No Time for Goodbye (11 page)

14

I had a free period
, so I poked my head into Rolly Carruthers’s office. “I’m on a prep. You got a minute?”

Rolly looked at the stack of stuff on his desk. Reports from the board office, teacher evaluations, budget estimates. He was drowning in paperwork. “If you only need a minute, I’ll have to say no. If you need at least an hour, however, I might be able to help you out.”

“An hour sounds about right.”

“You had lunch?”

“No.”

“Let’s go over to the Stonebridge. You drive. I may decide to get smashed.” He slipped on his sport jacket, told his secretary he’d be out of the school for a while but she could reach him on his cell if the building caught fire. “So I’ll know that I don’t need to come back,” he said.

His secretary insisted he speak to one of the superintendents, who was holding, so he signaled to me that he would be just a couple of minutes. I stepped outside the office, right in the path of Jane Scavullo, who was bearing down the hall at high speed, no doubt for a date to beat the shit out of some other girl in the schoolyard.

The handful of books she was carrying scattered across the hallway. “Fucking hell,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, and knelt down to help her pick them up.

“It’s okay,” she said, scrambling to get to the books before I did. But she wasn’t quick enough. I already had
Foxfire,
the Joyce Carol Oates book I’d recommended to her, in my hand.

She snatched it away from me, tucked it in with the rest of her stuff. I said, without a trace of I-told-you-so in my voice, “How are you liking it?”

“It’s good,” Jane said. “Those girls are seriously messed up. Why’d you suggest I read it? You think I’m as bad as the girls in this story?”

“Those girls aren’t all bad,” I said. “And no, I don’t think you’re like them. But I thought you’d appreciate the writing.”

She snapped her gum. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What do you care?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you care? About what I read, about my writing, that shit.”

“You think I’m a teacher just to get rich?”

She looked as though she was almost going to smile, and then caught herself. “I gotta go,” she said, and did.

The lunch crowd had thinned by the time Rolly and I got to the Stonebridge. He ordered some coconut shrimp and a beer to start, and I settled on a large bowl of New England clam chowder with extra crackers, and coffee.

Rolly was talking about putting their house on the market soon, that they’d have a lot of money left over after they paid for the mobile home in Bradenton. There’d be money to put in the bank, they could invest it, take the odd trip. And Rolly was going to buy a boat so he could fish along the Manatee River. It’s like he was already finished being a principal. He was someplace else.

“I got stuff on my mind,” I said.

Rolly took a sip of Sam Adams. “This about Lauren Wells?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “What made you think I wanted to talk about Wells?”

He shrugged. “I noticed you talking to her in the hall.”

“She’s a wingnut,” I said.

Rolly smiled. “A well-packaged wingnut.”

“I don’t know what it is. I think, in her world, Cynthia and I have achieved some sort of celebrity status. Lauren rarely spoke to me until we appeared on that show.”

“Can I have your autograph?” Rolly asked.

“Bite me,” I said. I waited a moment, as if to signal that I was changing gears here, and said, “Cynthia’s always thought of you like an uncle, you know? I know you looked out for her, after what happened. So I feel I can come to you, talk to you about her, when there’s a problem.”

“Go on.”

“I’m starting to wonder whether Cynthia’s losing it.”

Rolly put his glass of beer down on the table, licked his lips. “Aren’t the two of you already seeing some shrink, what’s-her-name, Krinkle or something?”

“Kinzler. Yeah. Every couple of weeks or so.”

“Have you talked to her about this?”

“No. It’s tricky. I mean, there are times when she talks to us separately. I could bring it up. But, it’s not like it’s any one thing. It’s all these little things put together.”

“Like what?”

I filled him in. The anxiety over the brown car. The anonymous phone call from someone saying her family had forgiven her, how she’d accidentally erased the call. Chasing the guy in the mall, thinking he was her brother. The hat in the middle of the table.

“What?” Rolly said. “Clayton’s
hat
?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Evidently. I mean, I suppose she could have had it tucked away in a box all these years. But it did have this little marking inside, his first initial, under the lining.”

Rolly thought about that. “If she put the hat there, she could have written in the initial herself.”

That had never occurred to me. Cyn had let me look for the initials, rather than take the hat away from me and do it herself. Her expression of shock had been pretty convincing.

But I supposed what Rolly was suggesting was possible.

