No Time for Goodbye (15 page)

I couldn’t be certain about this, but I thought I saw something on the floor of the kitchen, obscuring the black and white checker-boarded tiles.

A person.

“Cynthia,” I said, “take Grace back to the car.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t let her come into the house.”

“Jesus, Terry,” she whispered. “What is it?”

I grasped the knob, turned it slowly, and pushed, testing to see whether the door was locked. It was not.

I stepped in, Cynthia looking over my shoulder, and felt along the wall for the light switch, flipped it up.

Aunt Tess lay on the kitchen floor, facedown, her head twisted at an odd angle, one arm stretched out ahead of her, the other hanging back.

“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “She’s had a stroke or something!”

I didn’t exactly have a medical degree, but there seemed to be an awful lot of blood on the floor for a stroke.

20

Maybe, if Grace hadn’t been
there, Cynthia would have lost it completely. But when she heard our daughter running up behind us, preparing to leap right over the step and into the kitchen, Cynthia turned, blocked her, and started moving her around to the front yard.

“What’s wrong?” Grace shouted. “Aunt Tess?”

I knelt next to Cynthia’s aunt, tentatively touched her back. It felt very cold. “Tess,” I whispered. There was so much blood pooled under her that I didn’t want to turn her over, and there were these voices in my head telling me not to touch anything. So I shifted around, knelt even closer to the floor, to see her face. The sight of her open, unblinking eyes staring straight ahead left me chilled.

The blood, as best I could tell with my untrained eye, was dry and congealed, as though Tess had been this way for a very long time. And there was a terrible stench in the room that I’d only just now begun to notice, so shocked was I by this discovery.

I stood up and reached for the wall-mounted phone next to the bulletin board, then stopped myself. That voice again, telling me not to touch anything. I dug out my cell and made the call.

“Yes, I’ll wait here,” I told the 911 operator. “I’m not going anywhere.”

But I did leave the house by the back door and walk around to the front, where I found Cynthia sitting, with Grace in her lap, in the front seat of our car with the door open. Grace had her arms around her mother’s neck and appeared to have been crying. Cynthia seemed, at the moment, too shocked to weep.

Cynthia looked at me, her eyes sending a question, and I answered by shaking my head back and forth a couple of times, very slowly.

“What is it?” she asked me. “Do you think it was a heart attack?”

“A heart attack?” said Grace. “Is she okay? Is Aunt Tess okay?”

“No,” I said to Cynthia. “It wasn’t a heart attack.”

The police agreed.

There must have been ten cars there within the hour, including half a dozen cop cars, an ambulance that sat around for a while, and a couple of TV news vans that were held back at the main road.

A couple of detectives spoke to me and Cynthia separately while another officer stayed with Grace, who was overwhelmed with questions. All we’d told her was that Tess was sick, that something had happened to her. Something very bad.

That was an understatement.

She’d been stabbed. Someone had taken one of her own kitchen knives and driven it into her. At one point, while I was in the kitchen and Cynthia out in one of the patrol cars, answering another officer’s questions, I overheard a woman from the coroner’s office telling a detective that she couldn’t be certain at this point, but there was a good chance the knife got her right in the heart.

Jesus.

They had a lot of questions for me. Why had we come up? For a visit, I said. And to have a bit of a celebration. Tess had just received some good news from the doctor, I said.

She was going to be okay, I said.

The detective made a little snorting noise, but he was good enough not to laugh.

Did I have any idea who might have done this, he asked. No, I said. And that was the truth.

“It may have been some kind of break-in,” he said. “Kids looking for money to buy drugs, something like that.”

“Does it look to you like that’s what happened?” I asked.

The detective paused. “Not really.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking. “Doesn’t look like much was taken, if anything. They could have grabbed her keys, taken her car, but they didn’t.”

“They?”

The detective smiled. “It’s easier than saying ‘he or she.’ It might have been one person, might have been more. We just don’t know at this point.”

“This might,” I said hesitantly, “be related to something that happened to my wife.”

“Hmm?”

“Twenty-five years ago.”

I told him as condensed a version as possible of Cynthia’s story. About how there had been some strange developments of late, particularly since the TV item.

“Oh yeah,” said the detective. “I think I might have seen that. That’s the show with what’s her name? Paula something?”

“Yeah.” And I told him that we had engaged a private detective in the last few days to look into it.

“Denton Abagnall,” I said.

“Oh, I know him. Good guy. I know where to reach him.”

He let me go, with the proviso that I not yet go back to Milford, that I hang around a while longer in case he had any last-minute questions, and I went back out to find Cynthia. No one was asking her anything when I found her where she’d been before, in the front of the car with Grace in her lap. Grace looked so vulnerable and afraid.

