No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [56]
“Nothing like that,” I said.
“Listen,” Lauren said, “can you do me a favor? Just for a second? Can you say hi to my friend?”
“What?”
She held up the cell. “Her name’s Rachel. Just say hi to her. Say, ‘Hi, Rachel.’ She’ll die when I tell her you’re the one whose wife was on that show.”
I opened the door to my car and before I got in said, “Get a life, Lauren.”
She stared at me openmouthed, then shouted, loud enough for me to hear through the glass, “You think you’re hot shit but you’re not!”
When I got to Pamela’s, Cynthia was not there.
“She called in, said the locksmith was coming,” Pamela said. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly one. I figured that if the locksmith showed up on time, he’d have been gone by ten, eleven at the latest.
I reached into my pocket for my cell, but Pam offered me the phone on the counter.
“Hi, Pam,” Cynthia said when she answered. Caller ID. “I’m so sorry. I’m on my way.”
“It’s me,” I said.
“Oh!”
“I dropped by, figured you’d be here.”
“The guy was late, left only a little while ago. I was just heading over.”
Pam said to me, “Tell her not to worry, it’s quiet. Take the day.”
“You hear that?” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe it’s just as well. I can’t keep my mind on anything. Mr. Abagnall phoned. He wants to see us. He’s coming by at four-thirty. Can you be home by then?”
“Of course. What did he say? Has he found out anything?”
Pamela’s eyebrows went up.
“He wouldn’t say. He said he’d discuss everything with us when he gets here.”
“You okay?”
“I feel kind of weird.”
“Yeah, me too. He might be telling us that he hasn’t found a thing.”
“I know.”
“We seeing Tess tomorrow?”
“I left a message. Don’t be late, okay?”
When I hung up, Pam said, “What’s going on?”
“Cynthia hired—we hired someone to look into her family’s disappearance.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, it’s none of my business, but you ask me, it happened so long ago, you’re just throwing your money away. No one’s ever going to know what happened that night.”
“See you later, Pam,” I said. “Thanks for the use of the phone.”
“Would you like some coffee?” Cynthia asked as Denton Abagnall came into our house.
“Oh, I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”
He got settled on the couch and Cynthia brought out coffee and cups and sugar and cream on a tray, as well as some chocolate chip cookies, and then she poured coffee into three cups and held the plate of cookies for Abagnall and he took one, and inside our heads both Cynthia and I were screaming: For God’s sake, tell us what you know—we can’t stand it another minute! Cynthia glanced down at the tray and said to me, “I only got two spoons, Terry. Could you grab another one?”
I went back into the kitchen, opened the cutlery drawer for a spoon, and something caught my eye down in that space between the edge of the Rubbermaid cutlery holder and the wall of the drawer, where all sorts of odds and ends collect, from pencils and pens to those little plastic clips from the ends of bread bags.
A key.
I dug it out. It was the spare house key that normally hung on the hook.
I went back into the living room with the spoon, and sat down as Abagnall got out his notebook. He opened it up, leafed through a few pages, said, “Let me just see what I’ve got here.”
Cynthia and I smiled patiently.
“Okay, here we are,” he said. He looked at Cynthia. “Mrs. Archer, what can you tell me about Vince Fleming?”
“Vince Fleming?”
“That’s right. He was the boy you were with that night. You and he, you were parked in a car—” He stopped himself. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at Cynthia and then at me and then back at Cynthia again. “Are you comfortable with me talking about this in front of your husband?”
“It’s fine,” she said.
“You were parked in his car, out at the mall, I believe. That was where your father found you and brought you home.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had a chance to go over the police files on this case, and the producer at that TV show, she showed me a tape of the program—I’m