No Time for Goodbye (14 page)

“You okay?”

“I feel kind of weird.”

“Yeah, me too. He might be telling us that he hasn’t found a thing.”

“I know.”

“We seeing Tess tomorrow?”

“I left a message. Don’t be late, okay?”

When I hung up, Pam said, “What’s going on?”

“Cynthia hired—
we
hired someone to look into her family’s disappearance.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, it’s none of my business, but you ask me, it happened so long ago, you’re just throwing your money away. No one’s ever going to know what happened that night.”

“See you later, Pam,” I said. “Thanks for the use of the phone.”

“Would you like some coffee?” Cynthia asked as Denton Abagnall came into our house.

“Oh, I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”

He got settled on the couch and Cynthia brought out coffee and cups and sugar and cream on a tray, as well as some chocolate chip cookies, and then she poured coffee into three cups and held the plate of cookies for Abagnall and he took one, and inside our heads both Cynthia and I were screaming:
For God’s sake, tell us what you know—we can’t stand it another minute!
Cynthia glanced down at the tray and said to me, “I only got two spoons, Terry. Could you grab another one?”

I went back into the kitchen, opened the cutlery drawer for a spoon, and something caught my eye down in that space between the edge of the Rubbermaid cutlery holder and the wall of the drawer, where all sorts of odds and ends collect, from pencils and pens to those little plastic clips from the ends of bread bags.

A key.

I dug it out. It was the spare house key that normally hung on the hook.

I went back into the living room with the spoon, and sat down as Abagnall got out his notebook. He opened it up, leafed through a few pages, said, “Let me just see what I’ve got here.”

Cynthia and I smiled patiently.

“Okay, here we are,” he said. He looked at Cynthia. “Mrs. Archer, what can you tell me about Vince Fleming?”

“Vince Fleming?”

“That’s right. He was the boy you were with that night. You and he, you were parked in a car—” He stopped himself. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at Cynthia and then at me and then back at Cynthia again. “Are you comfortable with me talking about this in front of your husband?”

“It’s fine,” she said.

“You were parked in his car, out at the mall, I believe. That was where your father found you and brought you home.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve had a chance to go over the police files on this case, and the producer at that TV show, she showed me a tape of the program—I’m sorry, I never saw it when it originally ran, I don’t much care for crime shows—but most of the information they got was from the police. And this Vince Fleming fellow, he has a bit of a checkered history, if you get my drift.”

“I’m afraid I didn’t really keep in touch with him after that night,” Cynthia said.

“He’s been in and out of trouble with the law his whole life,” Abagnall said. “And his father was no different. Anthony Fleming, he ran a rather significant criminal organization back around that time.”

“Like the Mafia?” I said.

“Not quite that extensive. But he had his hand in a significant portion of the illegal drug market between New Haven and Bridgeport. Prostitution, truck hijackings, that kind of thing.”

“My God,” Cynthia said. “I had no idea. I mean, I knew Vince was a bit of a bad boy, but I had no idea what his father was involved in. Is his father still alive?”

“No. He was shot in 1992. Some aspiring hoodlums killed him in a deal that went very badly wrong.”

Cynthia was shaking her head, unable to believe it all. “Did the police catch them?”

“Didn’t have to,” Abagnall said. “Anthony Fleming’s people took care of them. Massacred a houseful of them—those who were responsible, and a few who were not but happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—in retaliation. They figure Vince Fleming was in charge of that operation, but he was never convicted, never even charged.”

Abagnall reached for another cookie. “I really shouldn’t,” he said. “I know my wife will be making me something nice for dinner.”

I spoke up. “But what does all this have to do with Cynthia, and her family?”

“Nothing, exactly,” the detective said. “But I’m learning about the kind of person Vince turned out to be, and I’m wondering about the kind of person he might have been, that night when your wife’s family disappeared.”

“You think he had something to do with it,” Cynthia said.

“I simply don’t know. But he would have had reason to be angry. Your father had dragged you away from a date with him. That must have been humiliating, not just for you, but for him as well. And if he did have anything to do with your parents’ disappearance, and that of your brother, if he…” His voice softened. “If he murdered them, then he had a father with the means, and the experience, to help him cover his tracks.”

“But surely the police must have looked into this at the time,” I said. “You can’t be the first person this has occurred to.”

“You’re right. The police looked into it. But they never came up with anything concrete. There were only some suspicions. And Vince and his family were each other’s alibis. He said he went home after Clayton Bigge took his daughter home.”

