All I do know is I need some space. Grace and I need to be a mother and daughter, who don’t have to worry about anything else except being a mother and daughter.

I won’t have my cell on very often. I know they can do that thing, triangulate, to find people. But I’ll check it once in a while for messages. Maybe, at some point, I’ll feel like talking to you. Just not right now.

Call the school, tell them Grace will be gone for a while. I’m not calling the shop. Let Pamela think what she wants.

Don’t look for me.

I still love you, but I don’t need you to find me right now.

L, Cyn

I read it three, maybe four times. Then I picked up the phone and called her cell, despite what she’d written. It went straight to message, and I left one. “Cyn. Jesus. Call me.”

And then I slammed the phone down. “Shit!” I shouted. “Shit!”

I paced the kitchen a few times, unsure what to do. I opened the door, walked down to the end of the drive, still in nothing but my jeans, and looked up and down the street, as if somehow I could magically divine which way Cynthia and Grace had gone. I went back into the house, grabbed the phone again, and, as if in a trance, dialed the number I always did when I needed to talk to someone who loved Cynthia as much as I did.

I had dialed Tess.

And when the phone rang a third time and no one picked up, I realized what I’d done, the incredible mistake I had made. I hung up and sat at the kitchen table and began to cry. With my elbows on the table, I put my head in my hands and let it all come out.

I don’t know quite how long I sat there, alone, at my kitchen table, letting the tears run down my cheeks. Long enough until there weren’t any left, I guess. Once I’d exhausted the supply, I had no choice but to come up with another course of action.

I went back upstairs, finished dressing. I had to keep telling myself a few things.

The first was that Cynthia and Grace were okay. It wasn’t as though they’d been kidnapped or anything. And second, I couldn’t imagine that Cynthia would let anything bad happen to Grace, no matter how upset she was.

She loved Grace.

But what was my daughter to think? Her mother getting her up in the middle of the night, making her pack a bag, sneaking out of the house together so her father wouldn’t hear?

Cynthia had to have believed, in her heart, that this was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t. It was wrong, and it was wrong to put Grace through something like this.

And that was why I had no problem ignoring Cynthia’s orders not to look for them.

Grace was my daughter. She was missing. And I was bloody well going to look for her. And try to work out things with my wife.

I dug around in the bookcase and got out a map of New England and New York State, opened it up on the kitchen table. There were times when MapQuest didn’t cut it, not when you wanted to see the big picture.

I let my eyes wander, from Portland south to Providence, Boston west to Buffalo, asking myself where Cynthia might go. I looked at the Connecticut-Massachusetts line, the town of Otis, the vicinity of the quarry. I couldn’t see her going there. Not with Grace in tow. What would be the point? What was to be learned from a return trip?

There was the village of Sharon, where Connie Gormley, the woman who was killed in some sort of staged hit-and-run accident, had been from, but that didn’t make any sense, either. Cynthia had never really grabbed on to that story in the newspaper clipping as meaning anything, not the way I had. I couldn’t see her heading up that way.

Maybe the answer wasn’t to be found in looking at a map. Maybe I needed to be thinking about names. People from her past. People Cynthia might turn to, in these very desperate times, for answers.

I went into the living room, where I found the two shoeboxes of mementos from Cynthia’s childhood on an end table. Given what the last few weeks had been like, the boxes had never found their way back to their usual hiding place, in the bottom of our closet.

I started riffling through the contents randomly, tossing old receipts and clippings onto the coffee table, but they held no meaning for me. They seemed to coalesce into one huge puzzle with no discernible pattern.

I went back into the kitchen, phoned Rolly at home. It was too early for him to have left for school yet. Millicent answered.

“Hi, Terry,” she said. “What’s going on? Are you not going in today?”

“Rolly already has me off,” I said. “Millie, you haven’t heard from Cynthia by any chance?”

“Cynthia? No. Terry, what’s going on? Isn’t Cynthia home?”

“She’s gone. She took Grace with her.”

“Let me get Rolly.”

I heard her set the phone down and a few seconds later Rolly said, “Cynthia’s gone?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what to do.”

“Shit. And I was going to call her today, see how she’s doing, if she wanted to talk. She didn’t tell you where she was going?”

“Rolly, if I knew where she was going, I wouldn’t be calling you so fucking early in the morning.”

“Okay, okay. Jesus, I don’t know what to say. Why did she go? Did you guys have a fight or something?”

“Yeah, kind of. I fucked up. And I think everything’s just gotten to her. She wasn’t feeling safe here, she wanted to protect Grace. But this was the wrong way to go about it. Look, if you hear from her, if you see her, let me know, okay?”

“I will,” Rolly said. “And if you find her, call.”

Next, I called Dr. Kinzler’s office. It hadn’t opened yet, so I left a message, said Cynthia was missing, asked her to please call me, left my home and cell numbers.

The only other person I could think to call was Rona Wedmore. I considered it, then decided not to. She wasn’t, as far as I could tell, solidly in our corner.

I think I understood Cynthia’s motivations for disappearing, but I was less sure Wedmore would.

And then a name popped into my head. Someone I’d never met, never spoken to, never even seen across a room. But his name kept coming up.

Maybe it was time to have a chat with Vince Fleming.

If I could have brought myself to call Detective Wedmore, I could have asked her outright where I might find Vince Fleming and saved myself some time. She’d already said she knew the name. Abagnall had told us he had a record for a variety of offenses. He was even believed to have participated in a revenge killing, after the murder of his father back in the early nineties. There was a pretty good chance that a police detective would know where someone like that might hang out.

But I didn’t want to talk to Wedmore.

I went up to the computer and started doing some searches on Vince Fleming and Milford. There were a couple of news stories from the New Haven paper over the last few years, one that detailed how he had been charged with assault. He’d used someone’s face to open a beer bottle. That one got dismissed when the victim decided to drop charges. I was willing to bet there was more to that story, but the online edition of this newspaper certainly didn’t have it.

There was another story where Vince Fleming got a passing reference, as someone rumored to be behind a rash of auto thefts in southern Connecticut. He owned a body shop in an industrial district somewhere in town, and there was a photo of him, one of those slightly grainy ones taken by a photographer who doesn’t want his subject to know he’s there, going into a bar called Mike’s.

I’d never been in, but I’d driven past Mike’s.

I got out the Yellow Pages, found several pages listing businesses that would fix your dented automobile. From the listings, it wasn’t immediately obvious which one might belong to Vince Fleming-there was no Vince’s Auto Body, no Fleming’s Fender Repair.