Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

I pried apart the blinds. Cynthia’s car was not in the driveway.

I muttered something along the lines of “What the fuck?”

Then I padded down the hall, barefoot and shirtless, and eased open the door to Grace’s room. Grace was never up this early, and I had every reason to expect to find her in bed.

The covers were turned back, the bed empty.

I could have just shouted out my wife’s name, or my daughter’s, standing up there at the top of the stairs, but it was still very early in the morning, and if there was a chance that there was still someone else in this house with me, and if that person was asleep, I didn’t want to wake her.

I popped my head into the study, found it empty, went down to the kitchen.

It looked as it had the night before. Everything cleaned up and put away. No one had had an early breakfast before departing.

I opened the door to the basement, and this time I felt comfortable shouting. “Cyn!” It was dumb, I know, given that her car was not in the driveway, but because that didn’t make sense, at some level I must have been operating on the theory that it had been stolen. “You down there?” I waited a beat, then, “Grace!”

When I opened the front door, the morning newspaper was there waiting for me.

It was hard, at that moment, not to shake the feeling that I was living out an episode from Cynthia’s life.

But this time, unlike that morning twenty-five years ago, there was a note.

It was folded and standing on its side, on the kitchen table, tucked in between the salt and pepper shakers. I reached for it, unfolded it. It was handwritten, and the writing was unmistakably Cynthia’s. It read:

Terry:

I’m going away.

I don’t know where, or for how long. I just know I can’t stay here another minute.

I don’t hate you. But when I see the doubt in your eyes, it tears me apart. I feel like I’m losing my mind, that no one believes me. I know Wedmore still doesn’t know what to think.

What’s going to happen next? Who will break in to our house? Who will be watching it from the street? Who will be next to die?

I don’t want it to be Grace. So I’m taking her with me. I figure you have the smarts to look after yourself. Who knows? Maybe with me out of the house, you’ll actually feel safer.

I want to look for my father, but I don’t have any idea where to start. I believe he’s alive. Maybe that’s what Mr. Abagnall discovered after he went to see Vince. I just don’t know.

All I do know is I need some space. Grace and I need to be a mother and daughter, who don’t have to worry about anything else except being a mother and daughter.

I won’t have my cell on very often. I know they can do that thing, triangulate, to find people. But I’ll check it once in a while for messages. Maybe, at some point, I’ll feel like talking to you. Just not right now.

Call the school, tell them Grace will be gone for a while. I’m not calling the shop. Let Pamela think what she wants.

Don’t look for me.

I still love you, but I don’t need you to find me right now.

L, Cyn

I read it three, maybe four times. Then I picked up the phone and called her cell, despite what she’d written. It went straight to message, and I left one. “Cyn. Jesus. Call me.”

And then I slammed the phone down. “Shit!” I shouted. “Shit!”

I paced the kitchen a few times, unsure what to do. I opened the door, walked down to the end of the drive, still in nothing but my jeans, and looked up and down the street, as if somehow I could magically divine which way Cynthia and Grace had gone. I went back into the house, grabbed the phone again, and, as if in a trance, dialed the number I always did when I needed to talk to someone who loved Cynthia as much as I did.

I had dialed Tess.

And when the phone rang a third time and no one picked up, I realized what I’d done, the incredible mistake I had made. I hung up and sat at the kitchen table and began to cry. With my elbows on the table, I put my head in my hands and let it all come out.

I don’t know quite how long I sat there, alone, at my kitchen table, letting the tears run down my cheeks. Long enough until there weren’t any left, I guess. Once I’d exhausted the supply, I had no choice but to come up with another course of action.

I went back upstairs, finished dressing. I had to keep telling myself a few things.

The first was that Cynthia and Grace were okay. It wasn’t as though they’d been kidnapped or anything. And second, I couldn’t imagine that Cynthia would let anything bad happen to Grace, no matter how upset she was.

She loved Grace.

But what was my daughter to think? Her mother getting her up in the middle of the night, making her pack a bag, sneaking out of the house together so her father wouldn’t hear?

Cynthia had to have believed, in her heart, that this was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t. It was wrong, and it was wrong to put Grace through something like this.

And that was why I had no problem ignoring Cynthia’s orders not to look for them.

Grace was my daughter. She was missing. And I was bloody well going to look for her. And try to work out things with my wife.

I dug around in the bookcase and got out a map of New England and New York State, opened it up on the kitchen table. There were times when MapQuest didn’t cut it, not when you wanted to see the big picture.

I let my eyes wander, from Portland south to Providence, Boston west to Buffalo, asking myself where Cynthia might go. I looked at the Connecticut-Massachusetts line, the town of Otis, the vicinity of the quarry. I couldn’t see her going there. Not with Grace in tow. What would be the point? What was to be learned from a return trip?

There was the village of Sharon, where Connie Gormley, the woman who was killed in some sort of staged hit-and-run accident, had been from, but that didn’t make any sense, either. Cynthia had never really grabbed on to that story in the newspaper clipping as meaning anything, not the way I had. I couldn’t see her heading up that way.

Maybe the answer wasn’t to be found in looking at a map. Maybe I needed to be thinking about names. People from her past. People Cynthia might turn to, in these very desperate times, for answers.

I went into the living room, where I found the two shoeboxes of mementos from Cynthia’s childhood on an end table. Given what the last few weeks had been like, the boxes had never found their way back to their usual hiding place, in the bottom of our closet.

I started riffling through the contents randomly, tossing old receipts and clippings onto the coffee table, but they held no meaning for me. They seemed to coalesce into one huge puzzle with no discernible pattern.

I went back into the kitchen, phoned Rolly at home. It was too early for him to have left for school yet. Millicent answered.

“Hi, Terry,” she said. “What’s going on? Are you not going in today?”

“Rolly already has me off,” I said. “Millie, you haven’t heard from Cynthia by any chance?”

“Cynthia? No. Terry, what’s going on? Isn’t Cynthia home?”

“She’s gone. She took Grace with her.”

“Let me get Rolly.”

I heard her set the phone down and a few seconds later Rolly said, “Cynthia’s gone?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what to do.”

“Shit. And I was going to call her today, see how she’s doing, if she wanted to talk. She didn’t tell you where she was going?”

“Rolly, if I knew where she was going, I wouldn’t be calling you so fucking early in the morning.”