spatula in the other.
“Here he is,” Blondie said.
The man nodded without saying anything.
“We’ll be down in the truck,” Baldy said, and motioned for Blondie and the driver to follow him out. The three of them walked out and I could hear their boots receding on the steps.
I stood there in the center of the room. Normally, I would have turned to take in the view out the glass doors, maybe even walked out onto the deck and taken in a whiff of sea air. But instead, I stared at the man’s back.
“You want some eggs?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said.
“It’s no trouble,” he said. “Fried, scrambled, over easy, whatever.”
“No, but thanks just the same,” I said.
“I get up a little later, sometimes it’s nearly lunchtime before I make breakfast,” he said. He reached up into a cupboard and brought down a plate, transferred some scrambled eggs to it, added some sausages that had been sitting on some paper towel that he must have cooked earlier, then reached into a cutlery drawer for a fork and what appeared to be a steak knife.
He turned around and walked over to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
He was about my age, although I think I can say, objectively, that he looked a bit worse for wear. His face was pockmarked, he had an inch-long scar above his right eye, and his once black hair was now heavily peppered with gray. He was in a black T-shirt, tucked into some black jeans, and I could see the bottom edge of a tattoo on his upper right arm, but not enough to know what it was. His stomach strained against his shirt, and he sighed at the effort of plopping down into his chair.
He motioned to the chair opposite him. I approached, cautiously, and sat down. He upended a bottle of ketchup, waited for a huge dollop to land on the plate by his eggs and sausage. He had a mug of coffee in front of him, and when he reached for it, said, “Coffee?”
“No,” I said. “I just had some at the doughnut shop.”
“The one by my business?” he said.
“Yes.”
“It’s not very good there,” he said.
“No, it’s not. I threw out half of it,” I said.
“Do I know you?” he asked, shoving some eggs into his mouth.
“No,” I said.
“But you’re asking around for me. First at Mike’s, then at my place of business.”
“Yes,” I said. “It wasn’t my intention to alarm you.”
“‘Wasn’t my intention,’” he parroted. The man I now knew to be Vince Fleming speared a sausage with his fork, held it in place, then picked up the steak knife and cut off a piece. He shoved it into his mouth. “Well, when people I don’t know start asking around for me, that can be a cause for concern.”
“I guess I didn’t fully appreciate that.”
“Given the kind of business I do, sometimes I run into people with unorthodox business practices.”
“Sure,” I said.
“So when people I don’t know start asking around for me, I like to arrange a meeting where I feel I have the advantage.”
“I think you do,” I said.
“So who the fuck are you?”
“Terry Archer. You know my wife.”
“I know your wife,” he said, as if to say,
Fleming scowled at me as he took another bite of sausage. “What is this? Did I fool around with your old lady or something? Look, it’s not my fault if you can’t keep your woman happy and she needs to come to me for what she needs.”
“It’s not that kind of thing,” I said. “My wife’s name is Cynthia. You would have known her when she was Cynthia Bigge.”
He stopped in mid-chew. “Oh. Shit. Man, that was a fucking long time ago.”
“Twenty-five years,” I said.
“You’ve taken a long time to drop by,” Vince Fleming said.
“There have been some recent developments,” I said. “I take it you remember what happened that night.”
“Yeah. Her whole fucking family vanished.”
“That’s right. They’ve just found the bodies of Cynthia’s mother and brother.”
“Todd?”
“That’s right.”
“I knew Todd.”
“You did?”
Vince Fleming shrugged. “A bit. I mean, we went to the same school. He was an okay guy.” He shoveled in some more ketchup-covered eggs.
“You’re not curious about where they found them?” I asked.
“I figure you’re going to tell me,” he said.
“They were in Cynthia’s mother’s car, a yellow Ford Escort, at the bottom of a lake in a quarry, up in Massachusetts.”
“No shit.”
“No shit.”
“They must have been there awhile,” Vince said. “And they were still able to tell who they were?”
“DNA,” I said.
Vince shook his head in admiration. “Fucking DNA. What did we ever do without it?” He finished off a sausage.
“And Cynthia’s aunt was murdered,” I said.
Vince’s eyes narrowed. “I think Cynthia talked about her. Bess?”
“Tess,” I said.
“Yeah. She bought it?”
“Someone stabbed her to death in her kitchen.”
“Hmm,” Vince said. “Is there some reason why you’re telling me all this?”
“Cynthia’s missing,” I said. “She’s…run off. With our daughter. We have a daughter named Grace. She’s eight.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I thought there was a chance Cynthia might have come looking for you. She’s trying to find the answers to what happened that night, and it’s possible you might have some of them.”
“What would I know?”
“I don’t know. But you were probably the last person to see Cynthia that night, other than her family. And you had a run-in with her father before he brought Cynthia home.”
I never saw it coming.
Vince Fleming reached across the table with one hand, grabbed my right wrist with his left, yanked it across the table toward him, while his other hand grabbed the steak knife he’d been using to cut his sausage. He swung it down toward the table in a long, swift arc, and the blade buried into the wood table between my middle and fourth finger.
I screamed. “Jesus!”
Vince’s hand was a vise on my wrist, pinning it to the table. “I don’t like the sound of what you’re suggesting,” he said.
I was panting too hard to respond. I kept looking at the knife, desperate to reassure myself that it had not actually gone through my hand.
“I have a question for you,” Vince said very quietly, still holding my wrist, leaving the knife standing straight
