No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [101]
“But this other car, this Ambassador or whatever, it followed Cynthia’s mother and brother.”
Vince looked at me. “Am I going too fast?”
“No, no, it’s just, in twenty-five years, I know Cynthia has never heard about this.”
“Well, that’s what I saw.”
“Is there anything else?”
“I guess I sat there for another forty-five minutes or so, and was just thinking of fucking off and going home, and suddenly the front door of the house opens, and the father, Clayton, he goes running out of the house like he’s got a huge bug up his ass. Gets in the car, backs out at like a hundred miles an hour, drives off fast as can be.”
I let that sink in.
“So anyway, I can do the math, right? Everyone’s gone except Cynthia. So I drive up, I knock on the door, figured I could talk to her. I banged on it half a dozen times, real hard, didn’t get any answer, figured she was probably sleeping it off, right? So I fucked off and went back home.” He shrugged.
“Someone was there,” I said. “Watching the house.”
“Yup. Not just me.”
“And you’ve never told anyone this? You didn’t tell the cops. You never told Cynthia?”
“No, I didn’t tell her. And like I said, I didn’t tell the cops. You think it would have made sense to tell them I was sitting outside that house for any time that night?”
I gazed out the window and into the Sound, at Charles Island in the distance, as if the answers I’d been searching for, the answers Cynthia had been searching for, were always beyond the horizon, impossible to reach.
“And why are you telling me this now?” I asked Vince.
He ran his hand over his chin, squeezed his nose. “Fuck, I don’t know. I’m guessing, all these years have been hard on Cyn, am I right?”
I felt that like a slap, to know that Vince might have called Cynthia by the same term of endearment I used. “Yes,” I said. “Very hard. Especially lately.”
“And why’s she disappeared?”
“We had a fight. And she’s scared. All the things that have happened in the last few weeks, the fact that the police don’t seem to entirely trust her. She’s scared for our daughter. The other night, there was someone standing on the street, looking at our house. Her aunt is dead. The detective we hired has been murdered.”
“Hmm,” Vince said. “That’s a hell of a mess. I wish there was something I could do to help.”
We were both startled at that moment when the door opened. Neither of us had heard anyone coming up the stairs.
It was Jane.
“Jesus Christ, Vince, are you going to help the poor bastard or not?”
“Where the hell were you?” he said. “You been listening in this whole time?”
“It’s a goddamn screen door,” Jane said. “You don’t want people to listen, maybe you better build yourself a little bank vault up here.”
“Goddamn,” he said.
“So are you going to help him? It’s not like you’re really busy or anything. And you got the Three Stooges to help you if you need them.”
Vince looked tiredly at me. “So,” he said. “Is there any way I could be of assistance to you?”
Jane was watching him with her arms folded across her chest.
I didn’t know what to say. Not knowing what I was up against, I couldn’t predict whether I needed the kinds of services someone like Vince Fleming offered. Even though he’d stopped trying to yank my hair out by the roots, I was still intimidated by him.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why don’t I tag along for a while, see what develops,” he said. When I didn’t immediately take him up on it, he said, “You don’t know whether to trust me, do you?”
I figured he’d be able to spot a lie. “No,” I said.
“That’s smart,” he said.
“So you’ll help him?” Jane said. Vince nodded. To me, she said, “You better get back to school fast.” Then she left, and this time we could hear her going down the stairs.
Vince said, “She scares the living shit out of me.”
35
I couldn’t think of anything cleverer to do at the moment than drive home, check and see whether Cynthia or anyone else might have phoned. If she was trying to get me, she’d probably try my cell if she couldn’t reach me at home, but I was feeling a bit desperate.
Vince Fleming