“We would never let anything happen to you,” I said. “Your mother and I love you very much.”
Grace said nothing.
“I still think it would be worth checking just once,” I said, shifting off the bed and kneeling in front of the telescope. “You mind if I have a look?” I asked.
“Knock yourself out,” Grace said. If the lights had been on, she might have seen me react to that.
“Okay,” I said, settling into position, but glancing first out the window to make sure the house wasn’t being watched. Then I put my eye up to the lens, took hold of the telescope.
I pointed it up into the night sky, saw stars fly past the end like a pan shot from Star Trek. “Let’s have a look here,” I said, and then the scope broke free of its stand, hit the floor, and rolled under Grace’s desk.
“I told you, Dad,” she said. “It’s just a piece of junk.”
I found Cynthia under the covers, too. They were pulled up right to her neck, as though she were cocooned. Her eyes were closed, although I had a feeling she was not asleep. She just didn’t want to engage in conversation.
I stripped down to my boxers, brushed my teeth, threw back the covers, and got into bed next to her. There was an old Harper’s next to the bed, and I flipped through the pages briefly, tried to read the Index, but couldn’t concentrate.
I reached over and turned the bedside lamp off. I settled in on my side, my back to Cynthia.
“I’m going to go lie with Grace,” Cynthia said.
“Sure,” I said into my pillow. Without looking at her, I said, “Cynthia, I love you. We love each other. What’s happening now, it’s tearing us up, tearing us apart. We need to come up with some plan, some way to take this on together.”
But she slipped out of bed without responding. A sliver of light from the hallway cut across the ceiling like a knife as she opened the door, then vanished as she closed it. Fine, I thought. I was too tired to fight, too tired to try to make up. Soon, I fell asleep.
In the morning, when I got up, Cynthia and Grace were gone.
31
I didn’t find it odd that Cynthia wasn’t sharing our bed with me when I woke up and saw that it was six-thirty. Even when we hadn’t fought, she’d sometimes fallen asleep on Grace’s bed and spent the entire night there. So I didn’t immediately trudge down the hall to check on them.
I got up, pulled on my jeans, wandered into the adjoining bathroom and splashed some water on my face. I had looked better. The stress of the last few weeks was taking its toll. There were dark circles under my eyes, and I think I’d actually lost a few pounds. That was something I could stand to do, but I would have preferred to do it following a plan that did not consist entirely of stress. There was red in the corner of my eyes, and I looked as though I could use a haircut.
The towel bar is right next to the window that looks down over the driveway. As I reached for a towel, there was something different about how the world beyond looked through the blinds. The cracks between the blinds are usually filled with white and silver, the colors of our two cars. But this time there was silver and asphalt.
I pried apart the blinds. Cynthia’s car was not in the driveway.
I muttered something along the lines of “What the fuck?”
Then I padded down the hall, barefoot and shirtless, and eased open the door to Grace’s room. Grace was never up this early, and I had every reason to expect to find her in bed.
The covers were turned back, the bed empty.
I could have just shouted out my wife’s name, or my daughter’s, standing up there at the top of the stairs, but it was still very early in the morning, and if there was a chance that there was still someone else in this house with me, and if that person was asleep, I didn’t want to wake her.
I popped my head into the study, found it empty, went down to the kitchen.
It looked as it had the night before. Everything cleaned up and put away. No one had had an early breakfast before departing.
I opened the door to the basement, and this time I felt comfortable shouting. “Cyn!” It was dumb, I know, given that her car was not in the driveway, but because that didn’t make sense, at some level I must have been operating on the theory that it had been stolen. “You down there?” I waited a beat, then, “Grace!”
When I opened the front door, the morning newspaper was there waiting for me.
It was hard, at that moment, not to shake the feeling that I was living out an episode from Cynthia’s life.
But this time, unlike that morning twenty-five years ago, there was a note.
It was folded and standing on its side, on the kitchen table, tucked in between the salt and pepper shakers. I reached for it, unfolded it. It was handwritten, and the writing was unmistakably Cynthia’s. It read:
Terry:
I’m going away.
I don’t know where, or for how long. I just know I can’t stay here another minute.
I don’t hate you. But when I see the doubt in your eyes, it tears me apart. I feel like I’m losing my mind, that no one believes me. I know Wedmore still doesn’t know what to think.
What’s going to happen next? Who will break in to our house? Who will be watching it from the street? Who will be next to die?
I don’t want it to be Grace. So I’m taking her with me. I figure you have the smarts to look after yourself. Who knows? Maybe with me out of the house, you’ll actually feel safer.
I want to look for my father, but I don’t have any idea where to start. I believe he’s alive. Maybe that’s what Mr. Abagnall discovered after he went to see Vince. I just don’t know.
All I do know is I need some space. Grace and I need to be a mother and daughter, who don’t have to worry about anything else except being a mother and daughter.
I won’t have my cell on very often. I know they can do that thing, triangulate, to find people. But I’ll check it once in a while for messages. Maybe, at some point, I’ll feel like talking to you. Just not right now.
