No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [30]
I cocked my head to one side. “Cash?”
“Just under five thousand dollars of it,” Tess said. “All sorts of bills. Twenties, fives, some hundreds.”
“An envelope full of cash? No explanation, no note, nothing?”
“Oh, there was a note.”
She got up from her chair and took a few steps over to an antique rolltop desk off to one side of the front door, opened the single drawer. “I found all this when I started cleaning up in the basement, going through those boxes of books and everything else. I need to start paring things down now, make it easier for you and Cynthia to sort through my stuff when I’m gone.”
Held together with a rubber band was a small stack of envelopes, maybe a dozen or more. Together, they weren’t half an inch thick.
“They’re all empty,” Tess said. “But I always kept the envelopes just the same, even though there’s nothing written on them, no return address, no postmark, of course. But I thought, what if they’ve got fingerprints on them or something that might be useful to someone someday?”
Tess’s hands were all over them, so it was doubtful how much evidence they contained. But then again, forensic science wasn’t exactly my area of expertise. You didn’t see me teaching chemistry.
Tess worked a piece of paper out from under the rubber band. “This was the only note I ever got. With the first envelope. All the others that followed, they had cash in them, too, but never another word.”
She handed me a standard-sized piece of typewriter paper, folded in thirds. It had yellowed slightly with age.
I unfolded it.
The message was printed, very deliberately, in block letters. It read:
THIS IS TO HELP YOU WITH CYNTHIA. FOR HER EDUCATION, FOR WHATEVER ELSE YOU NEED. THERE WILL BE MORE, BUT YOU MUST FOLLOW THESE RULES. NEVER TELL CYNTHIA ABOUT THIS MONEY. NEVER TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT. NEVER TRY TO FIND OUT WHERE IT’S COMING FROM. NEVER.
That was it.
I must have read it three times before I looked at Tess, standing in front of me.
“I never did,” she said. “I never told Cynthia. I never told anyone. I never made any attempt to find out who had left it in my car. I never knew when, or where, it would show up. One time, I found it tucked into the New Haven Register on the front step one evening. Another time, I came out of the Post Mall, there was another one in the car.”
“You never saw anyone.”
“No. I think whoever left it was watching me, making sure I was far enough away for it to be safe. You want to know something? I always made sure, whenever I parked the car, to leave the window open a crack, just in case.”
“How much, altogether?”
“Over about six years, forty-two thousand dollars.”
“Jesus.”
Tess reached out her hand. She wanted the note back. She folded it up, slipped it under the rubber band with the envelopes, got up, and put everything back into the desk drawer.
“So nothing for how many years?” I asked.
Tess thought a moment. “About fifteen, I guess. Nothing since Cynthia finished school. It was a blessing, I’ll tell you that. I’d have never got her through school without it, not without selling this house or taking out a new mortgage or something.”
“So,” I said, “who left it?”
“It’s the forty-two-thousand-dollar question,” Tess said. “It’s all I’ve ever wondered, all these years. Her mother? Her father? Both of them?”
“Which would mean they were alive all those years, or at least one of them was. Maybe still alive even now. But if one or the other of them was able to do that, to watch you, to leave you money, why wouldn’t they be able to get in touch?”
“I know,” Tess said. “It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Because I’ve always believed my sister is dead, that they’re all dead. That they all died the night they disappeared.”
“And if they are dead,” I said, “then whoever sent you that money, it’s someone who feels responsible for