“I didn’t really pay much attention, but then when it got down to the end of the street, it turned around, and then parked on the other side of the street, a couple of houses down from Cynthia’s place.”
“Could you see who was in it? What kind of car was it?”
“It was some piece of AMC shit, I think. An Ambassador or Rebel or something. Blue, I think. Looked like one person in the car. I couldn’t really tell who it was, but it looked to me like it was a woman. Don’t ask me why, but that was the sense I got.”
“A woman was parked out front of the house. Watching it?”
“Seemed like it. And I remember, they weren’t Connecticut plates on the car. New York State, which were kinda orange, I think, back then. But shit, you see plenty of those around.”
“How long did the car stay there?”
“Well, after a while, not that long really, Mrs. Bigge and Todd, the brother?”
I nodded.
“They came out and got in the mother’s car, this yellow Ford, and they drove off.”
“Just the two of them? The father, Clayton, he wasn’t with them?”
“Nope. Just Mom and Todd. He got in the passenger side, I don’t think he had his license yet, but I don’t really know. But they went somewhere. I don’t know where. As soon as they rounded the corner, this other car, the lights came on, and it followed them.”
“What did you do?”
“I just sat there. What else would I do?”
“But this other car, this Ambassador or whatever, it followed Cynthia’s mother and brother.”
Vince looked at me. “Am I going too fast?”
“No, no, it’s just, in twenty-five years, I know Cynthia has never heard about this.”
“Well, that’s what I saw.”
“Is there anything else?”
“I guess I sat there for another forty-five minutes or so, and was just thinking of fucking off and going home, and suddenly the front door of the house opens, and the father, Clayton, he goes running out of the house like he’s got a huge bug up his ass. Gets in the car, backs out at like a hundred miles an hour, drives off fast as can be.”
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?”
“We’re fine, Terry.”
“Honey, come home. Please come home.”
“I don’t know,” she said. There was a lot of background noise, a kind of humming.
“Where are you?”
“In the car.”
“Hi, Dad!” It was Grace, shouting so she could be heard from the passenger seat.
“Hi, Grace!” I said.
“Dad says hi,” Cynthia said.
“When are you coming back?” I asked.
“I said I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “I just need some time. I told you in my letter.” She didn’t want to go over it again, not in front of Grace.
“I’m worried about you, and I miss you,” I said.
“Tell her hi,” Vince shouted from the living room.
“Who’s that?” Cynthia asked.
“Vince Fleming,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t run off the road,” I said.
“What’s he doing there?”
“I went to see him. I had this crazy idea maybe you’d have gone to visit him.”
“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “Tell him…I said hi.”
“She says hi,” I told Vince. He just grunted from the other room, rooting about in the shoeboxes.
“But he’s at the house? Now?”
“Yeah. He was giving me a lift back to my car. It’s kind of a long story. I’ll tell you about it when you get back. Plus,” I hesitated, “he told me a couple of other things, about that night, that he hadn’t told anyone about before.”
“Like what?”
“Like he followed you and your dad back home that night, sat out front for a while, waiting for a chance to knock on your door and see how you were doing, and he saw Todd and your mom leave, then later, your dad left. In a hurry. And there was another car out front for a while, that left after your mom and Todd did.”
There was nothing but road noise coming through the phone.
“Cynthia?”
“I’m here. I don’t know what it means.”
“Me neither.”
“Terry, there’s traffic, I have to get off the road. I’m turning off the phone. I forgot to bring a charger and there’s not much battery left.”
“Come home soon, Cyn. I love you.”
“Bye,” she said, and ended the call. I replaced the receiver and went into the living room.
Vince Fleming handed me a newspaper clipping, the one of Todd standing with fellow members of a basketball team.
“That looks like Todd in that one,” Vince said. “I remember him.”
I nodded, not taking the clipping from his hand. I’d seen it a hundred times before. “Yeah. Did you have classes together or something?”
“Maybe one. Picture’s goofy, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t recognize anyone else in it. It’s nobody from our school back then.”
I took it from him, although there wasn’t much point. I didn’t go to school with Todd or Cynthia and wouldn’t know any of their classmates. Cynthia had never paid that much attention to this picture, as far as I could tell. I gave it a passing glance.