“It would explain one thing,” Cynthia said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Abagnall was smiling. He must have known what Cynthia was going to say, which was, “It would explain why I’m alive.”

Abagnall nodded.

“Because he liked me.”

“But your brother,” I said. “He had nothing against your brother.” I turned to Abagnall. “How do you explain that?”

“Todd may simply have been a witness. Someone who was there, who had to be eliminated.”

We were all quiet for a moment. Then Cynthia said, “He had a knife.”

“Who?” Abagnall asked. “Vince?”

“In the car that night. He was showing it off to me. It was a—what do you call it—one of those knives that springs open.”

“A switchblade,” Abagnall said.

“That’s it,” Cynthia said. “I remember…I can remember holding it….” Her voice trailed off, and her eyes were starting to roll up under her eyelids. “I feel faint.”

I quickly slipped my arm around her. “What can I get you?”

“I just, I just need to go…freshen up…for a minute,” she said, attempting to stand. I waited a moment to see that she was steady on her feet, then watched worriedly as she made her way up the stairs.

Abagnall was watching, too, and when he heard the bathroom door close, he leaned closer to me and said quietly, “What do you make of that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she’s exhausted.”

Abagnall nodded, didn’t speak for a moment. Then, “This Vince Fleming, his father made a very good living from his illegal activities. If he felt some sense of responsibility for what his son did, it would have been financially possible for him to leave sums of cash for your wife’s aunt to assist her in sending her niece to school.”

“You saw the letter,” I said. “Tess showed it to you.”

“Yes. She gave it to me, in fact, in addition to the envelopes. I take it you still haven’t told your wife about that.”

“Not yet. I think Tess is ready to, though. Cynthia’s decision to hire you, I think Tess sees that as a sign that she’s ready to know everything.”

Abagnall nodded thoughtfully. “It’s best to get everything out into the open now, since we’re trying to get some answers.”

“We’re planning to see Tess tomorrow night. Actually, it might be worth seeing her tonight.” I was, to be honest, thinking about Abagnall’s daily rate.

“That’s a good—” Inside his jacket, Abagnall’s phone rang. “A dinner report, no doubt,” he said, taking out the phone. But he looked puzzled when he saw the number, tossed the phone back into his jacket, and said, “They can leave a message.”

Cynthia was making her way back down the stairs.

“Mrs. Archer, are you feeling all right?” Abagnall asked. She nodded and sat back down. He cleared his throat. “Are you sure? Because I’d like to bring up another matter.”

Cynthia said, “Yes. Please go ahead.”

“Now, there may be a very simple explanation for this. It might just be some sort of clerical error, you never know. The state bureaucracy has been known to make its share of mistakes.”

“Yes?”

“Well, when you were unable to produce a photograph of your father, I went in search of one, and that led me to check with the Department of Motor Vehicles. I thought they would be able to assist me in this regard, but as it turns out, they weren’t much help to me.”

“They didn’t have his picture? Was that before they put pictures on driver’s licenses?” she asked.

“That’s really something of a moot point,” Abagnall said. “The thing is, they have no record of your father ever having a license at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no record of him, Mrs. Archer. As far as the DMV is concerned, he never existed.”

19

“But that could just be
what you said,” Cynthia said. “People go missing from computer files all the time.”

Denton Abagnall nodded agreeably. “That’s very true. The fact that Clayton Bigge didn’t show up in the DMV files is not, in itself, particularly conclusive of anything. But then I checked past records for his Social Security number.”

“Yes?” Cynthia said.

“And nothing came up there, either. It’s hard to find any record of your father anywhere, Mrs. Archer. We have no picture of him. I looked through your shoeboxes and I couldn’t find so much as a pay stub from a place of employment. Do you happen to know the name of the actual company he worked for, that sent him out on the road all the time?”

Cynthia thought. “No,” she said.

“There’s no record of him with the IRS. Far as I can tell, he never paid any taxes. Not under the name of Clayton Bigge, at any rate.”

“What are you saying?” she asked. “Are you saying he was a spy or something? Some kind of secret agent?”

Abagnall grinned. “Well, not necessarily. Nothing quite so exotic.”

“Because he was away a lot,” she said. She looked at me. “What do you think? Could he have been a government agent, being sent away on missions?”

“It seems kind of out there,” I said hesitantly. “I mean, next we’ll start wondering whether he was an alien from another planet. Maybe he was sent here to study us and then went back to his home world, took your mother and brother with him.”

