“Go for it,” I said.
She ran into the kitchen, dragged a chair over to reach the freezer compartment, grabbed the ice cream and a spoon from the drawer, and ran back downstairs.
Tess’s eyes were moist when I looked back at her.
I said, “I think you should be the one to tell Cynthia.”
She reached out and held my hand. “Oh, of course, I wouldn’t make you do that. I just needed to tell you first, so when I tell Cynthia, you’ll be ready to help her through it.”
I said, “She’ll have to help me through it, too.”
Tess grinned at that. “You turned out to be a pretty good catch for her. I wasn’t so sure at first, you know.”
“So you’ve said.” I smiled.
“You seemed a bit serious to me. Very earnest. But you turned out to be perfect. I’m so glad she found you, all the heartache she’s had.”
Then Tess looked away, but squeezed my hand a little harder. “There’s something else,” she said.
The way she said it, it was like what she still had to tell me was bigger than the fact that she was dying.
“There are some things I need to tell, while I’m still able to, to get it off my chest. You understand what I mean?”
“I suppose so.”
“And I’ve only got so much time left to tell it. What if something happens and I go tomorrow? What if I never get a chance to tell you what I know? Thing is, I don’t know whether Cynthia’s ready to hear all this, I don’t even know if it does her any service to know, because what I have to say only raises more questions than it answers. It may torment her more than help her.”
“Tess, what is it?”
“Just hold your horses and hear me out. You need to know this, because it might be an important piece of the puzzle someday. On its own, I don’t know what to make of it, but maybe, in the future, you’ll find out a bit more about what happened to my sister and her husband, to Todd. And if you do, this might be useful.”
I was breathing, but it felt as though I was holding my breath, waiting for Tess to say what she had to say.
“What?” Tess said, looking at me like I was stupid. “You don’t want to know?”
“Jesus Christ, Tess, I’m waiting.”
“It’s about the money,” she said.
“Money?”
Tess nodded tiredly. “There was money. It would just show up.”
“Money from where?”
Her eyebrows went up. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Where was it coming from? Who was it coming from?”
I ran my hand over the top of my head, starting to feel exasperated. “Just start at the beginning.”
Tess breathed in slowly through her nose. “It wasn’t going to be easy, raising Cynthia. But like I said, I didn’t have any choice. There wasn’t any other choice I’d have wanted to make. She was my niece, my sister’s flesh and blood. I loved her like she was my own child, so when it happened, I took her in.
“She’d been a bit of a wild kid there, up until her folks up and vanished, and in some ways, that calmed her down. She started to get a little more serious about things, started paying attention at school. She had her moments, of course. The cops brought her home one night, found her with marijuana.”
“Really?” I said.
Tess smiled. “Let her off with a warning.” She put a finger to her lips. “Not a word.”
“Sure.”
“Anyway, a thing like that happens to you, losing your family, you think you’ve got license to do whatever the hell you want, to cut loose, stay out late, that you’re owed. You know?”
“I think so.”
“But there was a part of her wanted to get herself together. In case her parents came back, she’d see that she made something of herself, that she didn’t turn out to be useless. Even though they were gone, she wanted them to be proud of her. So she decided to go to school, to college.”
“The University of Connecticut,” I said.
“That’s right. Good school. Not cheap. I wondered how I was going to be able to afford it. Her marks, they weren’t bad, but they weren’t scholarship material, if you get my meaning. I was going to have to look into loans for her, that kind of thing.”
“Okay.”
“I found the first envelope in the car, on the passenger seat,” Tess said. “It was just sitting there. I’d come out from work, got in, there was this white envelope on the seat next to me. Thing is, I’d locked the car, but I’d left the windows open half an inch, it was pretty hot out and I wanted to let a little air in. There was enough room to fit in the envelope, but only just. It was pretty thick.”
I cocked my head to one side. “Cash?”
“Just under five thousand dollars of it,” Tess said. “All sorts of bills. Twenties, fives, some hundreds.”
“An envelope full of cash? No explanation, no note, nothing?”
“Oh, there was a note.”
She got up from her chair and took a few steps over to an antique rolltop desk off to one side of the front door, opened the single drawer. “I found all this when I started cleaning up in the basement, going through those boxes of books and everything else. I need to start paring things down now, make it easier for you and Cynthia to sort through my stuff when I’m gone.”
Held together with a rubber band was a small stack of envelopes, maybe a dozen or more. Together, they weren’t half an inch thick.
“They’re all empty,” Tess said. “But I always kept the envelopes just the same, even though there’s nothing written on them, no return address, no postmark, of course. But I thought, what if they’ve got fingerprints on them or something that might be useful to someone someday?”
Tess’s hands were all over them, so it was doubtful how much evidence they contained. But then again, forensic science wasn’t exactly my area of expertise. You didn’t see me teaching chemistry.
Tess worked a piece of paper out from under the rubber band. “This was the only note I ever got. With the first envelope. All the others that followed, they had cash in them, too, but never another word.”
She handed me a standard-sized piece of typewriter paper, folded in thirds. It had yellowed slightly with age.
I unfolded it.
The message was printed, very deliberately, in block letters. It read:
THIS IS TO HELP YOU WITH CYNTHIA. FOR HER EDUCATION, FOR WHATEVER ELSE YOU NEED. THERE WILL BE MORE, BUT YOU MUST FOLLOW THESE RULES. NEVER TELL CYNTHIA ABOUT THIS MONEY. NEVER TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT. NEVER TRY TO FIND OUT WHERE IT’S COMING FROM. NEVER.
That was it.
I must have read it three times before I looked at Tess, standing in front of me.
“I never did,” she said. “I never told Cynthia. I never told anyone. I never made any attempt to find out who had left it in my car. I never knew when, or where, it would show up. One time, I found it tucked into the
“You never saw anyone.”
“No. I think whoever left it was watching me, making sure I was far enough away for it to be safe. You want to know something? I always made sure, whenever I parked the car, to leave the window open a crack, just in case.”
“How much, altogether?”
“Over about six years, forty-two thousand dollars.”
