“She’d been a bit of a wild kid there, up until her folks up and vanished, and in some ways, that calmed her down. She started to get a little more serious about things, started paying attention at school. She had her moments, of course. The cops brought her home one night, found her with marijuana.”
“Really?” I said.
Tess smiled. “Let her off with a warning.” She put a finger to her lips. “Not a word.”
“Sure.”
“Anyway, a thing like that happens to you, losing your family, you think you’ve got license to do whatever the hell you want, to cut loose, stay out late, that you’re owed. You know?”
“I think so.”
“But there was a part of her wanted to get herself together. In case her parents came back, she’d see that she made something of herself, that she didn’t turn out to be useless. Even though they were gone, she wanted them to be proud of her. So she decided to go to school, to college.”
“The University of Connecticut,” I said.
“That’s right. Good school. Not cheap. I wondered how I was going to be able to afford it. Her marks, they weren’t bad, but they weren’t scholarship material, if you get my meaning. I was going to have to look into loans for her, that kind of thing.”
“Okay.”
“I found the first envelope in the car, on the passenger seat,” Tess said. “It was just sitting there. I’d come out from work, got in, there was this white envelope on the seat next to me. Thing is, I’d locked the car, but I’d left the windows open half an inch, it was pretty hot out and I wanted to let a little air in. There was enough room to fit in the envelope, but only just. It was pretty thick.”
I cocked my head to one side. “Cash?”
“Just under five thousand dollars of it,” Tess said. “All sorts of bills. Twenties, fives, some hundreds.”
“An envelope full of cash? No explanation, no note, nothing?”
“Oh, there was a note.”
She got up from her chair and took a few steps over to an antique rolltop desk off to one side of the front door, opened the single drawer. “I found all this when I started cleaning up in the basement, going through those boxes of books and everything else. I need to start paring things down now, make it easier for you and Cynthia to sort through my stuff when I’m gone.”
Held together with a rubber band was a small stack of envelopes, maybe a dozen or more. Together, they weren’t half an inch thick.
“They’re all empty,” Tess said. “But I always kept the envelopes just the same, even though there’s nothing written on them, no return address, no postmark, of course. But I thought, what if they’ve got fingerprints on them or something that might be useful to someone someday?”
Tess’s hands were all over them, so it was doubtful how much evidence they contained. But then again, forensic science wasn’t exactly my area of expertise. You didn’t see me teaching chemistry.
Tess worked a piece of paper out from under the rubber band. “This was the only note I ever got. With the first envelope. All the others that followed, they had cash in them, too, but never another word.”
She handed me a standard-sized piece of typewriter paper, folded in thirds. It had yellowed slightly with age.
I unfolded it.
The message was printed, very deliberately, in block letters. It read:
THIS IS TO HELP YOU WITH CYNTHIA. FOR HER EDUCATION, FOR WHATEVER ELSE YOU NEED. THERE WILL BE MORE, BUT YOU MUST FOLLOW THESE RULES. NEVER TELL CYNTHIA ABOUT THIS MONEY. NEVER TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT. NEVER TRY TO FIND OUT WHERE IT’S COMING FROM. NEVER.
That was it.
I must have read it three times before I looked at Tess, standing in front of me.
“I never did,” she said. “I never told Cynthia. I never told anyone. I never made any attempt to find out who had left it in my car. I never knew when, or where, it would show up. One time, I found it tucked into the New Haven Register on the front step one evening. Another time, I came out of the Post Mall, there was another one in the car.”
“You never saw anyone.”
“No. I think whoever left it was watching me, making sure I was far enough away for it to be safe. You want to know something? I always made sure, whenever I parked the car, to leave the window open a crack, just in case.”
“How much, altogether?”
“Over about six years, forty-two thousand dollars.”
“Jesus.”
Tess reached out her hand. She wanted the note back. She folded it up, slipped it under the rubber band with the envelopes, got up, and put everything back into the desk drawer.
“So nothing for how many years?” I asked.
Tess thought a moment. “About fifteen, I guess. Nothing since Cynthia finished school. It was a blessing, I’ll tell you that. I’d have never got her through school without it, not without selling this house or taking out a new mortgage or something.”
“So,” I said, “who left it?”
“It’s the forty-two-thousand-dollar question,” Tess said. “It’s all I’ve ever wondered, all these years. Her mother? Her father? Both of them?”
“Which would mean they were alive all those years, or at least one of them was. Maybe still alive even now. But if one or the other of them was able to do that, to watch you, to leave you money, why wouldn’t they be able to get in touch?”
“I know,” Tess said. “It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Because I’ve always believed my sister is dead, that they’re all dead. That they all died the night they disappeared.”
“And if they are dead,” I said, “then whoever sent you that money, it’s someone who feels responsible for their deaths. Who’s trying to make it right.”
“You see what I mean?” Tess said. “It just raises more questions than it answers. The money, it doesn’t mean they’re alive. And it doesn’t mean they’re dead.”
