No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [11]
“I’ll deal with that when it comes,” she said. She paused. “I saw that car again.”
The car. There was always a car.
Cynthia could see in my face that I didn’t believe there was anything to this. “You think I’m crazy,” she said.
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“I’ve seen it two times. A brown car.”
“What kind of car?”
“I don’t know. An average car. With tinted windows. When it drives past me and Grace, it slows down a bit.”
“Has it stopped? Has the driver said anything to you?”
“No.”
“Did you get a license plate?”
“No. The first time, I didn’t think anything of it. The second time, I was too flustered.”
“Cyn, it’s probably just somebody who lives in the neighborhood. People have to slow down. It’s a school zone up there. Remember that one day, the cops set up a speed trap? Getting people to stop speeding through there, that time of day.”
Cynthia looked away from me, folded her arms in front of her. “You’re not out there every day like I am. You don’t know.”
“What I do know,” I said, “is that you aren’t doing Grace any favors if you don’t let her start fending for herself.”
“Oh, so you think, if some man tries to drag her into that car, that she’s going to be able to defend herself. An eight-year-old girl.”
“How did we get from some brown car driving by to a man trying to drag her away?”
“You’ve never taken these things as seriously as I do.” She waited a beat. “And I suppose that’s understandable, for you.”
I puffed out my cheeks, blew out some air. “Okay, look, we’re not going to solve this now,” I said. “I have to get going.”
“Sure,” Cynthia said, still not looking at me. “I think I’m going to call them.”
I hesitated. “Call who?”
“The show. Deadline.”
“Cyn, it’s been, what, three weeks since the show ran? If anyone was going to call in with anything, they’d have done it by now. And besides, if the station gets any interesting calls, they’re going to get in touch. They’ll want to do a follow-up.”
“I’m going to give them a call anyway. I haven’t called for a while, so maybe they won’t get so pissed off this time. They might have heard something, figured it wasn’t important, that it was some crank, but it might be something. We were lucky, you know, that some researcher even remembered what had happened to me, decided it was worth a look back.”
I turned her gently, lifted her chin so that our eyes could meet. “Okay, whatever you want to do, do,” I said. “I love you, you know.”
“I love you, too,” she said. “I—I know I’m not easy to live with about this stuff. I know it’s hard on Grace. I know my anxieties, that they kind of rub off on her. But lately, with that show, it’s made it all very real for me again.”
“I know,” I said. “I just want you to be able to live for the present, too. Not always fixate on the past.”
I felt her shoulders move. “Fixate?” she said. “Is that what you think I do?”
It was the wrong word. You’d think an English teacher could come up with something better.
“Don’t patronize me,” Cynthia said. “You think you know, but you don’t. You can’t ever know.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that, because it was true. I leaned in and kissed her hair and went to work.
3
She wanted to be comforting in what she had to say, but it was just as important to be firm.
“I can understand you might find the idea a bit unsettling, really, I do. I can see where you might be feeling a bit squeamish about the whole thing, but I’ve been here before, and I’m telling you, I’ve given this a lot of thought, and this is the only way. That’s the way it is with family. You have to do what you have to do, even if it’s difficult, even if it’s painful. Of course what we have to do to them is going to be difficult, but you have to look at the bigger picture. But it’s a bit like when they said—you’re probably not old enough to remember this—that you have to destroy a village to save it. It’s something like that. Think of our family as a village. We have to do whatever