No Time for Goodbye Read Online Free PDF

coffeemaker.”
    “I’ll look at some,” Cynthia said.
    As I got up from the table Grace looked at me despairingly. I knew what she wanted from me.
Talk to her. Please talk to her
.
    “Terry, you seen the spare key?” Cynthia asked.
    “Hmm?” I said.
    She pointed to the empty hook on the wall just inside the kitchen door that opened onto our small backyard. “Where’s the spare?” It was the one we used if we were taking a walk, maybe a stroll down to the Sound, and didn’t want to take a ring loaded with car remotes and workplace keys.
    “I don’t know. Grace, you got the key?” Grace did not yet have her own house key. She hardly needed it, with Cynthia around to take her to and from school. She shook her head, glared at me.
    I shrugged. “Maybe it’s me. I might have left it next to the bed.” I sidled up next to Cynthia, smelled her hair as I walked past. “See me off?” I said.
    She followed me to the front door. “Something going on?” she asked. “Is Grace okay? She seems kind of quiet this morning.”
    I grimaced, shook my head. “It’s, you know. She’s eight years old, Cyn.”
    She moved back a bit, bristling. “She complains about me to you?”
    “She just needs to feel a bit more independent.”
    “That’s what that was about. She wants you to talk to me, not her teacher.”
    I smiled tiredly. “She says the other kids are making fun of her.”
    “She’ll get over it.”
    I wanted to say something, but felt we’d had this discussion so many times, there weren’t any new points to make.
    So Cynthia filled the silence. “You know there are bad people out there. The world is full of them.”
    “I know, Cyn, I know.” I tried to keep the frustration, and the tiredness, out of my voice. “But how long are you going to walk her? Till she’s twelve? Fifteen? You going to walk her to high school?”
    “I’ll deal with that when it comes,” she said. She paused. “I saw that car again.”
    The car. There was always a car.
    Cynthia could see in my face that I didn’t believe there was anything to this. “You think I’m crazy,” she said.
    “I don’t think you’re crazy.”
    “I’ve seen it two times. A brown car.”
    “What kind of car?”
    “I don’t know. An average car. With tinted windows. When it drives past me and Grace, it slows down a bit.”
    “Has it stopped? Has the driver said anything to you?”
    “No.”
    “Did you get a license plate?”
    “No. The first time, I didn’t think anything of it. The second time, I was too flustered.”
    “Cyn, it’s probably just somebody who lives in the neighborhood. People have to slow down. It’s a school zone up there. Remember that one day, the cops set up a speed trap? Getting people to stop speeding through there, that time of day.”
    Cynthia looked away from me, folded her arms in front of her. “You’re not out there every day like I am. You don’t know.”
    “What I do know,” I said, “is that you aren’t doing Grace any favors if you don’t let her start fending for herself.”
    “Oh, so you think, if some man tries to drag her into that car, that she’s going to be able to defend herself. An eight-year-old girl.”
    “How did we get from some brown car driving by to a man trying to drag her away?”
    “You’ve never taken these things as seriously as I do.” She waited a beat. “And I suppose that’s understandable, for you.”
    I puffed out my cheeks, blew out some air. “Okay, look, we’re not going to solve this now,” I said. “I have to get going.”
    “Sure,” Cynthia said, still not looking at me. “I think I’m going to call them.”
    I hesitated. “Call who?”
    “The show.
Deadline
.”
    “Cyn, it’s been, what, three weeks since the show ran? If anyone was going to call in with anything, they’d have done it by now. And besides, if the station gets any interesting calls, they’re going to get in touch. They’ll want to do a follow-up.”
    “I’m going to give