Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“Fascinating,” breathed Paula. Cynthia remained expressionless.

“And I heard this voice, she said to me, ‘Please get a message to my daughter.’”

“Really? And did she say who she was?”

“She said her name was Patricia.”

Cynthia blinked.

“And what else did she say?”

“She said she wanted me to reach her daughter, Cynthia.”

“Why?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I think she wanted me to contact her so that I could learn more. That’s why I wanted you”-she smiled at Cynthia-“to bring some mementos, so that I could hold them, perhaps understand better what happened.”

Paula leaned in toward Cynthia. “You brought some things, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Cynthia said. “This is one of the shoeboxes I showed you before. Pictures, old clippings, just bits and pieces of things. I can show you what’s inside and-”

“No,” said Keisha. “That’s not necessary. If you would just give me the entire box…”

Cynthia let her take it, let her set it on her lap. Keisha put a hand on each end of the box and closed her eyes.

“I feel so much energy coming from this,” she said.

Give me a fucking break, I thought.

“I feel…sadness. So much sadness.”

“What else do you feel?” Paula asked.

Keisha furrowed her brow. “I sense…that you are about to receive a sign.”

“A sign?” said Cynthia. “What kind of sign?”

“A sign…that will help answer your questions. I’m not sure I can tell you more.”

“Why?” asked Cynthia.

“Why?” asked Paula.

Keisha opened her eyes. “I…I need you to turn the cameras off for a moment.”

“Huh?” said Paula. “Fellas? Can we hold off for a second?”

“Okay,” said one of the guys manning a camera.

“What’s the problem, Keisha?” said Paula.

“What is it?” Cynthia asked, alarmed. “What is it you didn’t want to say on camera? Something about my mother? Something about what she wanted you to tell me?”

“Sort of,” Keisha said. “But I just wanted to get straight, before we go any further, how much I’m getting paid to do this.”

Here we go.

“Uh, Keisha,” said Paula, “I think it was explained to you that while we would cover your expenses, put you up in a hotel for the night if necessary-I know you had to come down from Hartford-we weren’t paying you for your services in any sort of professional sense.”

“That wasn’t my understanding,” she said, getting a bit huffy now. “I’ve some very important stuff to tell this lady, and if you want to hear it, I’m going to need to be financially compensated.”

“Why don’t you tell her what you have to say and we’ll go from there?” Paula suggested.

I walked forward to the set, caught Cynthia’s eye. “Hon,” I said, tipping my head, the international “let’s go” gesture.

She nodded resignedly, unclipped the microphone from her blouse, and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Paula asked.

“We’re outta here,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Keisha asked, outraged. “Where are you going? Lady, if this show isn’t going to pay to hear what I know, maybe you should.”

Cynthia said, “I’m not going to be made a fool of anymore.”

“A thousand dollars,” Keisha said. “I’ll tell you what your momma told me to tell you for a thousand dollars.”

Cynthia was rounding the couch. I reached out my hand for hers.

“Okay, seven hundred!” Keisha said as we went to find our way to the green room.

“You really are a piece of work,” Paula told Keisha. “You could have been on TV. All the free advertising in the world, but you’ve got to shake us down for a few hundred bucks.”

Keisha gave Paula the evil eye, looked at her hair. “That’s one bad dye job, bitch.”

“You were right,” Cynthia said on the drive home.

I shook my head. “You were good, walking away like that. You should have seen the look on that so-called psychic’s face when you took off your mike. It’s like she was watching her meal ticket walk away.”

Cynthia’s smile was caught in the glare of some oncoming headlights. Grace, after a flurry of questions we declined to answer, had fallen asleep in the backseat.

“What a waste of an evening,” Cynthia said.

“No,” I said. “What you said was right, and I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about this. Even if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance, you have to check it out. So we checked it out. And now we can cross it off and move on.”

We pulled into the drive. I opened the back door, unbuckled Grace, and carried her into the house, following Cynthia into the living room. She walked ahead of me, turned on the lights in the kitchen as I headed for the stairs to carry Grace up to bed.

“Terry,” Cynthia said.

Ordinarily, I might have said “Be there in a sec” and taken Grace upstairs first, but there was something in my wife’s voice that said I should come into the kitchen immediately.

So I did.

Sitting in the center of the kitchen table was a man’s black hat. An old, worn, shiny-with-wear fedora.

She tried to move in a bit closer, got as near to him as she could, and whispered, “For heaven’s sake, are you even listening to me? I come all this way and you won’t even open your eyes. You think it’s easy getting here? The things you’ve put me through. I make the effort, seems the least you could do is stay awake a few minutes. You’ve got the whole day to sleep, I’m only here for a little while .

“Well, let me tell you something. You’re not quitting on us. You’re going to be with us for a while longer, that’s for sure. When it’s time for you to go, believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”

And then he seemed to be trying to say something.

“What’s that?” she said. She was just able to make out a question. “Oh, him,” she said. “He couldn’t come tonight.”

Gently, I set Grace downon the couch in the living room, tucked a throw pillow under her head, and went back into the kitchen.

The fedora might as well have been a dead rat, the way Cynthia was staring at it. She was standing as far away from the table as possible, her back to the wall, and her eyes were full of fear.

It wasn’t the hat itself that scared me. It was how it got there. “You watch Grace for a minute,” I said.

“Be careful,” Cynthia said.

I went upstairs, flicked on the lights in each room and poked in my head as I did so. Checked the bathroom, then decided to check the other rooms again, looking in closets, under beds. Everything looked the way it should.

I came back down to the main floor, opened the door to our unfinished basement. At the bottom of the steps I waved my hand around, caught the string, and turned on the bare bulb.

“What do you see?” Cynthia called from upstairs.

I saw a washer and dryer, a workbench piled with junk, an assortment of nearly empty paint cans, a folded-up spare bed. Nothing much else.

I came back upstairs. “The house is empty,” I said.

Cynthia was still staring at the hat. “He was here,” she said.

“Who was here?”

“My father. He was here.”

“Cynthia, someone was here and left that on the table, but your father?”

“It’s his hat,” she said, more calmly than I might have expected. I approached the table, reached out to grab it. “Don’t touch it!” she said.

“It’s not going to bite me,” I said, and grabbed one of the peaks between my thumb and forefinger, then grabbed it with both hands, turning it over, looking inside.