“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 Plains 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.
“Jesus,” I said, and pointed to the screen for Vince. “There’s a Clayton Sloan listed here on Niagara View Drive.”
“Clayton?”
“Yeah, Clayton.”
“That was Cynthia’s father’s first name,” Vince said, just wanting to be sure.
“Yeah,” I said. I grabbed a pencil and paper from the desk, wrote down the phone number off the computer screen. “I’m going to give this number a call.”
“Whoa!” Vince said. “You out of your fucking mind?”
“What?”
“Look, I don’t know what you’ve found here, or whether you’ve found anything, but what are you going to say when you call? On this phone? If they’ve got caller ID, they know right away who it is. Now, maybe they know who you are and maybe they don’t, but you don’t want to be tipping your hand, do you?”
What the hell was he up to? Was this actually good advice, or did Vince have some reason for not wanting me to call? Was he trying to keep me from connecting the dots because—
He handed me his cell phone. “Use this,” he said. “They won’t know who the hell is calling.”
I took the phone, flipped it open, looked at the phone number on the monitor, took a breath, and entered it into Vince’s phone. I put it to my ear and waited.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings.
“There’s nobody there,” I said.
“Give it a little longer,” Vince said.
When it got to be eight rings, I started to pull the phone away when I heard a voice.
“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice. Older, I thought, sixties at least.
“Oh, yes, hello,” I said. “I was just about to hang up.”
“Can I help you?”
“Is Jeremy there?” Even as I said it, I thought, and what if he is? What am I going to say? What on earth am I going to ask him? Or should I just hang up? Find out if he’s there, confirm that he actually exists, then end the call.
“I’m afraid not,” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I can try again in a little while.”
“He won’t be here later, either.”
“Oh. Do you know when I might be able to reach him?”
“He’s out of town,” the woman said. “I can’t say for sure when he’ll be back.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “He mentioned something to me about going to Connecticut.”
“He did?”
“I think so.”
“Are you sure about this?” She sounded quite perturbed.
“I could be wrong. Listen, I’ll just catch him later, it’s no big deal. Just a golf thing.”
“Golf? Jeremy doesn’t play golf. Who is this? I demand that you tell me.”
The call was already spiraling out of control. Vince, who had been leaning into me as I made the call and could hear both sides, drew a finger across his throat, mouthed the word “abort.” I folded the phone shut, ending the call, without saying another thing. I handed it back to Vince, who slipped it into his jacket.
“Sounds like you got the right place,” he said. “You might have played it a bit better, though.”
I ignored his critique. “So the Jeremy Sloan Cynthia found at the mall is very likely the Jeremy Sloan who lives in Youngstown, New York, at a house where the phone is listed under the name Clayton Sloan. And Cynthia’s father had kept a clipping in his drawer, of him with a basketball team.”
Neither of us said anything. We were both trying to get our heads around it.
“I’m going to call Cynthia,” I said, “bounce this off her.”
I raced back downstairs to the kitchen, dialed Cynthia’s cell. But as she’d promised, her phone was off. “Shit,” I said as Vince came into the kitchen behind me. “You got any ideas?” I asked him.
“Well, this Sloan guy, according to that woman—maybe she’s his mother, I don’t know—is still out of town. Which means he may still be in the Milford area. And unless he has friends or family here, he’s probably in some local motel or hotel.” He got the phone back out of his jacket, brought up a number from his contact list, hit one button. He waited a moment, then said, “Hey, it’s me. Yeah, he’s still with me. Something I need you to do.”
And then Vince told whoever was on the other end of the line to round up a couple of the other guys—I suspected this crew consisted of the two guys who grabbed me and their driver, the ones Jane called the Three Stooges—and start doing the rounds of the hotels in town.
“No, I
don’t
know how many there are,” he said. “Why don’t you count them for me? I want you to find out if there’s a guy named Jeremy Sloan, from Youngstown, New York, staying at one of them. And if you find out he is, you let me know. Don’t do anything. Okay. Maybe start with the Howard Johnson’s, the Red Roof, the Super 8, whatever. And Jesus, what the fuck is that horrible noise in the background? Huh? Who listens to the fucking Carpenters?”
Once the instructions were relayed and Vince was confident that they were fully understood, he put the phone back in his coat. “If this Sloan guy is in town, they’ll find him,” he said.
I opened the fridge, showed Vince a can of Coors. “Sure,” he said, and I tossed it to him, got one out for myself, and took a seat at the kitchen table. Vince sat down opposite me.
He said, “Do you have any fucking idea what’s going on?”
I swallowed some beer. “I think I might be starting to,” I said. “That woman who answered the phone. What if she’s this Jeremy Sloan’s mother? And what if this Jeremy Sloan really is my wife’s brother?”
“Yeah?”
“What if I just spoke to my wife’s mother?”
If Cynthia’s brother and mother were alive, then how did one explain the DNA tests on the two bodies they’d found in that car they’d fished out of the quarry? Except, of course, all Wedmore had been able to confirm for us up to now was that the bodies in the car were related to each other, not that they actually were Todd and Patricia Bigge. We were awaiting further tests to determine a genetic link between them and Cynthia’s DNA.
I was trying to get my head around this increasingly confusing jumble of information when I realized Vince was talking.
“I just hope those boys of mine don’t find him and kill him,” he said, taking another swig. “It’d be just like them.”