No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [53]
“I told you,” she said. “It’s kind of a crappy stand.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, and looked back into the scope, but the view had shifted and what I was looking at now was a hugely magnified circle of the sidewalk out front of our house.
And a man, watching it.
His face, blurry and indistinct, filled the lens. I abandoned the telescope, got out of the chair and went to the window. “Who the hell is that?” I said, more to myself than Grace.
“Who?” she said.
She got to the window in time to see the man run away. “Who’s that, Daddy?” she asked.
“You stay right here,” I said, and bolted out of her room, went down the steps two at a time, and nearly flew out the front door. I ran down to the end of the drive, looked up the street in the direction I’d seen the man run. A hundred feet ahead, red brake lights on a car parked at the curb came on as someone turned the ignition, moved it from park to drive, and floored it.
I was too far away, and it was too dark out to catch a license plate, or tell what kind of car it was before it turned the corner and rumbled away. From the sound of it, it was an older model, and dark. Blue, brown, gray, it was impossible to tell.
I was tempted to jump in my car, but the keys were in the house, and by the time I had them the man would be to Bridgeport.
When I got back to the front door, Grace was standing there. “I told you to stay in your room,” I said angrily.
“I just wanted to see—”
“Get to bed right now.”
She could tell from my tone that I wasn’t interested in an argument, and she tore up the stairs lickety-split.
My heart was pounding, and I needed a moment for it to settle down before I went upstairs. When I finally did, I found Cynthia, under the covers, fast asleep.
I looked at her and wondered what sorts of conversations she was listening in on or having with the missing or the dead.
Ask them a question for me, I wanted to say. Ask them who’s watching our house. Ask them what he wants with us.
18
Cynthia phoned Pam and arranged to show up for work a bit late the next day. We had a locksmith coming at nine. If we hadn’t already booked one, last night’s incident surely would have tipped me in that direction. If the locksmith ended up taking longer installing deadbolts than expected, Cynthia was covered.
I told her, over breakfast and before Grace came down to go to school, about the man on the sidewalk. I contemplated not doing so, but only briefly. First of all, Grace would in all likelihood bring it up, and second, if there was someone watching the house, whoever he was and for whatever reason, we all needed to be on high alert. For all we knew, this had absolutely nothing to do with Cynthia’s particular situation, but was some sort of neighborhood pervert the entire street needed to be alerted to.
“Did you get a good look at him?” Cynthia asked.
“No. I went to chase him down the street, but he got in a car and drove away.”
“Did you get a look at the car?”
“No.”
“Could it have been a brown car?”
“Cyn, I don’t know. It was dark, the car was dark.”
“So it could have been brown.”
“Yes, it could have been brown. And it could have been dark blue, or black. I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet it was the same person. The one who was driving past me and Grace on the way to school.”
“I’m going to talk to the neighbors,” I said.
I managed to catch the people on both sides as they were leaving for work, asked them if they’d noticed anyone hanging around last night, or any other night for that matter, whether they’d seen anything they’d consider suspicious. No one had seen a thing.
But I put in a call to the police anyway, just in case someone else on the street had reported anything out of the ordinary in the last few days, and they transferred me to someone who kept track of these things, and he said, “Nothing much, although, hang on, there was a report the other day, something quite bizarre, really.”
“What?” I asked. “What was it?”
“Someone called about a strange hat in their house.” The man laughed. “At first, I thought