“Look inside,” she said. “My father, years ago, he lost a couple of hats, people took his by mistake at restaurants, one time he took somebody else’s, so he got a marker and he put a ‘C,’ the letter, he wrote it on the inside of the band. For ‘Clayton.’”
I ran my finger along the inside of the band, folding it back. I found it on the right side, near the back. I turned the hat around so that Cynthia could see.
She took a breath. “Oh my God.” She took three tentative steps toward me, reached her hand out. I extended the hat toward her, and she took it, holding it as though it was something from King Tut’s tomb. She held it reverently in her hands for a moment, then slowly moved it toward her face. For a moment, I thought she was going to put it on, but instead, she brought it to her nose, took in its fragrance.
“It’s him,” she said.
I wasn’t going to argue. I knew that the sense of smell was perhaps the strongest when it came to triggering memories. I could recall going back to my own childhood home once in adulthood—the one my parents moved from when I was four—and asking the current owners if they’d mind my looking around. They were most obliging, and while the layout of the house, the creak of the fourth step as I climbed to the second floor, the view of the backyard from the kitchen window, were all familiar, it was when I stuck my nose into a crawl space, and caught a whiff of cedar mixed with dampness, that I felt almost dizzy. A flood of memories broke through the dam at that moment.
So I had an idea of what Cynthia was sensing as she held the hat so close to her face. She could smell her father.
She just knew.
“He was here,” she said. “He was right here, in this kitchen, in our house. Why, Terry? Why would he come here? Why would he do this? Why would he leave his goddamn hat but not wait for me to come home?”
“Cynthia,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, “even if it is your father’s hat—and if you say it is, I believe you—the fact that it’s here doesn’t mean that it was your father that left it.”
“He never went anywhere without it. He wore it everywhere. He was wearing that hat the last night I saw him. It wasn’t left behind in the house. You know what this means, don’t you?”
I waited.
“It means he’s alive.”
“It might, yes, it might mean that. But not necessarily.”
Cynthia put the hat back on the table, started to reach for the phone, then stopped, then reached for it again, and again stopped herself.
“The police,” she said. “They can take fingerprints.”
“Off that hat?” I said. “I doubt it. But you already know it’s your father’s. Even if they could get his prints off it, so what?”
“No,” Cynthia said. “Off the knob.” She pointed to the front door. “Or the table. Something. If they find his fingerprints in here, it’ll prove he’s alive.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but I agreed that calling the police was a good idea. Someone—if not Clayton Bigge, then somebody—had been in our house while we were out. Was it breaking and entering if nothing appeared broken? At least it was entering.
I called 911. “Someone…was in our house,” I told the dispatcher. “My wife and I are very upset, we have a little girl, we’re very worried.”
There was a car at the house about ten minutes later. Two uniforms, a man and a woman. They checked the doors and windows for any obvious signs of entry, came up with nothing. Grace, of course, had woken up during all the excitement and was refusing to go to bed. Even when we sent her back to her room and told her to get ready for bed, we spotted her at the top of the stairs, peering through the railings like an underage inmate.
“Was anything stolen?” the woman cop asked, her partner standing alongside her, tipping his hat back and scratching his head.
“Uh, no, not as far as we can tell,” I said. “I haven’t had a close look, but it doesn’t seem like it.”
“Any damage done? Any vandalism of any kind?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing of that sort.”
“You need to check for fingerprints,” Cynthia said.
The male cop said, “Ma’am?”
“Fingerprints. Isn’t that what you do when there’s a break-in?”
“Ma’am, I’m afraid there’s no real evidence here that there’s been a break-in. Everything seems in order.”
“But this hat was left here. That shows someone broke in. We locked the house up before we left.”
“So you’re saying,” the male cop said, “someone broke in to your house, didn’t take anything, didn’t break anything, but they got in here just so they could leave that hat on your kitchen table?”
Cynthia nodded. I could imagine how this looked to the officers.
“I think we’d have a hard time getting someone out to dust for prints,” the woman said, “when there’s no evidence of a crime having been committed.”
“This may be nothing more than a practical joke,” her partner said. “Chances are it’s someone you know having a bit of fun with you is all.”
Fun, I thought. Look at us, falling down laughing.
“There’s no sign of the lock being messed with,” he said. “Maybe someone you’ve given a key to came in, left this here, thought it belonged to you. Simple as that.”
My eye went to the small, empty hook where we usually keep the extra key. The one Cynthia had noticed missing the other morning.
“Can you have an officer park out front?” Cynthia asked. “To keep an eye on the house? In case anyone tries to get in again? But just to stop them, see who it is, not hurt them. I don’t want you hurting whoever it is.”
“Cyn,” I said.
“Ma’am, I’m afraid there’s no call for that. And we don’t have the manpower to put a car out front of your house, not without good reason,” the woman cop said. “But if you have any more problems, you be sure to give us a call.”
With that, they excused themselves. And in all likelihood, got back in their car and had a good laugh at our expense. I could see us on the police blotter. Responded to report of strange hat. Everyone at the station would get a good chuckle out of that.
