“Sure,” I said. “So, this man, what did he sound like?”
Cynthia wasn’t listening to my question. She had a vacant look on her face. “I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe I deleted the number. But nothing showed up on the screen anyway. You know when it says it’s an unknown number?”
“Okay, let’s not worry about that anymore. But the man, what did he sound like?”
Cynthia half raised her hands in a gesture of futility. “It was just a man. He was talking kind of low, like maybe he was trying to disguise it, you know. But there wasn’t really anything.” She paused, then her eyes flashed with an idea. “Maybe we should call the phone company. They might have a record of the call, maybe they’d even have a recording of it.”
“They don’t keep recordings of everybody’s phone calls,” I said, “no matter what some people may think. And what are we going to tell them? It was one isolated call, from a nut who probably saw the show. He didn’t threaten you, he didn’t even use obscene language.”
I slipped an arm around Cynthia’s shoulder. “Just…don’t worry about it. Too many people know about what happened to you. It can make you a target. You know what we should look into?”
“What?”
“An unlisted number. We could get an unlisted number, then we wouldn’t get calls like this.”
Cynthia shook her head. “No, we’re not doing that.”
“I don’t think it costs that much more, and besides-”
“No, we’re not doing it.”
“Why not?”
She swallowed. “Because when they are ready to call, when my family finally decides to get in touch, they have to be able to reach me.”
I had a free period after lunch, so I slipped out of the school, drove across town to Pamela’s, and went inside the store with four takeout cups of coffee.
It’s not what you’d call a high-end clothing store, and Pamela Forster, who at one time was Cynthia’s best friend in high school, was not aiming for a young, hip clientele. The racks were filled with fairly conservative apparel, the kind of clothes, I liked to joke with Cynthia, preferred by women who wear sensible shoes.
“Okay, so it’s not exactly Abercrombie & Fitch,” Cynthia would concede. “But A &F wouldn’t let me work whatever hours I want so I can pick up Grace after school, and Pam will.”
There was that.
Cyn was standing at the back of the shop, outside a changing room, talking to a customer through the curtain. “Do you want to try that in a twelve?” she asked.
She hadn’t spotted me, but Pam, standing behind the register, had, and she smiled. “Hey.” Pam, tall, thin, and small-chested, carried herself well on three-inch heels. Her knee-length turquoise dress was stylish enough to suggest that it had not come from her own stock. Just because she was appealing to a clientele unfamiliar with the pages of Vogue didn’t mean she had to completely tone it down herself.
“You’re too kind,” she said, looking at the four cups of coffee. “But it’s just me and Cyn holding down the fort at the moment. Ann’s on a break.”
“Maybe it’ll still be warm by the time she gets back.”
Pam pried off the plastic lid, sprinkled in a packet of Splenda. “So how’s things?”
“Good.”
“Cynthia says still nothing. From the show.”
Was this what everyone wanted to talk about? Lauren Wells, my own daughter, now Pamela Forster.
“That’s right,” I said.
“I told her not to do it,” Pam said, shaking her head.
“You did?” This was news to me.
“Long time ago. When they first called about doing it. I told her, honey, let sleeping dogs lie. No sense stirring up that shit.”
“Yeah, well,” I said.
“I said, look, it’s been twenty-five years, right? Whatever happened, it happened. If you can’t move on with your life after this much water’s gone under the bridge, well, where are you going to be in another five years, or ten?”
“She never mentioned this,” I said. Cynthia had caught sight of us talking and waved, but didn’t move from her post outside the changing-room curtain.
“The lady in there, trying shit on she can’t hope to fit into?” Pamela whispered. “She’s walked out of here before with stuff she didn’t pay for, so we keep an eye on her when she’s here. Lots of personal service.”
“She shoplifted?” I said, and Pamela nodded.
“If she stole, why don’t you charge her? Why do you let her back in?”
“Can’t prove it. We just have our suspicions. We kind of let her know we know, without saying it, never let her out of our sight.”
I started forming an image of the woman behind the curtain. Young, a bit rough looking, kind of cocky. The kind of person you’d pick out of a lineup as a shoplifter, maybe a tattoo on her shoulder or-
The curtain slid back and a short, stocky woman in her late forties, early fifties maybe, stepped out, handing several outfits to Cynthia. If I had to stereotype her, I would have said librarian. “I just don’t see anything today,” she said politely, and walked past Pamela and me on her way out.
“Her?” I said to Pamela.
“A regular Catwoman,” Pamela said.
Cynthia came over, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “A coffee run? What’s the occasion?”
“I had a free period,” I said. “Just figured, you know.”
Pamela excused herself to the back of the store, taking her coffee with her.
“Because of this morning,” Cynthia said.
“You were kind of shook up after the phone call. I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I’m good,” she said, with limited conviction, and took a sip of her coffee. “I’m okay.”
“Pam said she tried to talk you out of doing Deadline.”
“You weren’t all that sold on the idea, either.”
“But you never mentioned her talking against the idea.”
“You know Pam isn’t afraid to offer her opinion on anything. She also thinks you could lose five pounds.”
She’d blown the wind out of my sails. “So that lady, the one who was trying on clothes? She’s a shoplifter?”
“You just can’t tell about people,” Cynthia said, taking another sip.
This was the day when we met with Dr. Naomi Kinzler after work. Cynthia had arranged to drop Grace off at a friend’s house after school, and then we headed over. We’d been seeing Dr. Kinzler once every two weeks for the last four months, after being referred to her by our family physician. He’d been trying, without success, to help Cynthia deal with her anxieties, and felt it would be better for her to talk to someone-for both of us to talk to someone-rather than see her becoming dependent on a prescription.
I’d been skeptical from the beginning whether there was anything a psychiatrist could accomplish, and after coming here for almost ten sessions, I hadn’t become any more convinced. Dr. Kinzler had an office in a medical building in the east end of Bridgeport that had a view of the turnpike when she didn’t have the blinds closed, as she did today. I suppose she had noticed me looking out the window during previous visits, my mind drifting as I counted tractor trailers.
Sometimes Dr. Kinzler met with us together, other times one of us would step out to allow her some one-on-one with the other.
I’d never been to a shrink before. About all I knew came from watching The Sopranos ’ Dr. Melfi help Tony work through his problems. I couldn’t decide whether ours were more or less serious than his. Tony had people disappearing around him all the time, but he was often the one who’d arranged it. He had the advantage of knowing what had happened to these people.
Naomi Kinzler wasn’t exactly Dr. Melfi. She was short and plump with gray hair pulled back and pinned into submission. She was pushing seventy, I guessed, and had been at this kind of thing long enough to figure out how to keep everyone else’s pain from burrowing under her own skin and staying there.