No Time for Goodbye Read Free Page B

He must have had no idea that the person he was talking about was actually present. The ponytail producer took Cynthia by the elbow and ushered her gently, but firmly, around the back of the truck.
    “What kind of horseshit is that?” Cynthia asked. “What’s he trying to say? That I had something to do with my family’s disappearance? I’ve put up with that shit for so—”
    “Don’t worry about him,” the producer said.
    “You said the whole point of doing this was to help me,” Cynthia said. “To help me find out what happened to them. That’s the only reason I agreed to do this. Are you going to run that? What he said? What are people going to think when they hear him saying that?”
    “Don’t worry about it,” the producer assured her. “We’re not going to use that.”
    They must have been scared Cynthia was going to walk at that point, before they had even a minute of her on film, so there were plenty of reassurances, cajoling, promises that once this piece went on TV, for sure someone who knew something would see it. Happened all the time, they said. They’d closed cold cases for the cops all over the country, they said.
    Once they had again persuaded Cynthia that their intentions were honorable, and the old farts who lived in the house had been whisked away, the show went on.
    I followed two cameramen into the house, then got out of the way as they positioned themselves to catch Cynthia’s expressions of apprehension and déjà vu from different angles. I figured that once this was on TV, there’d be lots of fast editing, maybe they’d turn the image all grainy, dig around in their bag of tricks to bring more drama to an event that TV producers in decades past would have found plenty dramatic on its own.
    They led Cynthia upstairs to her old bedroom. She looked numb. They wanted footage of her walking into it, but Cynthia had to do it twice. The first time, the cameraman was waiting inside her bedroom, the door closed, to get a shot of Cynthia entering the room, ever so tentatively. Then they did it again, this time from the hall, the camera looking over her shoulder as she went into the room. When it aired, you could see they’d used some fish-eye lens or something to make the scene spookier, like maybe we were going to find Jason in a goalie mask hiding behind the door.
    Paula Malloy, who’d started out as a weather girl, got her makeup retouched and her blond hair repouffed. Then she and Cynthia had those little microphone packs attached to the backs of their skirts, the wires run up and under their blouses and clipped just below their collars. Paula let her shoulder rub up against Cynthia’s, like they were old friends reminiscing, reluctantly, about the bad times instead of the good.
    As they came into the kitchen, cameras rolling, Paula asked, “What must you have been thinking?” Cynthia appeared to be walking through a dream. “You hadn’t heard a sound in the house so far, your brother’s not upstairs, you come down here into the kitchen and there’s no sign of life at all.”
    “I didn’t know what was happening,” Cynthia said quietly. “I thought everyone had left early. That my dad was gone to work, that my mother must have taken my brother to school. I thought they must be mad at me, for misbehaving the night before.”
    “You were a difficult teen?” Paula asked.
    “I had…my moments. I’d been out the night before, with a boy my parents didn’t approve of, I’d had something to drink. But I wasn’t like some kids. I mean, I loved my parents, and I think”—her voice breaking a bit here—“they loved me.”
    “We read in the police reports from the time, from the statements that you’d made, that you’d had an argument with your parents.”
    “Yes,” Cynthia said. “About not being home when I promised, lying to them. I said some awful things.”
    “Like what?”
    “Oh,” Cynthia hesitated, “you know. Kids can say pretty hateful things to their