Cynthia just looked at me. She was still looking a bit woozy after her near fainting spell.

“It was supposed to be a joke,” I said apologetically.

Abagnall brought us—me in particular—back to reality. “That’s not one of my working theories.”

“Then what are your theories?” I asked.

He took a sip of coffee. “I could probably come up with half a dozen, based on what little I know at the moment,” he said. “Was your father living under a name that was not his own? Was he escaping some strange past? A criminal one, perhaps? Did Vince Fleming bring harm to your family that evening? Was his father’s criminal network somehow linked to something in your father’s past that he’d been successfully covering up until that time?”

“We don’t really know anything, do we?” Cynthia asked.

Abagnall leaned back tiredly into the couch cushions. “What I know is that in a couple of days, the unanswered questions in this case seem to be expanding exponentially. And I have to ask you whether you want me to continue. You’ve already spent several hundred dollars on my efforts, and it could run into the thousands. If you’d like me to stop now, that’s fine. I can walk away from this, give you a report on what I’ve learned so far. Or I can keep digging. It’s entirely up to you.”

Cynthia started to open her mouth, but before she could speak, I said, “We’d like you to continue.”

“All right,” he said. “Why don’t I stay on this for another couple of days? I don’t need another check at this time. I think another forty-eight hours will really determine whether I can make significant progress.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I think I want to look further into this Vince Fleming character. Mrs. Archer, what do you think? Could this man—well, he would have been a very young man back in 1983—have been capable of bringing harm to your family?”

She thought about that for a moment. “After all this time, I guess I have to consider that anything is possible.”

“Yes, it’s good to keep an open mind. Thank you for the coffee.”

Before leaving, Abagnall returned Cynthia’s shoebox of mementos. Cynthia closed the door as he left, then turned to me and asked, “Who was my father? Who the hell was my father?”

And I thought of Jane Scavullo’s creative writing assignment. How we’re all strangers to one another, how we often know the least about those we’re closest to.

For twenty-five years, Cynthia had endured the pain and anxiety associated with her family’s disappearance without a hint of what might have happened to them. And while we still didn’t have the answer to that question, strands of information were floating to the surface, like bits of planking from a ship sunk long ago. These revelations that Cynthia’s father might be living under an assumed name, that Vince Fleming’s past might be much darker than originally thought. The strange phone call, the mysterious appearance of what was purported to be Clayton Bigge’s hat. The man watching our house late at night. The news from Tess that for a period of time envelopes stuffed with cash from an anonymous source had been entrusted to her to look after Cynthia.

It was this last one I felt Cynthia was now entitled to know about. And I thought it would be better for her to learn about it from Tess herself.

We struggled through dinner not to discuss the questions that Abagnall’s visit had raised. We were both feeling that we’d already exposed Grace to too much of this. She had her radar out all the time, picking up one bit of information one day, matching it up with something else she might hear the next. We were worried that discussing Cynthia’s history, the opportunistic psychic, Abagnall’s investigation, all of those things, might be contributing to Grace’s anxiety, her fear that one night we’d all be wiped out by an object from outer space.

But try as we might to avoid the subject, it was often Grace who brought it up.

“Where’s the hat?” she asked after a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

“What?” Cynthia said.

“The hat. Your dad’s hat. The one that got left here. Where is it?”

“I put it up in the closet,” she said.

“Can I see it?”

“No,” Cynthia said. “It’s not to be played with.”

“I wasn’t going to
play
with it. I just wanted to
look
at it.”

“I don’t want you playing with it or looking at it or touching it!” Cynthia snapped.

Grace retreated, went back to her mashed potatoes.

Cynthia was preoccupied and on edge all through dinner. Who wouldn’t be, having learned only an hour earlier that the man she’d known her entire life as Clayton Bigge might not be Clayton Bigge at all?

“I think,” I said, “that we should go visit Tess tonight.”

“Yeah,” said Grace. “Let’s see Aunt Tess.”

Cynthia, as though coming out of a dream, said, “Tomorrow. I thought you said we should go see her tomorrow.”

“I know. But I think it might be good to see her tonight. There’s a lot to talk about. I think you should tell her what Mr. Abagnall said.”

“What did he say?” Grace asked.

I gave her a look that silenced her.

“I called earlier,” Cynthia said. “I left her a message. She must be out doing something. She’ll call us when she gets the message.”

“Let me make a call,” I said, and reached for the phone. I let it ring half a dozen times before her voicemail cut in. Given that Cynthia had already left a message, I couldn’t see the point in leaving another.