Call the school, tell them Grace will be gone for a while. I’m not calling the shop. Let Pamela think what she wants.
Don’t look for me.
I still love you, but I don’t need you to find me right now.
L, Cyn
I read it three, maybe four times. Then I picked up the phone and called her cell, despite what she’d written. It went straight to message, and I left one. “Cyn. Jesus. Call me.”
And then I slammed the phone down. “Shit!” I shouted. “Shit!”
I paced the kitchen a few times, unsure what to do. I opened the door, walked down to the end of the drive, still in nothing but my jeans, and looked up and down the street, as if somehow I could magically divine which way Cynthia and Grace had gone. I went back into the house, grabbed the phone again, and, as if in a trance, dialed the number I always did when I needed to talk to someone who loved Cynthia as much as I did.
I had dialed Tess.
And when the phone rang a third time and no one picked up, I realized what I’d done, the incredible mistake I had made. I hung up and sat at the kitchen table and began to cry. With my elbows on the table, I put my head in my hands and let it all come out.
I don’t know quite how long I sat there, alone, at my kitchen table, letting the tears run down my cheeks. Long enough until there weren’t any left, I guess. Once I’d exhausted the supply, I had no choice but to come up with another course of action.
I went back upstairs, finished dressing. I had to keep telling myself a few things.
The first was that Cynthia and Grace were okay. It wasn’t as though they’d been kidnapped or anything. And second, I couldn’t imagine that Cynthia would let anything bad happen to Grace, no matter how upset she was.
She loved Grace.
But what was my daughter to think? Her mother getting her up in the middle of the night, making her pack a bag, sneaking out of the house together so her father wouldn’t hear?
Cynthia had to ha
ve believed, in her heart, that this was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t. It was wrong, and it was wrong to put Grace through something like this.
And that was why I had no problem ignoring Cynthia’s orders not to look for them.
Grace was my daughter. She was missing. And I was bloody well going to look for her. And try to work out things with my wife.
I dug around in the bookcase and got out a map of New England and New York State, opened it up on the kitchen table. There were times when MapQuest didn’t cut it, not when you wanted to see the big picture.
I let my eyes wander, from Portland south to Providence, Boston west to Buffalo, asking myself where Cynthia might go. I looked at the Connecticut-Massachusetts line, the town of Otis, the vicinity of the quarry. I couldn’t see her going there. Not with Grace in tow. What would be the point? What was to be learned from a return trip?
There was the village of Sharon, where Connie Gormley, the woman who was killed in some sort of staged hit-and-run accident, had been from, but that didn’t make any sense, either. Cynthia had never really grabbed on to that story in the newspaper clipping as meaning anything, not the way I had. I couldn’t see her heading up that way.
Maybe the answer wasn’t to be found in looking at a map. Maybe I needed to be thinking about names. People from her past. People Cynthia might turn to, in these very desperate times, for answers.
I went into the living room, where I found the two shoeboxes of mementos from Cynthia’s childhood on an end table. Given what the last few weeks had been like, the boxes had never found their way back to their usual hiding place, in the bottom of our closet.
I started riffling through the contents randomly, tossing old receipts and clippings onto the coffee table, but they held no meaning for me. They seemed to coalesce into one huge puzzle with no discernible pattern.
I went back into the kitchen, phoned Rolly at home. It was too early for him to have left for school yet. Millicent answered.
“Hi, Terry,” she said. “What’s going on? Are you not going in today?”
“Rolly already has me off,” I said. “Millie, you haven’t heard from Cynthia by any chance?”
“Cynthia? No. Terry, what’s going on? Isn’t Cynthia home?”
“She’s gone. She took Grace with her.”
“Let me get Rolly.”
I heard her set the phone down and a few seconds later Rolly said, “Cynthia’s gone?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what to do.”
“Shit. And I was going to call her today, see how she’s doing, if she wanted to talk. She didn’t tell you where she was going?”
“Rolly, if I knew where she was going, I wouldn’t be calling you so fucking early in the morning.”
“Okay, okay. Jesus, I don’t know what to say. Why did she go? Did you guys have a fight or something?”
“Yeah, kind of. I fucked up. And I think everything’s just gotten to her. She wasn’t feeling safe here, she wanted to protect Grace. But this was the wrong way to go about it. Look, if you hear from her, if you see her, let me know, okay?”
“I will,” Rolly said. “And if you find her, call.”
Next, I called Dr. Kinzler’s office. It hadn’t opened yet, so I left a message, said Cynthia was missing, asked her to please call me, left my home and cell numbers.
The only other person I could think to call was Rona Wedmore. I considered it, then decided not to. She wasn’t, as far as I could tell, solidly in our corner.
I think I understood Cynthia’s motivations for disappearing, but I was less sure Wedmore would.
And then a name popped into my head. Someone I’d never met, never spoken to, never even seen across a room. But his name kept coming up.
Maybe it was time to have a chat with Vince Fleming.
