No Time for Goodbye Read Free Page A

inside, get her coming in.”
    “You’re fucking kidding me,” I said, loud enough for the crew—a half dozen or so, plus Paula Malloy, she of the gleaming teeth and Donna Karan suits, who was doing all the on-camera stuff and voiceovers—to hear.
    Paula herself came over to see me.
    “Mr. Archer,” she said, reaching out with both hands and touching me just below my shoulders, a Malloy trademark, “is everything okay?”
    “How can you do that to her?” I said. “My wife’s walking in there for the first time since her family fucking vanished, and you basically yell ‘Cut’?”
    “Terry,” she said, insinuating herself closer to me. “May I call you Terry?”
    I said nothing.
    “Terry, I’m sorry, we have to get the camera in position, and we want the look on Cynthia’s face, when she comes into the house after all these years, we want that to be genuine. We want this to be honest. I think that’s what both of you want as well.”
    That was a good one. That a reporter from the TV news/entertainment show
Deadline
—which, when it wasn’t revisiting bizarre unsolved crimes from years past, was chasing after the latest drinking-and-driving celebrity, or hunting down a pop star who’d failed to buckle her toddler into a seat belt—would play the honesty card.
    “Sure,” I said tiredly, thinking of the bigger picture here, that maybe after all these years, some TV exposure might finally provide Cynthia with some answers. “Sure, whatever.”
    Paula showed some perfect teeth and went briskly back across the street, her high heels clicking along the pavement.
    I’d been doing my best to stay out of the way since Cynthia and I’d arrived here. I’d arranged to get the day off from school. My principal and longtime friend, Rolly Carruthers, knew how important it was to Cynthia to do this show, and he’d arranged a substitute teacher to take my English and creative writing classes. Cynthia had taken the day off from Pamela’s, the dress shop where she worked. We’d dropped off our eight-year-old daughter, Grace, at school along the way. Grace would have been intrigued, watching a film crew do its thing, but her introduction to TV production was not going to be a segment on her own mother’s personal tragedy.
    The people who lived in the house now, a retired couple who’d moved down here from Hartford a decade ago to be close to their boat in the Milford harbor, had been paid off by the producers to clear out for the day so they could have the run of the place. Then the crew had gone about removing distracting knickknacks and personal photos from the walls, trying to make the house look, if not the way it looked when Cynthia lived there, at least as generic as possible.
    Before the owners took off for a day of sailing, they’d said a few things on the front lawn for the cameras.
    Husband: “It’s hard to imagine, what might have happened here, in this house, back then. You wonder, were they all cut up into bits in the basement or something?”
    Wife: “Sometimes, I think I hear voices, you know? Like the ghosts of them are still walking around the house. I’ll be sitting at the kitchen table, and I get this chill, like maybe the mother or the father, or the boy, has walked past.”
    Husband: “We didn’t even know, when we bought the house, what had happened here. Someone else had got it from the girl, and they sold it to someone else, and then we bought it from them, but when I found what happened here, I read up on it at the Milford library, and you have to wonder, how come she was spared? Huh? It seems a bit odd, don’t you think?”
    Cynthia, watching this from around the corner of one of the show’s trucks, shouted, “Excuse me? What’s that supposed to mean?”
    One of the crew whirled around, said, “Shush,” but Cynthia would have none of it. “Don’t you fucking shush me,” she said. To the husband, she called out, “What are you implying?”
    The man looked over, startled.