They interviewed my principal, Rolly Carruthers.
“It’s a mystery,” he said. “I knew Clayton Bigge. We went fishing together a couple of times. He was a good man. I can’t imagine what happened to them. Maybe there was some kind of Manson family, you know, heading across country, and Cynthia’s family, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
They interviewed Aunt Tess.
“I lost a sister, a brother-in-law, a nephew,” she said. “But Cynthia, her loss was so much greater. She managed to beat the odds, to still turn out to be a great kid, a great person.”
And while the producers kept their promise and didn’t air the comments of the man who now lived in Cynthia’s house, they got someone else to say something almost as sinister.
Cynthia was stunned, when the segment aired a couple of weeks later, to see the detective who’d questioned her in her house after her neighbor Mrs. Jamison called the police. He was retired now, living in Arizona. At the bottom of the screen it said, “Retired detective Bartholomew Finlay.” He’d led the initial investigation and finally moved it off his desk after a year because he wasn’t getting anywhere. The producers got a crew from one of their affiliates out in Phoenix to get some comments from him as he sat outside a gleaming Airstream trailer.
“The thing that always nagged at me was, why’d she survive? Assuming, of course, that the rest of the family was dead. Because I just never bought into the theory that a family would up and leave a kid behind. I could see kicking a kid out of the house who was difficult, that kind of thing happens all the time. But to go to the trouble to disappear just to be rid of one of your children? It didn’t make any sense. Which had to mean some sort of foul play. Which always brought me back to the original question. Why did she survive? There aren’t that many possibilities.”
“What do you mean by that?” The voice of Paula Malloy, although the camera never wandered from Finlay. Malloy’s questions had been edited in later because she hadn’t been sent to Arizona to interview this guy.
“Figure it out,” Detective Finlay said.
“What do you mean, figure it out?” Malloy’s voice asked.
“That’s all I’ll say.”
When she saw that, Cynthia was furious. “Jesus, this again!” she shouted at the television. “That son of a bitch is implying I had something to do with it. I’ve heard these whispers for years. And that Paula fucking Malloy said they weren’t going to run anything like that!”
But I had managed to calm her down, because the segment had been, on balance, pretty positive. The parts where Cynthia was onscreen, walking through the house, telling Paula what had happened to her that day, she’d come across as sincere and believable. “If there’s someone who knows something,” I assured her, “they’re not going to be influenced by what some boneheaded retired cop says. In fact, what he said, that might make it even more likely someone would step forward to contradict him.”
And so the program ran, but it was up against the season finale of some reality show featuring a bunch of overweight aspiring rock stars who had to live under the same roof and compete to see who could shed the most pounds and win a recording contract. Cynthia waited by the phone the moment the show finished, figuring someone would see it, someone who knew something, and call the station immediately. The producers would be in touch before the sun came up the next day, the mystery solved. Finally, she’d know the truth.
But there were no calls, other than one from a woman who said her own family had been abducted by aliens, and a man who theorized that Cynthia’s folks had stepped through a tear in the fabric of time, and were either on the run from dinosaurs, or having their minds erased in some Matrix-like future.
No credible tips came in.
Evidently no one who knew anything saw the show. Or if they did, they weren’t talking.
For the first week, Cynthia called the Deadline producers every day. They were nice enough, said that if they heard anything, they’d be in touch. The second week, Cynthia held off to every other day, but now the producers were getting short with her, said there was no point calling, they’d had no responses, and that if anything did come up they’d be in touch.
They were on to other stories. Cynthia quickly became old news.
2
Grace’s eyes were pleading, but her tone was stern.
“Dad,” she said. “I’m. Eight. Years. Old.” Where had she learned this? I wondered. This technique of breaking down sentences into individual words for dramatic effect. As if I needed to ask. There was more than enough drama to go around in this household.
“Yes,” I said to my daughter. “I’m aware.”
Her Cheerios were getting soggy and she hadn’t touched her orange juice. “The kids make fun of me,” she said.
I took a sip of my coffee. I’d only just poured it but it was already verging on cold. The coffeemaker was on the fritz. I decided I would pick up a cup at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the way to school.
“Who makes fun of you?” I asked.
“Everybody,” Grace said.
“Everybody,” I repeated. “What did they do? Did they call an assembly? Did the principal stand up there and tell everyone to make fun of you?”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
Okay, that was true. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get an idea how widespread this problem is. I’m guessing it’s not everybody. It just feels like everybody. And even if it’s only a few, I understand that can still be pretty embarrassing.”
“It is.”
“Is it your friends?”
“Yeah. They say Mom treats me like I’m a baby.”
“Your mom’s just being careful,” I said. “She loves you very much.”
“I know. But I’m eight.”
“Your mom just wants to know that you get to school safely, that’s all.”
Grace sighed and bowed her head defeatedly, a lock of her brown hair dropping in front of her brown eyes. She used her spoon to move some Cheerios around in the milk. “But she doesn’t have to walk me to school. Nobody’s mom walks them to school unless they’re in kindergarten.”
We’d been through this before, and I’d tried talking to Cynthia, suggested as gently as possible that maybe it was time for Grace to fly solo now that she was in third grade. There were plenty of other kids to walk with, it wasn’t as though she’d be walking all by herself.
“Why can’t you walk me instead?” Grace asked, and there was a bit of a glint in her eye.
The rare times when I had walked Grace to school, I’d fallen behind the better part of a block. As far as anyone knew, I was just out for a stroll, not actually keeping an eye on Grace, making sure she got there safely. And we never breathed a word of it to Cynthia. My wife took me at my word, that I’d walked with Grace, right alongside her, all the way to Fairmont Elementary School, and stood on the sidewalk until I’d seen her go inside.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to be at my school by eight. If I walk you to school before I go, you have to hang around outside for an hour. Your mom doesn’t start work till ten, so it’s not a problem for her. Once in a while, when I get a first period spare, I can walk you.”
In fact, Cynthia had arranged her hours at Pamela’s so that she’d be around each morning to make sure Grace was off to school safely. It had never been Cynthia’s dream to work at a women’s clothing store owned by her best friend from high school, but it allowed her to work part-time, which meant she could be home by the time school let out. In a concession to Grace, she didn’t wait for her at the school door, but down the street. Cynthia could see the school from there, and it didn’t take her long to spot our often-pigtailed daughter in the crowd. She had tried persuading Grace to wave, so that she could pick her out even sooner, but Grace had been stubborn about complying.