Once they were gone, we both took a seat at the kitchen table, the hat between us, neither of us saying a word.
Grace came into the kitchen, having slipped down the stairs noiselessly, pointed to the hat, grinned, and said, “Can I wear it?”
Cynthia grabbed the hat. “No,” she said.
“Go to bed, honey,” I said, and Grace toddled off. Cynthia didn’t release her grip on the hat until we went up to bed.
That night, staring at the ceiling again, I thought about how Cynthia had forgotten, at the last minute, to take along her shoebox to the station for that disastrous meeting with the psychic. How she’d had to run back into the house, just for a minute, while Grace and I waited in the car.
How, even though I’d offered to run in and get the box for her, she beat me to it.
She was in the house a long time, just to grab a box. Took an Advil, she told me when she got back into the car.
Not possible, I told myself, glancing over at Cynthia, sleeping next to me.
Surely not.
14
I had a free period, so I poked my head into Rolly Carruthers’s office. “I’m on a prep. You got a minute?”
Rolly looked at the stack of stuff on his desk. Reports from the board office, teacher evaluations, budget estimates. He was drowning in paperwork. “If you only need a minute, I’ll have to say no. If you need at least an hour, however, I might be able to help you out.”
“An hour sounds about right.”
“You had lunch?”
“No.”
“Let’s go over to the Stonebridge. You drive. I may decide to get smashed.” He slipped on his sport jacket, told his secretary he’d be out of the school for a while but she could reach him on his cell if the building caught fire. “So I’ll know that I don’t need to come back,” he said.
/> His secretary insisted he speak to one of the superintendents, who was holding, so he signaled to me that he would be just a couple of minutes. I stepped outside the office, right in the path of Jane Scavullo, who was bearing down the hall at high speed, no doubt for a date to beat the shit out of some other girl in the schoolyard.
The handful of books she was carrying scattered across the hallway. “Fucking hell,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said, and knelt down to help her pick them up.
“It’s okay,” she said, scrambling to get to the books before I did. But she wasn’t quick enough. I already had Foxfire, the Joyce Carol Oates book I’d recommended to her, in my hand.
She snatched it away from me, tucked it in with the rest of her stuff. I said, without a trace of I-told-you-so in my voice, “How are you liking it?”
“It’s good,” Jane said. “Those girls are seriously messed up. Why’d you suggest I read it? You think I’m as bad as the girls in this story?”
“Those girls aren’t all bad,” I said. “And no, I don’t think you’re like them. But I thought you’d appreciate the writing.”
She snapped her gum. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What do you care?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you care? About what I read, about my writing, that shit.”
“You think I’m a teacher just to get rich?”
She looked as though she was almost going to smile, and then caught herself. “I gotta go,” she said, and did.
The lunch crowd had thinned by the time Rolly and I got to the Stonebridge. He ordered some coconut shrimp and a beer to start, and I settled on a large bowl of New England clam chowder with extra crackers, and coffee.
Rolly was talking about putting their house on the market soon, that they’d have a lot of money left over after they paid for the mobile home in Bradenton. There’d be money to put in the bank, they could invest it, take the odd trip. And Rolly was going to buy a boat so he could fish along the Manatee River. It’s like he was already finished being a principal. He was someplace else.
“I got stuff on my mind,” I said.
Rolly took a sip of Sam Adams. “This about Lauren Wells?”
“No,” I said, surprised. “What made you think I wanted to talk about Wells?”
He shrugged. “I noticed you talking to her in the hall.”
“She’s a wingnut,” I said.
Rolly smiled. “A well-packaged wingnut.”
“I don’t know what it is. I think, in her world, Cynthia and I have achieved some sort of celebrity status. Lauren rarely spoke to me until we appeared on that show.”
“Can I have your autograph?” Rolly asked.
“Bite me,” I said. I waited a moment, as if to signal that I was changing gears here, and said, “Cynthia’s always thought of you like an uncle, you know? I know you looked out for her, after what happened. So I feel I can come to you, talk to you about her, when there’s a problem.”
“Go on.”
“I’m starting to wonder whether Cynthia’s losing it.”
Rolly put his glass of beer down on the table, licked his lips. “Aren’t the two of you already seeing some shrink, what’s-her-name, Krinkle or something?”
“Kinzler. Yeah. Every couple of weeks or so.”
“Have you talked to her about this?”
“No. It’s tricky. I mean, there are times when she talks to us separately. I could bring it up. But, it’s not like it’s any one thing. It’s all these little things put together.”
“Like what?”
I filled him in. The anxiety over the brown car. The anonymous phone call from someone saying her family had forgiven her, how she’d accidentally erased the call. Chasing the guy in the mall, thinking he was her brother. The hat in the middle of the table.
“What?” Rolly said. “Clayton’s hat?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Evidently. I mean, I suppose she could have had it tucked away in a box all these years. But it did have this little marking inside, his first initial, under the lining.”
