Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

Cynthia said, “Yes. Please go ahead.”

“Now, there may be a very simple explanation for this. It might just be some sort of clerical error, you never know. The state bureaucracy has been known to make its share of mistakes.”

“Yes?”

“Well, when you were unable to produce a photograph of your father, I went in search of one, and that led me to check with the Department of Motor Vehicles. I thought they would be able to assist me in this regard, but as it turns out, they weren’t much help to me.”

“They didn’t have his picture? Was that before they put pictures on driver’s licenses?” she asked.

“That’s really something of a moot point,” Abagnall said. “The thing is, they have no record of your father ever having a license at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no record of him, Mrs. Archer. As far as the DMV is concerned, he never existed.”

“But that could just bewhat you said,” Cynthia said. “People go missing from computer files all the time.”

Denton Abagnall nodded agreeably. “That’s very true. The fact that Clayton Bigge didn’t show up in the DMV files is not, in itself, particularly conclusive of anything. But then I checked past records for his Social Security number.”

“Yes?” Cynthia said.

“And nothing came up there, either. It’s hard to find any record of your father anywhere, Mrs. Archer. We have no picture of him. I looked through your shoeboxes and I couldn’t find so much as a pay stub from a place of employment. Do you happen to know the name of the actual company he worked for, that sent him out on the road all the time?”

Cynthia thought. “No,” she said.

“There’s no record of him with the IRS. Far as I can tell, he never paid any taxes. Not under the name of Clayton Bigge, at any rate.”

“What are you saying?” she asked. “Are you saying he was a spy or something? Some kind of secret agent?”

Abagnall grinned. “Well, not necessarily. Nothing quite so exotic.”

“Because he was away a lot,” she said. She looked at me. “What do you think? Could he have been a government agent, being sent away on missions?”

“It seems kind of out there,” I said hesitantly. “I mean, next we’ll start wondering whether he was an alien from another planet. Maybe he was sent here to study us and then went back to his home world, took your mother and brother with him.”

Cynthia just looked at me. She was still looking a bit woozy after her near fainting spell.

“It was supposed to be a joke,” I said apologetically.

Abagnall brought us-me in particular-back to reality. “That’s not one of my working theories.”

“Then what are your theories?” I asked.

He took a sip of coffee. “I could probably come up with half a dozen, based on what little I know at the moment,” he said. “Was your father living under a name that was not his own? Was he escaping some strange past? A criminal one, perhaps? Did Vince Fleming bring harm to your family that evening? Was his father’s criminal network somehow linked to something in your father’s past that he’d been successfully covering up until that time?”

“We don’t really know anything, do we?” Cynthia asked.

Abagnall leaned back tiredly into the couch cushions. “What I know is that in a couple of days, the unanswered questions in this case seem to be expanding exponentially. And I have to ask you whether you want me to continue. You’ve already spent several hundred dollars on my efforts, and it could run into the thousands. If you’d like me to stop now, that’s fine. I can walk away from this, give you a report on what I’ve learned so far. Or I can keep digging. It’s entirely up to you.”

Cynthia started to open her mouth, but before she could speak, I said, “We’d like you to continue.”

“All right,” he said. “Why don’t I stay on this for another couple of days? I don’t need another check at this time. I think another forty-eight hours will really determine whether I can make significant progress.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I think I want to look further into this Vince Fleming character. Mrs. Archer, what do you think? Could this man-well, he would have been a very young man back in 1983-have been capable of bringing harm to your family?”

She thought about that for a moment. “After all this time, I guess I have to consider that anything is possible.”

“Yes, it’s good to keep an open mind. Thank you for the coffee.”

Before leaving, Abagnall returned Cynthia’s shoebox of mementos. Cynthia closed the door as he left, then turned to me and asked, “Who was my father? Who the hell was my father?”

And I thought of Jane Scavullo’s creative writing assignment. How we’re all strangers to one another, how we often know the least about those we’re closest to.

For twenty-five years, Cynthia had endured the pain and anxiety associated with her family’s disappearance without a hint of what might have happened to them. And while we still didn’t have the answer to that question, strands of information were floating to the surface, like bits of planking from a ship sunk long ago. These revelations that Cynthia’s father might be living under an assumed name, that Vince Fleming’s past might be much darker than originally thought. The strange phone call, the mysterious appearance of what was purported to be Clayton Bigge’s hat. The man watching our house late at night. The news from Tess that for a period of time envelopes stuffed with cash from an anonymous source had been entrusted to her to look after Cynthia.

It was this last one I felt Cynthia was now entitled to know about. And I thought it would be better for her to learn about it from Tess herself.

We struggled through dinner not to discuss the questions that Abagnall’s visit had raised. We were both feeling that we’d already exposed Grace to too much of this. She had her radar out all the time, picking up one bit of information one day, matching it up with something else she might hear the next. We were worried that discussing Cynthia’s history, the opportunistic psychic, Abagnall’s investigation, all of those things, might be contributing to Grace’s anxiety, her fear that one night we’d all be wiped out by an object from outer space.

But try as we might to avoid the subject, it was often Grace who brought it up.

“Where’s the hat?” she asked after a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

“What?” Cynthia said.

“The hat. Your dad’s hat. The one that got left here. Where is it?”

“I put it up in the closet,” she said.

“Can I see it?”

“No,” Cynthia said. “It’s not to be played with.”

“I wasn’t going to play with it. I just wanted to look at it.”

“I don’t want you playing with it or looking at it or touching it!” Cynthia snapped.

Grace retreated, went back to her mashed potatoes.

Cynthia was preoccupied and on edge all through dinner. Who wouldn’t be, having learned only an hour earlier that the man she’d known her entire life as Clayton Bigge might not be Clayton Bigge at all?

“I think,” I said, “that we should go visit Tess tonight.”

“Yeah,” said Grace. “Let’s see Aunt Tess.”

Cynthia, as though coming out of a dream, said, “Tomorrow. I thought you said we should go see her tomorrow.”

“I know. But I think it might be good to see her tonight. There’s a lot to talk about. I think you should tell her what Mr. Abagnall said.”

“What did he say?” Grace asked.

I gave her a look that silenced her.

“I called earlier,” Cynthia said. “I left her a message. She must be out doing something. She’ll call us when she gets the message.”