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 else, 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.