“And it doesn’t even have to be her father’s hat. It could be any hat. She could have bought it at a secondhand store, said it was his hat.”

“She smelled it,” I said. “When she smelled it, she said for sure it was her father’s hat.”

Rolly looked at me like I was one of his dumb high school students. “And she could have let you smell it, too, to prove it. But that proves nothing.”

“She could be making everything up,” I said. “I can’t believe my mind’s going there.”

“Cynthia doesn’t strike me as mentally unbalanced,” Rolly said. “Under tremendous stress, yes. But delusional?”

“No,” I said. “She’s not like that.”

“Or fabricating things? Why would she be making these things up? Why would she pretend to get that phone call? Why would she set up something like the hat?”

“I don’t know.” I struggled to come up with an answer. “To get attention? So that, what? The police, whoever, would reopen the case? Finally find out what happened to her family?”

“Then why now?” Rolly asked. “Why wait all this time to finally do this?”

Again, I had no idea. “Shit, I don’t know what to think. I just wish it would all end. Even if that meant we found out they had all died that night.”

“Closure,” Rolly said.

“I hate that word,” I said. “But yeah, basically.”

“And the other thing you need to consider,” Rolly said, “is that if she
didn’t
leave that hat on the table, then you actually had an intruder in your house. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it was Cynthia’s father.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve already decided we’ve got to get deadbolts.” I pictured a stranger moving about through the rooms of our house, looking at our things, touching our stuff, getting a sense of who we were. I shuddered.

“We try to remember to lock the house up every time we go out. We’re pretty good about it, but the odd time, I guess we must slip up. The back door, I guess it’s possible we’ve forgotten that once in a while, especially if Grace was in and out and we didn’t know it.” I thought about that missing key, tried to remember when I first noticed it wasn’t on the hook. “But I know we locked everything up the night we met with that nutjob psychic.”

“Psychic?” Rolly said. I brought him up to speed.

“When you get deadbolts,” Rolly said, “look into those bars you can put across basement windows. That’s how a lot of kids get in.”

I was quiet for the next few minutes. I hadn’t gotten to the big thing I wanted to discuss. Finally, I said, “The thing is, there’s more.”

“About what?”

“Cyn’s in such a delicate frame of mind, there’s stuff I’m not telling her.” Rolly raised an eyebrow. “About Tess,” I said.

Rolly took another sip of his Sam Adams. “What about Tess?”

“First of all, she’s not well. She told me she’s dying.”

“Ah, fuck,” Rolly said. “What is it?”

“She didn’t want to get into specifics, but I’m guessing it must be cancer or something like that. She doesn’t look all that bad, mostly just tired, you know? But she’s not going to get any better. At least that’s the way it looks at the moment.”

“Cynthia’ll be devastated. They’re so close.”

“I know. And I think it has to be Tess who tells her. I can’t do it. I don’t
want
to do it. And before long, it’s going to become obvious that something’s wrong with her.”

“What’s the other thing?”

“Huh?”

“You said ‘first of all’ a second ago. What’s the other thing?”

I hesitated. It seemed wrong to tell Rolly about the secret payments Tess had received before I told Cynthia, but that was one of the reasons why I was telling him—to get some guidance on how to break this to my wife.

“For a number of years, Tess was getting money.”

Rolly set down his beer, took his hand off the glass. “What do you mean, getting money?”

“Someone left money for her. Cash, in an envelope. A number of times, with a note that it was to help pay for Cynthia’s education. The amounts varied, but it added up to more than forty thousand dollars.”

“Fucking hell,” Rolly said. “And she’d never told you this before?”

“No.”

“Did she say who it was from?”

I shrugged. “That’s the thing. Tess had no idea, still has no idea, although she wonders whether the envelopes the money came in, the note, whether you could still get fingerprints off them after all these years, or DNA, shit, what do I know about that stuff? But she can’t help but think it’s linked to the disappearance of Cynthia’s family. I mean, who would give her money, other than someone from her family, or someone who felt responsible for what had happened to her family?”

“Jesus Christ,” Rolly repeated. “This is huge. And Cynthia doesn’t know anything about this?”

“No. But she’s entitled to know.”

“Sure, of course she is.” He wrapped his hand around the beer again, drained the glass, signaled the waitress that he wanted another. “I suppose.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I have the same concerns you do. Suppose you do tell her. What then?”