“I told you,” Cynthia said.

I looked at the wall clock. It was nearly seven. Whatever Tess might be out doing, chances were she wouldn’t be out doing it much longer. “Why don’t we go for a drive, head up to her place, maybe she’ll be there by the time we arrive, or we can wait around for a little while until she shows up. You still have a key, right?”

Cynthia nodded.

“You don’t think this can all wait till tomorrow?” she asked.

“I think, not only would she want to hear about what Mr. Abagnall found out, there might be some things she might want to share with you.”

“What do you mean, she might have something to share with me?” Cynthia asked. Grace was eyeing me pretty curiously, too, but had the sense not to say anything this time.

“I don’t know. This new information, it might trigger something with her, prompt her to remember things she hasn’t thought about in years. You know, if we tell her your father might have had some other, I don’t know, identity, then she might go, oh yeah, that explains such and such.”

“You’re acting like you already know what it is she’s going to tell me.”

My mouth was dry. I got up, ran some water from the tap until it was cold, filled a glass, drank it down, turned around and leaned against the counter.

“Okay,” I said. “Grace, your mother and I need some privacy here.”

“I haven’t finished my dinner.”

“Take your plate with you and go watch some TV.”

She took her plate and left the room, a sour expression on her face. I knew she was thinking that she missed all the good stuff.

To Cynthia, I said, “Before she got those last test results, Tess thought she was dying.”

Cynthia was very still. “You knew this.”

“Yes. She told me she thought she only had a limited amount of time left.”

“You kept this from me.”

“Please. Just let me tell you this. You can get mad later.” I felt Cynthia’s eyes go into me like icicles. “But you were under a lot of stress at the time, and Tess told me because she wasn’t sure you’d be able to deal with that kind of news. And just as well she didn’t tell you, because as it turned out, she’s okay. That’s the thing we can’t lose sight of.”

Cynthia said nothing.

“Anyway, at the time, when she thought she was terminal, there was something else she felt she had to tell me, something that she felt you needed to know when the time was right. She wasn’t sure she’d get the chance again.”

And so I told Cynthia. Everything. The anonymous note, the cash, how it could show up anywhere, anytime. How it helped get her through school. How Tess, taking the author of the note at his or her word, that if she breathed a word of this the cash would stop coming, kept this to herself all these years.

She listened, only interrupting me a couple of times with questions, let me spell it all out for her.

When I was done, she looked numb. She said something I didn’t hear very often from her. “I could use a drink,” she said.

I got down a bottle of scotch from a shelf high in the pantry, poured her a small glass. She drank it down in one long gulp, and I poured her about half as much again. She drank that down, too.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go and see Tess.”

We would have preferred to go see Tess without bringing Grace along, but it would have been a scramble to find a sitter with no notice. And not only that, knowing that someone had been watching the house made us uneasy about putting Grace in anyone else’s care at the moment.

So we told her to bring some things to entertain herself—she grabbed her
Cosmos
book again and a DVD of that Jodie Foster movie
Contact
—down in Tess’s basement, allowing the rest of us to talk privately.

Grace wasn’t her usual chatty self on the way up. I think she was picking up the tension in the car, and decided, wisely, to lay low.

“Maybe we’ll get some ice cream on the way back,” I said, breaking the silence. “Or have some of Tess’s. She probably still has some left from her birthday.”

When we pulled off the main road between Milford and Derby and drove down Tess’s street, Cynthia pointed. “Her car’s home.”

Tess drove a four-wheel-drive Subaru wagon. She always said she didn’t want to be stranded in a snowstorm if she needed provisions.

Grace was out of the car first and ran up to the front door. “Hold on, pal,” I said. “Wait up. You can’t just go bursting in.”

We got to the door and I knocked. After a few seconds, I knocked again, only louder.

“Maybe she’s around back,” Cynthia said. “Working on her garden.”

So we walked around the house, Grace, as usual, charging on ahead, skipping, leaping into the air. Before we’d rounded the house, she was already running back, saying, “She’s not there.” We had to see for ourselves, of course, but Grace was correct. Tess was not in her backyard, working in the garden as twilight slowly turned to darkness.

Cynthia rapped on the back door, which led directly into Tess’s kitchen.

There was still no answer.

“That’s weird,” she said. It also seemed strange that, as night was falling, there were no lights on inside the house.

I crowded Cynthia on the back step and peered through the tiny window in the door.