Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“Let me make a call,” I said, and reached for the phone. I let it ring half a dozen times before her voicemail cut in. Given that Cynthia had already left a message, I couldn’t see the point in leaving another.

“I told you,” Cynthia said.

I looked at the wall clock. It was nearly seven. Whatever Tess might be out doing, chances were she wouldn’t be out doing it much longer. “Why don’t we go for a drive, head up to her place, maybe she’ll be there by the time we arrive, or we can wait around for a little while until she shows up. You still have a key, right?”

Cynthia nodded.

“You don’t think this can all wait till tomorrow?” she asked.

“I think, not only would she want to hear about what Mr. Abagnall found out, there might be some things she might want to share with you.”

“What do you mean, she might have something to share with me?” Cynthia asked. Grace was eyeing me pretty curiously, too, but had the sense not to say anything this time.

“I don’t know. This new information, it might trigger something with her, prompt her to remember things she hasn’t thought about in years. You know, if we tell her your father might have had some other, I don’t know, identity, then she might go, oh yeah, that explains such and such.”

“You’re acting like you already know what it is she’s going to tell me.”

My mouth was dry. I got up, ran some water from the tap until it was cold, filled a glass, drank it down, turned around and leaned against the counter.

“Okay,” I said. “Grace, your mother and I need some privacy here.”

“I haven’t finished my dinner.”

“Take your plate with you and go watch some TV.”

She took her plate and left the room, a sour expression on her face. I knew she was thinking that she missed all the good stuff.

To Cynthia, I said, “Before she got those last test results, Tess thought she was dying.”

Cynthia was very still. “You knew this.”

“Yes. She told me she thought she only had a limited amount of time left.”

“You kept this from me.”

“Please. Just let me tell you this. You can get mad later.” I felt Cynthia’s eyes go into me like icicles. “But you were under a lot of stress at the time, and Tess told me because she wasn’t sure you’d be able to deal with that kind of news. And just as well she didn’t tell you, because as it turned out, she’s okay. That’s the thing we can’t lose sight of.”

Cynthia said nothing.

“Anyway, at the time, when she thought she was terminal, there was something else she felt she had to tell me, something that she felt you needed to know when the time was right. She wasn’t sure she’d get the chance again.”

And so I told Cynthia. Everything. The anonymous note, the cash, how it could show up anywhere, anytime. How it helped get her through school. How Tess, taking the author of the note at his or her word, that if she breathed a word of this the cash would stop coming, kept this to herself all these years.

She listened, only interrupting me a couple of times with questions, let me spell it all out for her.

When I was done, she looked numb. She said something I didn’t hear very often from her. “I could use a drink,” she said.

I got down a bottle of scotch from a shelf high in the pantry, poured her a small glass. She drank it down in one long gulp, and I poured her about half as much again. She drank that down, too.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go and see Tess.”

We would have preferred to go see Tess without bringing Grace along, but it would have been a scramble to find a sitter with no notice. And not only that, knowing that someone had been watching the house made us uneasy about putting Grace in anyone else’s care at the moment.

So we told her to bring some things to entertain herself-she grabbed her Cosmos book again and a DVD of that Jodie Foster movie Contact -down in Tess’s basement, allowing the rest of us to talk privately.

Grace wasn’t her usual chatty self on the way up. I think she was picking up the tension in the car, and decided, wisely, to lay low.

“Maybe we’ll get some ice cream on the way back,” I said, breaking the silence. “Or have some of Tess’s. She probably still has some left from her birthday.”

When we pulled off the main road between Milford and Derby and drove down Tess’s street, Cynthia pointed. “Her car’s home.”

Tess drove a four-wheel-drive Subaru wagon. She always said she didn’t want to be stranded in a snowstorm if she needed provisions.

Grace was out of the car first and ran up to the front door. “Hold on, pal,” I said. “Wait up. You can’t just go bursting in.”

We got to the door and I knocked. After a few seconds, I knocked again, only louder.

“Maybe she’s around back,” Cynthia said. “Working on her garden.”

So we walked around the house, Grace, as usual, charging on ahead, skipping, leaping into the air. Before we’d rounded the house, she was already running back, saying, “She’s not there.” We had to see for ourselves, of course, but Grace was correct. Tess was not in her backyard, working in the garden as twilight slowly turned to darkness.

Cynthia rapped on the back door, which led directly into Tess’s kitchen.

There was still no answer.

“That’s weird,” she said. It also seemed strange that, as night was falling, there were no lights on inside the house.

I crowded Cynthia on the back step and peered through the tiny window in the door.

I couldn’t be certain about this, but I thought I saw something on the floor of the kitchen, obscuring the black and white checker-boarded tiles.

A person.

“Cynthia,” I said, “take Grace back to the car.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t let her come into the house.”

“Jesus, Terry,” she whispered. “What is it?”

I grasped the knob, turned it slowly, and pushed, testing to see whether the door was locked. It was not.

I stepped in, Cynthia looking over my shoulder, and felt along the wall for the light switch, flipped it up.

Aunt Tess lay on the kitchen floor, facedown, her head twisted at an odd angle, one arm stretched out ahead of her, the other hanging back.

“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “She’s had a stroke or something!”

I didn’t exactly have a medical degree, but there seemed to be an awful lot of blood on the floor for a stroke.

Maybe, if Grace hadn’t beenthere, Cynthia would have lost it completely. But when she heard our daughter running up behind us, preparing to leap right over the step and into the kitchen, Cynthia turned, blocked her, and started moving her around to the front yard.

“What’s wrong?” Grace shouted. “Aunt Tess?”

I knelt next to Cynthia’s aunt, tentatively touched her back. It felt very cold. “Tess,” I whispered. There was so much blood pooled under her that I didn’t want to turn her over, and there were these voices in my head telling me not to touch anything. So I shifted around, knelt even closer to the floor, to see her face. The sight of her open, unblinking eyes staring straight ahead left me chilled.

The blood, as best I could tell with my untrained eye, was dry and congealed, as though Tess had been this way for a very long time. And there was a terrible stench in the room that I’d only just now begun to notice, so shocked was I by this discovery.

I stood up and reached for the wall-mounted phone next to the bulletin board, then stopped myself. That voice again, telling me not to touch anything. I dug out my cell and made the call.

“Yes, I’ll wait here,” I told the 911 operator. “I’m not going anywhere.”