“But it means something,” I said. “After it stopped, when it was clear there wasn’t any more coming, why didn’t you tell the police? They might have reopened the investigation.”
Tess’s eyes grew weary. “I know you might think I’ve never been afraid to stir up a bit of shit, but where this was concerned, Terry, I just didn’t know whether I wanted to know the truth. I was scared, and I was afraid of how much the truth, if we were able to find it, might hurt Cynthia. It’s taken its toll on me. The stress of it. I wonder if that’s why I’m sick. They say stress’ll do that to you, affect your body.”
“I’ve heard that.” I paused. “Maybe you need to talk to somebody.”
“Oh, I gave that a try,” Tess said. “I saw your Dr. Kinzler.”
I blinked. “You did?”
“Cynthia mentioned going to her, so I gave her a call, saw her a couple of times. But you know, I’m just not prepared to open up to a stranger. There are some things you only tell family.”
We heard a car pull into the driveway.
“It’s up to you whether to tell Cynthia,” Tess said. “About the envelopes, that is. The stuff about me, I’ll tell her about myself, soon enough.”
A car door opened, closed. I peeked out the window, saw Cynthia going around to the back of the car, the trunk open.
“I have to think about this,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. But thank you for telling me.” I paused. “I wish you’d told me sooner.”
“I wish I could have.”
The front door opened and Cynthia burst in with a couple of shopping bags at the same time Grace reappeared from the basement, holding the container of chocolate ice cream to her chest like it was a stuffed toy, her mouth smeared with chocolate.
Cynthia eyed her curiously. I could see the wheels turning, that she was thinking she’d been sent on a fool’s errand.
Tess said, “Right after you left, we suddenly realized we had ice cream after all. But I still needed all those other things. It’s my goddamn birthday. Let’s have a party.”
10
When I went into Grace??
?s bedroom to kiss her goodnight, it was already in darkness, but I quickly saw her silhouetted against the window, where she was peering at a moonlit sky through her telescope. I was just barely able to see that she had crudely wrapped masking tape around the scope where it was supported by the stand to hold it together.
“Sweetheart,” I said.
She twinkled some fingers but didn’t pry herself away from the telescope. As my eyes adjusted I could see her Cosmos book open on her bed.
“Whatcha see?” I asked.
“Not much,” she said.
“That’s too bad.”
“No, it’s not. If there’s nothing coming to destroy Earth, that’s a good thing.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you and Mom. If an asteroid was going to hit our house by morning, I’d be able to see it coming by now, so you can rest easy.”
I touched her hair, ran my hand down to her shoulder.
“Dad, you’re bumping my eye,” Grace said.
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
“I think Aunt Tess is sick,” she said.
Oh no. She’d been listening. Instead of being down in the basement, she’d been hiding at the top of the stairs.
“Grace, were you—”
“She just didn’t seem very happy for her birthday,” she said. “I’m way happier than that on my birthday.”
“Sometimes when you get older, having a birthday isn’t quite such a big deal,” I said. “You’ve already had a lot of them. The novelty kind of wears off after a while.”
“What’s novelty?”
“You know how when something’s new, it’s exciting? But then after a while, it gets kind of boring? When it’s new, it’s a novelty.”
“Oh.” She moved her telescope a bit to the left. “The moon is really shiny tonight. You can see all the craters.”
“Get to bed,” I said.
“In a minute,” she protested. “Sleep tight, and don’t worry about asteroids tonight.”
I decided not to be heavy-handed and demand that she get under the covers immediately. Letting a kid stay up past her bedtime to study the solar system didn’t strike me as a crime worthy of intervention by the child welfare authorities. After giving her a gentle kiss on her ear, I slipped out of her room and back down the hall to our bedroom.
Cynthia, who’d already said goodnight to Grace, was sitting up in bed, looking at a magazine, just turning the pages, not paying any real attention to them.
“I have some errands to run at the mall tomorrow,” she said, not taking her eyes away from the pages. “I’ve got to find Grace some new running shoes.”
“Hers don’t look worn out.”
“They’re not, but her toes are jammed up in them. You joining us?”
“Sure,” I said. “I might cut the grass in the morning. We could grab some lunch there.”
“That was nice today,” she said. “We don’t see Tess enough.”
“Why don’t we make it a weekly thing?” I said.
“You think?” She smiled.
“Sure. Have her here for dinner, take her to Knickerbocker’s, maybe out to that seafood place along the Sound. She’d like that.”
“She’d love it. She seemed a bit preoccupied today. And I think she’s starting to get a bit absentminded. I mean, she already had ice cream.”
I took off my shirt, hung my pants over the back of a chair. “Oh well,” I said. “That’s not a big thing.”
Tess had held off telling Cynthia about her health problems. She wouldn’t have wanted to spoil her own birthday celebrations for Cynthia. And while it was certainly up to Tess to decide when to break the news to Cynthia, it felt wrong to know this while my wife was kept in the dark.
