nucleated cells.”
Cynthia and I must have both looked lost, so Wedmore said, “Well, the bottom line is, if our forensic people can get in there, and get to those cells, and extract sufficient DNA, the results will show a unique profile for each individual, including sex.”
“And?” Cynthia asked, holding her breath.
“It was a male, and a female,” Wedmore said. “The coroner’s analysis, even before DNA testing, suggests a male in his midteens, most likely, and a woman probably in her late thirties, maybe early forties.”
Cynthia glanced at me, then back to Wedmore.
Wedmore continued. “So, a very young man and a woman were in that car. Now the question becomes whether there’s a connection between them.”
Cynthia waited.
“The two DNA profiles suggest a close relatedness, possibly parent-child. The forensic results, coupled with the coroner’s findings, do suggest a mother-and-son relationship.”
“My mother,” Cynthia whispered. “Todd.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” Wedmore said. “While a relationship between the two deceased has been more or less determined, we don’t know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is in fact Todd Bigge and Patricia Bigge. If you still had anything of your mother’s that might provide a sample, an old hairbrush for example, with some hairs still caught in the bristles…”
“No,” said Cynthia, “I don’t have anything like that.”
“Well, we do have your DNA sample, and additional reports are pending with regard to any possible relationship you may have to the remains we took from the car. Once your sample is typed—and they’re working on that now—they’ll be able to determine the probability of maternity, regarding the female deceased, and the probability of a sibling relationship to the male deceased.”
Wedmore paused. “But based on what we know now, that these two bodies are related, that it’s a mother and son, that the car is in fact your mother’s, the working assumption is that we’ve found your mother and your brother.”
Cynthia looked dizzy.
“But not,” Wedmore pointed out, “your father. I’d like to ask you a few more questions about him, what he was like, what kind of person he was.”
“Why?” Cynthia asked. “What are you implying?”
“I think we have to consider the possibility he murdered both of them.”
29
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” he said.
“I was just thinking about you,” she said. “I haven’t heard from you for a while. I hope everything’s okay.”
“I wanted to wait to see what would happen,” he said. “How much they might find out. There’s been stuff on the news. They showed the car. On TV.”
“Oh my…”
“They had a picture of it being taken away from the quarry. And they had a story today, in the newspapers, about the DNA tests.”
“Oh, this is so exciting,” she said. “I wish I was there with you. What did it say?”
“Well, it said some stuff but not others, of course. I’ve got the paper right here. It said, ‘DNA tests indicate a genetic link between the two bodies in the car, that they are a mother and son.’”
“Interesting.”
“‘Forensic tests have yet to determine whether the bodies are genetically linked to Cynthia Archer. Police are operating on the assumption, however, that the recovered bodies are Patricia Bigge and Todd Bigge, missing for twenty-five years.’”
“So the story doesn’t actually say that’s who was in the car,” she said.
“Not quite.”
“You know what they say about ‘assume.’ It makes an ass out of you and—”
“I know, but—”
“But still, it’s amazing what they can do these days, isn’t it?” She sounded almost cheerful.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, back then, when your father and I got rid of that car, who’d even heard of DNA tests? It boggles the mind, that’s what it does. You still feeling nervous?”
“A little, maybe.” He did sound subdued to her.
“Even as a boy, you were a worrier, you know that? Me, I just take hold of a situation and deal with it.”
“Well, you’r
e the strong one, I guess.”
“I think you’ve done a wonderful job, lots to be proud of. Soon you’ll be home and you can take me back. I wouldn’t want to miss this for the world. When the moment comes, I can’t wait to see the expression on her face.”
30
“So how are you dealing with this?” Dr. Kinzler asked Cynthia. “The apparent discovery of your mother and your brother.”
“I’m not sure,” Cynthia said. “It’s not relief.”
“No, I can see why it wouldn’t be.”
“And the fact that my father was not there with them. This detective, Wedmore, she thinks maybe he killed them.”
“If that turns out to be true,” Dr. Kinzler said, “are you going to be able to deal with that?”
Cynthia bit her lip, looked at the blinds, as though she had X-ray vision and could see out to the highway. This was our regular session, and I’d talked Cynthia into keeping it, even though she’d been talking about canceling. But now that Dr. Kinzler was asking such probing questions, that to my mind just opened wounds as opposed to healing them, I was second-guessing myself.
“I’m already having to come to terms with the idea that my father may have been something other than the man I knew,” Cynthia said. “The fact that there’s no record of him, no Social Security number, no driver’s license…” She paused. “But the idea that he could have killed them, that he could have killed my mother and Todd, I can’t believe it.”
“You think he left the hat,” Dr. Kinzler said.
“It’s a possibility,” Cynthia said.
“Why would your father break in to your house, leave you a message like that, write a letter on your own typewriter with a map leading you to the others?”
“Is he…is he trying to settle things?”
Dr. Kinzler shrugged. “I’m asking you what you think.”
Standard shrink procedure, I thought.
“I don’t know what to think,” Cynthia said. “If I thought he’d done it, then the notes, everything, it might be him trying to set the record straight, to confess. I mean, whoever left that note had to be involved somehow in their deaths. To know those kinds of details.”
“True,” Dr. Kinzler said.
“And Detective Wedmore, even though she talks like my father killed them years ago, I think she thinks I wrote the note,” Cynthia said.
“Maybe,” Dr. Kinzler speculated, “she thinks you and your father are in this together. Because his body wasn’t found. Because you weren’t in that car with your mother and your brother.”
Cynthia paused before nodding. “I know, years ago, the police must have wondered about me. I mean, when they weren’t able to turn up anything, or any of them, I guess they would have considered everything, wouldn’t they? They probably wondered whether I might have done it with Vince. Whether we’d done it together. Because of the fight I’d had that night with my parents.”
