Rolly looked stupefied. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m telling you she’s going to be okay.”
“But,” he said slowly, as if unable to take it all in, “those doctors, they told her she was dying. And now, what, they say they were wrong?”
“You know,” I said, “this is not what I’d call bad news.”
Rolly blinked. “No, of course not. It’s wonderful news. Better than getting good news and then getting bad, I suppose.”
“True.”
Rolly glanced at his watch. “Listen, I’ve got to go.”
So did I. My creative writing class started in one minute. The last assignment I’d given them was to write a letter to someone they didn’t know, and to tell this person—real or imaginary—something they didn’t feel they could tell anyone else. “Sometimes,” I said, “it’s easier to tell a stranger something very personal. It’s like there’s less risk, opening yourself up to someone who doesn’t know you.”
When I asked for a volunteer to kick things off, to my amazement, Bruno, the class wiseass, put up his hand.
“Bruno?”
“Yes, sir, I’m ready.”
It was unlike Bruno to volunteer, or have completed an assignment. I was wary but at the same time intrigued. “Okay, Bruno, let’s have it.”
He opened his notebook and began, “Dear Penthouse.”
“Hold it,” I said. The class was already laughing. “This is supposed to be a letter to someone you don’t know.”
“I don’t know no one at Penthouse,” Bruno said. “And I did just like you said. I wrote them about something I wouldn’t tell nobody else. Well, not my mama, anyhow.”
“Your mama’s the one got a staple through her belly,” someone quipped.
“You wish your mama looked like that,” Bruno said, “’stead of like somebody’s photocopied butt.”
“Anyone else?” I asked.
“No, wait,” Bruno said. “Dear Penthouse: I’d like to tell you about an experience involving a very close personal friend of mine, whom I shall henceforth call Mr. Johnson.”
A kid named Ryan nearly fell off his chair from laughing.
As usual, Jane Scavullo sat at the back of the room, gazing at the window, bored, acting as though everything that was happening in this class was beneath her. Today, perhaps she was right. She looked as though she’d rather be anyplace but here, and if I could have looked in a mirror right then, I might have found myself wearing the same expression.
A girl who sat ahead of her, Valerie Swindon, a pleaser if there ever was one, had her hand up.
“Dear President Lincoln: I think you were one of the greatest presidents because you fought to free slaves and make everyone equal.”
It went on from there. Kids yawned, rolled their eyes, and I thought it was a terrible state of affairs when you couldn’t be earnest about Abraham Lincoln without seeming like a dweeb. But even as she read her letter, I found my mind wandering to the Bob Newhart routine, the phone conversation between the savvy Madison Avenue type and the president, how he tells Abe maybe he should unwind, take in a play.
I asked a couple of other kids to share, and then tried Jane.
“I’ll pass,” she said.
At the end of class, on her way out, she dropped a sheet of paper on my desk. It read:
“Dear Anyone: This is a letter from one anyone to another anyone, no names required, because nobody really knows anybody anyway. Names don’t make a hell of a lot of difference. The world is made up entirely of strangers. Millions and millions of them. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Sometimes we think we know other people, especially those we supposedly are close to, but if we really knew them, why are we so often surprised by the shit they do? Like, parents are always surprised by what their kids will do. They raise them from the time they are babies, spend each and every day with them, think they’re these goddamn fucking angels, and then one day the cops come to the door and say hey, guess what, parents? Your kid just bashed some other kid’s head in with a baseball bat. Or you’re the kid, and you think things are pretty fucking okay, and then one day this guy who’s supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems okay, but you think, when’s it coming? That’s what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when’s it coming? Because if it hasn’t come for a long, long time, you know you’re fucking due. All the best, Anyone.”
I read it a couple of times, and then at the top, with my red pen, I printed an “A.”
I wanted to drop by Pamela’s at lunch again to see Cynthia, and as I was walking to my car in the staff parking lot, Lauren Wells was pulling into the empty spot next to mine, steering with one hand, a cell phone pressed up against her head with the other.
