Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“I guess I can understand that.” I chose my words carefully. “Your father, he did okay, am I right?”

“Money?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. He did all right for himself. While he could. Before he got killed.”

“I heard a bit about that,” I said.

“What else did you hear?”

“I heard that the people who most likely did it got paid back.”

Vince smiled darkly. “That they did.” He came back to the present and asked, “So what’s your point, about money?”

“Do you think your father, do you think he would have had any sympathy for Cynthia, the situation she found herself in? To the point that he would have helped pay for her education, to go to college?”

“Huh?”

“I’m just asking. Do you think he might have thought you were responsible somehow, that maybe you had something to do with her family going missing, and that he gave money to Cynthia’s aunt, Tess Berman, anonymously, to help cover the costs of her schooling?”

Vince looked at me as though I had lost my mind. “You say you’re a teacher? They let people teach in the public schools with minds this fucked up?”

“You could just say no.”

“No.”

“Because,” I said, and I was debating with myself whether I should be sharing this information, but sometimes you just go with your gut, “someone did that.”

“No shit?” Vince asked. “Someone was giving her aunt money for school?”

“That’s right.”

“And no one ever knew who?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s weird,” he said. “And this aunt, you say she’s dead?”

“That’s right.”

Vince Fleming leaned back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling a moment, came back forward and put his elbows on the table. He let out a long sigh.

“Well, I’ll tell you something,” he said, “but not if you’re going to tell the cops, because if you do, I’ll tell them I never said any of this, because they might find a way to use it against me, the fuckers.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe I could have told them this and it wouldn’t have come back to bite me in the ass, but I couldn’t afford to take the chance. I couldn’t admit to being where I was at the time, even if it might have helped Cynthia out. I guessed it might cross the cops’ minds at some point that she had something to do with killing her own family, even though I knew she could never do that. I didn’t want to get dragged into it.”

My mouth felt dry. “Anything you can tell me now, I’d be grateful.”

“That night,” he said, closing his eyes a moment, as though picturing it, “after her old man found us in the car, took her home, I drove after them. Didn’t follow them exactly, but I guess I was wondering just how much shit she was in, thought maybe I could see whether her father was screaming at her, that kind of thing. But I was way back, really couldn’t see all that much.”

I waited.

“I saw them pull into the driveway, go into the house together. She was a bit wobbly on her feet, you know? She’d had a bit to drink, we both had, but I’d already built up a pretty good tolerance by that point.” He grinned. “I was a young starter.”

I felt Vince was moving toward something important and didn’t want to slow him down with my own stupid comments.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I parked down the street, thinking maybe she’d leave again after her parents reamed her out, you know, she’d get all pissed off and storm out, and then I could drive up and pick her up. But that didn’t happen. And after a while, this other car drove past me, going slow, like someone was trying to read the house numbers, you know?”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t really pay much attention, but then when it got down to the end of the street, it turned around, and then parked on the other side of the street, a couple of houses down from Cynthia’s place.”

“Could you see who was in it? What kind of car was it?”

“It was some piece of AMC shit, I think. An Ambassador or Rebel or something. Blue, I think. Looked like one person in the car. I couldn’t really tell who it was, but it looked to me like it was a woman. Don’t ask me why, but that was the sense I got.”

“A woman was parked out front of the house. Watching it?”

“Seemed like it. And I remember, they weren’t Connecticut plates on the car. New York State, which were kinda orange, I think, back then. But shit, you see plenty of those around.”

“How long did the car stay there?”

“Well, after a while, not that long really, Mrs. Bigge and Todd, the brother?”

I nodded.

“They came out and got in the mother’s car, this yellow Ford, and they drove off.”

“Just the two of them? The father, Clayton, he wasn’t with them?”

“Nope. Just Mom and Todd. He got in the passenger side, I don’t think he had his license yet, but I don’t really know. But they went somewhere. I don’t know where. As soon as they rounded the corner, this other car, the lights came on, and it followed them.”

“What did you do?”

“I just sat there. What else would I do?”

“But this other car, this Ambassador or whatever, it followed Cynthia’s mother and brother.”

Vince looked at me. “Am I going too fast?”

“No, no, it’s just, in twenty-five years, I know Cynthia has never heard about this.”

“Well, that’s what I saw.”

“Is there anything else?”

“I guess I sat there for another forty-five minutes or so, and was just thinking of fucking off and going home, and suddenly the front door of the house opens, and the father, Clayton, he goes running out of the house like he’s got a huge bug up his ass. Gets in the car, backs out at like a hundred miles an hour, drives off fast as can be.”

I let that sink in.

“So anyway, I can do the math, right? Everyone’s gone except Cynthia. So I drive up, I knock on the door, figured I could talk to her. I banged on it half a dozen times, real hard, didn’t get any answer, figured she was probably sleeping it off, right? So I fucked off and went back home.” He shrugged.

“Someone was there,” I said. “Watching the house.”

“Yup. Not just me.”

“And you’ve never told anyone this? You didn’t tell the cops. You never told Cynthia?”

“No, I didn’t tell her. And like I said, I didn’t tell the cops. You think it would have made sense to tell them I was sitting outside that house for any time that night?”

I gazed out the window and into the Sound, at Charles Island in the distance, as if the answers I’d been searching for, the answers Cynthia had been searching for, were always beyond the horizon, impossible to reach.

“And why are you telling me this now?” I asked Vince.

He ran his hand over his chin, squeezed his nose. “Fuck, I don’t know. I’m guessing, all these years have been hard on Cyn, am I right?”

I felt that like a slap, to know that Vince might have called Cynthia by the same term of endearment I used. “Yes,” I said. “Very hard. Especially lately.”

“And why’s she disappeared?”

“We had a fight. And she’s scared. All the things that have happened in the last few weeks, the fact that the police don’t seem to entirely trust her. She’s scared for our daughter. The other night, there was someone standing on the street, looking at our house. Her aunt is dead. The detective we hired has been murdered.”

“Hmm,” Vince said. “That’s a hell of a mess. I wish there was something I could do to help.”

We were both startled at that moment when the door opened. Neither of us had heard anyone coming up the stairs.

It was Jane.

“Jesus Christ, Vince, are you going to help the poor bastard or not?”