“I never told her,” I said.
When I went inside, Cynthia spotted a tear running down my cheek. I thought I’d wiped my cheeks dry, but evidently I’d missed one. She reached up and brushed it away with her index finger.
“Terry,” she said, “what? What’s happened?”
I threw my arms around her. “I’m so happy,” I said. “I’m just so happy.”
She must have thought I was losing my mind. No one was ever this happy around here.
Cynthia was more at ease than I had seen her for some time the next couple of days. With Denton Abagnall on the case, a sense of calm washed over her. I was afraid she’d be calling his cell every couple of hours, like with the Deadline producers, wanting to know what progress, if any, he was making. But she did not. Sitting at the kitchen table, just before we headed up for bed, she asked me whether I thought he’d learn anything, so his progress was very much on her mind, but she was willing to let him do his job without being hounded.
After Grace was home from school the following day, Cynthia suggested they go over to the public tennis courts behind the library, and she said sure. I’m no better at tennis now than I was in college, so I rarely, if ever, pick up a racket, but I still enjoy watching the girls play, particularly to marvel at Cynthia’s mean backhand. So I tagged along, bringing some papers to mark, glancing up every few seconds to watch my wife and daughter run and laugh and make fun of each other. Of course, Cynthia didn’t use her backhand to pummel Grace, but was always offering her friendly tips on how to perfect her own. Grace wasn’t bad, but after half an hour on the court, I could see her tiring, and I was guessing she’d rather be home reading Carl Sagan, like all the other eight-year-old girls.
When they were done, I suggested grabbing some dinner on the way home.
“Are you sure?” Cynthia asked. “What with…our other expense of the moment?”
“I don’t care,” I said.
Cynthia gave me a devilish smile. “What is it with you? Ever since yesterday, you’re the most cheerful little boy in town.”
How could I tell her? How could I let her know how thrilled I was by Tess’s good news when she’d never been privy to the bad? She’d be happy that Tess was okay, but hurt that she’d been kept out of the loop.
“I just feel…optimistic,” I said.
“That Mr. Abagnall is going to find out something?”
“Not necessarily. I just feel as though we’ve turned a corner, that you—that we—have gone through some stressful times of late, and that we’re coming out of them.”
“Then I think I’ll have a glass of wine with dinner,” she said.
I returned her playful smile. “I think you should.”
“I’m going to have a milkshake,” Grace said. “With a cherry.”
When we got home from dinner, Grace vanished to watch something on the Discovery Channel about what Saturn’s rings are really made of, and Cynthia and I plunked ourselves down at the kitchen table. I was writing down numbers on a scratch pad, adding them up, doing them another way. This was where we always sat when faced with weighty financial decisions. Could we afford that second car? Would a trip to Disney World break the bank?
“I’m thinking,” I said, looking at the numbers, “that we could probably afford Mr. Abagnall for two weeks instead of just one. I don’t think it would put us in the poorhouse, you know?”
Cynthia put her hand over the one I was writing with. “I love you, you know.”
In the other room, someone on the TV said “Uranus” and Grace giggled.
“Did I ever tell you the time,” Cynthia asked, “when I ruined my mother’s James Taylor cassette?”
“No.”
“I must have been eleven or twelve, and Mom had lots of music—she loved James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Young and lots of others, but most of all she liked James Taylor. She said he could make her happy, and he could make her sad. One day, Mom made me mad about something, there was something I wanted to wear to school that was in the dirty clothes pile and I mouthed off because she hadn’t done her job.”
“That must have gone over well.”
“No kidding. She said if she wasn’t cleaning my clothes to my satisfaction, I knew where the washing machine was. So I popped open the cassette player she had in the kitchen, grabbed whatever tape was in there, and threw it on the floor. It busted open and the tape spilled out and the thing was ruined.”
I listened.
“I froze, I couldn’t even believe I’d done it, and I thought she’d kill me. But instead, she stopped what she was doing, went over, picked up the tape, calm as could be, had a look at which one it was, and said, ‘James Taylor. This is the one with “Your Smiling Face” on it. That’s my favorite. You know why I like that one?’ she asks me. ‘Because it starts off how every time I see your face, I have to smile myself, because I love you.’ Anyway, something like that. And she said, ‘That’s my favorite because every time I hear it, it makes me think of you, and how much I love you. And right about now, you need me to hear that song more than ever.’”
Cynthia’s eyes were wet.
“So after school, I took the bus over to the Post Mall and I found the cassette. JT, it was called. I bought it and brought it home, and I gave it to her. And she got all the cellophane wrapping off it and put the cassette into her player and asked me if I wanted to hear her favorite song.”
A single tear ran down her cheek and dropped onto the kitchen table. “I love that song,” Cynthia said. “And I miss her so much.”
Later, she phoned Tess. No special reason, just to talk. Afterward, she came up to the extra bedroom with the sewing machine and the computer, where I was typing a couple of notes to students on my old Royal, and her red eyes suggested that she had been crying again.