I moved my spoon around in the clam chowder. I didn’t have much of an appetite. “That’s the thing. It raises more questions than it answers.”

“And even if it did mean that maybe someone from Cynthia’s family was alive then, it doesn’t mean they’re alive now. The money stopped showing up when?”

“Around the time she finished at UConn,” I said.

“What’s that, twenty years?”

“Not quite. But a long time ago.”

Rolly shook his head in wonderment. “Man, I don’t know how to advise you. I mean, I think I know what I would do if I were in your shoes, but you’ve got to decide yourself how to handle this.”

“Tell me,” I said. “What would you do?”

He pressed his lips together and leaned forward over the table. “I’d sit on it.”

I guess I was surprised. “Really?”

“At least for the time being. Because it’s only going to torment Cynthia. It’ll make her think that, at least back when she was a student, that had she known about the money, maybe there was something she could have done, that she could have found them if she’d only been paying attention and asking the right questions, that she could have found out what happened. But who knows whether that’s even possible now.”

I thought about that. I thought he was right.

“And not only that,” he said. “Just when Tess needs all the support and love she can get from Cynthia, when she’s in poor health, Cynthia’s going to be mad at her.”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

“She’s going to feel betrayed. She’s going to feel her aunt had no business keeping this information from her all these years. She’s going to feel it was her right to know about this. Which it was. And, arguably, still is. But not telling her back then, it’s water under the bridge now.”

I nodded, but then stopped. “But I’ve only just found out. If I don’t tell her, aren’t I betraying her the same way she may feel Tess did?”

Rolly studied me and smiled. “That’s why I’m glad it’s your decision instead of mine, my friend.”

When I got home, Cynthia’s car was in the drive, and there was a vehicle I didn’t recognize parked at the curb. A silver Toyota sedan, the anonymous kind of car you’d look at and never remember a moment later.

I stepped in through the front door and saw Cynthia sitting on the couch in the living room across from a short, heavyset, nearly bald man with olive-colored skin. They both got to their feet and Cynthia moved toward me.

“Hi, honey,” she said, forcing a smile.

“Hi, sweetheart.” I turned toward the man and extended a hand, which he took confidently in his and shook. “Hello,” I said.

“Mr. Archer,” he said, his voice deep and almost syrupy.

“This is Mr. Abagnall,” Cynthia said. “This is the private detective we’re hiring to find out what happened to my family.”

15

“Denton Abagnall,” the detective said
. “Mrs. Archer here has filled me in on a lot of the particulars, but I wouldn’t mind asking you a few questions as well.”

“Sure,” I said, holding a “hang on just a second” finger up to him and turning to Cynthia to say, “Can I talk to you a minute?”

She gave Abagnall an apologetic look, said, “Could you excuse us?” He nodded. I steered Cynthia out the front door and onto the top step. Our house was small enough that I figured Abagnall would hear us if we had this discussion—which I was worried might become a bit heated—in the kitchen.

“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m not waiting around anymore,” Cynthia said. “I’m not going to wait for something to happen, wondering what’s going to happen next. I’ve decided to take charge of this situation.”

“What do you expect him to find out?” I asked. “Cynthia, it’s a very old trail. It’s twenty-five years.”

“Oh, thanks,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”

I winced.

“Well, that hat didn’t appear twenty-five years ago,” she said. “That happened this week. And that phone call I got, that morning you walked Grace to school, that wasn’t twenty-five years ago, either.”

“Honey,” I said, “even if I thought hiring a private detective was a good idea, I don’t see how we can afford it. How much does he charge?”

She told me his daily rate. “And any expenses he has are on top of that,” she said.

“Okay, so how long are you prepared to let him go?” I said. “Are you going to keep him on this a week? A month? Six months? Something like this, he could spend a year on it and still be getting nowhere.”

“We can skip a mortgage payment,” Cynthia said. “You remember, that letter the bank sent us before last Christmas? That offer to let you skip a payment in January, so you can pay off your Christmas Visa bill? They tack the missed payment onto the end of the mortgage? Well, this can be my Christmas present. You don’t have to get me anything this year.”

I looked down at my feet and shook my head. I really didn’t know what to do.

“What’s happening with you, Terry?” Cynthia asked. “One of the reasons I married you is because I knew you’d be a guy who was always there for me, who knew the kind of fucked-up history I had, who’d support me, who’d be in my corner. And for years, you’ve been that guy. But lately, I don’t know, I’m getting this vibe, that maybe you aren’t that guy anymore. That maybe you’re getting tired of being that guy. That maybe you’re not even sure you believe me all the time anymore.”

