I let that sink in.
“So anyway, I can do the math, right? Everyone’s gone except Cynthia. So I drive up, I knock on the door, figured I could talk to her. I banged on it half a dozen times, real hard, didn’t get any answer, figured she was probably sleeping it off, right? So I fucked off and went back home.” He shrugged.
“Someone was there,” I said. “Watching the house.”
“Yup. Not just me.”
“And you’ve never told anyone this? You didn’t tell the cops. You never told Cynthia?”
“No, I didn’t tell her. And like I said, I didn’t tell the cops. You think it would have made sense to tell them I was sitting outside that house for any time that night?”
I gazed out the window and into the Sound, at Charles Island in the distance, as if the answers I’d been searching for, the answers Cynthia had been searching for, were always beyond the horizon, impossible to reach.
“And why are you telling me this now?” I asked Vince.
He ran his hand over his chin, squeezed his nose. “Fuck, I don’t know. I’m guessing, all these years have been hard on Cyn, am I right?”
I felt that like a slap, to know that Vince might have called Cynthia by the same term of endearment I used. “Yes,” I said. “Very hard. Especially lately.”
“And why’s she disappeared?”
“We had a fight. And she’s scared. All the things that have happened in the last few weeks, the fact that the police don’t seem to entirely trust her. She’s scared for our daughter. The other night, there was someone standing on the street, looking at our house. Her aunt is dead. The detective we hired has been murdered.”
“Hmm,” Vince said. “That’s a hell of a mess. I wish there was something I could do to help.”
We were both startled at that moment when the door opened. Neither of us had heard anyone coming up the stairs.
It was Jane.
“Jesus Christ, Vince, are you going to help the poor bastard or not?”
“Where the hell were you?” he said. “You been listening in this whole time?”
“It’s a goddamn screen door,” Jane said. “You don’t want people to listen, maybe you better build yourself a little bank vault up here.”
“Goddamn,” he said.
“So are you going to help him? It’s not like you’re really busy or anything. And you got the Three Stooges to help you if you need them.”
Vince looked tiredly at me. “So,” he said. “Is there any way I could be of assistance to you?”
Jane was watching him with her arms folded across her chest.
I didn’t know what to say. Not knowing what I was up against, I couldn’t predict whether I needed the kinds of services someone like Vince Fleming offered. Even though he’d stopped trying to yank my hair out by the roots, I was still intimidated by him.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why don’t I tag along for a while, see what develops,” he said. When I didn’t immediately take him up on it, he said, “You don’t know whether to trust me, do you?”
I figured he’d be able to spot a lie. “No,” I said.
“That’s smart,” he said.
“So you’ll help him?” Jane said. Vince nodded. To me, she said, “You better get back to school fast.” Then she left, and this time we could hear her going down the stairs.
Vince said, “She scares the living shit out of me.”
35
I couldn’t think of anything cleverer to do at the moment than drive home, check and see whether Cynthia or anyone else might have phoned. If she was trying to get me, she’d probably try my cell if she couldn’t reach me at home, but I was feeling a bit desperate.
Vince Fleming released his thugs with the SUV, and offered to drive me back to my car in his own vehicle, which turned out to be an aggressive-looking Dodge Ram pickup. My house was not far off the route back to the body shop, where I’d left my car before walking over to the doughnut shop, and later being abducted. I asked Vince if he’d mind stopping there briefly so I could check whether, by any chance, Cynthia had come home, or even dropped by and left me a message.
“Sure,” he said as we got into his truck, which was parked alongside the curb on East Broadway.
“I’ve always wanted to get a place along here, as long as I’ve lived in Milford,” I said.
“I’ve always lived around here,” Vince said. “You?”
“I didn’t grow up around here.”
“As kids, sometimes, when the tide was out, we’d walk out to Charles Island. But then you wouldn’t have time to get back before the tide came in again. That was always fun.”
I felt some anxiety about my new friend. Vince was, not to put too fine a point on it, a criminal. He ran a criminal organization. I had no idea how big or small it was. It was certainly big enough to have three guys on the payroll who were on call to grab people off the street who made Vince nervous.
What if Jane Scavullo hadn’t walked in? What if she hadn’t persuaded Vince I was an okay guy? What if Vince had continued to believe that I presented some sort of a threat to him? How might things have turned out?
Like a fool, I decided to ask.
“Suppose Jane hadn’t dropped by when she did,” I said. “What would have happened to me?”
Vince, right hand on the wheel, left arm resting on the windowsill, glanced over. “You really want an answer to that question?”
I let it go. My mind was already heading in another direction, questioning Vince Fleming’s motives. Was he helping me because Jane wanted him to, or was he genuinely concerned about Cynthia? Was it a bit of both? Or had he decided that doing what Jane wanted was a good way to keep an eye on me?
Was his story about what he saw out front of Cynthia’s house that night true? And if it wasn’t, what possible point would there be in telling it?
I was inclined to believe it.
I gave Vince directions to our street, pointed out the house up ahead. But he kept on driving, didn’t even slow down. Went right past the house.
Oh no. I’d been suckered. I was about to have a date with a wood chipper.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What are you doing?”
“You got cops out front of your house,” he said. “Unmarked car.” I glanced into the oversized mirror hanging off the driver’s door, saw the car parked across the street from the house receding into the background.
“That’s probably Wedmore,” I said.
“We’ll drive around the block, come in from the back,” Vince said, like he did this sort of thing all the time.
And that’s what we did. We left the truck one street over, walked between a couple of houses, and approached my house through the backyard.
Once inside, I looked for any evidence that Cynthia might have returned, a note, anything.
She had not.
Vince wandered the first floor, looking at the pictures on the walls, the books we had on our shelves. Casing the joint, I thought. His eyes landed on the open shoeboxes of mementos.
“The hell’s this stuff?” he asked.
“It’s Cynthia’s. From her house when she was a kid. She goes through it all the time, hoping it will offer up some sort of secret. I was kind of doing the same thing today, after she left.”
Vince sat on the couch, ran his hand through the stuff. “Looks like a lot of useless shit to me,” he said.
“Yeah, well, so far that’s exactly what it’s been,” I said.
I tried phoning Cynthia’s cell on the off chance that it might be on. I was about to hang up after the fourth ring when I heard Cynthia say, “Hello?”
“Cyn?”
“Hi, Terry.”
“Jesus, are you okay? Where are you?”