Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“Where the hell were you?” he said. “You been listening in this whole time?”

“It’s a goddamn screen door,” Jane said. “You don’t want people to listen, maybe you better build yourself a little bank vault up here.”

“Goddamn,” he said.

“So are you going to help him? It’s not like you’re really busy or anything. And you got the Three Stooges to help you if you need them.”

Vince looked tiredly at me. “So,” he said. “Is there any way I could be of assistance to you?”

Jane was watching him with her arms folded across her chest.

I didn’t know what to say. Not knowing what I was up against, I couldn’t predict whether I needed the kinds of services someone like Vince Fleming offered. Even though he’d stopped trying to yank my hair out by the roots, I was still intimidated by him.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why don’t I tag along for a while, see what develops,” he said. When I didn’t immediately take him up on it, he said, “You don’t know whether to trust me, do you?”

I figured he’d be able to spot a lie. “No,” I said.

“That’s smart,” he said.

“So you’ll help him?” Jane said. Vince nodded. To me, she said, “You better get back to school fast.” Then she left, and this time we could hear her going down the stairs.

Vince said, “She scares the living shit out of me.”

I couldn’t think of anythingcleverer to do at the moment than drive home, check and see whether Cynthia or anyone else might have phoned. If she was trying to get me, she’d probably try my cell if she couldn’t reach me at home, but I was feeling a bit desperate.

Vince Fleming released his thugs with the SUV, and offered to drive me back to my car in his own vehicle, which turned out to be an aggressive-looking Dodge Ram pickup. My house was not far off the route back to the body shop, where I’d left my car before walking over to the doughnut shop, and later being abducted. I asked Vince if he’d mind stopping there briefly so I could check whether, by any chance, Cynthia had come home, or even dropped by and left me a message.

“Sure,” he said as we got into his truck, which was parked alongside the curb on East Broadway.

“I’ve always wanted to get a place along here, as long as I’ve lived in Milford,” I said.

“I’ve always lived around here,” Vince said. “You?”

“I didn’t grow up around here.”

“As kids, sometimes, when the tide was out, we’d walk out to Charles Island. But then you wouldn’t have time to get back before the tide came in again. That was always fun.”

I felt some anxiety about my new friend. Vince was, not to put too fine a point on it, a criminal. He ran a criminal organization. I had no idea how big or small it was. It was certainly big enough to have three guys on the payroll who were on call to grab people off the street who made Vince nervous.

What if Jane Scavullo hadn’t walked in? What if she hadn’t persuaded Vince I was an okay guy? What if Vince had continued to believe that I presented some sort of a threat to him? How might things have turned out?

Like a fool, I decided to ask.

“Suppose Jane hadn’t dropped by when she did,” I said. “What would have happened to me?”

Vince, right hand on the wheel, left arm resting on the windowsill, glanced over. “You really want an answer to that question?”

I let it go. My mind was already heading in another direction, questioning Vince Fleming’s motives. Was he helping me because Jane wanted him to, or was he genuinely concerned about Cynthia? Was it a bit of both? Or had he decided that doing what Jane wanted was a good way to keep an eye on me?

Was his story about what he saw out front of Cynthia’s house that night true? And if it wasn’t, what possible point would there be in telling it?

I was inclined to believe it.

I gave Vince directions to our street, pointed out the house up ahead. But he kept on driving, didn’t even slow down. Went right past the house.

Oh no. I’d been suckered. I was about to have a date with a wood chipper.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What are you doing?”

“You got cops out front of your house,” he said. “Unmarked car.” I glanced into the oversized mirror hanging off the driver’s door, saw the car parked across the street from the house receding into the background.

“That’s probably Wedmore,” I said.

“We’ll drive around the block, come in from the back,” Vince said, like he did this sort of thing all the time.

And that’s what we did. We left the truck one street over, walked between a couple of houses, and approached my house through the backyard.

Once inside, I looked for any evidence that Cynthia might have returned, a note, anything.

She had not.

Vince wandered the first floor, looking at the pictures on the walls, the books we had on our shelves. Casing the joint, I thought. His eyes landed on the open shoeboxes of mementos.

“The hell’s this stuff?” he asked.

“It’s Cynthia’s. From her house when she was a kid. She goes through it all the time, hoping it will offer up some sort of secret. I was kind of doing the same thing today, after she left.”

Vince sat on the couch, ran his hand through the stuff. “Looks like a lot of useless shit to me,” he said.

“Yeah, well, so far that’s exactly what it’s been,” I said.

I tried phoning Cynthia’s cell on the off chance that it might be on. I was about to hang up after the fourth ring when I heard Cynthia say, “Hello?”

“Cyn?”

“Hi, Terry.”

“Jesus, are you okay? Where are you?”

“We’re fine, Terry.”

“Honey, come home. Please come home.”

“I don’t know,” she said. There was a lot of background noise, a kind of humming.

“Where are you?”

“In the car.”

“Hi, Dad!” It was Grace, shouting so she could be heard from the passenger seat.

“Hi, Grace!” I said.

“Dad says hi,” Cynthia said.

“When are you coming back?” I asked.

“I said I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “I just need some time. I told you in my letter.” She didn’t want to go over it again, not in front of Grace.

“I’m worried about you, and I miss you,” I said.

“Tell her hi,” Vince shouted from the living room.

“Who’s that?” Cynthia asked.

“Vince Fleming,” I said.

“What?”

“Don’t run off the road,” I said.

“What’s he doing there?”

“I went to see him. I had this crazy idea maybe you’d have gone to visit him.”

“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “Tell him…I said hi.”

“She says hi,” I told Vince. He just grunted from the other room, rooting about in the shoeboxes.

“But he’s at the house? Now?”

“Yeah. He was giving me a lift back to my car. It’s kind of a long story. I’ll tell you about it when you get back. Plus,” I hesitated, “he told me a couple of other things, about that night, that he hadn’t told anyone about before.”

“Like what?”

“Like he followed you and your dad back home that night, sat out front for a while, waiting for a chance to knock on your door and see how you were doing, and he saw Todd and your mom leave, then later, your dad left. In a hurry. And there was another car out front for a while, that left after your mom and Todd did.”

There was nothing but road noise coming through the phone.

“Cynthia?”

“I’m here. I don’t know what it means.”

“Me neither.”

“Terry, there’s traffic, I have to get off the road. I’m turning off the phone. I forgot to bring a charger and there’s not much battery left.”