When she saw me, she asked, “Is Aunt Tess dead, Dad?”

I glanced at Cynthia, waiting for a signal. Tell her the truth, don’t tell her the truth. Something. But there was nothing, so I said, “Yes, honey. She is.”

Grace’s lip started trembling. Cynthia said, so evenly that I could tell she was actually holding back, “You could have told me.”

“What?”

“You could have told me what you knew. What Tess had told you. You could have told me.”

“Yes,” I said. “I could have. I should have.”

She paused, choosing her words carefully. “And then maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Cyn, I don’t see how, I mean, there’s no way to know—”

“That’s right. There’s no way to know. But I know this. If you’d told me sooner what Tess had told you, about the money, the envelopes, I’d have been up here talking to her about it, we’d have been putting our heads together trying to figure out what it all meant, and if I’d been doing that, maybe I’d have been here, or maybe we’d have figured something out, before someone had a chance to do this.”

“Cyn, I just don’t—”

“What else haven’t you told me, Terry? What other things are you holding back, supposedly to protect me? To spare me? What else did she tell you, what else do you know that I’m not able to handle?”

Grace started to cry and buried her face into Cynthia’s chest. It appeared that we had given up completely now on trying to shield her from all of this.

“Honey, honest to God,” I said, “anything I kept from you, I did it with your best interests in mind.”

She wrapped her arms tighter around Grace. “What else, Terry? What else?”

“Nothing,” I said.

But there was one thing. Something I’d only just noticed and hadn’t mentioned to anyone yet, because I didn’t know whether it was significant.

I’d been brought back into the kitchen by the investigating officers, asked to describe all of my movements, where I’d stood, what I’d done, what I’d touched.

As I was leaving the room I happened to look at the small bulletin board next to the phone. There was the picture of Grace that I had taken on our trip to Disney World.

What was it Tess had said on the phone to me? After Denton Abagnall had been out to visit her?

I’d said something along the lines of, “If you think of anything else, you should give him a call.”

And Tess had said, “That’s what he asked me to do. He gave me his card. I’m looking at it right now, it’s pinned to my board here by the phone, right next to that picture of Grace with Goofy.”

There was no card on the board now.

21

“You don’t say,” she said. This was quite the development.

“Oh, it’s true,” he said.

“Well well well,” she said. “And to think we were just talking about her.”

“I know.”

“That’s quite the coinky-dink,” she said slyly. “You being down there and all.”

“Yeah.”

“She had it coming, you know,” she said.

“I knew you wouldn’t be upset when I told you. But I think it means we have to hold off for a couple of days on the next part.”

“Really?” she said. She knew she’d preached to him on the virtues of taking his time, but she was feeling impatient all of a sudden.

“There’s going to be a funeral here tomorrow,” he said, “and I guess there’s a whole lot of planning for something like that, and she didn’t even have any other family to make arrangements, right?”

“That’s my understanding,” she said.

“So my sister, she’s going to be pretty busy making all those arrangements, right? So maybe we should wait for that to be over.”

“I see your point. But there’s something I’d like you to do for me.”

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s just a little thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t call her your sister.” She was very firm.

“Sorry.”

“You know how I feel.”

“Okay. It’s just, well, you know, she is—”

“I don’t care,” she said.

“Okay, Mom,” he said. “I won’t do it again.”

22

There weren’t many
people to call.

Patricia Bigge, Cynthia’s mother, had been Tess’s only sibling. Their own parents, of course, were long gone. Tess, although she had been married briefly, had never had any children of her own, and there was no point in trying to track down her ex-husband. He wouldn’t have come back for the funeral anyway, and Tess wouldn’t have wanted the son of a bitch there.

And Tess had not kept up any of her friendships with the people at the roads department office where she’d worked before retiring. From what Tess used to say, she didn’t have many friends there anyway. They didn’t care much for her liberal notions. She belonged to a bridge club, but Cynthia had no idea who any of the members were, so there were no calls to make there.

It wasn’t as though we had to alert everyone to the funeral. Tess Berman’s death had made the news.

There were interviews with other people who lived on her heavily wooded street, none of whom, by the way, had noticed anything unusual going on in the neighborhood in the hours leading up to Tess’s death.

“It really makes you wonder,” said one for the TV cameras.

“Things like that don’t happen around here,” said another.

“We’re being extra careful to lock our doors and windows at night,” said someone else.

Maybe, if Tess had been fatally stabbed by an ex-husband or a jilted lover, the neighbors could have felt more at ease. But the word from the police was that they had no idea who had done this, no idea as to motive. And no suspects.

