Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“I just feel…optimistic,” I said.

“That Mr. Abagnall is going to find out something?”

“Not necessarily. I just feel as though we’ve turned a corner, that you-that we-have gone through some stressful times of late, and that we’re coming out of them.”

“Then I think I’ll have a glass of wine with dinner,” she said.

I returned her playful smile. “I think you should.”

“I’m going to have a milkshake,” Grace said. “With a cherry.”

When we got home from dinner, Grace vanished to watch something on the Discovery Channel about what Saturn’s rings are really made of, and Cynthia and I plunked ourselves down at the kitchen table. I was writing down numbers on a scratch pad, adding them up, doing them another way. This was where we always sat when faced with weighty financial decisions. Could we afford that second car? Would a trip to Disney World break the bank?

“I’m thinking,” I said, looking at the numbers, “that we could probably afford Mr. Abagnall for two weeks instead of just one. I don’t think it would put us in the poorhouse, you know?”

Cynthia put her hand over the one I was writing with. “I love you, you know.”

In the other room, someone on the TV said “Uranus” and Grace giggled.

“Did I ever tell you the time,” Cynthia asked, “when I ruined my mother’s James Taylor cassette?”

“No.”

“I must have been eleven or twelve, and Mom had lots of music-she loved James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Young and lots of others, but most of all she liked James Taylor. She said he could make her happy, and he could make her sad. One day, Mom made me mad about something, there was something I wanted to wear to school that was in the dirty clothes pile and I mouthed off because she hadn’t done her job.”

“That must have gone over well.”

“No kidding. She said if she wasn’t cleaning my clothes to my satisfaction, I knew where the washing machine was. So I popped open the cassette player she had in the kitchen, grabbed whatever tape was in there, and threw it on the floor. It busted open and the tape spilled out and the thing was ruined.”

I listened.

“I froze, I couldn’t even believe I’d done it, and I thought she’d kill me. But instead, she stopped what she was doing, went over, picked up the tape, calm as could be, had a look at which one it was, and said, ‘James Taylor. This is the one with “Your Smiling Face” on it. That’s my favorite. You know why I like that one?’ she asks me. ‘Because it starts off how every time I see your face, I have to smile myself, because I love you.’ Anyway, something like that. And she said, ‘That’s my favorite because every time I hear it, it makes me think of you, and how much I love you. And right about now, you need me to hear that song more than ever.’”

Cynthia’s eyes were wet.

“So after school, I took the bus over to the Post Mall and I found the cassette. JT , it was called. I bought it and brought it home, and I gave it to her. And she got all the cellophane wrapping off it and put the cassette into her player and asked me if I wanted to hear her favorite song.”

A single tear ran down her cheek and dropped onto the kitchen table. “I love that song,” Cynthia said. “And I miss her so much.”

Later, she phoned Tess. No special reason, just to talk. Afterward, she came up to the extra bedroom with the sewing machine and the computer, where I was typing a couple of notes to students on my old Royal, and her red eyes suggested that she had been crying again.

Tess, she told me, had thought she was very ill, terminal even, but it had turned out to be okay. “She said she didn’t want to tell me, that she thought I had enough on my plate that she didn’t want to burden me with it. That’s what she said. ‘Burden.’ Can you imagine?”

“That’s so crazy,” I said.

“And then she finds out she’s actually okay, and felt she could tell me everything, but I just wish she’d told me when she knew, you know? Because she’s always been there for me, and no matter what I’m going through, she’s always…” She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. Finally, she said, “I can’t imagine losing her.”

“I know. Neither can I.”

“When you were so happy, that didn’t have anything…”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

I probably could have told her the truth. I could have afforded to be honest at that moment, but chose not to.

“Oh shit,” she said. “She asked me to tell you to call her. She probably wants to tell you this herself. Don’t tell her I already told you, okay? Please? I just couldn’t keep it to myself, you know?”

“Sure,” I said.

I went downstairs and dialed Tess.

“I told her,” Tess said.

“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”

“He was here.”

“Hmm?”

“The detective. That Mr. Abagnall. He’s a very nice man.”

“Yes.”

“His wife called while he was here. To tell him what she was making him for dinner.”

“What was it?” I had to know.

“Uh, some sort of roast, I think. A roast of beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

“Sounds delicious.”

“Anyway, I told him everything. About the money, the letter. I gave all of it to him. He was very interested.”

I nodded. “I would think so.”

“Do you think they can still get fingerprints off those envelopes after all these years?”

“I don’t know, Tess. It’s been so long, and you’ve handled them quite a few times. I’m no expert. But I think that was the best thing to do, giving him everything. If you think of anything else, you should give him a call.”

“That’s what he asked me to do. He gave me his card. I’m looking at it right now, it’s pinned to my board here by the phone, right next to that picture of Grace with Goofy. I don’t know which one looks goofier.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Give Cynthia a hug for me,” she said.

“I will. I love you, Tess,” I said, and hung up.

“She told you?” Cynthia asked me when I got up to our bedroom.

“She told me.”

Cynthia, now in her nightshirt, lay on the bed, on top of the covers. “I’d been thinking, all evening, that I would like to make mad, passionate love to you tonight, but I’m so dead tired, I’m not sure I could perform to any reasonable standard.”

“I’m not particular,” I said.

“So how about a rain check?”

“Sure. Maybe what we should do is, get Tess to take Grace for a weekend, we could drive up to Mystic. Get a bed-and-breakfast.”

Cynthia agreed. “Maybe I’d sleep better up there, too,” she said. “My dreams have been…kind of unsettling lately.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like I told Dr. Kinzler. I hear them talking. They’re talking to me, I think, or I’m talking to them, or we’re all talking with one another, but it’s like I’m with them but not with them, and I can almost reach out and touch them. But when I do, it’s like they’re smoke. They just blow away.”

I leaned over, kissed her forehead. “Have you said goodnight to Grace?”

“While you were talking to Tess.”

“You try to get some sleep. I’ll say goodnight to her.”

As usual, Grace’s room was in total darkness so as to give her a better view of the stars through her telescope. “Are we safe tonight?” I asked as I slipped in, closing the door to the hall behind me to keep the light out.

“Looks like it,” Grace said.

“That’s good.”

“You wanna see?”

Grace was able to stand and see through her telescope, but I didn’t want to have to bend over, so I grabbed the Ikea computer chair from her desk and sat in front of it. I squinted into the end, saw nothing but blackness with a few pinpricks of light. “Okay, what am I looking at?”