Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“Come home soon, Cyn. I love you.”

“Bye,” she said, and ended the call. I replaced the receiver and went into the living room.

Vince Fleming handed me a newspaper clipping, the one of Todd standing with fellow members of a basketball team.

“That looks like Todd in that one,” Vince said. “I remember him.”

I nodded, not taking the clipping from his hand. I’d seen it a hundred times before. “Yeah. Did you have classes together or something?”

“Maybe one. Picture’s goofy, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t recognize anyone else in it. It’s nobody from our school back then.”

I took it from him, although there wasn’t much point. I didn’t go to school with Todd or Cynthia and wouldn’t know any of their classmates. Cynthia had never paid that much attention to this picture, as far as I could tell. I gave it a passing glance.

“And the name is wrong,” Vince said, pointing to the cutline under the picture listing the names of the players from left to right, bottom row, center row, top row.

I shrugged. “Okay. So newspapers get names wrong.” I looked at the cutline, which gave everyone’s last name and first initial. Todd was standing two from the left, center row. I scanned the cutline, read the name where his should have been.

The name was J. Sloan.

I stared for a moment at the initial and the word that followed it.

“Vince,” I said, “Does the name J. Sloan mean anything to you?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I double-checked that the name was, in fact, referring to the individual in the center row, two from the left.

“Holy fuck,” I said.

Vince looked at me. “You wanna fill me in?”

“J. Sloan,” I said. “Jeremy Sloan.”

Vince shook his head. “I still don’t get it.”

“The man in the food court,” I said. “At the Post Mall. That was the name of this man Cynthia accused of being her brother.”

“What are you talking about?”Vince asked.

“A couple of weeks ago,” I said, “Cynthia and Grace and I are at the mall, and Cynthia sees this guy, she’s convinced he’s Todd. Says he looks like what Todd would probably look like all grown up, twenty-five years later.”

“How did you get his name?”

“Cynthia followed him, out to the parking lot. She called out to him, called him Todd, he didn’t respond, so she goes right up to him, says she’s his sister, that she knows he’s her brother.”

“Jesus,” Vince said.

“It was a horrible scene. The guy denied up and down that he was her brother, he acted like she was a crazy person, and she was acting like a crazy person. So I took the guy aside, said I was sorry, said maybe, if he showed Cynthia his driver’s license, if he could prove to her he wasn’t who she thought he was, she’d leave him alone.”

“He did that?”

“Yeah. I saw the license. New York State. His name was Jeremy Sloan.”

Vince took the clipping back from me, looked at the name attached to Todd Bigge. “That’s pretty fucking curious, isn’t it?”

“I can’t figure this out,” I said. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why is Todd’s picture in an old newspaper clipping with this different name?”

Vince was quiet for a moment. “This guy,” he said finally. “The one from the mall. He say anything at all?”

I tried to think. “He said he thought my wife should get help. But not much other than that.”

“What about the license?” Vince said. “You remember anything about that?”

“Just that it was New York,” I said.

“It’s kind of a fucking big state,” Vince said. “He might live across the line in Port Chester or White Plains or something, and he might be from fucking Buffalo.”

“I think it was Young something.”

“Young something?”

“I’m not sure. Shit, I only saw the license for a second.”

“There’s a Youngstown in Ohio,” Vince said. “You sure it wasn’t an Ohio license?”

“I could tell that much.”

Vince flipped the clipping over. There was text on the back, but the clipping had clearly been saved for the picture. The scissors had gone through the center of a column, cut a headline in half on the back side.

“That’s not why he would have saved it,” I said.

“Shut up,” Vince said. He was reading bits and pieces of stories, then looked up. “You got a computer?”

I nodded.

“Fire it up,” Vince said. He followed me upstairs, stood over me as I pulled up a chair and turned the computer on. “There’s bits of a story here, involving Falkner Park and Niagara County. Throw all that into Google.”

I asked him to spell “Falkner,” then typed in the words, hit Search. It didn’t take long to figure it all out. “There’s a Falkner Park in Youngstown, New York, in Niagara County,” I said.

“Bingo,” Vince said. “So this is most likely from some paper from that area, because it’s just a piss-piddly story about park maintenance.”

I turned around in my chair, looked up at him. “Why is Todd in a picture in a paper from Youngstown, New York, with a bunch of basketball players from some other school, and he’s listed as J. Sloan?”

Vince leaned up against the doorframe. “Maybe it’s not a mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s not a picture of Todd Bigge. Maybe it’s a picture of J. Sloan.”

I gave that a second to sink in. “What are you saying? That there are two people? One named Todd Bigge and one named J. Sloan-Jeremy Sloan-or is there one person with two names?”

“Hey,” said Vince, “I’m just here because Jane asked me.”

I turned back to the computer, went to the White Pages website where you could look up phone numbers, entered in Jeremy Sloan for Youngstown, New York.

The search came up empty, but suggested I try alternatives, like J. Sloan, or the last name only. I tried the latter, and up came a handful of Sloans in the Youngstown area.

“Jesus,” I said, and pointed to the screen for Vince. “There’s a Clayton Sloan listed here on Niagara View Drive.”

“Clayton?”

“Yeah, Clayton.”

“That was Cynthia’s father’s first name,” Vince said, just wanting to be sure.

“Yeah,” I said. I grabbed a pencil and paper from the desk, wrote down the phone number off the computer screen. “I’m going to give this number a call.”

“Whoa!” Vince said. “You out of your fucking mind?”

“What?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’ve found here, or whether you’ve found anything, but what are you going to say when you call? On this phone? If they’ve got caller ID, they know right away who it is. Now, maybe they know who you are and maybe they don’t, but you don’t want to be tipping your hand, do you?”

What the hell was he up to? Was this actually good advice, or did Vince have some reason for not wanting me to call? Was he trying to keep me from connecting the dots because-

He handed me his cell phone. “Use this,” he said. “They won’t know who the hell is calling.”

I took the phone, flipped it open, looked at the phone number on the monitor, took a breath, and entered it into Vince’s phone. I put it to my ear and waited.

One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings.

“There’s nobody there,” I said.

“Give it a little longer,” Vince said.

When it got to be eight rings, I started to pull the phone away when I heard a voice.

“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice. Older, I thought, sixties at least.

“Oh, yes, hello,” I said. “I was just about to hang up.”

“Can I help you?”

“Is Jeremy there?” Even as I said it, I thought, and what if he is? What am I going to say? What on earth am I going to ask him? Or should I just hang up? Find out if he’s there, confirm that he actually exists, then end the call.