There was no sign of forced entry. No signs of a struggle, aside from a kitchen table that was slightly askew and a single chair that had been knocked over. It appeared that Tess’s killer had struck quickly, Tess had resisted for only a moment or so, just long enough to make her attacker stumble into the table, knock the chair over. But then the knife was driven home, and she was dead.

Her body, police said, had been on the floor there for as long as twenty-four hours.

I thought of all the things we’d done while Tess lay dead in a pool of her own blood. We’d readied ourselves for bed, slept, gotten up, brushed our teeth, listened to the morning news on the radio, gone to work, had dinner, lived an entire day of our lives that Tess had not.

It was too much to think about.

When I forced myself to stop, my mind went to equally troubling topics. Who had done this? Why? Was Tess the victim of some random attacker, or did this have something to do with Cynthia?

Where was Denton Abagnall’s business card? Had Tess not pinned it to the board as she’d told me? Had she decided she’d never be calling him with any more information, taken it down and tossed it into the trash?

The next morning, consumed with these and other questions, I found the card Abagnall had left with us and called his cell phone number.

The provider cut in immediately and invited me to leave a message, suggesting that Abagnall’s phone was off.

So I tried his home number. A woman answered.

“Is Mr. Abagnall there, please?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Is this Mrs. Abagnall?”

“Who is this, please?”

“This is Terry Archer.”

“Mr. Archer!” she said, sounding a bit frantic. “I was just going to call you!”

“Mrs. Abagnall, I really need to speak to your husband. It’s possible the police have already been in touch. I gave them your husband’s name last night and—”

“Have you heard from him?”

“Sorry?”

“Have you heard from Denton? Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“This isn’t like him at all. Sometimes, he has to work overnight, on surveillance, but he always gets in touch at some point.”

I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I said, “He was at our house yesterday afternoon. Late afternoon. He was bringing us up to date.”

“I know,” she said. “I phoned him just after he left your place. He said he’d had another call, that someone had left him a message, that they’d call back.”

I remembered Abagnall’s phone ringing as he sat in our living room, how I had assumed it was his wife calling to tell him what she was cooking for supper, how he’d looked at it, surprised it wasn’t a call from home, how he’d let it go to voicemail.

“Did they call back?”

“I don’t know. That was the last I spoke to him.”

“Have you heard from the police?”

“Yes. I nearly had a heart attack when they came to the door this morning. But it was about a woman, up near Derby, who’d been murdered in her home.”

“My wife’s aunt,” I said. “We went up to visit her, and found her.”

“My God,” Mrs. Abagnall said. “I’m so sorry.”

I thought about what I was going to say next before I said it, given that I’d developed a habit lately of keeping things from people out of fears I’d worry them needlessly. But that was a policy that didn’t appear to be paying off. So I said, “Mrs. Abagnall, I don’t want to alarm you, and I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason your husband hasn’t gotten in touch with you, but I think you need to call the police.”

“Oh,” she said quietly.

“I think you should tell them your husband is missing. Even though it hasn’t been for very long.”

“I see,” Mrs. Abagnall said. “I’m going to do that.”

“And you can call me if anything happens. Let me give you my home number, if you don’t already have it, and my cell, too.”

She didn’t have to ask to get a pencil. My guess was, being married to a detective, there was a notepad and pen next to the phone at all times.

Cynthia came into the kitchen. She was on her way back down to the funeral home. Tess, bless her heart, had planned ahead to make things as simple as possible for her loved ones. She’d finished paying for her funeral, in small monthly installments, years ago. Her ashes were to be scattered over Long Island Sound.

“Cyn,” I said.

She didn’t respond. She’d frozen me out. Regardless of whether I thought it was rational, she was holding me, at least in part, responsible for Tess’s death. Even I was wondering whether things might have gone differently if I had told Cynthia everything I’d known at the time I’d known it. Would Tess have been in her home when her killer came to call if Cynthia had known how Tess was able to put her through school? Or would the two of them been someplace else entirely, working as a team, maybe helping Abagnall with his investigation?

I couldn’t know. And the not knowing was something I was going to have to live with.

We were both home from work, of course. She’d taken off indefinitely from the dress shop, and I called the school to tell them that I’d be off for the next few days and that they’d better get a substitute teacher who had a clear calendar. Whoever it was, good luck with my crew, I thought.

“I’m not going to keep anything from you from now on,” I told Cynthia. “And something else has happened that you should know about.”

She stopped before leaving the kitchen, but didn’t turn around to look at me.

“I just spoke with Denton Abagnall’s wife,” I said. “He’s missing.”

She seemed to list a bit to one side, as if some of the air had been let out of her. “What did she say?” Cynthia managed to ask.

I told her.

