Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“I guess I didn’t fully appreciate that.”

“Given the kind of business I do, sometimes I run into people with unorthodox business practices.”

“Sure,” I said.

“So when people I don’t know start asking around for me, I like to arrange a meeting where I feel I have the advantage.”

“I think you do,” I said.

“So who the fuck are you?”

“Terry Archer. You know my wife.”

“I know your wife,” he said, as if to say, So ? “Not anymore. But a long time ago.”

Fleming scowled at me as he took another bite of sausage. “What is this? Did I fool around with your old lady or something? Look, it’s not my fault if you can’t keep your woman happy and she needs to come to me for what she needs.”

“It’s not that kind of thing,” I said. “My wife’s name is Cynthia. You would have known her when she was Cynthia Bigge.”

He stopped in mid-chew. “Oh. Shit. Man, that was a fucking long time ago.”

“Twenty-five years,” I said.

“You’ve taken a long time to drop by,” Vince Fleming said.

“There have been some recent developments,” I said. “I take it you remember what happened that night.”

“Yeah. Her whole fucking family vanished.”

“That’s right. They’ve just found the bodies of Cynthia’s mother and brother.”

“Todd?”

“That’s right.”

“I knew Todd.”

“You did?”

Vince Fleming shrugged. “A bit. I mean, we went to the same school. He was an okay guy.” He shoveled in some more ketchup-covered eggs.

“You’re not curious about where they found them?” I asked.

“I figure you’re going to tell me,” he said.

“They were in Cynthia’s mother’s car, a yellow Ford Escort, at the bottom of a lake in a quarry, up in Massachusetts.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

“They must have been there awhile,” Vince said. “And they were still able to tell who they were?”

“DNA,” I said.

Vince shook his head in admiration. “Fucking DNA. What did we ever do without it?” He finished off a sausage.

“And Cynthia’s aunt was murdered,” I said.

Vince’s eyes narrowed. “I think Cynthia talked about her. Bess?”

“Tess,” I said.

“Yeah. She bought it?”

“Someone stabbed her to death in her kitchen.”

“Hmm,” Vince said. “Is there some reason why you’re telling me all this?”

“Cynthia’s missing,” I said. “She’s…run off. With our daughter. We have a daughter named Grace. She’s eight.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I thought there was a chance Cynthia might have come looking for you. She’s trying to find the answers to what happened that night, and it’s possible you might have some of them.”

“What would I know?”

“I don’t know. But you were probably the last person to see Cynthia that night, other than her family. And you had a run-in with her father before he brought Cynthia home.”

I never saw it coming.

Vince Fleming reached across the table with one hand, grabbed my right wrist with his left, yanked it across the table toward him, while his other hand grabbed the steak knife he’d been using to cut his sausage. He swung it down toward the table in a long, swift arc, and the blade buried into the wood table between my middle and fourth finger.

I screamed. “Jesus!”

Vince’s hand was a vise on my wrist, pinning it to the table. “I don’t like the sound of what you’re suggesting,” he said.

I was panting too hard to respond. I kept looking at the knife, desperate to reassure myself that it had not actually gone through my hand.

“I have a question for you,” Vince said very quietly, still holding my wrist, leaving the knife standing straight up. “There’s been a guy, another guy, asking around about me. You know anything about that?”

“What guy?” I said.

“In his fifties, short guy, might have been private. Asked around without being quite so obvious as you.”

“It might have been a man named Abagnall,” I said. “Denton Abagnall.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Cynthia hired him. We both hired him.”

“To check up on me?”

“No. I mean, not specifically. We hired him to try and find Cynthia’s family. Or at least, what happened to them.”

“And that meant asking about me?”

I swallowed. “He mentioned that he thought you were worth taking a look at.”

“Really? And what’s he found out about me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I mean, if he did find out anything, we don’t know what it was. And we’re not likely to find out, either.”

“Why’s that?” Vince Fleming asked.

He either didn’t know, or was very good with the poker face.

“He’s dead,” I said. “He was murdered, too. In a parking garage in Stamford. We think it might have something to do with Tess’s murder.”

“And the boys also said some cop was nosing around asking for me. Black chick, short and fat.”

“Wedmore,” I said. “She’s been looking into all of it.”

“Well,” said Vince, letting go of my wrist and working the knife out of the table, “that’s all very interesting, but I don’t particularly give a fuck.”

“So you haven’t seen my wife,” I said. “She hasn’t been by here, or your work, to talk to you?”

Very evenly, he said, “No.” And he stared into my eyes, as though daring me to contradict him.

I held his gaze. “I hope you’re telling me the truth, Mr. Fleming. Because I’ll do anything to make sure she and my daughter get home safely.”

He got up from his chair and walked around to my side of the table. “Should I take that as some sort of a threat?”

“I’m just saying that when it comes to family, even people like me, people who don’t have nearly as much influence as people like you, will do whatever they have to do.”

He grabbed my hair in his fist, bent down and put his face into mine. His breath smelled of sausage and ketchup.

“Listen, fuckface, do have any idea who you’re talking to? Those guys who brought you here. You have any idea what they can do? You could end up in a wood chipper. You could be chum thrown off a boat in the Sound out there. You could-”

Outside, at the base of the stairs, I heard one of the three guys who’d delivered me here shout, “Hey, don’t go up there.”

And a woman, shouting back, “Go fuck yourself.” Then footsteps on the stairs.

I was staring into Vince’s face and couldn’t see the screen door, but I heard it swing open, and then a voice I thought I recognized said, “Hey, Vince, you seen my mom, because-”

Then, seeing Vince Fleming with a man’s hair in his fist, she stopped talking.

“I’m kind of busy here,” he told her. “And I don’t know where your mother is. Try the goddamn mall.”

“Jesus, Vince, what the fuck are you doing to my teacher?” the woman said.

Even with Vince’s meaty fingers holding on to my scalp, I managed to turn my head far enough to see Jane Scavullo.

“Your teacher?” Vince said, not relaxing his grip on my hair. “What teacher?”

“My fucking creative writing teacher,” Jane said. “If you’re going to beat the shit out of my teachers, there are other ones you could start with first. This is Mr. Archer. He’s, like, the least assholish of any of them.” She approached. “Hi, Mr. Archer.”

“Hi, Jane,” I said.

“When are you coming back?” she asked. “This guy they got in to teach your class is a complete dweeb. Everybody’s skipping. He’s worse than that woman who stutters. Nobody gives a shit whether he takes attendance or not. He’s always got something stuck in his teeth, and he’s got his finger in there, trying to get it out, but he does it quick, like he thinks you won’t notice, but he’s not fooling anybody.” I noticed that Jane, outside of school, was not nearly so shy about talking to me.