No Time For Goodbye

where I’d stood, what I’d done, what I’d touched.

As I was leaving the room I happened to look at the small bulletin board next to the phone. There was the picture of Grace that I had taken on our trip to Disney World.

What was it Tess had said on the phone to me? After Denton Abagnall had been out to visit her?

I’d said something along the lines of, “If you think of anything else, you should give him a call.”

And Tess had said, “That’s what he asked me to do. He gave me his card. I’m looking at it right now, it’s pinned to my board here by the phone, right next to that picture of Grace with Goofy.”

There was no card on the board now.

21

“You don’t say,” she said. This was quite the development.

“Oh, it’s true,” he said.

“Well well well,” she said. “And to think we were just talking about her.”

“I know.”

“That’s quite the coinky-dink,” she said slyly. “You being down there and all.”

“Yeah.”

“She had it coming, you know,” she said.

“I knew you wouldn’t be upset when I told you. But I think it means we have to hold off for a couple of days on the next part.”

“Really?” she said. She knew she’d preached to him on the virtues of taking his time, but she was feeling impatient all of a sudden.

“There’s going to be a funeral here tomorrow,” he said, “and I guess there’s a whole lot of planning for something like that, and she didn’t even have any other family to make arrangements, right?”

“That’s my understanding,” she said.

“So my sister, she’s going to be pretty busy making all those arrangements, right? So maybe we should wait for that to be over.”

“I see your point. But there’s something I’d like you to do for me.”

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s just a little thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t call her your sister.” She was very firm.

“Sorry.”

“You know how I feel.”

“Okay. It’s just, well, you know, she is-”

“I don’t care,” she said.

“Okay, Mom,” he said. “I won’t do it again.”

22

There weren’t many people to call.

Patricia Bigge, Cynthia’s mother, had been Tess’s only sibling. Their own parents, of course, were long gone. Tess, although she had been married briefly, had never had any children of her own, and there was no point in trying to track down her ex-husband. He wouldn’t have come back for the funeral anyway, and Tess wouldn’t have wanted the son of a bitch there.

And Tess had not kept up any of her friendships with the people at the roads department office where she’d worked before retiring. From what Tess used to say, she didn’t have many friends there anyway. They didn’t care much for her liberal notions. She belonged to a bridge club, but Cynthia had no idea who any of the members were, so there were no calls to make there.

It wasn’t as though we had to alert everyone to the funeral. Tess Berman’s death had made the news.

There were interviews with other people who lived on her heavily wooded street, none of whom, by the way, had noticed anything unusual going on in the neighborhood in the hours leading up to Tess’s death.

“It really makes you wonder,” said one for the TV cameras.

“Things like that don’t happen around here,” said another.

“We’re being extra careful to lock our doors and windows at night,” said someone else.

Maybe, if Tess had been fatally stabbed by an ex-husband or a jilted lover, the neighbors could have felt more at ease. But the word from the police was that they had no idea who had done this, no idea as to motive. And no suspects.

There was no sign of forced entry. No signs of a struggle, aside from a kitchen table that was slightly askew and a single chair that had been knocked over. It appeared that Tess’s killer had struck quickly, Tess had resisted for only a moment or so, just long enough to make her attacker stumble into the table, knock the chair over. But then the knife was driven home, and she was dead.

Her body, police said, had been on the floor there for as long as twenty-four hours.

I thought of all the things we’d done while Tess lay dead in a pool of her own blood. We’d readied ourselves for bed, slept, gotten up, brushed our teeth, listened to the morning news on the radio, gone to work, had dinner, lived an entire day of our lives that Tess had not.

It was too much to think about.

When I forced myself to stop, my mind went to equally troubling topics. Who had done this? Why? Was Tess the victim of some random attacker, or did this have something to do with Cynthia?

Where was Denton Abagnall’s business card? Had Tess not pinned it to the board as she’d told me? Had she decided she’d never be calling him with any more information, taken it down and tossed it into the trash?

The next morning, consumed with these and other questions, I found the card Abagnall had left with us and called his cell phone number.

The provider cut in immediately and invited me to leave a message, suggesting that Abagnall’s phone was off.

So I tried his home number. A woman answered.

“Is Mr. Abagnall there, please?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Is this Mrs. Abagnall?”

“Who is this, please?”

“This is Terry Archer.”

“Mr. Archer!” she said, sounding a bit frantic. “I was just going to call you!”

“Mrs. Abagnall, I really need to speak to your husband. It’s possible the police have already been in touch. I gave them your husband’s name last night and-”

“Have you heard from him?”

“Sorry?”

“Have you heard from Denton? Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“This isn’t like him at all. Sometimes, he has to work overnight, on surveillance, but he always gets in touch at some point.”

I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I said, “He was at our house yesterday afternoon. Late afternoon. He was bringing us up to date.”

“I know,” she said. “I phoned him just after he left your place. He said he’d had another call, that someone had left him a message, that they’d call back.”