She stood there for another moment, put one hand up to the wall to steady herself, and then said, “I have to go to the funeral home, make some last-minute decisions.”

“Of course,” I said. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“No,” she said, and left.

For a while, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, besides worry. I tidied up the kitchen, picked up around the house, attempted, without success, to attach Grace’s telescope more securely to its tripod-like stand.

I walked out of the kitchen and my eyes landed on the two shoeboxes on the coffee table that Abagnall had returned to us the day before. I picked them up, took them back into the kitchen, and set them on the table.

I started taking things out one at a time. Much the way Abagnall must have, I suspected.

When Cynthia had cleared things out of her house as a teenager, she’d basically dumped the contents of drawers into these boxes, including those from the bedside tables of her parents. Like most small drawers, they became a repository for things important and not, spare change, keys you no longer knew the use for, receipts, coupons, newspaper clippings, buttons, old pens.

Clayton Bigge wasn’t much of a sentimentalist, but he saved the odd thing, like newspaper clippings. There was that one clipping of the basketball team Todd was part of, for example. But if it had anything to do with fishing, it was even more likely Clayton would hang on to it. Cynthia had told me that he read through the newspapers’ sports sections for fishing tournament news, through the travel sections for stories about out-of-the-way lakes where there were so many fish, they practically jumped into the boat.

In the box, there were probably half a dozen such clippings that Cynthia must have dug out of Clayton’s bedside table years ago before the household furniture, and the house itself, were disposed of and sold off, and I wondered when she would realize that there wasn’t much value in saving them any longer. I unfolded each yellowed clipping, careful not to tear it, to make sure what it was.

There was something about one of them that caught my eye.

It had been saved from the pages of the
Hartford Courant.
A piece about fly-fishing on the Housatonic River. Whoever had cut the clipping from the paper—Clayton, presumably—had been meticulous about it, taking the scissors carefully down the gutters between the first column of this story and the last of one that had been discarded. The story had been placed above some unseen ads, or other stories, that had been stacked like steps in the bottom left corner.

That’s why it seemed odd to me that a news story, unrelated to fly-fishing but tucked into the bottom right leg of the story, remained.

It was only a couple of inches long, this story. It said:

Police still have no leads in the hit-and-run death of Connie Gormley, 27, of Sharon, whose body was found dumped into the ditch alongside U.S. 7 Saturday morning. Investigators believe Gormley, a single woman who worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Torrington, was walking alongside the highway near the Cornwall Bridge when she was struck by a southbound car late Friday night. Police say it appears that Gormley’s body was moved into the ditch after it had been struck by the car.

Police theorize that the driver of the car may have moved the body off the road and into the ditch, presumably so that she would not be noticed until sometime later.

Why, I wondered, had everything else around that article been so neatly trimmed away, but this story left intact?

The date on the top of the newspaper page was October 15, 1982.

I was pondering that when I heard a knock at the door. I set the clipping to one side, got up from my chair, and went to answer it.

Keisha Ceylon. The psychic. That woman the TV show had set us up with, who had inexplicably lost her ability to pick up supernatural vibrations once she realized the producers weren’t cutting her a fat check.

“Mr. Archer?” she said. She was still dressed against type, in a professional-looking business suit, no kerchief, no huge hoop earrings.

I nodded, wary.

“I’m Keisha Ceylon? We met at the TV station?”

“I remember,” I said.

“First of all, I’d like to apologize for what transpired there. They had promised to pay me for my trouble, and that did lead to a disagreement, but it should never have happened in front of your wife, in front of Mrs. Archer.”

I said nothing.

“Anyway,” she said, filling the gap, evidently not expecting to have to carry both sides of the conversation, “the fact remains that I did have some things that I wanted to share with you and your wife that might be helpful with regard to her missing family.”

I still wasn’t saying anything.

“May I come in?” she asked.

I wanted to close the door in her face, but then I thought about what Cynthia had said before we’d gone to see her the first time, how you have to be willing to look like a fool if there’s a chance, even a one-in-a-million chance, that somebody might have something useful to tell you.

Of course, we’d already been burned by Keisha Ceylon, but the fact that she was willing to face us a second time made me wonder whether I should hear her out.

So, after hesitating a moment, I opened the door wide to admit her. I steered her toward the living room couch where Abagnall had sat hours earlier. I plunked down across from her and crossed my legs.

“I can certainly understand that you might be skeptical,” she said. “But there are a great many mysterious forces around us all the time, and only a few of us are able to harness them.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“When I come into possession of information that would be important to a person going through troublesome times, I feel an obligation to share that knowledge. It’s the only responsible thing to do when you are blessed with such a gift.”

“Of course.”

“The financial reward is secondary.”