No Time for Goodbye

Author:Linwood Barclay
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Suspense, Family Life, Fiction, Suspense fiction, Missing persons, Domestic fiction
ISBN: 9780553805550
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2007-09-25T04:49:44+00:00

My students were amazingly well behaved. Word must have gotten around about why I’d been away the last couple of days. A death in the family. High school kids, like most natural predators, will typically seize on their prey’s weakness, use it to their advantage. From all reports, they had certainly done this with the woman who’d been called in to cover my classes. She had the tiniest trace of a stutter, usually no more than a hesitation with the first word in any given sentence, but it was noticeable enough for the kids to all start mimicking it. She’d evidently gone home the first day in tears, other staff members told me over lunch without a hint of sympathy in their voices. It was a jungle down that hallway, and you either made it or you didn’t.

But they cut me some slack. Not just my creative writing group, but my two other English classes as well. I think they were behaving not just out of respect for my feelings—in fact, that was probably a very small part of it. They didn’t act out because they were watching for signs that maybe I’d behave differently, shed a tear, get impatient with someone, slam a door, anything.

But I did not. So I could expect no special considerations the next day.

Jane Scavullo hung back as my morning class filed out of the room. “Sorry about your aunt,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “She was my wife’s aunt, actually, although I felt every bit as close to her.”

“Whatever,” she said, and caught up with the others.

About midafternoon, I was walking down the hall near the office when one of the secretaries charged out, saw me, and stopped dead.

“I was just going to go looking for you,” she said. “I paged your office, you weren’t there.”

“That’s because I’m here,” I said.

“Phone call for you,” she said. “I think it’s your wife.”

“Okay.”

“You can take it in the office.”

“Okay.”

I followed her in and she pointed to the phone on her desk. One of the lights was flashing. “Just press that one,” she said.

I grabbed the receiver, hit the button. “Cynthia?”

“Terry, I—”

“Listen, I was going to call you. I’m sorry about last night. What I said.”

The secretary sat back down at her desk, pretended not to be listening.

“Terry, something—”

“Maybe we need to hire another guy. I mean, I don’t know what’s happened to Abagnall, but—”

“Terry, shut up,” Cynthia said.

I shut up.

“Something’s happened,” Cynthia said, her voice low, almost breathless. “I know where they are.”

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