No Time for Goodbye

by Linwood Barclay

  “I figure you’re going to tell me,” he said.

  “They were in Cynthia’s mother’s car, a yellow Ford Escort, at the bottom of a lake in a quarry, up in Massachusetts.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit.”

  “They must have been there awhile,” Vince said. “And they were still able to tell who they were?”

  “DNA,” I said.

  Vince shook his head in admiration. “Fucking DNA. What did we ever do without it?” He finished off a sausage.

  “And Cynthia’s aunt was murdered,” I said.

  Vince’s eyes narrowed. “I think Cynthia talked about her. Bess?”

  “Tess,” I said.

  “Yeah. She bought it?”

  “Someone stabbed her to death in her kitchen.”

  “Hmm,” Vince said. “Is there some reason why you’re telling me all this?”

  “Cynthia’s missing,” I said. “She’s…run off. With our daughter. We have a daughter named Grace. She’s eight.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I thought there was a chance Cynthia might have come looking for you. She’s trying to find the answers to what happened that night, and it’s possible you might have some of them.”

  “What would I know?”

  “I don’t know. But you were probably the last person to see Cynthia that night, other than her family. And you had a run-in with her father before he brought Cynthia home.”

  I never saw it coming.

  Vince Fleming reached across the table with one hand, grabbed my right wrist with his left, yanked it across the table toward him, while his other hand grabbed the steak knife he’d been using to cut his sausage. He swung it down toward the table in a long, swift arc, and the blade buried into the wood table between my middle and fourth finger.

  I screamed. “Jesus!”

  Vince’s hand was a vise on my wrist, pinning it to the table. “I don’t like the sound of what you’re suggesting,” he said.

  I was panting too hard to respond. I kept looking at the knife, desperate to reassure myself that it had not actually gone through my hand.

  “I have a question for you,” Vince said very quietly, still holding my wrist, leaving the knife standing straight up. “There’s been a guy, another guy, asking around about me. You know anything about that?”

  “What guy?” I said.

  “In his fifties, short guy, might have been private. Asked around without being quite so obvious as you.”

  “It might have been a man named Abagnall,” I said. “Denton Abagnall.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  “Cynthia hired him. We both hired him.”

  “To check up on me?”

  “No. I mean, not specifically. We hired him to try and find Cynthia’s family. Or at least, what happened to them.”

  “And that meant asking about me?”

  I swallowed. “He mentioned that he thought you were worth taking a look at.”

  “Really? And what’s he found out about me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I mean, if he did find out anything, we don’t know what it was. And we’re not likely to find out, either.”

  “Why’s that?” Vince Fleming asked.

  He either didn’t know, or was very good with the poker face.

  “He’s dead,” I said. “He was murdered, too. In a parking garage in Stamford. We think it might have something to do with Tess’s murder.”

  “And the boys also said some cop was nosing around asking for me. Black chick, short and fat.”

  “Wedmore,” I said. “She’s been looking into all of it.”

  “Well,” said Vince, letting go of my wrist and working the knife out of the table, “that’s all very interesting, but I don’t particularly give a fuck.”

  “So you haven’t seen my wife,” I said. “She hasn’t been by here, or your work, to talk to you?”

  Very evenly, he said, “No.” And he stared into my eyes, as though daring me to contradict him.

  I held his gaze. “I hope you’re telling me the truth, Mr. Fleming. Because I’ll do anything to make sure she and my daughter get home safely.”

  He got up from his chair and walked around to my side of the table. “Should I take that as some sort of a threat?”

  “I’m just saying that when it comes to family, even people like me, people who don’t have nearly as much influence as people like you, will do whatever they have to do.”

  He grabbed my hair in his fist, bent down and put his face into mine. His breath smelled of sausage and ketchup.

  “Listen, fuckface, do have any idea who you’re talking to? Those guys who brought you here. You have any idea what they can do? You could end up in a wood chipper. You could be chum thrown off a boat in the Sound out there. You could—”

  Outside, at the base of the stairs, I heard one of the three guys who’d delivered me here shout, “Hey, don’t go up there.”

  And a woman, shouting back, “Go fuck yourself.” Then footsteps on the stairs.

  I was staring into Vince’s face and couldn’t see the screen door, but I heard it swing open, and then a voice I thought I recognized said, “Hey, Vince, you seen my mom, because—”

  Then, seeing Vince Fleming with a man’s hair in his fist, she stopped talking.

  “I’m kind of busy here,” he told her. “And I don’t know where your mother is. Try the goddamn mall.”

  “Jesus, Vince, what the fuck are you doing to my teacher?” the woman said.

  Even with Vince’s meaty fingers holding on to my scalp, I managed to turn my head far enough to see Jane Scavullo.

  34

  “Your teacher?” Vince said, not relaxing his grip on my hair. “What teacher?”

