Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“I’m afraid not,” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”

“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I can try again in a little while.”

“He won’t be here later, either.”

“Oh. Do you know when I might be able to reach him?”

“He’s out of town,” the woman said. “I can’t say for sure when he’ll be back.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “He mentioned something to me about going to Connecticut.”

“He did?”

“I think so.”

“Are you sure about this?” She sounded quite perturbed.

“I could be wrong. Listen, I’ll just catch him later, it’s no big deal. Just a golf thing.”

“Golf? Jeremy doesn’t play golf. Who is this? I demand that you tell me.”

The call was already spiraling out of control. Vince, who had been leaning into me as I made the call and could hear both sides, drew a finger across his throat, mouthed the word “abort.” I folded the phone shut, ending the call, without saying another thing. I handed it back to Vince, who slipped it into his jacket.

“Sounds like you got the right place,” he said. “You might have played it a bit better, though.”

I ignored his critique. “So the Jeremy Sloan Cynthia found at the mall is very likely the Jeremy Sloan who lives in Youngstown, New York, at a house where the phone is listed under the name Clayton Sloan. And Cynthia’s father had kept a clipping in his drawer, of him with a basketball team.”

Neither of us said anything. We were both trying to get our heads around it.

“I’m going to call Cynthia,” I said, “bounce this off her.”

I raced back downstairs to the kitchen, dialed Cynthia’s cell. But as she’d promised, her phone was off. “Shit,” I said as Vince came into the kitchen behind me. “You got any ideas?” I asked him.

“Well, this Sloan guy, according to that woman-maybe she’s his mother, I don’t know-is still out of town. Which means he may still be in the Milford area. And unless he has friends or family here, he’s probably in some local motel or hotel.” He got the phone back out of his jacket, brought up a number from his contact list, hit one button. He waited a moment, then said, “Hey, it’s me. Yeah, he’s still with me. Something I need you to do.”

And then Vince told whoever was on the other end of the line to round up a couple of the other guys-I suspected this crew consisted of the two guys who grabbed me and their driver, the ones Jane called the Three Stooges-and start doing the rounds of the hotels in town.

“No, I don’t know how many there are,” he said. “Why don’t you count them for me? I want you to find out if there’s a guy named Jeremy Sloan, from Youngstown, New York, staying at one of them. And if you find out he is, you let me know. Don’t do anything. Okay. Maybe start with the Howard Johnson’s, the Red Roof, the Super 8, whatever. And Jesus, what the fuck is that horrible noise in the background? Huh? Who listens to the fucking Carpenters?”

Once the instructions were relayed and Vince was confident that they were fully understood, he put the phone back in his coat. “If this Sloan guy is in town, they’ll find him,” he said.

I opened the fridge, showed Vince a can of Coors. “Sure,” he said, and I tossed it to him, got one out for myself, and took a seat at the kitchen table. Vince sat down opposite me.

He said, “Do you have any fucking idea what’s going on?”

I swallowed some beer. “I think I might be starting to,” I said. “That woman who answered the phone. What if she’s this Jeremy Sloan’s mother? And what if this Jeremy Sloan really is my wife’s brother?”

“Yeah?”

“What if I just spoke to my wife’s mother?”

If Cynthia’s brother and mother were alive, then how did one explain the DNA tests on the two bodies they’d found in that car they’d fished out of the quarry? Except, of course, all Wedmore had been able to confirm for us up to now was that the bodies in the car were related to each other, not that they actually were Todd and Patricia Bigge. We were awaiting further tests to determine a genetic link between them and Cynthia’s DNA.

I was trying to get my head around this increasingly confusing jumble of information when I realized Vince was talking.

“I just hope those boys of mine don’t find him and kill him,” he said, taking another swig. “It’d be just like them.”

“Someone phoned here for you,” she said .

“Who?”

“He didn’t say who it was.”

“Who did it sound like?” he asked. “Was it one of my friends?”

“I don’t know who it sounded like. How would I know that? But he asked for you, and when I said you were away, he said he remembered you saying something about going to Connecticut.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t have told anyone where you were going!”

“I didn’t!”

“Then how did he know? You must have told someone. I can’t believe you could be that stupid.” She sounded very annoyed with him.

“I’m telling you I didn’t!” He felt about six years old when she spoke to him this way.

“Well, if you didn’t, how would he know?”

“I don’t know. Did it say on the phone where the call was from? Was there a number?”

“No. He said he knew you from golfing.”

“Golfing? I don’t golf.”

“That’s what I told him,” she said. “I told him you don’t golf.”

“You know what, Mom? It was probably just a wrong number or something.”

“He asked for you. He said Jeremy. Plain as day. Maybe you just mentioned it to somebody in passing, that you were going.”

“Look, Mom, even if I did, which I didn’t, you don’t have to make such a big deal about it.”

“It just upset me.”

“Don’t be upset. Besides, I’m coming home.”

“You are?” Her whole tone changed.

“Yeah. Today, I think. I’ve done everything I can do here, the only thing left is…you know.”

“I don’t want to miss that. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this.”

“If I get out of here soon,” he said, “I guess I’ll be home pretty late tonight. It’s already after lunch, and sometimes I get kind of tired, so I might stop awhile around Utica or something, but I’ll still make it in one day.”

“That’ll give me time to make you a carrot cake,” she said brightly. “I’ll make it this afternoon.”

“Okay.”

“You drive safely. I don’t want you falling asleep at the wheel. You’ve never had the same kind of driving stamina your father had.”

“How is he?”

“I think, if we get things done this week, he’ll last at least that long. I’ll be glad when this is finally over. You know what it costs to take a taxi down to see him?”

“It won’t matter soon, Mom.”

“It’s about more than the money, you know,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about how it’ll be done. We’re going to need some rope, you know. Or some of that tape. And I guess it makes sense to do the mother first. The little one’ll be no trouble after that. I can help you with her. I’m not completely useless, you know.”

Vince and I finished our beer, then snuck out through the backyard and returned to his truck. He was going to drive me back to get my car, still parked near his body shop.

“So you know Jane has been having a bit of trouble at school,” he said.