No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [41]
“Why don’t you tell her what you have to say and we’ll go from there?” Paula suggested.
I walked forward to the set, caught Cynthia’s eye. “Hon,” I said, tipping my head, the international “let’s go” gesture.
She nodded resignedly, unclipped the microphone from her blouse, and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Paula asked.
“We’re outta here,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Keisha asked, outraged. “Where are you going? Lady, if this show isn’t going to pay to hear what I know, maybe you should.”
Cynthia said, “I’m not going to be made a fool of anymore.”
“A thousand dollars,” Keisha said. “I’ll tell you what your momma told me to tell you for a thousand dollars.”
Cynthia was rounding the couch. I reached out my hand for hers.
“Okay, seven hundred!” Keisha said as we went to find our way to the green room.
“You really are a piece of work,” Paula told Keisha. “You could have been on TV. All the free advertising in the world, but you’ve got to shake us down for a few hundred bucks.”
Keisha gave Paula the evil eye, looked at her hair. “That’s one bad dye job, bitch.”
“You were right,” Cynthia said on the drive home.
I shook my head. “You were good, walking away like that. You should have seen the look on that so-called psychic’s face when you took off your mike. It’s like she was watching her meal ticket walk away.”
Cynthia’s smile was caught in the glare of some oncoming headlights. Grace, after a flurry of questions we declined to answer, had fallen asleep in the backseat.
“What a waste of an evening,” Cynthia said.
“No,” I said. “What you said was right, and I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about this. Even if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance, you have to check it out. So we checked it out. And now we can cross it off and move on.”
We pulled into the drive. I opened the back door, unbuckled Grace, and carried her into the house, following Cynthia into the living room. She walked ahead of me, turned on the lights in the kitchen as I headed for the stairs to carry Grace up to bed.
“Terry,” Cynthia said.
Ordinarily, I might have said “Be there in a sec” and taken Grace upstairs first, but there was something in my wife’s voice that said I should come into the kitchen immediately.
So I did.
Sitting in the center of the kitchen table was a man’s black hat. An old, worn, shiny-with-wear fedora.
12
She tried to move in a bit closer, got as near to him as she could, and whispered, “For heaven’s sake, are you even listening to me? I come all this way and you won’t even open your eyes. You think it’s easy getting here? The things you’ve put me through. I make the effort, seems the least you could do is stay awake a few minutes. You’ve got the whole day to sleep, I’m only here for a little while.
“Well, let me tell you something. You’re not quitting on us. You’re going to be with us for a while longer, that’s for sure. When it’s time for you to go, believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”
And then he seemed to be trying to say something.
“What’s that?” she said. She was just able to make out a question. “Oh, him,” she said. “He couldn’t come tonight.”
13
Gently, I set Grace down on the couch in the living room, tucked a throw pillow under her head, and went back into the kitchen.
The fedora might as well have been a dead rat, the way Cynthia was staring at it. She was standing as far away from the table as possible, her back to the wall, and her eyes were full of fear.
It wasn’t the hat itself that scared me. It was how it got there. “You watch Grace for a minute,” I said.
“Be careful,” Cynthia said.
I went upstairs, flicked on the lights in each room and poked in my head as I did so. Checked the bathroom, then decided to check the other rooms again, looking in closets, under beds. Everything looked the way it should.
I came back down to the main floor, opened the door to our unfinished basement. At the bottom of the steps I waved my hand around, caught the string, and turned on the bare bulb.
“What do you