I had managed not to run into her the last couple of days, and didn’t want to talk to her now, but she was powering her window down and raising her chin at me while she kept talking on the cell, signaling me to hold on. She stopped the car, said, “Hang on a sec” into the phone, then turned to me.
“Hey,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since you went back to see Paula. Are you going to be on the show again?”
“No,” I said.
Her face flashed disappointment. “That’s too bad,” she said. “It might have helped, right? Did Paula say no?”
“Nothing like that,” I said.
“Listen,” Lauren said, “can you do me a favor? Just for a second? Can you say hi to my friend?”
“What?”
She held up the cell. “Her name’s Rachel. Just say hi to her. Say, ‘Hi, Rachel.’ She’ll die when I tell her you’re the one whose wife was on that show.”
I opened the door to my car and before I got in said, “Get a life, Lauren.”
She stared at me openmouthed, then shouted, loud enough for me to hear through the glass, “You think you’re hot shit but you’re not!”
When I got to Pamela’s, Cynthia was not there.
“She called in, said the locksmith was coming,” Pamela said. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly one. I figured that if the locksmith showed up on time, he’d have been gone by ten, eleven at the latest.
I reached into my pocket for my cell, but Pam offered me the phone on the counter.
“Hi, Pam,” Cynthia said when she answered. Caller ID. “I’m so sorry. I’m on my way.”
“It’s me,” I said.
“Oh!”
“I dropped by, figured you’d be here.”
“The guy was late, left only a little while ago. I was just heading over.”
Pam said to me, “Tell her not to worry, it’s quiet. Take the day.”
“You hear that?” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe it’s just as well. I can’t keep my mind on anything. Mr. Abagnall phoned. He wants to see us. He’s coming by at four-thirty. Can you be home by then?”
“Of course. What did he say? Has he found out anything?”
Pamela’s eyebrows went up.
“He wouldn’t say. He said he’d discuss everything with us when he gets here.”
“You okay?”
“I feel kind of weird.”
“Yeah, me too. He might be telling us that he hasn’t found a thing.”
“I know.”
“We seeing Tess tomorrow?”
“I left a message. Don’t be late, okay?”
When I hung up, Pam said, “What’s going on?”
“Cynthia hired—we hired someone to look into her family’s disappearance.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, it’s none of my business, but you ask me, it happened so long ago, you’re just throwing your money away. No one’s ever going to know what happened that night.”
“See you later, Pam,” I said. “Thanks for the use of the phone.”
“Would you like some coffee?” Cynthia asked as Denton Abagnall came into our house.
“Oh, I’d like
that,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”
He got settled on the couch and Cynthia brought out coffee and cups and sugar and cream on a tray, as well as some chocolate chip cookies, and then she poured coffee into three cups and held the plate of cookies for Abagnall and he took one, and inside our heads both Cynthia and I were screaming: For God’s sake, tell us what you know—we can’t stand it another minute! Cynthia glanced down at the tray and said to me, “I only got two spoons, Terry. Could you grab another one?”
I went back into the kitchen, opened the cutlery drawer for a spoon, and something caught my eye down in that space between the edge of the Rubbermaid cutlery holder and the wall of the drawer, where all sorts of odds and ends collect, from pencils and pens to those little plastic clips from the ends of bread bags.
A key.
I dug it out. It was the spare house key that normally hung on the hook.
I went back into the living room with the spoon, and sat down as Abagnall got out his notebook. He opened it up, leafed through a few pages, said, “Let me just see what I’ve got here.”
Cynthia and I smiled patiently.
“Okay, here we are,” he said. He looked at Cynthia. “Mrs. Archer, what can you tell me about Vince Fleming?”
“Vince Fleming?”
“That’s right. He was the boy you were with that night. You and he, you were parked in a car—” He stopped himself. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at Cynthia and then at me and then back at Cynthia again. “Are you comfortable with me talking about this in front of your husband?”