Rolly thought about that. “If she put the hat there, she could have written in the initial herself.”
That had never occurred to me. Cyn had let me look for the initials, rather than take the hat away from me and do it herself. Her expression of shock had been pretty convincing.
But I supposed what Rolly was suggesting was possible.
“And it doesn’t even have to be her father’s hat. It could be any hat. She could have bought it at a secondhand store, said it was his hat.”
“She smelled it,” I said. “When she smelled it, she said for sure it was her father’s hat.”
Rolly looked at me like I was one of his dumb high school students. “And she could have let you smell it, too, to prove it. But that proves nothing.”
“She could be making everything up,” I said. “I can’t believe my mind’s going there.”
“Cynthia doesn’t strike me as mentally unbalanced,” Rolly said. “Under tremendous stress, yes. But delusional?”
“No,” I said. “She’s not like that.”
“Or fabricating things? Why would she be making these things up? Why would she pretend to get that phone call? Why would she set up something like the hat?”
“I don’t know.” I struggled to come up with an answer. “To get attention? So that, what? The police, whoever, would reopen the case? Finally find out what happened to her family?”
“Then why now?” Rolly asked. “Why wait all this time to finally do this?”
Again, I had no idea. “Shit, I don’t know what to think. I just wish it would all end. Even if that meant we found out they had all died that night.”
“Closure,” Rolly said.
“I hate that word,” I said. “But yeah, basically.”
“And the other thing you need to consider,” Rolly said, “is that if she didn’t leave that hat on the table, then you actually had an intruder in your house. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it was Cynthia’s father.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve already decided we’ve got to get deadbolts.” I pictured a stranger moving about through the rooms of our house, looking at our things, touching our stuff, getting a sense of who we were. I shuddered.
“We try to remember to lock the house up every time we go out. We’re pretty good about it, but the odd time, I guess we must slip up. The back door, I guess it’s possible we’ve forgotten that once in a while, especially if Grace was in and out and we didn’t know it.” I thought about that missing key, tried to remember when I first noticed it wasn’t on the hook. “But I know we locked everything up the night we met with that nutjob psychic.”
“Psychic?” Rolly said. I brought him up to speed.
“When you get deadbolts,” Rolly said, “look into those bars you can put across basement windows. That’s how a lot of kids get in.”
I was quiet for the next few minutes. I hadn’t gotten to the big thing I wanted to discuss. Finally, I said, “The thing is, there’s more.”
“About what?”
“Cyn’s in such a delicate frame of mind, there’s stuff I’m not telling her.” Rolly raised an eyebrow. “About Tess,” I said.
Rolly took another sip of his Sam Adams. “What about Tess?”
“First of all, she’s not well. She told me she’s dying.”
“Ah, fuck,” Rolly said. “What is it?”
“She didn’t want to get into specifics, but I’m guessing it must be cancer or something like that. She doesn’t look all that bad, mostly just tired, you know? But she’s not going to get any better. At least that’s the way it looks at the moment.”
“Cynthia’ll be devastated. They’re so close.”
“I know. And I think it has to be Tess who tells her. I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. And before long, it’s going to become obvious that something’s wrong with her.”
“What’s the ot
her thing?”
“Huh?”
“You said ‘first of all’ a second ago. What’s the other thing?”
I hesitated. It seemed wrong to tell Rolly about the secret payments Tess had received before I told Cynthia, but that was one of the reasons why I was telling him—to get some guidance on how to break this to my wife.
“For a number of years, Tess was getting money.”
Rolly set down his beer, took his hand off the glass. “What do you mean, getting money?”
“Someone left money for her. Cash, in an envelope. A number of times, with a note that it was to help pay for Cynthia’s education. The amounts varied, but it added up to more than forty thousand dollars.”
“Fucking hell,” Rolly said. “And she’d never told you this before?”
“No.”
“Did she say who it was from?”
I shrugged. “That’s the thing. Tess had no idea, still has no idea, although she wonders whether the envelopes the money came in, the note, whether you could still get fingerprints off them after all these years, or DNA, shit, what do I know about that stuff? But she can’t help but think it’s linked to the disappearance of Cynthia’s family. I mean, who would give her money, other than someone from her family, or someone who felt responsible for what had happened to her family?”
“Jesus Christ,” Rolly repeated. “This is huge. And Cynthia doesn’t know anything about this?”
“No. But she’s entitled to know.”
“Sure, of course she is.” He wrapped his hand around the beer again, drained the glass, signaled the waitress that he wanted another. “I suppose.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I have the same concerns you do. Suppose you do tell her. What then?”
I moved my spoon around in the clam chowder. I didn’t have much of an appetite. “That’s the thing. It raises more questions than it answers.”
“And even if it did mean that maybe someone from Cynthia’s family was alive then, it doesn’t mean they’re alive now. The money stopped showing up when?”
“Around the time she finished at UConn,” I said.
“What’s that, twenty years?”
“Not quite. But a long time ago.”