“Your teacher?” Vince said, not relaxing his grip on my hair. “What teacher?”
“My fucking creative writing teacher,” Jane said. “If you’re going to beat the shit out of my teachers, there are other ones you could start with first. This is Mr. Archer. He’s, like, the least assholish of any of them.” She approached. “Hi, Mr. Archer.”
“Hi, Jane,” I said.
“When are you coming back?” she asked. “This guy they got in to teach your class is a complete dweeb. Everybody’s skipping. He’s worse than that woman who stutters. Nobody gives a shit whether he takes attendance or not. He’s always got something stuck in his teeth, and he’s got his finger in there, trying to get it out, but he does it quick, like he thinks you won’t notice, but he’s not fooling anybody.” I noticed that Jane, outside of school, was not nearly so shy about talking to me.
Then, casually, she asked Vince, “What’s the deal?”
“Why don’t you run along, Jane, okay?” Vince said.
“Have you seen my mom?”
“I think she might be up at the garage. Why?”
“I need some money.”
“What for?”
“Stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Stuff stuff.”
“How much you need?”
Jane Scavullo shrugged. “Forty?”
Vince Fleming let go of my hair and reached into his back pocket for his wallet, pulled out two twenties, and handed them to Jane.
He said, “Is this the guy? The one you were talking about? Who likes your stories?”
Jane nodded. She was so relaxed, I had to assume she’d seen others getting this sort of treatment from Vince. The only thing different this time was that it was one of her teachers. “Yeah. Why you fucking him over?”
“Look, honey, I can’t really get into this with you.”
“I’m trying to find my wife,” I said. “She’s with my daughter, and I’m very worried about them. I thought your fa-I thought Vince here might be able to help me.”
“He’s not my father,” Jane said. “He and my mom have been together for a while now.” To Vince, she said, “I don’t mean that like an insult, about you not being my father. Because you’re okay.” To me, she said, “Remember that one story I wrote for you, about the guy making me eggs?”
I had to think. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“That was sort of based on Vince here. He’s decent.” She smiled at the irony. “Well, to me. So if you’re just trying to find your wife and kid, why’s Vince here getting all pissed with you?”
“Sweetheart,” Vince said.
She walked up to Vince, got right in his face. “You be nice to him or I’m fucked. His is, like, the only class where I’m getting any decent grades. If he wants help finding his wife, why don’t you help him find her, because if he’s not coming back to school until his wife gets found then I got to look at this guy picking his teeth every day and that’s not good for my education. It also makes me want to puke.”
Vince put an arm around her shoulder and walked her to the door. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to her, but just before she went back down the stairs, she said to me, “See ya, Mr. Archer.”
“Goodbye, Jane,” I said. She was so light-footed I didn’t hear her descend the stairs after the door closed.
Vince walked back over to the table, much of the menace gone out of his posture, and sat back down at the table. He looked a bit sheepish, and didn’t say anything right away.
“She’s a good kid,” I said.
Vince nodded. “Yeah, she is. Her mom, she and I’ve hooked up, and she’s a bit of a flake, but Jane, she’s okay. She’s been needing some, whaddya call it, stability in her life. I never raised any kids, and sometimes, I kind of think of her like a daughter.”
“She seems to get on pretty good with you,” I said.
“She fucking wraps me around her finger,” he said, and grinned. “She’s mentioned you. I didn’t make the connection when you told me who you were. But it’s Mr. Archer this, Mr. Archer that.”
“Really,” I said.
“She says you’ve encouraged her,” Vince said. “About her writing.”
“She’s pretty good.”
Vince pointed to the jammed bookshelves. “I read a lot. I’m not what you’d call a very educated kind of guy, but I like to read books. I especially like history, biography. Some adventure books. I’m kind of amazed by people who can do that, who can sit down and write a whole book. So when Jane said you thought she could be a writer, I thought that was kind of interesting.”
“She has her own voice,” I said.
“Huh?”
“You know how, when you read some writers, you’d know it was them even if their name wasn’t on the cover?”
“Sure.”
“That’s voice. I think Jane has that.”
Vince nodded. “Listen,” he said. “About what happened…”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, working up some spit in my mouth so I could swallow.
“People start asking questions about you, trying to find you, that can be a bit worrying for someone like me,” he said.
“What does that mean, someone like you?” I asked, running my fingers through my hair, trying to get it looking normal again.
“Well, let me put it this way,” Vince said. “I’m not a creative writing teacher. I don’t imagine, in your line of work, that you might have to do some of the things that I have to do in mine.”
“Like sending out guys in SUVs to grab people off the street,” I said.
“Exactly,” Vince said. “That kind of thing.” He paused. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be good.”
He walked over to the counter, poured me a cup from the coffeemaker, and came back to the table.
“I’m still concerned that you and that detective and that cop have been asking around for me,” Vince said.
“May I be frank without having my hair pulled out or a knife stabbed into the table between my fingers?”
