Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

Then, casually, she asked Vince, “What’s the deal?”

“Why don’t you run along, Jane, okay?” Vince said.

“Have you seen my mom?”

“I think she might be up at the garage. Why?”

“I need some money.”

“What for?”

“Stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Stuff stuff.”

“How much you need?”

Jane Scavullo shrugged. “Forty?”

Vince Fleming let go of my hair and reached into his back pocket for his wallet, pulled out two twenties, and handed them to Jane.

He said, “Is this the guy? The one you were talking about? Who likes your stories?”

Jane nodded. She was so relaxed, I had to assume she’d seen others getting this sort of treatment from Vince. The only thing different this time was that it was one of her teachers. “Yeah. Why you fucking him over?”

“Look, honey, I can’t really get into this with you.”

“I’m trying to find my wife,” I said. “She’s with my daughter, and I’m very worried about them. I thought your fa-I thought Vince here might be able to help me.”

“He’s not my father,” Jane said. “He and my mom have been together for a while now.” To Vince, she said, “I don’t mean that like an insult, about you not being my father. Because you’re okay.” To me, she said, “Remember that one story I wrote for you, about the guy making me eggs?”

I had to think. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“That was sort of based on Vince here. He’s decent.” She smiled at the irony. “Well, to me. So if you’re just trying to find your wife and kid, why’s Vince here getting all pissed with you?”

“Sweetheart,” Vince said.

She walked up to Vince, got right in his face. “You be nice to him or I’m fucked. His is, like, the only class where I’m getting any decent grades. If he wants help finding his wife, why don’t you help him find her, because if he’s not coming back to school until his wife gets found then I got to look at this guy picking his teeth every day and that’s not good for my education. It also makes me want to puke.”

Vince put an arm around her shoulder and walked her to the door. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to her, but just before she went back down the stairs, she said to me, “See ya, Mr. Archer.”

“Goodbye, Jane,” I said. She was so light-footed I didn’t hear her descend the stairs after the door closed.

Vince walked back over to the table, much of the menace gone out of his posture, and sat back down at the table. He looked a bit sheepish, and didn’t say anything right away.

“She’s a good kid,” I said.

Vince nodded. “Yeah, she is. Her mom, she and I’ve hooked up, and she’s a bit of a flake, but Jane, she’s okay. She’s been needing some, whaddya call it, stability in her life. I never raised any kids, and sometimes, I kind of think of her like a daughter.”

“She seems to get on pretty good with you,” I said.

“She fucking wraps me around her finger,” he said, and grinned. “She’s mentioned you. I didn’t make the connection when you told me who you were. But it’s Mr. Archer this, Mr. Archer that.”

“Really,” I said.

“She says you’ve encouraged her,” Vince said. “About her writing.”

“She’s pretty good.”

Vince pointed to the jammed bookshelves. “I read a lot. I’m not what you’d call a very educated kind of guy, but I like to read books. I especially like history, biography. Some adventure books. I’m kind of amazed by people who can do that, who can sit down and write a whole book. So when Jane said you thought she could be a writer, I thought that was kind of interesting.”

“She has her own voice,” I said.

“Huh?”

“You know how, when you read some writers, you’d know it was them even if their name wasn’t on the cover?”

“Sure.”

“That’s voice. I think Jane has that.”

Vince nodded. “Listen,” he said. “About what happened…”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, working up some spit in my mouth so I could swallow.

“People start asking questions about you, trying to find you, that can be a bit worrying for someone like me,” he said.

“What does that mean, someone like you?” I asked, running my fingers through my hair, trying to get it looking normal again.

“Well, let me put it this way,” Vince said. “I’m not a creative writing teacher. I don’t imagine, in your line of work, that you might have to do some of the things that I have to do in mine.”

“Like sending out guys in SUVs to grab people off the street,” I said.

“Exactly,” Vince said. “That kind of thing.” He paused. “Can I get you some coffee?”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be good.”

He walked over to the counter, poured me a cup from the coffeemaker, and came back to the table.

“I’m still concerned that you and that detective and that cop have been asking around for me,” Vince said.

“May I be frank without having my hair pulled out or a knife stabbed into the table between my fingers?”

Slowly, Vince nodded, not taking his eyes off me.

“You were with Cynthia that night. Her father found the two of you and dragged her home. Less than twelve hours later, Cynthia wakes up and she’s the only one left in her family. You are, presumably, one of the last people to see a member of her family, other than Cynthia herself, alive. And I’m not sure whether you had a fight with her father, Clayton Bigge, but at the very least it must have been an awkward situation, her father finding you, taking her home with him.” I paused. “But I’m sure the police went over all this with you at the time.”

“Yeah.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. I didn’t tell them anything. That was one thing I learned from my old man, God rest his soul. You never answer questions from the cops. Even if you’re one hundred percent innocent. Nobody’s situation ever improved after talking to the cops.”

“But you might have been able to help them figure out what happened.”

“Wasn’t my concern.”

“But didn’t that make the police suspect you had something to do with it? Refusing to talk?”

“Maybe. But they can’t convict you on suspicion. They need evidence. And they didn’t have any of that. If they’d had any evidence, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here having a nice chat with you right now.”

I took a sip of my coffee. “Whoa,” I said. “This is excellent.” It was.

“Thank you,” Vince said. “Now, may I be frank with you without you pulling my hair out?” He grinned.

“I don’t think you have much to worry about there,” I said.

“I felt bad about it. About not being able to help Cynthia. Because she was…I don’t wish to offend you here at all, being her husband.”

“It’s okay.”

“She was a very, very nice girl. A bit fucked up like all kids that age, but nothing compared to me. I’d already been in shit with the cops. I guess she went through a period of being attracted to the bad boy. Before she met you.” He said it like I was a bit of a comedown for her. “No offense intended.”

“None taken.”

“She was a sweet kid, and I felt terrible about what happened to her. Jesus, imagine, you wake up one day, your fucking family’s gone. And I wished I could do something for her, you know? But my dad said to me, he said walk away from a chick like that. You don’t need those kinds of problems. Cops are going to be looking at you enough already, with your background, with an old man like me involved in the shit I’m involved in, that’s all we need, you messed up with a girl whose entire family probably got murdered.”