Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“You don’t know that Todd is dead,” Cynthia said.

“I know. I didn’t mean it to come out that way. All I’m saying is-”

“There he is. He’s heading for the escalator.” She was on her feet and moving.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said.

“Daddy!” Grace said.

I turned to her. “You stay right here and do not move, you understand?” She nodded, a spoonful of ice cream stopped frozen en route to her mouth. The woman at the next table glanced over again and I caught her eye. “Excuse me,” I said, “but would you mind keeping an eye on my daughter, just for a moment?”

She stared at me, unsure what to say.

“Just a couple of minutes,” I said, trying to reassure her, then got up, not giving her a chance to say no.

I went after Cynthia. I managed to spot the head of the man she was after disappearing, descending the escalator. The food court was so crowded it had slowed Cynthia down, and there were half a dozen people between her, as she got onto the top step of the escalator, and the man, and another half dozen between Cynthia and me.

When the man got off at the bottom, he started walking briskly in the direction of the exit. Cynthia was straining to get around a couple ahead of her, but they were balancing a stroller on the precarious steps, and she couldn’t get past them.

When she hit the bottom, she broke into a run after the man, who was nearly to the doors.

“Todd!” she shouted.

The man was oblivious. He shoved open the first door, let it swing shut behind him, threw open the second, proceeded on to the parking lot. I’d nearly caught up to Cynthia as she went through the first door.

“Cynthia!” I said.

But she was giving me no more attention than the man was giving her. Once she was out the door, she called “Todd!” again to no effect, then caught up to the man, grabbing him by the elbow.

He turned around, startled by this out-of-breath, wild-eyed woman.

“Yes?” he said.

“Excuse me,” Cynthia said, taking a second to catch her breath. “But I think I know you.”

I was at her side now, and the man looked at me, as if to ask, “What the hell’s going on?”

“I don’t think so,” the man said slowly.

“You’re Todd,” Cynthia said.

“Todd?” He shook his head. “Lady, I’m sorry, but I don’t know-”

“I know who you are,” Cynthia said. “I can see my father in you. In your eyes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to the man. “My wife thinks you look like her brother. She hasn’t seen him in a very long time.”

Cynthia turned angrily on me. “I’m not losing my mind,” she said. To the man, she said, “Okay, who are you then? Tell me who you are.”

“Lady, I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but keep me out of it, okay?”

I tried to position myself between the two of them, and using as calm a voice as possible, said to the man, “This is a lot to ask, believe me, I understand, but maybe, if you could tell us who you are, it would help put my wife’s mind at ease.”

“This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t have to do that.”

“You see?” Cynthia said. “It’s you, but for some reason, you can’t admit it.”

I took Cynthia aside and said, “Give me a minute.” Then I turned back to the man and said, “My wife’s family went missing many years ago. She hasn’t seen her brother in years and you, evidently, bear a resemblance. I’ll understand if you say no, but if you were to show me some ID, a driver’s license, something like that, it would be a tremendous help to me, and it would put my wife’s mind at ease. It would settle this once and for all.”

He studied my face a moment. “She needs help, you know that,” he said.

I said nothing.

Finally, he sighed and shook his head and took his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it open, and withdrew a plastic card. “There,” he said, handing it to me.

It was a New York State license for Jeremy Sloan. An address up in Youngstown. It had his picture right on it.

“May I have this for one moment?” I asked. He nodded. I moved over to Cynthia and handed it to her. “Look at this.”

She took the license tentatively between her thumb and index finger, examined it through the start of tears. Her eyes went from the picture on the license to the man in person. Quietly, she handed the license back to him.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m, I’m so sorry.”

The man took the license back, slid it into his wallet, shook his head again disgustedly, muttered something under his breath although the only word I caught was “loony,” and headed off into the parking lot.

“Come on, Cyn,” I said. “Let’s get Grace.”

“Grace?” she said. “You left Grace?”

“She’s with someone,” I said. “It’s okay.”

But she was running back into the mall, across the main court, up the escalator. I was right behind her, and we threaded our way back through the maze of busy tables to where we’d had our lunch. There were the three trays. Our unfinished Styrofoam bowls of soup and sandwiches, Grace’s McDonald’s trash.

Grace was not there.

The woman in the blue coat was not there.

“Where the hell…”

“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “You left her here? You left her here alone ?”

“I’m telling you I left her with this woman, she was sitting right here.” What I wanted to tell her was that if she hadn’t run off on a wild-goose chase, I wouldn’t have been faced with the choice of leaving Grace on her own. “She must be around somewhere,” I said.

“Who was she?” Cynthia asked. “What did she look like?”

“I don’t know. I mean, she was an older woman. She had on a blue coat. She was just this woman sitting here.”

She had left her unfinished salad sitting on her tray, along with a paper cup half filled with Pepsi or Coke. It was like she’d left in a hurry.

“Mall security,” I said, trying to keep panic from taking over. “They can watch for a woman, blue coat, with a little girl-”

I was scanning the food court, looking for anyone official.

“Did you see our little girl?” Cynthia asked people at surrounding tables. They looked back, their faces blank, shrugging. “Eight years old? She was sitting right here?”

I felt overwhelmed with helplessness. I looked back toward the McDonald’s counter, thinking maybe the woman lured her away with the promise of another ice cream. But surely Grace was too smart for that. She was only eight, but she’d been through the whole street-proofing thing and-

Cynthia, standing in the middle of the crowded food court, started to shout our daughter’s name. “Grace!” she said. “Grace!”

And then, behind me, a voice.

“Hi, Dad.”

I whirled around. “Why’s Mom screaming?” Grace asked.

“Where the hell were you?” I asked. Cynthia had spotted us and was running over. “What happened to that woman?”

“Her cell rang, and she said she had to go,” Grace said matter-of-factly. “And then I had to go to the bathroom. I told you I had to go to the bathroom. Don’t everybody freak out.”

Cynthia grabbed Grace, held her close enough to smother her. If I’d been having qualms about keeping to myself the information about those secret payments to Tess, I was over them now. This family did not need any more chaos.

No one spoke the whole way home.

When we got there, the message light on the phone was flashing. It was one of the producers from Deadline . The three of us stood in the kitchen and listened to her say that someone had gotten in touch with them. Someone who claimed to know what might have happened to Cynthia’s parents and brother.