32
If I could have brought myself to call Detective Wedmore, I could have asked her outright where I might find Vince Fleming and saved myself some time. She’d already said she knew the name. Abagnall had told us he had a record for a variety of offenses. He was even believed to have participated in a revenge killing, after the murder of his father back in the early nineties. There was a pretty good chance that a police detective would know where someone like that might hang out.
But I didn’t want to talk to Wedmore.
I went up to the computer and started doing some searches on Vince Fleming and Milford. There were a couple of news stories from the New Haven paper over the last few years, one that detailed how he had been charged with assault. He’d used someone’s face to open a beer bottle. That one got dismissed when the victim decided to drop charges. I was willing to bet there was more to that story, but the online edition of this newspaper certainly didn’t have it.
There was another story where Vince Fleming got a passing reference, as someone rumored to be behind a rash of auto thefts in southern Connecticut. He owned a body shop in an industrial district somewhere in town, and there was a photo of him, one of those slightly grainy ones taken by a photographer who doesn’t want his subject to know he’s there, going into a bar called Mike’s.
I’d never been in, but I’d driven past Mike’s.
I got out the Yellow Pages, found several pages listing businesses that would fix your dented automobile. From the listings, it wasn’t immediately obvious which one might belong to Vince Fleming—there was no Vince’s Auto Body, no Fleming’s Fender Repair.
I could start phoning every body shop in the Milford area, or I could try asking around for Vince Fleming at Mike’s. Maybe there, I might find someone who could point me in the right direction, at least give me the name of the body shop he owned, and where, if the papers were to be believed, he chopped up the occasional stolen car for parts.
Although not particularly hungry, I felt I needed some food in my stomach and put a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, slathered peanut butter over them, and ate them standing over the sink so I wouldn’t have to clean up the crumbs. I threw on a jacket, made sure I had my cell phone with me, and went to the front door.
When I opened it, Rona Wedmore was standing there.
“Whoa,” she said, her fist suspended in midair, ready to knock.
I jumped back. “Jesus,” I said. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Mr. Archer,” she said, maintaining her composure. Evidently my sudden opening of the door scared me more than it did her.
“Hello,” I said. “I was just on my way out.”
“Is Mrs. Archer here? I don’t see her car.”
“She’s out. Is there something I can help you with? Have you any new information?”
“No,” she said. “When will she be back?”
“I can’t say, exactly. What did you want her for?”
Wedmore ignored my question. “Is she at work?”
“Perhaps.”
“You know what? I’ll just give her a call. I think I made a note here,” she had her notebook out, “of her cell phone number.”
“She’s not answer—” I stopped myself.
“She’s not answering her phone?” Wedmore said. “Let’s see if you’re right about that.” She punched in the number, put the phone to her ear, waited, closed the phone. “You’re right. Does she not like to answer her phone?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“When did Mrs. Archer leave?” she asked.
“This morning,” I said.
“Because I drove by here around one in the morning, getting off shift late and all, and her car wasn’t here then, either.”
Shit. Cynthia had hit the road with Grace even earlier than I’d imagined.
“Really,” I said. “You should have dropped in and said hello.”
“Where is she, Mr. Archer?”
“I don’t know. Check back in the afternoon. Maybe she’ll be here then.” Part of me wanted to ask Wedmore’s help, but I was afraid of making Cynthia seem guiltier than I feared Wedmore already viewed her.
That tongue was pok
ing around inside her mouth again. It took a break so she could ask, “Has she taken Grace, too?”
I found myself unable to say anything for a moment, then, “I really have things to do.”
“You look worried, Mr. Archer. And you know what? You should be. Your wife has been under one hell of a strain. I want you to get in touch with me the moment she shows up.”
“I don’t know what it is you think she’s done,” I said. “My wife’s the victim here. She’s the one who was robbed of her family. Her parents and brother first, now her aunt.”
Wedmore tapped me on the chest with an index finger. “Call me.” She handed me another one of her business cards before heading back to her car.
Seconds later, I was in mine, driving west on Bridgeport Avenue into the Milford neighborhood of Devon. I’d been past Mike’s a hundred times, a small brick building next to a 7-Eleven, its five-letter neon sign running vertically down the second story, ending above the entrance. The front windows were decorated with signs advertising Schlitz and Coors and Budweiser.
I parked around the corner and walked back, not sure whether Mike’s would even be open in the morning for business, but once inside I realized that for many, it was never too early to drink.
There were about a dozen customers in the dimly lit bar, two perched on stools up at the counter having a conversation, the rest scattered about the tables. I approached the bar just down from the two guys, leaned against it until I had caught the attention of the short, heavyset man in a check shirt working behind it.
“Help ya?” he asked, a damp mug in one hand, a towel in the other. He worked the towel into the mug, twisted it around.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for a guy, I think he comes in here a lot.”
“We get a lot of people,” he said. “Got a name?”
“Vince Fleming.”
The bartender had a pretty good poker face. Didn’t flinch, raise an eyebrow. But he didn’t say anything right away, either.
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