  “My fucking creative writing teacher,” Jane said. “If you’re going to beat the shit out of my teachers, there are other ones you could start with first. This is Mr. Archer. He’s, like, the least assholish of any of them.” She approached. “Hi, Mr. Archer.”

  “Hi, Jane,” I said.

  “When are you coming back?” she asked. “This guy they got in to teach your class is a complete dweeb. Everybody’s skipping. He’s worse than that woman who stutters. Nobody gives a shit whether he takes attendance or not. He’s always got something stuck in his teeth, and he’s got his finger in there, trying to get it out, but he does it quick, like he thinks you won’t notice, but he’s not fooling anybody.” I noticed that Jane, outside of school, was not nearly so shy about talking to me.

  Then, casually, she asked Vince, “What’s the deal?”

  “Why don’t you run along, Jane, okay?” Vince said.

  “Have you seen my mom?”

  “I think she might be up at the garage. Why?”

  “I need some money.”

  “What for?”

  “Stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Stuff stuff.”

  “How much you need?”

  Jane Scavullo shrugged. “Forty?”

  Vince Fleming let go of my hair and reached into his back pocket for his wallet, pulled out two twenties, and handed them to Jane.

  He said, “Is this the guy? The one you were talking about? Who likes your stories?”

  Jane nodded. She was so relaxed, I had to assume she’d seen others getting this sort of treatment from Vince. The only thing different this time was that it was one of her teachers. “Yeah. Why you fucking him over?”

  “Look, honey, I can’t really get into this with you.”

  “I’m trying to find my wife,” I said. “She’s with my daughter, and I’m very worried about them. I thought your fa—I thought Vince here might be able to help me.”

  “He’s not my father,” Jane said. “He and my mom have been together for a while now.” To Vince, she said, “I don’t mean that like an insult, about you not being my father. Because you’re okay.” To me, she said, “Remember that one story I wrote for you, about the guy making me eggs?”<
br />
  I had to think. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “That was sort of based on Vince here. He’s decent.” She smiled at the irony. “Well, to me. So if you’re just trying to find your wife and kid, why’s Vince here getting all pissed with you?”

  “Sweetheart,” Vince said.

  She walked up to Vince, got right in his face. “You be nice to him or I’m fucked. His is, like, the only class where I’m getting any decent grades. If he wants help finding his wife, why don’t you help him find her, because if he’s not coming back to school until his wife gets found then I got to look at this guy picking his teeth every day and that’s not good for my education. It also makes me want to puke.”

  Vince put an arm around her shoulder and walked her to the door. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to her, but just before she went back down the stairs, she said to me, “See ya, Mr. Archer.”

  “Goodbye, Jane,” I said. She was so light-footed I didn’t hear her descend the stairs after the door closed.

  Vince walked back over to the table, much of the menace gone out of his posture, and sat back down at the table. He looked a bit sheepish, and didn’t say anything right away.

  “She’s a good kid,” I said.

  Vince nodded. “Yeah, she is. Her mom, she and I’ve hooked up, and she’s a bit of a flake, but Jane, she’s okay. She’s been needing some, whaddya call it, stability in her life. I never raised any kids, and sometimes, I kind of think of her like a daughter.”

  “She seems to get on pretty good with you,” I said.

  “She fucking wraps me around her finger,” he said, and grinned. “She’s mentioned you. I didn’t make the connection when you told me who you were. But it’s Mr. Archer this, Mr. Archer that.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “She says you’ve encouraged her,” Vince said. “About her writing.”

  “She’s pretty good.”

  Vince pointed to the jammed bookshelves. “I read a lot. I’m not what you’d call a very educated kind of guy, but I like to read books. I especially like history, biography. Some adventure books. I’m kind of amazed by people who can do that, who can sit down and write a whole book. So when Jane said you thought she could be a writer, I thought that was kind of interesting.”

  “She has her own voice,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You know how, when you read some writers, you’d know it was them even if their name wasn’t on the cover?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s voice. I think Jane has that.”

  Vince nodded. “Listen,” he said. “About what happened…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, working up some spit in my mouth so I could swallow.

  “People start asking questions about you, trying to find you, that can be a bit worrying for someone like me,” he said.

  “What does that mean, someone like you?” I asked, running my fingers through my hair, trying to get it looking normal again.

  “Well, let me put it this way,” Vince said. “I’m not a creative writing teacher. I don’t imagine, in your line of work, that you might have to do some of the things that I have to do in mine.”

  “Like sending out guys in SUVs to grab people off the street,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Vince said. “That kind of thing.” He paused. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’d be good.”

  He walked over to the counter, poured me a cup from the coffeemaker, and came back to the table.

  “I’m still concerned that you and that detective and that cop have been asking around for me,” Vince said.

  “May I be frank without having my hair pulled out or a knife stabbed into the table between my fingers?”

  Slowly, Vince nodded, not taking his eyes off me.

