No Time for Goodbye (10 page)

“I’d like to introduce you to Keisha Ceylon,” Paula said.

I guess I was expecting someone who looked like a gypsy or something. A flower child, maybe. Someone in a floor-length tie-dyed skirt, not someone who looked like she could be chairing a board meeting.

“Pleased to meet you,” Keisha said, shaking hands with us. She caught something in my look and said, “You were expecting something different.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“And this must be Grace,” she said, bending down to shake hands with our daughter.

“Hi,” Grace said.

“Is there someplace Grace could go?” I asked.

Grace said, “Can I stay?” She looked up at Keisha. “Have you, like, seen Mom’s parents in a vision or something?”

“Maybe, what do you call it, a green room?” I said.

“Why is it green?” Grace asked as she was led away by some assistant to an assistant.

After they’d put some makeup on Cynthia and Keisha, they were seated on the couch with the shoebox between them. Paula got herself into a chair opposite them while a couple of cameras were wheeled noiselessly into position. I retreated back into the darkness of the studio, far enough to be out of the way, but close enough to watch.

Paula did some setup stuff, a recap of the story they’d broadcast a few weeks earlier. They’d be able to edit more into the segment later. Then she told her audience of a startling development in the case. A psychic had stepped forward, a woman who believed she could offer some insights into the disappearance of the Bigge family in 1983.

“I had seen your show,” said Keisha Ceylon, her voice low and comforting. “And of course I found it interesting. But I didn’t think much more about it after that. And then, a couple of weeks later, I was helping a client attempt to communicate with a lost relative, and I was not having the success I normally do, as though there were some kind of interference, like I was on one of those old party lines and someone else is picking up the phone when you’re trying to make a call.”

“Fascinating,” breathed Paula. Cynthia remained expressionless.

“And I heard this voice, she said to me, ‘Please get a message to my daughter.’”

“Really? And did she say who she was?”

“She said her name was Patricia.”

Cynthia blinked.

“And what else did she say?”

“She said she wanted me to reach her daughter, Cynthia.”

“Why?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I think she wanted me to contact her so that I could learn more. That’s why I wanted you”—she smiled at Cynthia—“to bring some mementos, so that I could hold them, perhaps understand better what happened.”

Paula leaned in toward Cynthia. “You brought some things, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Cynthia said. “This is one of the shoeboxes I showed you before. Pictures, old clippings, just bits and pieces of things. I can show you what’s inside and—”

“No,” said Keisha. “That’s not necessary. If you would just give me the entire box…”

Cynthia let her take it, let her set it on her lap. Keisha put a hand on each end of the box and closed her eyes.

“I feel so much energy coming from this,” she said.

Give me a fucking break, I thought.

“I feel…sadness. So much sadness.”

“What else do you feel?” Paula asked.

Keisha furrowed her brow. “I sense…that you are about to receive a sign.”

“A sign?” said Cynthia. “What kind of sign?”

“A sign…that will help answer your questions. I’m not sure I can tell you more.”

“Why?” asked Cynthia.

“Why?” asked Paula.

Keisha opened her eyes. “I…I need you to turn the cameras off for a moment.”

“Huh?” said Paula. “Fellas? Can we hold off for a second?”

“Okay,” said one of the guys manning a camera.

“What’s the problem, Keisha?” said Paula.

“What is it?” Cynthia asked, alarmed. “What is it you didn’t want to say on camera? Something about my mother? Something about what she wanted you to tell me?”

“Sort of,” Keisha said. “But I just wanted to get straight, before we go any further, how much I’m getting paid to do this.”

Here we go.

“Uh, Keisha,” said Paula, “I think it was explained to you that while we would cover your expenses, put you up in a hotel for the night if necessary—I know you had to come down from Hartford—we weren’t paying you for your services in any sort of professional sense.”

“That wasn’t my understanding,” she said, getting a bit huffy now. “I’ve some very important stuff to tell this lady, and if you want to hear it, I’m going to need to be financially compensated.”

“Why don’t you tell her what you have to say and we’ll go from there?” Paula suggested.

I walked forward to the set, caught Cynthia’s eye. “Hon,” I said, tipping my head, the international “let’s go” gesture.

