“Jesus.”
Tess reached out her hand. She wanted the note back. She folded it up, slipped it under the rubber band with the envelopes, got up, and put everything back into the desk drawer.
“So nothing for how many years?” I asked.
Tess thought a moment. “About fifteen, I guess. Nothing since Cynthia finished school. It was a blessing, I’ll tell you that. I’d have never got her through school without it, not without selling this house or taking out a new mortgage or something.”
“So,” I said, “who left it?”
“It’s the forty-two-thousand-dollar question,” Tess said. “It’s all I’ve ever wondered, all these years. Her mother? Her father? Both of them?”
“Which would mean they were alive all those years, or at least one of them was. Maybe still alive even now. But if one or the other of them was able to do that, to watch you, to leave you money, why wouldn’t they be able to get in touch?”
“I know,” Tess said. “It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Because I’ve always believed my sister is dead, that they’re all dead. That they all died the night they disappeared.”
“And if they are dead,” I said, “then whoever sent you that money, it’s someone who feels responsible for their deaths. Who’s trying to make it right.”
“You see what I mean?” Tess said. “It just raises more questions than it answers. The money, it doesn’t mean they’re alive. And it doesn’t mean they’re dead.”
“But it means something,” I said. “After it stopped, when it was clear there wasn’t any more coming, why didn’t you tell the police? They might have reopened the investigation.”
Tess’s eyes grew weary. “I know you might think I’ve never been afraid to stir up a bit of shit, but where this was concerned, Terry, I just didn’t know whether I wanted to know the truth. I was scared, and I was afraid of how much the truth, if we were able to find it, might hurt Cynthia. It’s taken its toll on me. The stress of it. I wonder if that’s why I’m sick. They say stress’ll do that to you, affect your body.”
“I’ve heard that.” I paused. “Maybe you need to talk to somebody.”
“Oh, I gave that a try,” Tess said. “I saw your Dr. Kinzler.”
I blinked. “You did?”
“Cynthia mentioned going to her, so I gave her a call, saw her a couple of times. But you know, I’m just not prepared to open up to a stranger. There are some things you only tell family.”
We heard a car pull into the driveway.
“It’s up to you whether to tell Cynthia,” Tess said. “About the envelopes, that is. The stuff about me, I’ll tell her about myself, soon enough.”
A car door opened, closed. I peeked out the window, saw Cynthia going around to the back of the car, the trunk open.
“I have to think about this,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. But thank you for telling me.” I paused. “I wish you’d told me sooner.”
“I wish I could have.”
The front door opened and Cynthia burst in with a couple of shopping bags at the same time Grace reappeared from the basement, holding the container of chocolate ice cream to her chest like it was a stuffed toy, her mouth smeared with chocolate.
Cynthia eyed her curiously. I could see the wheels turning, that she was thinking she’d been sent on a fool’s errand.
Tess said, “Right after you left, we suddenly realized we had ice cream after all. But I still needed all those other things. It’s my goddamn birthday. Let’s have a party.”
10
When I went into Grace’s bedroom to kiss her goodnight, it was already in darkness, but I quickly saw her silhouetted against the window, where she was peering at a moonlit sky through her telescope. I was just barely able to see that she had crudely wrapped masking tape around the scope where it was supported by the stand to hold it together.
“Sweetheart,” I said.
She twinkled some fingers but didn’t pry herself away from the telescope. As my eyes adjusted I could see her
“Whatcha see?” I asked.
“Not much,” she said.
“That’s too bad.”
“No, it’s not. If there’s nothing coming to destroy Earth, that’s a good thing.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you and Mom. If an asteroid was going to hit our house by morning, I’d be able to see it coming by now, so you can rest easy.”
I touched her hair, ran my hand down to her shoulder.
“Dad, you’re bumping my eye,” Grace said.
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
“I think Aunt Tess is sick,” she said.
Oh no. She’d been listening. Instead of being down in the basement, she’d been hiding at the top of the stairs.
“Grace, were you-”
“She just didn’t seem very happy for her birthday,” she said. “I’m way happier than that on my birthday.”
“Sometimes when you get older, having a birthday isn’t quite such a big deal,” I said. “You’ve already had a lot of them. The novelty kind of wears off after a while.”
“What’s novelty?”
“You know how when something’s new, it’s exciting? But then after a while, it gets kind of boring? When it’s new, it’s a novelty.”
“Oh.” She moved her telescope a bit to the left. “The moon is really shiny tonight. You can see all the craters.”
“Get to bed,” I said.
“In a minute,” she protested. “Sleep tight, and don’t worry about asteroids tonight.”
I decided not to be heavy-handed and demand that she get under the covers immediately. Letting a kid stay up past her bedtime to study the solar system didn’t strike me as a crime worthy of intervention by the child welfare authorities. After giving her a gentle kiss on her ear, I slipped out of her room and back down the hall to our bedroom.
Cynthia, who’d already said goodnight to Grace, was sitting up in bed, looking at a magazine, just turning the pages, not paying any real attention to them.
“I have some errands to run at the mall tomorrow,” she said, not taking her eyes away from the pages. “I’ve got to find Grace some new running shoes.”
“Hers don’t look worn out.”
“They’re not, but her toes are jammed up in them. You joining us?”
“Sure,” I said. “I might cut the grass in the morning. We could grab some lunch there.”
“That was nice today,” she said. “We don’t see Tess enough.”
“Why don’t we make it a weekly thing?” I said.
“You think?” She smiled.
“Sure. Have her here for dinner, take her to Knickerbocker’s, maybe out to that seafood place along the Sound. She’d like that.”
“She’d love it. She seemed a bit preoccupied today. And I think she’s starting to get a bit absentminded. I mean, she already had ice cream.”
