No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [0]
Title Page
Dedication
May 1983
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgments
Also by Linwood Barclay
Copyright
This is for my wife, Neetha
May 1983
When Cynthia woke up, it was so quiet in the house she thought it must be Saturday.
If only.
If there’d ever been a day that she needed to be a Saturday, to be anything but a school day, this was it. Her stomach was still doing the occasional somersault, her head was full of cement, and it took some effort to keep it from falling forward or onto her shoulders.
Jesus, what the hell was that in the wastepaper basket next to the bed? She couldn’t even remember throwing up in the night, but if you were looking for evidence, there it was.
She had to deal with this first, before her parents came in. Cynthia got to her feet, wobbled a moment, grabbed the small plastic container with one hand and opened her bedroom door a crack with the other. There was no one in the hall, so she slipped past the open doors of her brother’s and parents’ bedrooms and into the bathroom, closing the door and locking it behind her.
She emptied the bucket into the toilet, rinsed it in the tub, took a bleary-eyed look at herself in the mirror. So, this is how a fourteen-year-old girl looks when she gets hammered. Not a pretty sight. She could barely remember what Vince had given her to try the night before, stuff he’d snuck out of his house. A couple of cans of Bud, some vodka, gin, an already opened bottle of red wine. She’d promised to bring some of her dad’s rum, but had chickened out in the end.
Something was niggling at her. Something about the bedrooms.
She splashed cold water on her face, dried off with a towel. Cynthia took a deep breath, tried to pull herself together, in case her mother was waiting for her on the other side of the door.
She wasn’t.
Cynthia headed back to her room, feeling the broadloom under her toes. Along the way, she glanced into her brother Todd’s room, then her parents’. The beds were made. Her mother didn’t usually get around to making them until later in the morning—Todd never made his own, and their mother let him get away with it—but here they were, looking as though they’d never been slept in.
Cynthia felt a wave of panic. Was she already late for school? Just how late was it?
She could see Todd’s clock on his bedside table from where she stood. Just ten before eight. Nearly half an hour before she usually left for her first class.
The house was still.
She could usually hear her parents down in the kitchen about this time. Even if they weren’t speaking to each other, which was often the case, there’d be the faint sounds of the fridge opening and closing, a spatula scraping against a frying pan, the muffled rattling of dishes in the sink. Someone, her father usually, leafing through the pages of the morning newspaper, grunting about something in the news that irritated him.
Weird.
She went into her room, the walls plastered with posters of KISS and other soul-destroying performers that gave her parents fits, and closed the door. Pull it together, she told herself. Show up for breakfast like nothing ever happened. Pretend there wasn’t a screaming match the night before. Act like her father hadn’t dragged her out of her much older boyfriend’s car and taken her home.
She glanced at her ninth-grade math text sitting atop her open notebook on her desk. She’d only managed half the questions before she’d gone out the night before, deluded herself into thinking that if she got