Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“Okay, Mom,” he said. “I won’t do it again.”

There weren’t manypeople to call.

Patricia Bigge, Cynthia’s mother, had been Tess’s only sibling. Their own parents, of course, were long gone. Tess, although she had been married briefly, had never had any children of her own, and there was no point in trying to track down her ex-husband. He wouldn’t have come back for the funeral anyway, and Tess wouldn’t have wanted the son of a bitch there.

And Tess had not kept up any of her friendships with the people at the roads department office where she’d worked before retiring. From what Tess used to say, she didn’t have many friends there anyway. They didn’t care much for her liberal notions. She belonged to a bridge club, but Cynthia had no idea who any of the members were, so there were no calls to make there.

It wasn’t as though we had to alert everyone to the funeral. Tess Berman’s death had made the news.

There were interviews with other people who lived on her heavily wooded street, none of whom, by the way, had noticed anything unusual going on in the neighborhood in the hours leading up to Tess’s death.

“It really makes you wonder,” said one for the TV cameras.

“Things like that don’t happen around here,” said another.

“We’re being extra careful to lock our doors and windows at night,” said someone else.

Maybe, if Tess had been fatally stabbed by an ex-husband or a jilted lover, the neighbors could have felt more at ease. But the word from the police was that they had no idea who had done this, no idea as to motive. And no suspects.

There was no sign of forced entry. No signs of a struggle, aside from a kitchen table that was slightly askew and a single chair that had been knocked over. It appeared that Tess’s killer had struck quickly, Tess had resisted for only a moment or so, just long enough to make her attacker stumble into the table, knock the chair over. But then the knife was driven home, and she was dead.

Her body, police said, had been on the floor there for as long as twenty-four hours.

I thought of all the things we’d done while Tess lay dead in a pool of her own blood. We’d readied ourselves for bed, slept, gotten up, brushed our teeth, listened to the morning news on the radio, gone to work, had dinner, lived an entire day of our lives that Tess had not.

It was too much to think about.

When I forced myself to stop, my mind went to equally troubling topics. Who had done this? Why? Was Tess the victim of some random attacker, or did this have something to do with Cynthia?

Where was Denton Abagnall’s business card? Had Tess not pinned it to the board as she’d told me? Had she decided she’d never be calling him with any more information, taken it down and tossed it into the trash?

The next morning, consumed with these and other questions, I found the card Abagnall had left with us and called his cell phone number.

The provider cut in immediately and invited me to leave a message, suggesting that Abagnall’s phone was off.

So I tried his home number. A woman answered.

“Is Mr. Abagnall there, please?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Is this Mrs. Abagnall?”

“Who is this, please?”

“This is Terry Archer.”

“Mr. Archer!” she said, sounding a bit frantic. “I was just going to call you!”

“Mrs. Abagnall, I really need to speak to your husband. It’s possible the police have already been in touch. I gave them your husband’s name last night and-”

“Have you heard from him?”

“Sorry?”

“Have you heard from Denton? Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“This isn’t like him at all. Sometimes, he has to work overnight, on surveillance, but he always gets in touch at some point.”

I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I said, “He was at our house yesterday afternoon. Late afternoon. He was bringing us up to date.”

“I know,” she said. “I phoned him just after he left your place. He said he’d had another call, that someone had left him a message, that they’d call back.”

I remembered Abagnall’s phone ringing as he sat in our living room, how I had assumed it was his wife calling to tell him what she was cooking for supper, how he’d looked at it, surprised it wasn’t a call from home, how he’d let it go to voicemail.

“Did they call back?”

“I don’t know. That was the last I spoke to him.”

“Have you heard from the police?”

“Yes. I nearly had a heart attack when they came to the door this morning. But it was about a woman, up near Derby, who’d been murdered in her home.”

“My wife’s aunt,” I said. “We went up to visit her, and found her.”

“My God,” Mrs. Abagnall said. “I’m so sorry.”

I thought about what I was going to say next before I said it, given that I’d developed a habit lately of keeping things from people out of fears I’d worry them needlessly. But that was a policy that didn’t appear to be paying off. So I said, “Mrs. Abagnall, I don’t want to alarm you, and I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason your husband hasn’t gotten in touch with you, but I think you need to call the police.”

“Oh,” she said quietly.

“I think you should tell them your husband is missing. Even though it hasn’t been for very long.”

“I see,” Mrs. Abagnall said. “I’m going to do that.”

“And you can call me if anything happens. Let me give you my home number, if you don’t already have it, and my cell, too.”

She didn’t have to ask to get a pencil. My guess was, being married to a detective, there was a notepad and pen next to the phone at all times.

Cynthia came into the kitchen. She was on her way back down to the funeral home. Tess, bless her heart, had planned ahead to make things as simple as possible for her loved ones. She’d finished paying for her funeral, in small monthly installments, years ago. Her ashes were to be scattered over Long Island Sound.

“Cyn,” I said.

She didn’t respond. She’d frozen me out. Regardless of whether I thought it was rational, she was holding me, at least in part, responsible for Tess’s death. Even I was wondering whether things might have gone differently if I had told Cynthia everything I’d known at the time I’d known it. Would Tess have been in her home when her killer came to call if Cynthia had known how Tess was able to put her through school? Or would the two of them been someplace else entirely, working as a team, maybe helping Abagnall with his investigation?

I couldn’t know. And the not knowing was something I was going to have to live with.

We were both home from work, of course. She’d taken off indefinitely from the dress shop, and I called the school to tell them that I’d be off for the next few days and that they’d better get a substitute teacher who had a clear calendar. Whoever it was, good luck with my crew, I thought.

“I’m not going to keep anything from you from now on,” I told Cynthia. “And something else has happened that you should know about.”

She stopped before leaving the kitchen, but didn’t turn around to look at me.

“I just spoke with Denton Abagnall’s wife,” I said. “He’s missing.”

She seemed to list a bit to one side, as if some of the air had been let out of her. “What did she say?” Cynthia managed to ask.

I told her.

She stood there for another moment, put one hand up to the wall to steady herself, and then said, “I have to go to the funeral home, make some last-minute decisions.”

“Of course,” I said. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“No,” she said, and left.