No sign of her.
“Grace!” Cynthia shouted.
We threw on more lights as we came running down the stairs. This couldn’t be happening, I told myself. This simply could not be happening.
Cynthia swung open the basement door, shouted our daughter’s name down into the darkness. No response.
As I entered the kitchen I noticed the back door, with its new deadbolt installed, was just barely ajar.
I felt my heart stop.
“Call the police,” I said to Cynthia.
“Oh my God,” she said.
I turned on the outside light over the door as I swung it open and ran out, in my bare feet, into the yard.
“Grace!” I shouted.
And then a voice. Annoyed. “Dad, turn off that light!”
I glanced to my right, and there was Grace, standing in the yard in her pajamas, her telescope set up on the lawn, pointed at the night sky.
“What?” she said.
We both could, and probably should, have taken more time off work, especially after the night we’d put in, but we both returned to our jobs the following morning.
“I’m really sorry,” Grace said, for about the hundredth time, as she ate her Cheerios.
“Don’t you ever pull a stunt like that again,” Cynthia said.
“I said I’m sorry.”
Cynthia had still ended up sleeping with her for the night. She wasn’t about to let Grace out of her sight for a while.
“You snore, you know,” Grace told her.
It was the first I’d felt inclined to laugh in a while, but I managed to hold it in.
I left first for work, as usual. Cynthia did not say goodbye or walk me to the door. She still hadn’t forgotten our fight before the false alarm with Grace. Just when we needed to pull together, there was this invisible wedge being driven between us. Cynthia remained suspicious that I was still keeping things from her. And I was feeling uneasy about Cynthia in ways I was finding it hard to articulate, even to myself.
Cynthia thought I was blaming her for all our current troubles. It was undeniable that her history, her proverbial baggage, was currently haunting our days and nights. And at some level, maybe I was blaming her, even though it wasn’t her fault that her family had disappeared.
The one concern we had in common, of course, was how all this was affecting Grace. And the way our daughter had chosen to cope with the household angst-so troubling that thoughts of a destructive asteroid actually provided some sort of an escape-had itself become the catalyst for another blowup.
My students were amazingly well behaved. Word must have gotten around about why I’d been away the last couple of days. A death in the family. High school kids, like most natural predators, will typically seize on their prey’s weakness, use it to their advantage. From all reports, they had certainly done this with the woman who’d been called in to cover my classes. She had the tiniest trace of a stutter, usually no more than a hesitation with the first word in any given sentence, but it was noticeable enough for the kids to all start mimicking it. She’d evidently gone home the first day in tears, other staff members told me over lunch without a hint of sympathy in their voices. It was a jungle down that hallway, and you either made it or you didn’t.
But they cut me some slack. Not just my creative writing group, but my two other English classes as well. I think they were behaving not just out of respect for my feelings-in fact, that was probably a very small part of it. They didn’t act out because they were watching for signs that maybe I’d behave differently, shed a tear, get impatient with someone, slam a door, anything.
But I did not. So I could expect no special considerations the next day.
Jane Scavullo hung back as my morning class filed out of the room. “Sorry about your aunt,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “She was my wife’s aunt, actually, although I felt every bit as close to her.”
“Whatever,” she said, and caught up with the others.
About midafternoon, I was walking down the hall near the office when one of the secretaries charged out, saw me, and stopped dead.
“I was just going to go looking for you,” she said. “I paged your office, you weren’t there.”
“That’s because I’m here,” I said.
“Phone call for you,” she said. “I think it’s your wife.”
“Okay.”
“You can take it in the office.”
“Okay.”
I followed her in and she pointed to the phone on her desk. One of the lights was flashing. “Just press that one,” she said.
I grabbed the receiver, hit the button. “Cynthia?”
“Terry, I-”
“Listen, I was going to call you. I’m sorry about last night. What I said.”
The secretary sat back down at her desk, pretended not to be listening.
“Terry, something-”
“Maybe we need to hire another guy. I mean, I don’t know what’s happened to Abagnall, but-”
“Terry, shut up,” Cynthia said.
I shut up.
“Something’s happened,” Cynthia said, her voice low, almost breathless. “I know where they are.”
25
“Sometimes, when you don’t call when I’m expecting you to,” she said, “I think I’m the one being driven crazy.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But I’ve got good news. I think it’s happening.”
“Oh, that’s lovely. What was it Sherlock Holmes used to say? ‘The game is afoot?’ Or was it Shakespeare?”
“I’m not really sure,” he said.
“So you delivered it?”
“Yes.”
“But you need to stay a little longer to see what happens.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “I’m sure it will end up on the news.”
“I wish I could tape it here.”
“I’ll bring home the newspapers.”
“Oh, I’d love that,” she said.
“There haven’t been any more stories about Tess. I guess that means they haven’t found out anything.”
“I guess we should just be grateful for whatever good fortune comes our way, shouldn’t we?”
“And there was something else on the news, about this missing detective. The one my…you know…hired.”
“Do you think they’ll find him?” she asked.
“Hard to say.”
“Well, we can’t worry about that,” she said. “You sound a bit nervous.”
“I guess.”
“This is the hard part, the risky part, but when you add it all together, it’s going to pay off. And when it’s time, you can come back and get me.”
“I know. Won’t he wonder where you are, why you’re not going to see him?”
“He hardly gives me the time of day,” she said. “He’s winding down. Maybe a month to go. Long enough.”
“You think he’s ever really loved us?” he asked.
“The only one he’s ever loved is her,” she said, making no attempt to hide her bitterness. “And has she ever been there for him? Looked after him? Cleaned up after him? And who solved his biggest problem? He’s never been grateful for what I’ve done. We’re the ones who’ve been wronged here. We were robbed of having a real family. What we’re doing now, this is justice.”
“I know,” he said.
“What do you want me to make for you when you get home?”