But an even greater burden was knowing, for the first time, about the money that had been sent anonymously to Tess over several years. What right did I have to keep that information to myself? Surely Cynthia was more entitled to know about it than I. But Tess had held back from telling because she thought Cynthia was fragile enough these days, and I couldn’t disagree. And yet.
I’d even liked to have asked Cynthia whether she knew her aunt had paid a couple of visits to Dr. Kinzler, but then she’d want to know why Tess had mentioned that to me and not her, so I left it alone.
“You okay?” Cynthia asked.
“Yeah, good. Just kind of beat, that’s all,” I said as I stripped down to my boxers. I brushed my teeth and got into bed, lying on my side, my back to her. Cynthia threw her magazine onto the floor and turned off the light, and a few seconds after that, her arm slipped around me, and she stroked my chest, and then she took me in her hand.
“How beat are you?” she whispered.
“Not that beat,” I said, and turned over.
“I want to be safe with you,” she said, pulling my mouth down to hers.
“No asteroids tonight,” I said, and if the lights had been on, I think I might have seen her smile.
Cynthia fell asleep quickly. I wasn’t so lucky.
I stared at the ceiling, turned over on to my side, glared at the digital clock. When it turned over to a new minute, I started counting to sixty, seeing how close I could come. Then I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling some more. Around three in the morning, Cynthia sensed my restlessness and said groggily to me, “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
It was her questions I couldn’t face. If I knew the answers to the questions Cynthia would have about the cash-stuffed envelopes that had been left for Tess to help pay for her upbringing, I might have told her about it right away.
No, that was not true. Having some of the answers would only spark more questions. Suppose I knew the money was being left by someone from her family. Suppose I even knew which one.
I wouldn’t be able to answer why.
Suppose I knew the money was being left by someone outside her family. But who? Who else would feel responsible enough for Cynthia, about what had happened to her mother and father and brother, to leave that kind of money to care for her?
And then I wondered whether I should tell the police. Get Tess to turn over the letter and the envelopes. Maybe, even after all these years, they still held some secrets that someone with the right kind of forensic equipment could unlock.
Assuming, of course, that there was anyone still in the police department who cared about this case. It had gone into the “cold” file a very long time ago.
When they were doing the TV show, they had a hard time even finding anyone still on the force who’d investigated the incident. Which was why they’d had to track down that guy in Arizona, sitting out front of his Airstream, so he could insinuate that Cynthia had had something to do with the disappearance of her brother and her parents, the prick.
And so I lay awake, haunted by the information I had that Cynthia did not, and how it only served to remind me of how much we still didn’t know.
I killed some time in the bookstore while Cynthia and Grace looked at shoes. I had an early Philip Roth, one that I’d never gotten around to reading, in my hand when Grace came running into the store. Cynthia trailed behind her, a shopping bag in hand.
“I’m starving,” Grace said, throwing her arms around me.
“You got some shoes?”
She took a step back and modeled for me, sticking out one foot and then the other. White sneakers with a pink swoosh.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked.
“Her old ones,” Cynthia said. “She had to wear them right away. You hungry?”
I was. I put the Roth book back and we took the escalator up to the food court level. Grace wanted McDonald’s, so I gave her enough money to buy herself something while Cynthia and I went to a different counter to get soup and a sandwich. Cynthia kept glancing back over to the McDonald’s, making sure she could see Grace. The mall was busy on this Sunday afternoon, as was the food court. There were still a few tables fre
e, but they were filling up fast.
Cynthia was so occupied watching Grace that I moved both our plastic trays along, gathered together cutlery and napkins, loaded the sandwiches and soup as they became ready.
“She’s got us a table,” Cynthia said. I scanned the court, spotted Grace at a table for four, waving her arm back and forth long after we’d caught sight of her. She already had her Big Mac out of the box when we joined her, her fries dumped into the other side of the container.
“Eww,” she said when she saw my cream of broccoli soup. A kindly looking, fiftyish woman in a blue coat, sitting alone at the next table, glanced over, smiled, and then went back to her own lunch.
I sat across from Cynthia, Grace to my right. I noticed that Cynthia kept looking over my shoulder. I turned around once, looked where she was looking, turned back.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, and took a bite of her chicken salad sandwich.
“What were you looking at?”
“Nothing,” she said again.
Grace pushed a fry into her mouth, biting it into quarter-inch segments at a furious rate.
Cynthia was looking over my shoulder again.
“Cyn,” I said, “what the hell are you looking at?”
She didn’t immediately deny this time that something had caught her eye. “There’s a man over there,” she said. I started to turn around and she said, “No, don’t look.”
“What’s so special about him?”
“Nothing,” she said.
I sighed, and probably rolled my eyes, too. “For crying out loud, Cyn, you can’t just stare at the guy for—”
“He looks like Todd,” she said.
Okay, I thought. We’ve been here before. Just be cool. “Okay,” I said. “What is it about him that makes him look like your brother?”
“I don’t know. It’s just something about him. He just looks like Todd would probably look today.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace asked.