“Cynthia, don’t—”

“Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I’m doing this, why I want to hire this man. Because he’s not going to judge me. He’s not going into this thinking I’m some sort of crackpot.”

“I never said I think you’re a—”

“You don’t have to,” Cynthia said. “I could see it in your eyes. When I thought that man was my brother. You thought I’d lost my mind.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Hire your fucking detective.”

I never saw the slap coming. I don’t think Cynthia did either, and she was the one swinging. It just happened. An explosion of anger, like a thunderclap, standing out there on the step. And all we could do for a couple of seconds was look at each other in stunned silence. Cynthia appeared to be in shock, both hands poised just over her open mouth.

Finally, I said, “I guess I can be grateful it wasn’t your backhand. I wouldn’t even be standing now.”

“Terry,” she said, “I don’t know what happened. I just, I just kind of lost my mind there for a second.”

I pulled her close to me, whispered into her ear, “I’m sorry. I’ll always be that guy in your corner, I’ll always be here for you.”

She put her arms around me and pressed her head into my chest. I had a pretty good feeling that we’d be throwing our money away. But even if Denton Abagnall didn’t find out anything, maybe hiring him to try was exactly what Cynthia needed to do. Maybe she was right. It was a way to take control of the situation.

At least for a while. As long as we could afford it. I did some quick calculations in my head and figured that a month’s mortgage payment, plus dipping into the movie rental fund for the next couple of months, would buy us a week of Abagnall’s time.

“We’ll hire him,” I said. She hugged me a bit more tightly.

“If he doesn’t find anything soon,” she said, still not looking at me, “we’ll stop.”

“What do we know about this guy?” I asked. “Is he reliable? Is he trustworthy?”

Cynthia pulled away, sniffed. I handed her a tissue from my pocket and she dabbed her eyes, blew her nose. “I called
Deadline
. Got the producer. She got all defensive when she knew it was me, figured I was going to give her shit about that psychic, but then I asked her if they ever used detectives to find out stuff for them, and she gave me this guy’s name, said they hadn’t used him, but they did a story on him once. Said he seemed on the up-and-up.”

“Then let’s go talk to him,” I said.

Abagnall had been sitting on the couch, looking through Cynthia’s shoeboxes of mementos, and got up when we came in. I know he spotted my red cheek, but he did a good job of not being too obvious about it.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I was having a look at your things here. I’d like to spend some more time looking at them, provided you’ve reached a decision about whether you want my help.”

“We have,” I said. “And we do. We’d like you to try to find out what happened to Cynthia’s family.”

“I’m not going to give you any false hopes,” Abagnall said. He spoke slowly, deliberately, and jotted down the occasional thing in his notebook. “This is a very cold trail. I’ll start with reviewing the police file on this, talking to anyone who remembers working on the case, but I think you should have low expectations.”

Cynthia nodded solemnly.

“I don’t see a lot here,” he said, motioning to the shoeboxes, “that jumps out at me, that offers any sorts of clues, at least right away. But I wouldn’t mind hanging on to these, for a while, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s fine,” Cynthia said. “Just so long as I get them back.”

“Of course.”

“What about the hat?” she asked. The hat she believed to be her father’s sat on the couch next to him. He’d been looking at it earlier.

“Well,” he said, “the first thing I would suggest is that you and your husband review your security arrangements here, perhaps upgrade your locks, get deadbolts on your doors.”

“I’m on it,” I said. I had already called a couple of locksmiths to see who could fit us in first.

“Because whether this hat is your father’s or not, someone got in here and left it. You have a daughter. You want this house to be as secure as it can possibly be. As far as determining whether this is your father’s,” he said, his voice low and comforting, “I suppose I could take it to a private lab and they could attempt to do a DNA test on it, to find hair samples from it, sweat from the inside lining. But that won’t be cheap, and Mrs. Archer, you’d need to provide a sample for comparison purposes. If there turned out to be a link between your DNA and what they might find on this hat, well, that might confirm that this was indeed your father’s, but it won’t tell us where he is or whether he’s alive.”

I could tell, looking at Cynthia, that she was starting to feel overwhelmed.

“Why don’t we just leave out that part of it for now,” I suggested.

