No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [22]
“All he said was he had a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“He said they forgive me.”
“What?”
“My family. He said they forgive me for what I did.”
7
I sat down next to Cynthia at the kitchen table. I put one hand over hers and could feel her shaking. “Okay,” I said, “just try to remember what he said exactly.”
“I told you,” she said, clipping her words. She bit into her upper lip, then, “He said—okay, wait a minute.” She pulled herself together. “The phone rang and I said hello, and he said, ‘Is this Cynthia Bigge?’ Which threw me, calling me by that name, but I said it was. And he said, I couldn’t believe he said this, he said, ‘Your family, they forgive you.’” She paused. “‘For what you did.’
“I didn’t know what to say. I think I just asked him who he was, what he was talking about.”
“Then what did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything else. He just hung up.” A solitary tear ran down Cynthia’s cheek as she looked into my face. “Why would he say something like that? What does he mean, they forgive me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s probably some nut. Some nut who saw the show.”
“But why would a person call and say something like that? What would the point be?”
I pulled the phone over closer to me. It was the only high-tech one we had in the house, with a small caller-ID display screen.
“Why would he say my family forgives me? What does my family think I did? I don’t understand. And if they think I did something to them, then how can they even tell me they forgive me? It doesn’t make any sense, Terry.”
“I know. It’s crazy.” My eyes were on the phone. “Did you see where the call was coming from?”
“I looked and it didn’t say, and then when he hung up I tried to check the number.”
I pressed the button that displayed the call history. There was no record of a call in the last few minutes.
“It’s not showing anything,” I said.
Cynthia sniffed, wiped the tear from her cheek, and leaned over the phone. “I must have…what did I do? When I went to check where the call came from, I pressed this button to save it.”
“That’s how you delete it,” I said.
“What?”
“You deleted the last call from the history,” I said.
“Oh shit,” Cynthia said. “I was so flustered, I was upset, I just didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Sure,” I said. “So, this man, what did he sound like?”
Cynthia wasn’t listening to my question. She had a vacant look on her face. “I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe I deleted the number. But nothing showed up on the screen anyway. You know when it says it’s an unknown number?”
“Okay, let’s not worry about that anymore. But the man, what did he sound like?”
Cynthia half raised her hands in a gesture of futility. “It was just a man. He was talking kind of low, like maybe he was trying to disguise it, you know. But there wasn’t really anything.” She paused, then her eyes flashed with an idea. “Maybe we should call the phone company. They might have a record of the call, maybe they’d even have a recording of it.”
“They don’t keep recordings of everybody’s phone calls,” I said, “no matter what some people may think. And what are we going to tell them? It was one isolated call, from a nut who probably saw the show. He didn’t threaten you, he didn’t even use obscene language.”
I slipped an arm around Cynthia’s shoulder. “Just…don’t worry about it. Too many people know about what happened to you. It can make you a target. You know what we should look into?”
“What?”
“An unlisted number. We could get an unlisted number, then we wouldn’t get calls like this.”
Cynthia shook her head. “No, we’re not doing that.”
“I don’t think it costs that much more, and besides—”
“No, we’re not doing it.”
“Why not?”
She swallowed. “Because when they are ready to call, when my family finally decides to get in touch, they have to be able to reach me.”
I had a free period after lunch, so I slipped out of the school, drove across town to Pamela’s, and went inside the store with four takeout cups of coffee.
It’s not what you’d call a high-end clothing store, and Pamela Forster, who at one