Cynthia just looked at me. She was still looking a bit woozy after her near fainting spell.
“It was supposed to be a joke,” I said apologetically.
Abagnall brought us—me in particular—back to reality. “That’s not one of my working theories.”
“Then what are your theories?” I asked.
He took a sip of coffee. “I could probably come up with half a dozen, based on what little I know at the moment,” he said. “Was your father living under a name that was not his own? Was he escaping some strange past? A criminal one, perhaps? Did Vince Fleming bring harm to your family that evening? Was his father’s criminal network somehow linked to something in your father’s past that he’d been successfully covering up until that time?”
“We don’t really know anything, do we?” Cynthia asked.
Abagnall leaned back tiredly into the couch cushions. “What I know is that in a couple of days, the unanswered questions in this case seem to be expanding exponentially. And I have to ask you whether you want me to continue. You’ve already spent several hundred dollars on my efforts, and it could run into the thousands. If you’d like me to stop now, that’s fine. I can walk away from this, give you a report on what I’ve learned so far. Or I can keep digging. It’s entirely up to you.”
Cynthia started to open her mouth, but before she could speak, I said, “We’d like you to continue.”
“All right,” he said. “Why don’t I stay on this for another couple of days? I don’t need another check at this time. I think another forty-eight hours will really determine whether I can make significant progress.”
“Of course,” I said.
“I think I want to look further into this Vince Fleming character. Mrs. Archer, what do you think? Could this man—well, he would have been a very young man back in 1983—have been capable of bringing harm to your family?”
She thought about that for a moment. “After all this time, I guess I have to consider that anything is possible.”
“Yes, it’s good to keep an open mind. Thank you for the coffee.”
Before leaving, Abagnall returned Cynthia’s shoebox of mementos. Cynthia closed the door as he left, then turned to me and asked, “Who was my father? Who the hell was my father?”
And I thought of Jane Scavullo’s creative writing assignment. How we’re all strangers to one another, how we often know the least about those we’re closest to.
For twenty-five years, Cynthia had endured the pain and anxiety associated with her family’s disappearance without a hint of what might have happened to them. And while we still didn’t have the answer to that question, strands of information were floating to the surface, like bits of planking from a ship sunk long ago. These revelations that Cynthia’s father might be living under an assumed name, that Vince Fleming’s past might be much darker than originally thought. The strange phone call, the mysterious appearance of what was purported to be Clayton Bigge’s hat. The man watching our house late at night. The news from Tess that for a period of time envelopes stuffed with cash from an anonymous source had been entrusted to her to look after Cynthia.
It was this last one I felt Cynthia was now entitled to know about. And I thought it would be better for her to learn about it from Tess herself.
We struggled through dinner not to discuss the questions that Abagnall’s visit had raised. We were both feeling that we’d already exposed Grace to too much of this. She had her radar out all the time, picking up one bit of information one day, matching it up with something else she might hear the next. We were worried that discussing Cynthia’s history, the opportunistic psychic, Abagnall’s investigation, all of those things, might be contributing to Grace’s anxiety, her fear that one night we’d all be wiped out by an object from outer space.
But try as we might to avoid the subject, it was often Grace who brought it up.
“Where’s the hat?” she asked after a spoonful of mashed potatoes.
“What?” Cynthia said.
“The hat. Your dad’s hat. The one that got left here. Where is it?”
“I put it up in the closet,” she said.
“Can I see it?”
“No,” Cynthia said. “It’s not to be played with.”
“I wasn’t going to play with it. I just wanted to look at it.”
“I don’t want you playing with it or looking at it or touching it!” Cynthia snapped.
Grace retreated, went back to her mashed potatoes.
Cynthia was preoccupied and on edge all through dinner. Who wouldn’t be, having learned only an hour earlier that the man she’d known her entire life as Clayton Bigge might not be Clayton Bigge at all?
“I think,” I said, “that we should go visit Tess tonight.”
“Yeah,” said Grace. “Let’s see Aunt Tess.”
Cynthia, as though coming out of a dream, said, “Tomorrow. I thought you said we should go see her tomorrow.”
“I know. But I think it might be good to see her tonight. There’s a lot to talk about. I think you should tell her what Mr. Abagnall said.”
“What did he say?” Grace asked.
I gave her a look that silenced her.
“I called earlier,” Cynthia said. “I left her a message. She must be out doing something. She’ll call us when she gets the message.”
“Let me make a call,” I said, and reached for the phone. I let it ring half a dozen times before her voicemail cut in. Given that Cynthia had already left a message, I couldn’t see the point in leaving another.
