No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [103]
“Dad says hi,” Cynthia said.
“When are you coming back?” I asked.
“I said I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “I just need some time. I told you in my letter.” She didn’t want to go over it again, not in front of Grace.
“I’m worried about you, and I miss you,” I said.
“Tell her hi,” Vince shouted from the living room.
“Who’s that?” Cynthia asked.
“Vince Fleming,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t run off the road,” I said.
“What’s he doing there?”
“I went to see him. I had this crazy idea maybe you’d have gone to visit him.”
“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “Tell him…I said hi.”
“She says hi,” I told Vince. He just grunted from the other room, rooting about in the shoeboxes.
“But he’s at the house? Now?”
“Yeah. He was giving me a lift back to my car. It’s kind of a long story. I’ll tell you about it when you get back. Plus,” I hesitated, “he told me a couple of other things, about that night, that he hadn’t told anyone about before.”
“Like what?”
“Like he followed you and your dad back home that night, sat out front for a while, waiting for a chance to knock on your door and see how you were doing, and he saw Todd and your mom leave, then later, your dad left. In a hurry. And there was another car out front for a while, that left after your mom and Todd did.”
There was nothing but road noise coming through the phone.
“Cynthia?”
“I’m here. I don’t know what it means.”
“Me neither.”
“Terry, there’s traffic, I have to get off the road. I’m turning off the phone. I forgot to bring a charger and there’s not much battery left.”
“Come home soon, Cyn. I love you.”
“Bye,” she said, and ended the call. I replaced the receiver and went into the living room.
Vince Fleming handed me a newspaper clipping, the one of Todd standing with fellow members of a basketball team.
“That looks like Todd in that one,” Vince said. “I remember him.”
I nodded, not taking the clipping from his hand. I’d seen it a hundred times before. “Yeah. Did you have classes together or something?”
“Maybe one. Picture’s goofy, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t recognize anyone else in it. It’s nobody from our school back then.”
I took it from him, although there wasn’t much point. I didn’t go to school with Todd or Cynthia and wouldn’t know any of their classmates. Cynthia had never paid that much attention to this picture, as far as I could tell. I gave it a passing glance.
“And the name is wrong,” Vince said, pointing to the cutline under the picture listing the names of the players from left to right, bottom row, center row, top row.
I shrugged. “Okay. So newspapers get names wrong.” I looked at the cutline, which gave everyone’s last name and first initial. Todd was standing two from the left, center row. I scanned the cutline, read the name where his should have been.
The name was J. Sloan.
I stared for a moment at the initial and the word that followed it.
“Vince,” I said, “Does the name J. Sloan mean anything to you?”
He shook his head. “No.”
I double-checked that the name was, in fact, referring to the individual in the center row, two from the left.
“Holy fuck,” I said.
Vince looked at me. “You wanna fill me in?”
“J. Sloan,” I said. “Jeremy Sloan.”
Vince shook his head. “I still don’t get it.”
“The man in the food court,” I said. “At the Post Mall. That was the name of this man Cynthia accused of being her brother.”
36
“What are you talking about?” Vince asked.
“A couple of weeks ago,” I said, “Cynthia and Grace and I are at the mall, and Cynthia sees this guy, she’s convinced he’s Todd. Says he looks like what Todd would probably look like all grown up, twenty-five years later.”
“How did you get his name?”
“Cynthia followed him, out to the parking lot. She called out to him, called him Todd, he didn’t respond, so she goes right up to him, says she’s his sister, that she knows he’s her brother.”
“Jesus,” Vince said.
“It was a horrible scene. The guy denied up and down that he was her brother, he acted like she was a crazy person, and she was acting like a crazy person. So I took the guy aside, said I was sorry,