  “You were with Cynthia that night. Her father found the two of you and dragged her home. Less than twelve hours later, Cynthia wakes up and she’s the only one left in her family. You are, presumably, one of the last people to see a member of her family, other than Cynthia herself, alive. And I’m not sure whether you had a fight with her father, Clayton Bigge, but at the very least it must have been an awkward situation, her father finding you, taking her home with him.” I paused. “But I’m sure the police went over all this with you at the time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I didn’t tell them anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. I didn’t tell them anything. That was one thing I learned from my old man, God rest his soul. You never answer questions from the cops. Even if you’re one hundred percent innocent. Nobody’s situation ever improved after talking to the cops.”

  “But you might have been able to help them figure out what happened.”

  “Wasn’t my concern.”

  “But didn’t that make the police suspect you had something to do with it? Refusing to talk?”

  “Maybe. But they can’t convict you on suspicion. They need evidence. And they didn’t have any of that. If they’d had any evidence, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here having a nice chat with you right now.”

  I took a sip of my coffee. “Whoa,” I said. “This is excellent.” It was.

  “Thank you,” Vince said. “Now, may I be frank with you without you pulling my hair out?” He grinned.

  “I don’t think you have much to worry about there,” I said.

  “I felt bad about it. About not being able to help Cynthia. Because she was…I don’t wish to offend you here at all, being her husband.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “She was a very, very nice girl. A bit fucked up like all kids that age, but nothing compared to me. I’d already been in shit with the cops. I guess she went through a period of being attracted to the bad boy. Before she met you.” He said it like I was a bit of a comedown for her. “No offense intended.”

  “None taken.”

  “She was a sweet kid, and I felt terrible about what happened to her. Jesus, imagine, you wake up one day, your fucking family’s gone. And I wished I could do something for her, you know? But my dad said to me, he said walk away from a chick like that. You don’t need those kinds of problems. Cops are going to be looking at you enough already, with your background, with an old man like me involved in the shit I’m involved in, that’s all we need, you messed up with a girl whose entire family probably got murdered.”

  “I guess I can understand that.” I chose my words carefully. “Your father, he did okay, am I right?”

  “Money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah. He did all right for himself. While he could. Before he got killed.”

  “I heard a bit about that,” I said.

  “What else did you hear?”

  “I heard that the people who most likely did it got paid back.”

  Vince smiled darkly. “That they did.” He came back to the present and asked, “So what’s your point, about money?”

  “Do you think your father, do you think he would have had any sympathy for Cynthia, the situation she found herself in? To the point that he would have helped pay for her education, to go to college?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m just asking. Do you think he might have thought you were responsible somehow, that maybe you had something to do with her family going missing, and that he gave money to Cynthia’s aunt, Tess Berman, anonymously, to help cover the costs of her schooling?”

  Vince looked at me as though I had lost my mind. “You say you’re a teacher? They let people teach in the public schools with minds this fucked up?”

  “You could just say no.”

  “No.”

  “Because,” I said, and I was debating with myself whether I should be sharing this information, but sometimes you just go with your gut, “someone did that.”

  “No shit?” Vince asked. “Someone was giving her aunt money for school?”
<
br />   “That’s right.”

  “And no one ever knew who?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’s weird,” he said. “And this aunt, you say she’s dead?”

  “That’s right.”

  Vince Fleming leaned back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling a moment, came back forward and put his elbows on the table. He let out a long sigh.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something,” he said, “but not if you’re going to tell the cops, because if you do, I’ll tell them I never said any of this, because they might find a way to use it against me, the fuckers.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe I could have told them this and it wouldn’t have come back to bite me in the ass, but I couldn’t afford to take the chance. I couldn’t admit to being where I was at the time, even if it might have helped Cynthia out. I guessed it might cross the cops’ minds at some point that she had something to do with killing her own family, even though I knew she could never do that. I didn’t want to get dragged into it.”

  My mouth felt dry. “Anything you can tell me now, I’d be grateful.”

  “That night,” he said, closing his eyes a moment, as though picturing it, “after her old man found us in the car, took her home, I drove after them. Didn’t follow them exactly, but I guess I was wondering just how much shit she was in, thought maybe I could see whether her father was screaming at her, that kind of thing. But I was way back, really couldn’t see all that much.”

  I waited.

  “I saw them pull into the driveway, go into the house together. She was a bit wobbly on her feet, you know? She’d had a bit to drink, we both had, but I’d already built up a pretty good tolerance by that point.” He grinned. “I was a young starter.”

  I felt Vince was moving toward something important and didn’t want to slow him down with my own stupid comments.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I parked down the street, thinking maybe she’d leave again after her parents reamed her out, you know, she’d get all pissed off and storm out, and then I could drive up and pick her up. But that didn’t happen. And after a while, this other car drove past me, going slow, like someone was trying to read the house numbers, you know?”

  “Okay.”