“And the name is wrong,” Vince said, pointing to the cutline under the picture listing the names of the players from left to right, bottom row, center row, top row.
I shrugged. “Okay. So newspapers get names wrong.” I looked at the cutline, which gave everyone’s last name and first initial. Todd was standing two from the left, center row. I scanned the cutline, read the name where his should have been.
The name was J. Sloan.
I stared for a moment at the initial and the word that followed it.
“Vince,” I said, “Does the name J. Sloan mean anything to you?”
He shook his head. “No.”
I double-checked that the name was, in fact, referring to the individual in the center row, two from the left.
“Holy fuck,” I said.
Vince looked at me. “You wanna fill me in?”
“J. Sloan,” I said. “Jeremy Sloan.”
Vince shook his head. “I still don’t get it.”
“The man in the food court,” I said. “At the Post Mall. That was the name of this man Cynthia accused of being her brother.”
36
“What are you talking about?” Vince asked.
“A couple of weeks ago,” I said, “Cynthia and Grace and I are at the mall, and Cynthia sees this guy, she’s convinced he’s Todd. Says he looks like what Todd would probably look like all grown up, twenty-five years later.”
“How did you get his name?”
“Cynthia followed him, out to the parking lot. She called out to him, called him Todd, he didn’t respond, so she goes right up to him, says she’s his sister, that she knows he’s her brother.”
“Jesus,” Vince said.
“It was a horrible scene. The guy denied up and down that he was her brother, he acted like she was a crazy person, and she was acting like a crazy person. So I took the guy aside, said I was sorry, said maybe, if he showed Cynthia his driver’s license, if he could prove to her he wasn’t who she thought he was, she’d leave him alone.”
“He did that?”
“Yeah. I saw the license. New York State. His name was Jeremy Sloan.”
Vince took the clipping back from me, looked at the name attached to Todd Bigge. “That’s pretty fucking curious, isn’t it?”
“I can’t figure this out,” I said. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why is Todd’s picture in an old newspaper clipping with this different name?”
Vince was quiet for a moment. “This guy,” he said finally. “The one from the mall. He say anything at all?”
I tried to think. “He said he thought my wife should get help. But not much other than that.”
“What about the license?” Vince said. “You remember anything about that?”
“Just that it was New York,” I said.
“It’s kind of a fucking big state,” Vince said. “He might live across the line in Port Chester or White Plain
s or something, and he might be from fucking Buffalo.”
“I think it was Young something.”
“Young something?”
“I’m not sure. Shit, I only saw the license for a second.”
“There’s a Youngstown in Ohio,” Vince said. “You sure it wasn’t an Ohio license?”
“I could tell that much.”
Vince flipped the clipping over. There was text on the back, but the clipping had clearly been saved for the picture. The scissors had gone through the center of a column, cut a headline in half on the back side.
“That’s not why he would have saved it,” I said.
“Shut up,” Vince said. He was reading bits and pieces of stories, then looked up. “You got a computer?”
I nodded.
“Fire it up,” Vince said. He followed me upstairs, stood over me as I pulled up a chair and turned the computer on. “There’s bits of a story here, involving Falkner Park and Niagara County. Throw all that into Google.”
I asked him to spell “Falkner,” then typed in the words, hit Search. It didn’t take long to figure it all out. “There’s a Falkner Park in Youngstown, New York, in Niagara County,” I said.
“Bingo,” Vince said. “So this is most likely from some paper from that area, because it’s just a piss-piddly story about park maintenance.”
I turned around in my chair, looked up at him. “Why is Todd in a picture in a paper from Youngstown, New York, with a bunch of basketball players from some other school, and he’s listed as J. Sloan?”
Vince leaned up against the doorframe. “Maybe it’s not a mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it’s not a picture of Todd Bigge. Maybe it’s a picture of J. Sloan.”
I gave that a second to sink in. “What are you saying? That there are two people? One named Todd Bigge and one named J. Sloan—Jeremy Sloan—or is there one person with two names?”
“Hey,” said Vince, “I’m just here because Jane asked me.”
I turned back to the computer, went to the White Pages website where you could look up phone numbers, entered in Jeremy Sloan for Youngstown, New York.
The search came up empty, but suggested I try alternatives, like J. Sloan, or the last name only. I tried the latter, and up came a handful of Sloans in the Youngstown area.