“I told you,” Cynthia said.
I looked at the wall clock. It was nearly seven. Whatever Tess might be out doing, chances were she wouldn’t be out doing it much longer. “Why don’t we go for a drive, head up to her place, maybe she’ll be there by the time we arrive, or we can wait around for a little while until she shows up. You still have a key, right?”
Cynthia nodded.
“You don’t think this can all wait till tomorrow?” she asked.
“I think, not only would she want to hear about what Mr. Abagnall found out, there might be some things she might want to share with you.”
“What do you mean, she might have something to share with me?” Cynthia asked. Grace was eyeing me pretty curiously, too, but had the sense not to say anything this time.
“I don’t know. This new information, it might trigger something with her, prompt her to remember things she hasn’t thought about in years. You know, if we tell her your father might have had some other, I don’t know, identity, then she might go, oh yeah, that explains such and such.”
“You’re acting like you already know what it is she’s going to tell me.”
My mouth was dry. I got up, ran some water from the tap until it was cold, filled a glass, drank it down, turned around and leaned against the counter.
“Okay,” I said. “Grace, your mother and I need some privacy here.”
“I haven’t finished my dinner.”
“Take your plate with you and go watch some TV.”
She took her plate and left the room, a sour expression on her face. I knew she was thinking that she missed all the good stuff.
To Cynthia, I said, “Before she got those last test results, Tess thought she was dying.”
Cynthia was very still. “You knew this.”
“Yes. She told me she thought she only had a limited amount of time left.”
“You kept this from me.”
“Please. Just let me tell you this. You can get mad later.” I felt Cynthia’s eyes go into me like icicles. “But you were under a lot of stress at the time, and Tess told me because she wasn’t sure you’d be able to deal with that kind of news. And just as well she didn’t tell you, because as it turned out, she’s okay. That’s the thing we can’t lose sight of.”
Cynthia said nothing.
“Anyway, at the time, when she thought she was terminal, there was something else she felt she had to tell me, something that she felt you need
ed to know when the time was right. She wasn’t sure she’d get the chance again.”
And so I told Cynthia. Everything. The anonymous note, the cash, how it could show up anywhere, anytime. How it helped get her through school. How Tess, taking the author of the note at his or her word, that if she breathed a word of this the cash would stop coming, kept this to herself all these years.
She listened, only interrupting me a couple of times with questions, let me spell it all out for her.
When I was done, she looked numb. She said something I didn’t hear very often from her. “I could use a drink,” she said.
I got down a bottle of scotch from a shelf high in the pantry, poured her a small glass. She drank it down in one long gulp, and I poured her about half as much again. She drank that down, too.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go and see Tess.”
We would have preferred to go see Tess without bringing Grace along, but it would have been a scramble to find a sitter with no notice. And not only that, knowing that someone had been watching the house made us uneasy about putting Grace in anyone else’s care at the moment.
So we told her to bring some things to entertain herself—she grabbed her Cosmos book again and a DVD of that Jodie Foster movie Contact—down in Tess’s basement, allowing the rest of us to talk privately.
Grace wasn’t her usual chatty self on the way up. I think she was picking up the tension in the car, and decided, wisely, to lay low.
“Maybe we’ll get some ice cream on the way back,” I said, breaking the silence. “Or have some of Tess’s. She probably still has some left from her birthday.”
When we pulled off the main road between Milford and Derby and drove down Tess’s street, Cynthia pointed. “Her car’s home.”
Tess drove a four-wheel-drive Subaru wagon. She always said she didn’t want to be stranded in a snowstorm if she needed provisions.
Grace was out of the car first and ran up to the front door. “Hold on, pal,” I said. “Wait up. You can’t just go bursting in.”
We got to the door and I knocked. After a few seconds, I knocked again, only louder.
“Maybe she’s around back,” Cynthia said. “Working on her garden.”
So we walked around the house, Grace, as usual, charging on ahead, skipping, leaping into the air. Before we’d rounded the house, she was already running back, saying, “She’s not there.” We had to see for ourselves, of course, but Grace was correct. Tess was not in her backyard, working in the garden as twilight slowly turned to darkness.
Cynthia rapped on the back door, which led directly into Tess’s kitchen.
There was still no answer.
“That’s weird,” she said. It also seemed strange that, as night was falling, there were no lights on inside the house.
I crowded Cynthia on the back step and peered through the tiny window in the door.
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 dete
ctive. “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.