No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [42]
I saw a washer and dryer, a workbench piled with junk, an assortment of nearly empty paint cans, a folded-up spare bed. Nothing much else.
I came back upstairs. “The house is empty,” I said.
Cynthia was still staring at the hat. “He was here,” she said.
“Who was here?”
“My father. He was here.”
“Cynthia, someone was here and left that on the table, but your father?”
“It’s his hat,” she said, more calmly than I might have expected. I approached the table, reached out to grab it. “Don’t touch it!” she said.
“It’s not going to bite me,” I said, and grabbed one of the peaks between my thumb and forefinger, then grabbed it with both hands, turning it over, looking inside.
It was an old hat, no question. The edges of the brim were worn, the lining darkened from years of sweat, the nap worn to the point of shiny in places.
“It’s just a hat,” I said.
“Look inside,” she said. “My father, years ago, he lost a couple of hats, people took his by mistake at restaurants, one time he took somebody else’s, so he got a marker and he put a ‘C,’ the letter, he wrote it on the inside of the band. For ‘Clayton.’”
I ran my finger along the inside of the band, folding it back. I found it on the right side, near the back. I turned the hat around so that Cynthia could see.
She took a breath. “Oh my God.” She took three tentative steps toward me, reached her hand out. I extended the hat toward her, and she took it, holding it as though it was something from King Tut’s tomb. She held it reverently in her hands for a moment, then slowly moved it toward her face. For a moment, I thought she was going to put it on, but instead, she brought it to her nose, took in its fragrance.
“It’s him,” she said.
I wasn’t going to argue. I knew that the sense of smell was perhaps the strongest when it came to triggering memories. I could recall going back to my own childhood home once in adulthood—the one my parents moved from when I was four—and asking the current owners if they’d mind my looking around. They were most obliging, and while the layout of the house, the creak of the fourth step as I climbed to the second floor, the view of the backyard from the kitchen window, were all familiar, it was when I stuck my nose into a crawl space, and caught a whiff of cedar mixed with dampness, that I felt almost dizzy. A flood of memories broke through the dam at that moment.
So I had an idea of what Cynthia was sensing as she held the hat so close to her face. She could smell her father.
She just knew.
“He was here,” she said. “He was right here, in this kitchen, in our house. Why, Terry? Why would he come here? Why would he do this? Why would he leave his goddamn hat but not wait for me to come home?”
“Cynthia,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, “even if it is your father’s hat—and if you say it is, I believe you—the fact that it’s here doesn’t mean that it was your father that left it.”
“He never went anywhere without it. He wore it everywhere. He was wearing that hat the last night I saw him. It wasn’t left behind in the house. You know what this means, don’t you?”
I waited.
“It means he’s alive.”
“It might, yes, it might mean that. But not necessarily.”
Cynthia put the hat back on the table, started to reach for the phone, then stopped, then reached for it again, and again stopped herself.
“The police,” she said. “They can take fingerprints.”
“Off that hat?” I said. “I doubt it. But you already know it’s your father’s. Even if they could get his prints off it, so what?”
“No,” Cynthia said. “Off the knob.” She pointed to the front door. “Or the table. Something. If they find his fingerprints in here, it’ll prove he’s alive.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but I agreed that calling the police was a good idea. Someone—if not Clayton Bigge, then somebody—had been in our house while we were out. Was it breaking and entering if nothing appeared broken? At least it was entering.
I called 911. “Someone…was in our house,” I told the dispatcher. “My wife and I are very upset, we have a little girl, we’re very