She nodded resignedly, unclipped the microphone from her blouse, and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Paula asked.

“We’re outta here,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Keisha asked, outraged. “Where are you going? Lady, if this show isn’t going to pay to hear what I know, maybe you should.”

Cynthia said, “I’m not going to be made a fool of anymore.”

“A thousand dollars,” Keisha said. “I’ll tell you what your momma told me to tell you for a thousand dollars.”

Cynthia was rounding the couch. I reached out my hand for hers.

“Okay, seven hundred!” Keisha said as we went to find our way to the green room.

“You really are a piece of work,” Paula told Keisha. “You could have been on TV. All the free advertising in the world, but you’ve got to shake us down for a few hundred bucks.”

Keisha gave Paula the evil eye, looked at her hair. “That’s one bad dye job, bitch.”

“You were right,” Cynthia said on the drive home.

I shook my head. “You were good, walking away like that. You should have seen the look on that so-called psychic’s face when you took off your mike. It’s like she was watching her meal ticket walk away.”

Cynthia’s smile was caught in the glare of some oncoming headlights. Grace, after a flurry of questions we declined to answer, had fallen asleep in the backseat.

“What a waste of an evening,” Cynthia said.

“No,” I said. “What you said was right, and I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about this. Even if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance, you have to check it out. So we checked it out. And now we can cross it off and move on.”

We pulled into the drive. I opened the back door, unbuckled Grace, and carried her into the house, following Cynthia into the living room. She walked ahead of me, turned on the lights in the kitchen as I headed for the stairs to carry Grace up to bed.

“Terry,” Cynthia said.

Ordinarily, I might have said “Be there in a sec” and taken Grace upstairs first, but there was something in my wife’s voice that said I should come into the kitchen immediately.

So I did.

Sitting in the center of the kitchen table was a man’s black hat. An old, worn, shiny-with-wear fedora.

12

She tried to move
in a bit closer, got as near to him as she could, and whispered, “For heaven’s sake, are you even listening to me? I come all this way and you won’t even open your eyes. You think it’s easy getting here? The things you’ve put me through. I make the effort, seems the least you could do is stay awake a few minutes. You’ve got the whole day to sleep, I’m only here for a little while.

“Well, let me tell you something. You’re not quitting on us. You’re going to be with us for a while longer, that’s for sure. When it’s time for you to go, believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”

And then he seemed to be trying to say something.

“What’s that?” she said. She was just able to make out a question. “Oh, him,” she said. “He couldn’t come tonight.”

13

Gently, I set Grace down
on the couch in the living room, tucked a throw pillow under her head, and went back into the kitchen.

The fedora might as well have been a dead rat, the way Cynthia was staring at it. She was standing as far away from the table as possible, her back to the wall, and her eyes were full of fear.

It wasn’t the hat itself that scared me. It was how it got there. “You watch Grace for a minute,” I said.

“Be careful,” Cynthia said.

I went upstairs, flicked on the lights in each room and poked in my head as I did so. Checked the bathroom, then decided to check the other rooms again, looking in closets, under beds. Everything looked the way it should.

I came back down to the main floor, opened the door to our unfinished basement. At the bottom of the steps I waved my hand around, caught the string, and turned on the bare bulb.

“What do you see?” Cynthia called from upstairs.

I saw a washer and dryer, a workbench piled with junk, an assortment of nearly empty paint cans, a folded-up spare bed. Nothing much else.

I came back upstairs. “The house is empty,” I said.

Cynthia was still staring at the hat. “He was here,” she said.

“Who was here?”

“My father. He was here.”

“Cynthia, someone was here and left that on the table, but your father?”

“It’s his hat,” she said, more calmly than I might have expected. I approached the table, reached out to grab it. “Don’t touch it!” she said.

“It’s not going to bite me,” I said, and grabbed one of the peaks between my thumb and forefinger, then grabbed it with both hands, turning it over, looking inside.

It was an old hat, no question. The edges of the brim were worn, the lining darkened from years of sweat, the nap worn to the point of shiny in places.

“It’s just a hat,” I said.

“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.