“It’s fine,” she said.
“You were parked in his car, out at the mall, I believe. That was where your father found you and brought you home.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had a chance to go over the police files on this case, and the producer at that TV show, she showed me a tape of the program—I’m sorry, I never saw it when it originally ran, I don’t much care for crime shows—but most of the information they got was from the police. And this Vince Fleming fellow, he has a bit of a checkered history, if you get my drift.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t really keep in touch with him after that night,” Cynthia said.
“He’s been in and out of trouble with the law his whole life,” Abagnall said. “And his father was no different. Anthony Fleming, he ran a rather significant criminal organization back around that time.”
“Like the Mafia?” I said.
“Not quite that extensive. But he had his hand in a significant portion of the illegal drug market between New Haven and Bridgeport. Prostitution, truck hijackings, that kind of thing.”
“My God,” Cynthia said. “I had no idea. I mean, I knew Vince was a bit of a bad boy, but I had no idea what his father was involved in. Is his father still alive?”
“No. He was shot in 1992. Some aspiring hoodlums killed him in a deal that went very badly wrong.”
Cynthia was shaking her head, unable to believe it all. “Did the police catch them?”
“Didn’t have to,” Abagnall said. “Anthony Fleming’s people took care of them. Massacred a houseful of them—those who were responsible, and a few who were not but happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—in retaliation. They figure Vince Fleming was in charge of that operation, but he was never convicted, never even charged.”
Abagnall reached for another cookie. “I really shouldn’t,” he said. “I know my wife will be making me something nice for dinner.”
I spoke up. “But what does all this have to do with Cynthia, and her family?”
“Nothing, exactly,” the detective said. “But I’m learning about the kind of person Vince turned out to be, and I’m wondering about the kind of person he might have been, that night when your wife’s family disappeared.”
“You think he had something to do with it,” Cynthia said.
“I simply don’t know. But he would have had reason to be angry. Your father had dragged you away from a date with him. That must have been humiliating, not just for you, but for him as well. And if he did have anything to do with your parents’ disappearance, and that of your brother, if he…” His voice softened. “If he murdered them, then he had a father with the means, and the experience, to help him cover his tracks.”
“But surely the police must have looked into this at the time,” I said. “You can’t be the first person this has occurred to.”
“You’re right. The police looked into it. But they never came up with anything concrete. There were only some suspicions. And Vince and his family were each other’s alibis. He said he went home after Clayton Bigge took his daughter home.”
“It would explain one thing,” Cynthia said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Abagnall was smiling. He must have known what Cynthia was going to say, which was, “It would explain why I’m alive.”
Abagnall nodded.
“Because he liked me.”
“But your brother,” I said. “He had nothing against your brother.” I turned to Abagnall. “How do you explain that?”
“Todd may simply have been a witness. Someone who was there, who had to be eliminated.”
We were all quiet for a moment. Then Cynthia said, “He had a knife.”
“Who?” Abagnall asked. “Vince?”
“In the car that night. He was showing it off to me. It was a—what do you call it—one of those knives that springs open.”
“A switchblade,” Abagnall said.
“That’s it,” Cynthia said. “I remember…I can remember holding it….” Her voice trailed off, and her eyes were starting to roll up under her eyelids. “I feel faint.”
I quickly slipped my arm around her. “What can I get you?”
“I just, I just need to go…freshen up…for a minute,” she said, attempting to stand. I waited a moment to see that she was steady on her feet, then watched worriedly as she made her way up the stairs.
Abagnall was watching, too, and when he heard the bathroom door close, he leaned closer to me and said quietly, “What do you make of that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she’s exhausted.”
Abagnall nodded, didn’t speak for a moment. Then, “This Vince Fleming, his father made a very good living from his illegal activities. If he felt some sense of responsibility for what his son did, it would have been financially possible for him to leave sums of cash for your wife’s aunt to assist her in sending her niece to school.”
“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.”