Tess, she told me, had thought she was very ill, terminal even, but it had turned out to be okay. “She said she didn’t want to tell me, that she thought I had enough on my plate that she didn’t want to burden me with it. That’s what she said. ‘Burden.’ Can you imagine?”
“That’s so crazy,” I said.
“And then she finds out she’s actually okay, and felt she could tell me everything, but I just wish she’d told me when she knew, you know? Because she’s always been there for me, and no matter what I’m going through, she’s always…” She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. Finally, she said, “I can’t imagine losing her.”
“I know. Neither can I.”
“When you were so happy, that didn’t have anything…”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
I probably could have told her the truth. I could have afforded to be honest at that moment, but chose not to.
“Oh shit,” she said. “She asked me to tell you to call her. She probably wants to tell you this herself. Don’t tell her I already told you, okay? Please? I just couldn’t keep it to myself, you know?”
“Sure,” I said.
I went downstairs and dialed Tess.
“I told her,” Tess said.
“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”
“He was here.”
“Hmm?”
“The detective. That Mr. Abagnall. He’s a very nice man.”
“Yes.”
“His wife called while he was here. To tell him what she was making him for dinner.”
“What was it?” I had to know.
“Uh, some sort of roast, I think. A roast of beef and Yorkshire pudding.”
“Sounds delicious.”
“Anyway, I told him everything. About the money, the letter. I gave all of it to him. He was very interested.”
I nodded. “I would think so.”
“Do you think they can still get fingerprints off those envelopes after all these years?”
“I don’t know, Tess. It’s been so long, and you’ve handled them quite a few times. I’m no expert. But I think that was the best thing to do, giving him everything. If you think of anything e
lse, you should give him a call.”
“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. I don’t know which one looks goofier.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Give Cynthia a hug for me,” she said.
“I will. I love you, Tess,” I said, and hung up.
“She told you?” Cynthia asked me when I got up to our bedroom.
“She told me.”
Cynthia, now in her nightshirt, lay on the bed, on top of the covers. “I’d been thinking, all evening, that I would like to make mad, passionate love to you tonight, but I’m so dead tired, I’m not sure I could perform to any reasonable standard.”
“I’m not particular,” I said.
“So how about a rain check?”
“Sure. Maybe what we should do is, get Tess to take Grace for a weekend, we could drive up to Mystic. Get a bed-and-breakfast.”
Cynthia agreed. “Maybe I’d sleep better up there, too,” she said. “My dreams have been…kind of unsettling lately.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like I told Dr. Kinzler. I hear them talking. They’re talking to me, I think, or I’m talking to them, or we’re all talking with one another, but it’s like I’m with them but not with them, and I can almost reach out and touch them. But when I do, it’s like they’re smoke. They just blow away.”
I leaned over, kissed her forehead. “Have you said goodnight to Grace?”
“While you were talking to Tess.”
“You try to get some sleep. I’ll say goodnight to her.”
As usual, Grace’s room was in total darkness so as to give her a better view of the stars through her telescope. “Are we safe tonight?” I asked as I slipped in, closing the door to the hall behind me to keep the light out.
“Looks like it,” Grace said.
“That’s good.”
“You wanna see?”
Grace was able to stand and see through her telescope, but I didn’t want to have to bend over, so I grabbed the Ikea computer chair from her desk and sat in front of it. I squinted into the end, saw nothing but blackness with a few pinpricks of light. “Okay, what am I looking at?”
“Stars,” Grace said.
I turned and looked at her, grinning impishly in the dim light. “Thank you, Carl Sagan,” I said. I got my eye back in position, went to adjust the scope a bit, and it slipped partway off its stand.
“Whoa!” I said. Some of the tape Grace had used to secure the telescope had worked free.
“I told you,” she said. “It’s kind of a crappy stand.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, and looked back into the scope, but the view had shifted and what I was looking at now was a hugely magnified circle of the sidewalk out front of our house.
And a man, watching it.
His face, blurry and indistinct, filled the lens. I abandoned the telescope, got out of the chair and went to the window. “Who the hell is that?” I said, more to myself than Grace.
“Who?” she said.
She got to the window in time to see the man run away. “Who’s that, Daddy?” she asked.
“You stay right here,” I said, and bolted out of her room, went down the steps two at a time, and nearly flew out the front door. I ran down to the end of the drive, looked up the street in the direction I’d seen the man run. A hundred feet ahead, red brake lights on a car parked at the curb came on as someone turned the ignition, moved it from park to drive, and floored it.
I was too far away, and it was too dark out to catch a license plate, or tell what kind of car it was before it turned the corner and rumbled away. From the sound of it, it was an older model, and dark. Blue, brown, gray, it was impossible to tell.
I was tempted to jump in my car, but the keys were in the house, and by the time I had them the man would be to Bridgeport.
When I got back to the front door, Grace was standing there. “I told you to stay in your room,” I said angrily.
