No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [90]
She loved Grace.
But what was my daughter to think? Her mother getting her up in the middle of the night, making her pack a bag, sneaking out of the house together so her father wouldn’t hear?
Cynthia had to have believed, in her heart, that this was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t. It was wrong, and it was wrong to put Grace through something like this.
And that was why I had no problem ignoring Cynthia’s orders not to look for them.
Grace was my daughter. She was missing. And I was bloody well going to look for her. And try to work out things with my wife.
I dug around in the bookcase and got out a map of New England and New York State, opened it up on the kitchen table. There were times when MapQuest didn’t cut it, not when you wanted to see the big picture.
I let my eyes wander, from Portland south to Providence, Boston west to Buffalo, asking myself where Cynthia might go. I looked at the Connecticut-Massachusetts line, the town of Otis, the vicinity of the quarry. I couldn’t see her going there. Not with Grace in tow. What would be the point? What was to be learned from a return trip?
There was the village of Sharon, where Connie Gormley, the woman who was killed in some sort of staged hit-and-run accident, had been from, but that didn’t make any sense, either. Cynthia had never really grabbed on to that story in the newspaper clipping as meaning anything, not the way I had. I couldn’t see her heading up that way.
Maybe the answer wasn’t to be found in looking at a map. Maybe I needed to be thinking about names. People from her past. People Cynthia might turn to, in these very desperate times, for answers.
I went into the living room, where I found the two shoeboxes of mementos from Cynthia’s childhood on an end table. Given what the last few weeks had been like, the boxes had never found their way back to their usual hiding place, in the bottom of our closet.
I started riffling through the contents randomly, tossing old receipts and clippings onto the coffee table, but they held no meaning for me. They seemed to coalesce into one huge puzzle with no discernible pattern.
I went back into the kitchen, phoned Rolly at home. It was too early for him to have left for school yet. Millicent answered.
“Hi, Terry,” she said. “What’s going on? Are you not going in today?”
“Rolly already has me off,” I said. “Millie, you haven’t heard from Cynthia by any chance?”
“Cynthia? No. Terry, what’s going on? Isn’t Cynthia home?”
“She’s gone. She took Grace with her.”
“Let me get Rolly.”
I heard her set the phone down and a few seconds later Rolly said, “Cynthia’s gone?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what to do.”
“Shit. And I was going to call her today, see how she’s doing, if she wanted to talk. She didn’t tell you where she was going?”
“Rolly, if I knew where she was going, I wouldn’t be calling you so fucking early in the morning.”
“Okay, okay. Jesus, I don’t know what to say. Why did she go? Did you guys have a fight or something?”
“Yeah, kind of. I fucked up. And I think everything’s just gotten to her. She wasn’t feeling safe here, she wanted to protect Grace. But this was the wrong way to go about it. Look, if you hear from her, if you see her, let me know, okay?”
“I will,” Rolly said. “And if you find her, call.”
Next, I called Dr. Kinzler’s office. It hadn’t opened yet, so I left a message, said Cynthia was missing, asked her to please call me, left my home and cell numbers.
The only other person I could think to call was Rona Wedmore. I considered it, then decided not to. She wasn’t, as far as I could tell, solidly in our corner.
I think I understood Cynthia’s motivations for disappearing, but I was less sure Wedmore would.
And then a name popped into my head. Someone I’d never met, never spoken to, never even seen across a room. But his name kept coming up.
Maybe it was time to have a chat with Vince Fleming.
32
If I could have brought myself to call Detective Wedmore, I could have asked her outright where I might