Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

But I did leave the house by the back door and walk around to the front, where I found Cynthia sitting, with Grace in her lap, in the front seat of our car with the door open. Grace had her arms around her mother’s neck and appeared to have been crying. Cynthia seemed, at the moment, too shocked to weep.

Cynthia looked at me, her eyes sending a question, and I answered by shaking my head back and forth a couple of times, very slowly.

“What is it?” she asked me. “Do you think it was a heart attack?”

“A heart attack?” said Grace. “Is she okay? Is Aunt Tess okay?”

“No,” I said to Cynthia. “It wasn’t a heart attack.”

The police agreed.

There must have been ten cars there within the hour, including half a dozen cop cars, an ambulance that sat around for a while, and a couple of TV news vans that were held back at the main road.

A couple of detectives spoke to me and Cynthia separately while another officer stayed with Grace, who was overwhelmed with questions. All we’d told her was that Tess was sick, that something had happened to her. Something very bad.

That was an understatement.

She’d been stabbed. Someone had taken one of her own kitchen knives and driven it into her. At one point, while I was in the kitchen and Cynthia out in one of the patrol cars, answering another officer’s questions, I overheard a woman from the coroner’s office telling a detective that she couldn’t be certain at this point, but there was a good chance the knife got her right in the heart.

Jesus.

They had a lot of questions for me. Why had we come up? For a visit, I said. And to have a bit of a celebration. Tess had just received some good news from the doctor, I said.

She was going to be okay, I said.

The detective made a little snorting noise, but he was good enough not to laugh.

Did I have any idea who might have done this, he asked. No, I said. And that was the truth.

“It may have been some kind of break-in,” he said. “Kids looking for money to buy drugs, something like that.”

“Does it look to you like that’s what happened?” I asked.

The detective paused. “Not really.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking. “Doesn’t look like much was taken, if anything. They could have grabbed her keys, taken her car, but they didn’t.”

“They?”

The detective smiled. “It’s easier than saying ‘he or she.’ It might have been one person, might have been more. We just don’t know at this point.”

“This might,” I said hesitantly, “be related to something that happened to my wife.”

“Hmm?”

“Twenty-five years ago.”

I told him as condensed a version as possible of Cynthia’s story. About how there had been some strange developments of late, particularly since the TV item.

“Oh yeah,” said the detective. “I think I might have seen that. That’s the show with what’s her name? Paula something?”

“Yeah.” And I told him that we had engaged a private detective in the last few days to look into it.

“Denton Abagnall,” I said.

“Oh, I know him. Good guy. I know where to reach him.”

He let me go, with the proviso that I not yet go back to Milford, that I hang around a while longer in case he had any last-minute questions, and I went back out to find Cynthia. No one was asking her anything when I found her where she’d been before, in the front of the car with Grace in her lap. Grace looked so vulnerable and afraid.

When she saw me, she asked, “Is Aunt Tess dead, Dad?”

I glanced at Cynthia, waiting for a signal. Tell her the truth, don’t tell her the truth. Something. But there was nothing, so I said, “Yes, honey. She is.”

Grace’s lip started trembling. Cynthia said, so evenly that I could tell she was actually holding back, “You could have told me.”

“What?”

“You could have told me what you knew. What Tess had told you. You could have told me.”

“Yes,” I said. “I could have. I should have.”

She paused, choosing her words carefully. “And then maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Cyn, I don’t see how, I mean, there’s no way to know-”

“That’s right. There’s no way to know. But I know this. If you’d told me sooner what Tess had told you, about the money, the envelopes, I’d have been up here talking to her about it, we’d have been putting our heads together trying to figure out what it all meant, and if I’d been doing that, maybe I’d have been here, or maybe we’d have figured something out, before someone had a chance to do this.”

“Cyn, I just don’t-”

“What else haven’t you told me, Terry? What other things are you holding back, supposedly to protect me? To spare me? What else did she tell you, what else do you know that I’m not able to handle?”

Grace started to cry and buried her face into Cynthia’s chest. It appeared that we had given up completely now on trying to shield her from all of this.

“Honey, honest to God,” I said, “anything I kept from you, I did it with your best interests in mind.”

She wrapped her arms tighter around Grace. “What else, Terry? What else?”

“Nothing,” I said.

But there was one thing. Something I’d only just noticed and hadn’t mentioned to anyone yet, because I didn’t know whether it was significant.

I’d been brought back into the kitchen by the investigating officers, asked to describe all of my movements, where I’d stood, what I’d done, what I’d touched.

As I was leaving the room I happened to look at the small bulletin board next to the phone. There was the picture of Grace that I had taken on our trip to Disney World.

What was it Tess had said on the phone to me? After Denton Abagnall had been out to visit her?

I’d said something along the lines of, “If you think of anything else, you should give him a call.”

And Tess had said, “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.”

There was no card on the board now.

“You don’t say,” she said. This was quite the development.

“Oh, it’s true,” he said.

“Well well well,” she said. “And to think we were just talking about her.”

“I know.”

“That’s quite the coinky-dink,” she said slyly. “You being down there and all.”

“Yeah.”

“She had it coming, you know,” she said.

“I knew you wouldn’t be upset when I told you. But I think it means we have to hold off for a couple of days on the next part.”

“Really?” she said. She knew she’d preached to him on the virtues of taking his time, but she was feeling impatient all of a sudden.

“There’s going to be a funeral here tomorrow,” he said, “and I guess there’s a whole lot of planning for something like that, and she didn’t even have any other family to make arrangements, right?”

“That’s my understanding,” she said.

“So my sister, she’s going to be pretty busy making all those arrangements, right? So maybe we should wait for that to be over.”

“I see your point. But there’s something I’d like you to do for me.”

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s just a little thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t call her your sister.” She was very firm.

“Sorry.”

“You know how I feel.”

“Okay. It’s just, well, you know, she is-”

“I don’t care,” she said.