No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [72]
I didn’t know what to say.
“Connie and me was close. I didn’t approve of the way she lived her life, but then, I was never no angel myself and was never in any position to point a finger. After all these years, I’m still angry, and wish they’d find the bastard who did it, but the thing is, it was so long ago, there’s a pretty good chance that son of a bitch may be dead himself by now.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s very possible.”
When I was done talking to Howard Gormley, I just sat there at my desk for a while, staring off into space, trying to figure out whether it meant anything.
Then, reflexively as I often do, I hit the Mail button on the computer keyboard to see whether we had any messages. As usual, there were a bunch, most of them offering deals on Viagra or stock tips or places to get a Rolex cheap or solicitations from widows of wealthy Nigerian gold mine owners looking for assistance transferring their millions to a North American account. Our anti-spam filter caught only a fraction of these annoyances.
But there was one e-mail, from a Hotmail address that was nothing but numbers—05121983—with the words “It won’t be much longer” in the subject line.
I clicked on it.
The message was short. It read: “Dear Cynthia: As per our earlier conversation, your family really does forgive you. But they can’t ever stop asking themselves: Why?”
I must have read it five times, then went back up to the subject line. It wouldn’t be much longer till what?
24
“How could someone get our e-mail address?” I asked Cynthia. She was sitting in front of the computer, staring at the screen. At one point, she reached toward the monitor, as if touching the message might somehow reveal more about it.
“My father,” she said.
“What about your father?”
“When he got in here, when he left the hat,” Cynthia said. “He could have come up here and looked around, got on the computer, figured out our e-mail address.”
“Cyn,” I said cautiously, “we still don’t know that your father left that hat. We don’t know who left that hat.”
I thought back to Rolly’s theory, and my own briefly held suspicion, that Cynthia could have placed the hat there herself. And for an instant, no longer, I thought about how easy it would be to set up a Hotmail address and send an e-mail to yourself.
Knock it off, I told myself.
I could sense Cynthia bristling at my comment of a moment ago, so I added, “But you’re right. Whoever got in here, they could have come upstairs and nosed around, turned on the computer, gotten our e-mail address.”
“So it’s the same person,” Cynthia said. “The person who phoned me, the one you said was just a crank, is the same person who sent this e-mail, and the same person who snuck into our house and left the hat. My father’s hat.”
That made sense to me. The part I was having trouble with was, who was that person? Was it the same person who’d murdered Tess? Was it the man I’d spotted through Grace’s telescope the other night, watching our house?
“And he’s still talking about forgiveness,” Cynthia said. “That they forgive me. Why does he say that? And what does it mean, that it won’t be much longer?”
I shook my head. “And the address,” I said, pointing to the e-mail box on the screen. “Just a jumble of numbers.”
“That’s not a jumble of numbers,” Cynthia said. “It’s a date. May 12, 1983. The night my family disappeared.”
“We’re not safe,” Cynthia said that night.
She was sitting up in bed, the covers pulled up to her waist. I happened to be looking out the bedroom window, taking one last peek at the street before I got under the covers with her. This was a habit I’d developed in the last week.
“We’re not,” she repeated. “And I know you feel the same way, but you don’t want to talk about it. You’re worried you’re going to upset me, send me over the edge or something.”
“I’m not afraid you’re going to go over the edge,