“You’ve told me you don’t remember a lot about that night,” Dr. Kinzler said. “Do you think it’s possible there are things you know that you’ve blocked out? I have occasionally referred people to someone I trust very much who does hypnosis therapy.”
“I’m not blocking things out. I blacked out. I came home drunk. I was a kid. I was stupid. I came home, I passed out. I woke up the next morning.” She raised her hands, dropped them in her lap. “I couldn’t have committed a crime if I’d wanted to. I was out of it.” She sighed. “Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course,” Dr. Kinzler said. Gently, she asked, “Tell me more about your relationship with your father.”
“Normal, I guess. I mean, we had fights, but we more or less got along. I think,” and she paused again, “that he loved me. I think he loved me very much.”
“More than the other members of your family?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if he was in a state of mind that led him to kill your mother and your brother, why wouldn’t he have killed you, too?”
“I don’t know. And I’ve told you, I don’t believe he did it. I…I can’t explain any of this, okay? But my father wouldn’t do something like that. He couldn’t have killed my mother. He’d never have killed his own son, my brother. You know why? Not just because he loved us. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything like that because he was too weak.”
That caught my attention.
“He was a sweet man, but—this is hard to say about a parent—but he just wouldn’t have had it in him to do something like that.”
I said, “I don’t see where any of this is getting us.”
“We know that your wife is deeply troubled by the questions raised by this discovery,” the psychiatrist said. Did she ever raise her voice? Did she ever get demonstrably pissed off? “I’m trying to help her with that.”
“What if they arrest me?” Cynthia said.
“Pardon?” said Dr. Kinzler.
“What?” I said.
“What if Detective Wedmore arrests me?” she asked. “What if she becomes convinced I had something to do with it? What if she thinks I’m the only person who could possibly have known what was in that quarry? If she arrests me, how will I explain this to Grace? Who’ll look after her if they take me away? She needs her mother.”
“Honey,” I said. I almost blurted out that I would look after Grace, but that would have suggested I believed that the scenario she was laying out for us was likely, and imminent.
“If she arrests me, she’ll stop trying to find the truth,” Cynthia said.
“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “If she arrested you, she’d have to believe that you had something to do with everything else, with Tess’s death, maybe even Abagnall’s death. Because all these things, they must be connected somehow. These things are all part of the same puzzle. They’re all related. We just don’t know how.”
“I wonder if Vince knows,” Cynthia said. “I wonder if anyone has talked to him lately.”
“Abagnall said he was looking into him,” I said. “Didn’t he say something, the last time we saw him, about checking into his background a bit more?”
Dr. Kinzler, attempting to get us back on track, said, “I don’t think we should wait for two more weeks before your next appointment.” She was looking at Cynthia when she said it, not me.
“Sure,” she said, her voice soft and distant. “Sure.” She excused herself and left the office to use the washroom.
I said to Dr. Kinzler, “Her aunt, Tess Berman, came to see you a couple of times.”
The eyebrows went up. “Yes.”
“What did she have to say?”
“I wouldn’t normally discuss another patient with you, but in Tess Berman’s case, there isn’t anything to discuss. She came a couple of times, but never opened up to me. I think she had contempt for the process.”
I loved Tess.
There were ten calls on our answering machine when we got home, all from different media outlets. There was a long, impassioned message from Paula, from Deadline. She said Cynthia owed their viewers a chance to revisit this case in light of recent developments. Just name the time and place, and she’d be there with a film crew, Paula said.
I watched as Cynthia hit the button to delete the message. Not flustered. No confusion. One quick motion with a steady index finger.
“Didn’t have any trouble that time,” I said. God forgive me, it just slipped out.
“What?” she said, looking at me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“What did you mean? That I didn’t have any trouble that time?”
“Forget it,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“You mean when I deleted that message?”
“I said it was nothing.”
“You’re thinking about that morning. When I got the call. When I accidentally erased the call history. I told you what happened. I was shook up.”
“Of course you were.”
“You don’t even believe I got that call, do y
ou?”
“Of course I do.”
“And if I didn’t get that call, then that e-mail, I must have made that up, too? Maybe when I was typing up that note on your typewriter?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Cynthia moved closer to me, raised her hand and pointed at me. “How can I stay here under this roof if I can’t be one hundred percent certain that I have your support? Your trust? I don’t need you looking at me sideways, second-guessing everything I do.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“So say it. Tell me right now. Look me in the eye and tell me you believe in me, that you know I haven’t had a hand in any of this.”
I swear I was going to say it. But my tenth-of-a-second hesitation was all it took for Cynthia to turn and walk away.
When I went into Grace’s room that night and found the lights all turned off, I expected to find her peering through her telescope, but she was already under the covers. She was wide awake.
“I’m surprised to find you here,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and touching the side of her head.
Grace didn’t say anything.
“I thought you’d be looking for asteroids. Or did you already look?”
“I didn’t bother,” she said so softly I almost couldn’t hear.
“Are you not worried about asteroids anymore?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“So there aren’t any coming to hit the earth anytime soon?” I said, brightening. “Well, that has to be a good thing.”
“They might still be coming,” Grace said, turning her head into the pillow. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean by that, honey?”
“Everyone around here is so sad all the time.”
“Oh, honey. I know. These have been a tough few weeks.”
“It didn’t matter whether an asteroid was coming or not. Aunt Tess still died. People die all the time from all sorts of things. They get hit by cars. They can drown. And sometimes people kill them.”
“I know.”
“And Mom’s acting like we’re not safe, and she hasn’t looked in my telescope even once. She thinks something’s coming to get us, but it’s not something from outer space.”