No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [3]
First-period History was a write-off. Second-period Math was even worse. She couldn’t focus, her head still hurt. “How did you do on those questions, Cynthia?” the math teacher asked. She didn’t even look at him.
Just before lunch, she saw Pam, who said, “Jesus, if you’re going to tell your mom you’re at my house, you wanna fucking let me know? Then maybe I could tell my mom something.”
“Sorry,” Cynthia said. “Did she have a fit?”
“When I came in,” Pam said.
At lunch, Cynthia slipped out of the cafeteria, went to the school pay phone, dialed home. She’d tell her mother she was sorry. Really, really sorry. And then she’d ask to come home, say she felt sick. Her mother would look after her. She couldn’t stay mad at her if she was sick. She’d make soup.
Cynthia gave up after fifteen rings, then thought maybe she’d dialed wrong. Tried again, no answer. She had no work number for her dad. He was on the road so much of the time, you had to wait for him to check in from wherever he was staying.
She was hanging out in front of the school with some friends when Vince Fleming drove by in his Mustang. “Sorry about all that shit last night,” he said. “Jeez, your dad’s a prize.”
“Yeah, well,” Cynthia said.
“So what happened after you went home?” Vince asked. There was something in the way he asked, like he already knew. Cynthia shrugged and shook her head, didn’t want to talk about it.
Vince asked, “Where’s your brother today?”
Cynthia said, “What?”
“He home sick?” Vince Fleming asked.
Nobody’d seen Todd at school. Vince said he was going to ask him, quiet like, how much trouble Cynthia was in, whether she was grounded, because he was hoping she wanted to get together Friday night or Saturday, his friend Kyle was getting him some beer, they could go up to that spot, the one on the hill, maybe sit in the car awhile, look at stars, right?
Cynthia ran home. Didn’t ask Vince for a ride, even though he was right there. Didn’t check in at the school office to tell them she was skipping off early. Ran the whole way, thinking, as she pumped her legs, Please let her car be there, Please let her car be there.
But when she rounded the corner from Pumpkin Delight Road to Hickory, and her two-story house came into view, the yellow Escort, her mother’s car, was not there. But she shouted out her mother’s name anyway when she got inside with what little breath she had left. Then her brother’s.
She started to tremble, then willed herself to stop.
It made no sense. No matter how angry her parents might be at her, they wouldn’t do this, would they? Just leave? Take off without telling her? And take Todd with them?
Cynthia felt stupid doing it, but rang the bell at the Jamison house next door. There was probably a simple explanation for all this, something she forgot, a dental appointment, something, and any second her mother would turn in to the driveway. Cynthia would feel like a total idiot, but that was okay.
She started blathering when Mrs. Jamison opened the door. That when she woke up no one was home and then she went to school and Todd never showed up and her mom still wasn’t—
Mrs. Jamison said whoa, everything’s okay, your mother’s probably out doing some shopping. Mrs. Jamison walked Cynthia back home, glanced down at the newspaper that still had not been taken in. Together they looked upstairs and down and in the garage again and out in the backyard.
“That sure is odd,” Mrs. Jamison said. She didn’t quite know what to think, so, somewhat reluctantly, she called the Milford police.
They sent around an officer, who didn’t seem all that concerned, at first. But soon there were more officers and more cars, and by evening, there were cops all over the place. Cynthia heard them putting out descriptions of her parents’ two cars, calling Milford Hospital. Police were going up and down the street, knocking on doors, asking questions.