No Time For Goodbye

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.

I couldn’t be certain about this, but I thought I saw something on the floor of the kitchen, obscuring the black and white checker-boarded tiles.

A person.

“Cynthia,” I said, “take Grace back to the car.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t let her come into the house.”

“Jesus, Terry,” she whispered. “What is it?”

I grasped the knob, turned it slowly, and pushed, testing to see whether the door was locked. It was not.

I stepped in, Cynthia looking over my shoulder, and felt along the wall for the light switch, flipped it up.

Aunt Tess lay on the kitchen floor, facedown, her head twisted at an odd angle, one arm stretched out ahead of her, the other hanging back.

“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “She’s had a stroke or something!”

I didn’t exactly have a medical degree, but there seemed to be an awful lot of blood on the floor for a stroke.