Slowly, Vince nodded, not taking his eyes off me.
“You were with Cynthia that night. Her father found the two of you and dragged her home. Less than twelve hours later, Cynthia wakes up and she’s the only one left in her family. You are, presumably, one of the last people to see a member of her family, other than Cynthia herself, alive. And I’m not sure whether you had a fight with her father, Clayton Bigge, but at the very least it must have been an awkward situation, her father finding you, taking her home with him.” I paused. “But I’m sure the police went over all this with you at the time.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I didn’t tell them anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I didn’t tell them anything. That was one thing I learned from my old man, God rest his soul. You never answer questions from the cops. Even if you’re one hundred percent innocent. Nobody’s situation ever improved after talking to the cops.”
“But you might have been able to help them figure out what happened.”
“Wasn’t my concern.”
“But didn’t that make the police suspect you had something to do with it? Refusing to talk?”
“Maybe. But they can’t convict you on suspicion. They need evidence. And they didn’t have any of that. If they’d had any evidence, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here having a nice chat with you right now.”
I took a sip of my coffee. “Whoa,” I said. “This is excellent.” It was.
“Thank you,” Vince said. “Now, may I be frank with you without you pulling my hair out?” He grinned.
“I don’t think you have much to worry about there,” I said.
“I felt bad about it. About not being able to help Cynthia. Because she was…I don’t wish to offend you here at all, being her husband.”
“It’s okay.”
“She was a very, very nice girl. A bit fucked up like all kids that age, but nothing compared to me. I’d already been in shit with the cops. I guess she went through a period of being attracted to the bad boy. Before she met you.” He said it like I was a bit of a comedown for her. “No offense intended.”
“None taken.”
“She was a sweet kid, and I felt terrible about what happened to her. Jesus, imagine, you wake up one day, your fucking family’s gone. And I wished I could do something for her, you know? But my dad said to me, he said walk away from a chick like that. You don’t need those kinds of problems. Cops are going to be looking at you enough already, with your background, with an old man like me involved in the shit I’m involved in, that’s all we need, you messed up with a girl whose entire family probably got murdered.”
“I guess I can understand that.” I chose my words carefully. “Your father, he did okay, am I right?”
“Money?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. He did all right for himself. While he could. Before he got killed.”
“I heard a bit about that,” I said.
“What else did you hear?”
“I heard that the people who most likely did it got paid back.”
Vince smiled darkly. “That they did.” He came back to the present and asked, “So what’s your point, about money?”
“Do you think your father, do you think he would have had any sympathy for Cynthia, the situation she found herself in? To the point that he would have helped pay for her education, to go to college?”
“Huh?”
“I’m just asking. Do you think he might have thought you were responsible somehow, that maybe you had something to do with her family going missing, and that he gave money to Cynthia’s aunt, Tess Berman, anonymously, to help cover the costs of her schooling?”
Vince looked at me as though I had lost my mind. “You say you’re a teacher? They let people teach in the public schools with minds this fucked up?”
“You could just say no.”
“No.”
“Because,” I said, and I was debating with myself whether I should be sharing this information, but sometimes you just go with your gut, “someone did that.”
“No shit?” Vince asked. “Someone was giving her aunt money for school?”
“That’s right.”
“And no one ever knew who?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that’s weird,” he said. “And this aunt, you say she’s dead?”
“That’s right.”
Vince Fleming leaned back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling a moment, came back forward and put his elbows on the table. He let out a long sigh.
“Well, I’ll tell you something,” he said, “but not if you’re going to tell the cops, because if you do, I’ll tell them I never said any of this, because they might find a way to use it against me, the fuckers.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe I could have told them this and it wouldn’t have come back to bite me in the ass, but I couldn’t afford to take the chance. I couldn’t admit to being where I was at the time, even if it might have helped Cynthia out. I guessed it might cross the cops’ minds at some point that she had something to do with killing her own family, even though I knew she could never do that. I didn’t want to get dragged into it.”
My mouth felt dry. “Anything you can tell me now, I’d be grateful.”
“That night,” he said, closing his eyes a moment, as though picturing it, “after her old man found us in the car, took her home, I drove after them. Didn’t follow them exactly, but I guess I was wondering just how much shit she was in, thought maybe I could see whether her father was screaming at her, that kind of thing. But I was way back, really couldn’t see all that much.”
I waited.
“I saw them pull into the driveway, go into the house together. She was a bit wobbly on her feet, you know? She’d had a bit to drink, we both had, but I’d already built up a pretty good tolerance by that point.” He grinned. “I was a young starter.”
I felt Vince was moving toward something important and didn’t want to slow him down with my own stupid comments.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I parked down the street, thinking maybe she’d leave again after her parents reamed her out, you know, she’d get all pissed off and storm out, and then I could drive up and pick her up. But that didn’t happen. And after a while, this other car drove past me, going slow, like someone was trying to read the house numbers, you know?”
“Okay.”
“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.”