Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

I was breathing, but it felt as though I was holding my breath, waiting for Tess to say what she had to say.

“What?” Tess said, looking at me like I was stupid. “You don’t want to know?”

“Jesus Christ, Tess, I’m waiting.”

“It’s about the money,” she said.

“Money?”

Tess nodded tiredly. “There was money. It would just show up.”

“Money from where?”

Her eyebrows went up. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Where was it coming from? Who was it coming from?”

I ran my hand over the top of my head, starting to feel exasperated. “Just start at the beginning.”

Tess breathed in slowly through her nose. “It wasn’t going to be easy, raising Cynthia. But like I said, I didn’t have any choice. There wasn’t any other choice I’d have wanted to make. She was my niece, my sister’s flesh and blood. I loved her like she was my own child, so when it happened, I took her in.

“She’d been a bit of a wild kid there, up until her folks up and vanished, and in some ways, that calmed her down. She started to get a little more serious about things, started paying attention at school. She had her moments, of course. The cops brought her home one night, found her with marijuana.”

“Really?” I said.

Tess smiled. “Let her off with a warning.” She put a finger to her lips. “Not a word.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway, a thing like that happens to you, losing your family, you think you’ve got license to do whatever the hell you want, to cut loose, stay out late, that you’re owed. You know?”

“I think so.”

“But there was a part of her wanted to get herself together. In case her parents came back, she’d see that she made something of herself, that she didn’t turn out to be useless. Even though they were gone, she wanted them to be proud of her. So she decided to go to school, to college.”

“The University of Connecticut,” I said.

“That’s right. Good school. Not cheap. I wondered how I was going to be able to afford it. Her marks, they weren’t bad, but they weren’t scholarship material, if you get my meaning. I was going to have to look into loans for her, that kind of thing.”

“Okay.”

“I found the first envelope in the car, on the passenger seat,” Tess said. “It was just sitting there. I’d come out from work, got in, there was this white envelope on the seat next to me. Thing is, I’d locked the car, but I’d left the windows open half an inch, it was pretty hot out and I wanted to let a little air in. There was enough room to fit in the envelope, but only just. It was pretty thick.”

I cocked my head to one side. “Cash?”

“Just under five thousand dollars of it,” Tess said. “All sorts of bills. Twenties, fives, some hundreds.”

“An envelope full of cash? No explanation, no note, nothing?”

“Oh, there was a note.”

She got up from her chair and took a few steps over to an antique rolltop desk off to one side of the front door, opened the single drawer. “I found all this when I started cleaning up in the basement, going through those boxes of books and everything else. I need to start paring things down now, make it easier for you and Cynthia to sort through my stuff when I’m gone.”

Held together with a rubber band was a small stack of envelopes, maybe a dozen or more. Together, they weren’t half an inch thick.

“They’re all empty,” Tess said. “But I always kept the envelopes just the same, even though there’s nothing written on them, no return address, no postmark, of course. But I thought, what if they’ve got fingerprints on them or something that might be useful to someone someday?”

Tess’s hands were all over them, so it was doubtful how much evidence they contained. But then again, forensic science wasn’t exactly my area of expertise. You didn’t see me teaching chemistry.

Tess worked a piece of paper out from under the rubber band. “This was the only note I ever got. With the first envelope. All the others that followed, they had cash in them, too, but never another word.”

She handed me a standard-sized piece of typewriter paper, folded in thirds. It had yellowed slightly with age.

I unfolded it.

The message was printed, very deliberately, in block letters. It read:

THIS IS TO HELP YOU WITH CYNTHIA. FOR HER EDUCATION, FOR WHATEVER ELSE YOU NEED. THERE WILL BE MORE, BUT YOU MUST FOLLOW THESE RULES. NEVER TELL CYNTHIA ABOUT THIS MONEY. NEVER TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT. NEVER TRY TO FIND OUT WHERE IT’S COMING FROM. NEVER.

That was it.

I must have read it three times before I looked at Tess, standing in front of me.

“I never did,” she said. “I never told Cynthia. I never told anyone. I never made any attempt to find out who had left it in my car. I never knew when, or where, it would show up. One time, I found it tucked into the New Haven Register on the front step one evening. Another time, I came out of the Post Mall, there was another one in the car.”

“You never saw anyone.”

“No. I think whoever left it was watching me, making sure I was far enough away for it to be safe. You want to know something? I always made sure, whenever I parked the car, to leave the window open a crack, just in case.”

“How much, altogether?”

“Over about six years, forty-two thousand dollars.”

“Jesus.”

Tess reached out her hand. She wanted the note back. She folded it up, slipped it under the rubber band with the envelopes, got up, and put everything back into the desk drawer.

“So nothing for how many years?” I asked.

Tess thought a moment. “About fifteen, I guess. Nothing since Cynthia finished school. It was a blessing, I’ll tell you that. I’d have never got her through school without it, not without selling this house or taking out a new mortgage or something.”

“So,” I said, “who left it?”

“It’s the forty-two-thousand-dollar question,” Tess said. “It’s all I’ve ever wondered, all these years. Her mother? Her father? Both of them?”

“Which would mean they were alive all those years, or at least one of them was. Maybe still alive even now. But if one or the other of them was able to do that, to watch you, to leave you money, why wouldn’t they be able to get in touch?”

“I know,” Tess said. “It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Because I’ve always believed my sister is dead, that they’re all dead. That they all died the night they disappeared.”

“And if they are dead,” I said, “then whoever sent you that money, it’s someone who feels responsible for their deaths. Who’s trying to make it right.”

“You see what I mean?” Tess said. “It just raises more questions than it answers. The money, it doesn’t mean they’re alive. And it doesn’t mean they’re dead.”

“But it means something,” I said. “After it stopped, when it was clear there wasn’t any more coming, why didn’t you tell the police? They might have reopened the investigation.”

Tess’s eyes grew weary. “I know you might think I’ve never been afraid to stir up a bit of shit, but where this was concerned, Terry, I just didn’t know whether I wanted to know the truth. I was scared, and I was afraid of how much the truth, if we were able to find it, might hurt Cynthia. It’s taken its toll on me. The stress of it. I wonder if that’s why I’m sick. They say stress’ll do that to you, affect your body.”

“I’ve heard that.” I paused. “Maybe you need to talk to somebody.”

“Oh, I gave that a try,” Tess said. “I saw your Dr. Kinzler.”

I blinked. “You did?”

“Cynthia mentioned going to her, so I gave her a call, saw her a couple of times. But you know, I’m just not prepared to open up to a stranger. There are some things you only tell family.”