Abagnall nodded. “That would be my advice, at least for the time being.” Inside his jacket, his cell phone rang. “Excuse me one second.” He opened the phone, saw who was calling, answered it. “Yes, love?” He listened, nodded. “Oh, that sounds wonderful. With the shrimp?” He smiled. “But not too spicy. Okay. I’ll see you in a bit.” He folded the phone and put it away. “My wife,” he said. “She gives me a call about this time to let me know what she’s making for dinner.”

Cynthia and I exchanged glances.

“Shrimp with linguini in a hot pepper sauce tonight,” he said, smiling. “Gives me something to look forward to. Now, Mrs. Archer, I wonder, do you think you have any photos of your father? You’ve provided some of your mother, and one of your brother, but I have nothing for Clayton Bigge.”

“I’m afraid not,” she said.

“I’ll check with the Department of Motor Vehicles,” he said. “I don’t know how far back their records go, but maybe they have a photo. And perhaps you could tell me a bit more about the route he traveled for work.”

“Between here and Chicago,” Cynthia said. “He was in sales. He took orders, I think it was, for machine shop supplies. That kind of thing.”

“You never knew his exact route?”

She shook her head. “I was just a kid. I didn’t really understand what he did, only that it meant he was on the road a lot of the time. One time, he showed me some pictures of the Wrigley building in Chicago. There’s a Polaroid shot of it in the box, I think.”

Abagnall nodded, folded his notebook shut and slipped it into his jacket, then handed each of us a business card. He gathered up the shoeboxes and got to his feet. “I’ll be in touch soon, let you know how I’m progressing. How about you pay me now for three days of my services? I wouldn’t expect to find the answers to your questions in that time, but I might have an idea whether I think it’s reasonable to think that such a thing is possible.”

Cynthia went for her checkbook, which was in her purse, wrote out a check and handed it to Abagnall.

Grace, who had been upstairs all this time, called down, “Mom? Can you come up here for a second? I spilled something on my top.”

“I’ll walk Mr. Abagnall to his car,” I said.

Abagnall had his door open and was about to plop down into his seat when I said, “Cynthia mentioned that you might want to talk to her aunt, to Tess.”

“Yes.”

If I didn’t want Abagnall’s efforts to be a complete waste, it made sense for him to know as much as possible.

“She recently told me something, something she’s not yet disclosed to Cynthia.”

Abagnall didn’t beg, but waited. I told him about the anonymous donations of cash.

“Well,” he said.

“I’ll tell Tess to expect you. And I’ll tell her she should tell you everything.”

“Thank you,” he said. He dropped into the seat, pulled the door shut, powered down the window. “Do you believe her?”

“Tess? Yes, I do. She showed me the note, the envelopes.”

“No. Your wife. Do you believe your wife?”

I cleared my throat before responding. “Of course.”

Abagnall reached over his shoulder for the seat belt, snapped it in place. “One time I had a woman call me up, wanted me to find someone, went to see her, and can you guess who she wanted me to locate?”

I waited.

“Elvis. She wanted me to find Elvis Presley. This was around 1990, I think it was, and Elvis had been dead about thirteen years at that point. She lived in a big house, had lots of money, and she had a few screws loose as I’m sure you might have guessed, and she’d never so much as met Elvis in her entire life and had no connection to him whatsoever, but she was convinced that the King was still alive and just waiting for her to find and rescue him. I could have worked for her for a year, trying to track him down for her. She could have been my early retirement plan, this lady, bless her heart. But I had to say no. She was very upset, so I explained to her that I’d been hired once before to find Elvis, and that I’d found him, and he was fine, but wanted to live the rest of his life in peace.”

“No kidding. And did she accept that?”

“Well, she seemed to at the time. Of course, she might have called some other detective. For all I know, he’s still working on the case.” He chuckled softly to himself. “Wouldn’t that be something.”

“What’s your point, Mr. Abagnall?” I asked.

“I guess the point I’m making is, your wife really wants to know what happened to her parents and her brother. I wouldn’t take a check from someone I thought was trying to string me a line. Your wife isn’t trying to string me a line.”

“No, I don’t think she is, either,” I said. “But this woman who wanted you to find Elvis, was she trying to string you a line? Or did she really believe, in her heart, that Elvis was still alive?”

Abagnall gave me a sad smile. “I’ll report back to you folks in three days, sooner if I learn anything interesting.”