“I just wanted to see—”
“Get to bed right now.”
She could tell from my tone that I wasn’t interested in an argument, and she tore up the stairs lickety-split.
My heart was pounding, and I needed a moment for it to settle down before I went upstairs. When I finally did, I found Cynthia, under the covers, fast asleep.
I looked at her and wondered what sorts of conversations she was listening in on or having with the missing or the dead.
Ask them a question for me, I wanted to say. Ask them who’s watching our house. Ask them what he wants with us.
18
Cynthia phoned Pam and arranged to show up for work a bit late the next day. We had a locksmith coming at nine. If we hadn’t already booked one, last night’s incident surely would have tipped me in that direction. If the locksmith ended up taking longer installing deadbolts than expected, Cynthia was covered.
I told her, over breakfast and before Grace came down to go to school, about the man on the sidewalk. I contemplated not doing so, but only briefly. First of all, Grace would in all likelihood bring it up, and second, if there was someone watching the house, whoever he was and for whatever reason, we all needed to be on high alert. For all we knew, this had absolutely nothing to do with Cynthia’s particular situation, but was some sort of neighborhood pervert the entire street needed to be alerted to.
“Did you get a good look at him?” Cynthia asked.
“No. I went to chase him down the street, but he got in a car and drove away.”
“Did you get a look at the car?”
“No.”
“Could it have been a brown car?”
“Cyn, I don’t know. It was dark, the car was dark.”
“So it could have been brown.”
“Yes, it could have been brown. And it could have been dark blue, or black. I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet it was the same person. The one who was driving past me and Grace on the way to school.”
“I’m going to talk to the neighbors,” I said.
I managed to catch the people on both sides as they were leaving for work, asked them if they’d noticed anyone hanging around last night, or any other night for that matter, whether they’d seen anything they’d consider suspicious. No one had seen a thing.
But I put in a call to the police anyway, just in case someone else on the street had reported anything out of the ordinary in the last few days, and they transferred me to someone who kept track of these things, and he said, “Nothing much, although, hang on, there was a report the other day, something quite bizarre, really.”
“What?” I asked. “What was it?”
“Someone called about a strange hat in their house.” The man laughed. “At first, I thought maybe this was a typo, that someone got a bat in their house, but nope, it’s ‘hat.’”
“Never mind,” I said.
Before I left for school, Cynthia said, “I’d like to go out and see Tess. I mean, I know we were there last weekend, and we don’t usually see her every week, but considering what she’s been through lately, I was thinking that—”
“Say no more,” I said. “I think that’s a great idea. Why don’t we go over tomorrow night? Maybe take her out for ice cream or something?”
“I’m going to call her,” Cynthia said.
At school, I found Rolly rinsing out a mug in the school staff room so he could pour himself some incredibly horrible coffee. “How’re things?” I asked, coming up behind him.
He jumped. “Jesus,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I work here.” I got myself a mug, filled it, added a few extra sugars to mask the taste.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
Rolly shrugged. He seemed distracted. “Same old. You?”
I let out a sigh. “Someone was standing in the dark staring at our house last night, and when I tried t
o find out who it was, he ran away.” I took a sip of the coffee I had poured. It tasted bad, but at least it was cold. “Who’s responsible for this? Is the coffee thing contracted out to a sewage disposal company?”
“Someone was watching your house?” Rolly said. “What do you think he was doing there?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, but they’re putting deadbolts on the doors this morning and just in time, it seems.”
“That’s pretty creepy,” Rolly said. “Maybe some guy, he’s trolling your street, looking for people who’ve left their garage doors open or something. Just wants to steal some stuff.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Either way, new locks aren’t a bad idea.”
“True,” Rolly said, nodded. He paused, then said, “I’m thinking of taking early retirement.”
So we were done talking about me. “I thought you had to stay at least until the end of the school year.”
“Yeah, well, what if I dropped dead? They’d have to find someone fast then, wouldn’t they? It only means a few bucks less per month on my pension. I’m ready to move on, Terry. Running a school, working in a school, it’s not like it used to be, you know? I mean, you always had tough kids, but it’s worse now. They’re armed. Their parents don’t give a shit. I gave the system forty years and now I want out. Millicent and I, we sell the house, sock some money into the bank, head to Bradenton, maybe my blood pressure will start to go down a little bit.”
“You do look a bit tense today. Maybe you should go home.”
“I’m all right.” He paused. Rolly didn’t smoke, but he looked like a smoker who desperately needed to light up. “Millicent’s already retired. There’s nothing to stop me. None of us are getting any younger, right? You never know how much longer you’ve got. You’re here one minute, gone the next.”
“Oh,” I said. “That reminds me.”
“What?”
“About Tess.”
Rolly blinked. “What about Tess?”
“It turns out, she’s going to be okay.”
“What?”
“They did another test, turns out the initial diagnosis was wrong. She’s not dying. She’s going to be okay.”