No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [58]
“You saw the letter,” I said. “Tess showed it to you.”
“Yes. She gave it to me, in fact, in addition to the envelopes. I take it you still haven’t told your wife about that.”
“Not yet. I think Tess is ready to, though. Cynthia’s decision to hire you, I think Tess sees that as a sign that she’s ready to know everything.”
Abagnall nodded thoughtfully. “It’s best to get everything out into the open now, since we’re trying to get some answers.”
“We’re planning to see Tess tomorrow night. Actually, it might be worth seeing her tonight.” I was, to be honest, thinking about Abagnall’s daily rate.
“That’s a good—” Inside his jacket, Abagnall’s phone rang. “A dinner report, no doubt,” he said, taking out the phone. But he looked puzzled when he saw the number, tossed the phone back into his jacket, and said, “They can leave a message.”
Cynthia was making her way back down the stairs.
“Mrs. Archer, are you feeling all right?” Abagnall asked. She nodded and sat back down. He cleared his throat. “Are you sure? Because I’d like to bring up another matter.”
Cynthia said, “Yes. Please go ahead.”
“Now, there may be a very simple explanation for this. It might just be some sort of clerical error, you never know. The state bureaucracy has been known to make its share of mistakes.”
“Yes?”
“Well, when you were unable to produce a photograph of your father, I went in search of one, and that led me to check with the Department of Motor Vehicles. I thought they would be able to assist me in this regard, but as it turns out, they weren’t much help to me.”
“They didn’t have his picture? Was that before they put pictures on driver’s licenses?” she asked.
“That’s really something of a moot point,” Abagnall said. “The thing is, they have no record of your father ever having a license at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no record of him, Mrs. Archer. As far as the DMV is concerned, he never existed.”
19
“But that could just be what you said,” Cynthia said. “People go missing from computer files all the time.”
Denton Abagnall nodded agreeably. “That’s very true. The fact that Clayton Bigge didn’t show up in the DMV files is not, in itself, particularly conclusive of anything. But then I checked past records for his Social Security number.”
“Yes?” Cynthia said.
“And nothing came up there, either. It’s hard to find any record of your father anywhere, Mrs. Archer. We have no picture of him. I looked through your shoeboxes and I couldn’t find so much as a pay stub from a place of employment. Do you happen to know the name of the actual company he worked for, that sent him out on the road all the time?”
Cynthia thought. “No,” she said.
“There’s no record of him with the IRS. Far as I can tell, he never paid any taxes. Not under the name of Clayton Bigge, at any rate.”
“What are you saying?” she asked. “Are you saying he was a spy or something? Some kind of secret agent?”
Abagnall grinned. “Well, not necessarily. Nothing quite so exotic.”
“Because he was away a lot,” she said. She looked at me. “What do you think? Could he have been a government agent, being sent away on missions?”
“It seems kind of out there,” I said hesitantly. “I mean, next we’ll start wondering whether he was an alien from another planet. Maybe he was sent here to study us and then went back to his home world, took your mother and brother with him.”
Cynthia just looked at me. She was still looking a bit woozy after her near fainting spell.
“It was supposed to be a joke,” I said apologetically.
Abagnall brought us—me in particular—back to reality. “That’s not one of my working theories.”
“Then what are your theories?” I asked.
He took a sip of coffee. “I could probably come up with half a dozen, based on what little I know at the moment,” he said. “Was your father living under a name that was not his