We took a couple of turns, went over some railroad tracks, and then it felt as though the SUV was descending, ever so slightly, as though we were heading toward the shore. Down toward the Sound.

Then the truck slowed, did an abrupt right, bounced up over a curb, and came to a stop. Looking up through the windows, I saw mostly sky, but also the side of a house. When the driver killed the engine, I heard seagulls.

“Okay,” said Baldy, looking down at me, “I want you to be nice. We’re getting out and going up some stairs and into a house, and if you try to run away, or if you try shouting for help, or try doing any other kind of retarded thing, I’m going to hurt you. You understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

Blondie and the driver were already out. Baldy opened his door, got out, and I pulled myself up first onto the backseat, then scooted over until I was out the side.

We were parked in a driveway between two beach houses. I had a pretty good idea we were on East Broadway. The houses are packed in pretty tight together along there, and glancing south between the houses I could see beach and beyond that, Long Island Sound. When I saw Charles Island out there, I was even more sure where we were.

Baldy motioned for me to climb up a set of open-back stairs that went up the side of a pale yellow house to the second floor. The first floor was mostly garage. Blondie and the driver went ahead, then me, then Baldy. The steps were gritty with beach sand and made soft, scratching noises under our shoes.

At the top of the stairs the driver held open a screen door, and the rest of us walked in ahead of him. We entered into a large room with sliding glass doors facing the water, and a deck that was suspended over the beach. There were some chairs and a couch just inside the door, a shelf weighed down with paperback novels, then as you moved back into the room there was an eating table and a kitchen along the back wall.

A heavyset man with his back to me was standing at the stove, steadying a frying pan with one hand, a spatula in the other.

“Here he is,” Blondie said.

The man nodded without saying anything.

“We’ll be down in the truck,” Baldy said, and motioned for Blondie and the driver to follow him out. The three of them walked out and I could hear their boots receding on the steps.

I stood there in the center of the room. Normally, I would have turned to take in the view out the glass doors, maybe even walked out onto the deck and taken in a whiff of sea air. But instead, I stared at the man’s back.

“You want some eggs?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said.

“It’s no trouble,” he said. “Fried, scrambled, over easy, whatever.”

“No, but thanks just the same,” I said.

“I get up a little later, sometimes it’s nearly lunchtime before I make breakfast,” he said. He reached up into a cupboard and brought down a plate, transferred some scrambled eggs to it, added some sausages that had been sitting on some paper towel that he must have cooked earlier, then reached into a cutlery drawer for a fork and what appeared to be a steak knife.

He turned around and walked over to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

He was about my age, although I think I can say, objectively, that he looked a bit worse for wear. His face was pockmarked, he had an inch-long scar above his right eye, and his once black hair was now heavily peppered with gray. He was in a black T-shirt, tucked into some black jeans, and I could see the bottom edge of a tattoo on his upper right arm, but not enough to know what it was. His stomach strained against his shirt, and he sighed at the effort of plopping down into his chair.

He motioned to the chair opposite him. I approached, cautiously, and sat down. He upended a bottle of ketchup, waited for a huge dollop to land on the plate by his eggs and sausage. He had a mug of coffee in front of him, and when he reached for it, said, “Coffee?”

“No,” I said. “I just had some at the doughnut shop.”

“The one by my business?” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s not very good there,” he said.

“No, it’s not. I threw out half of it,” I said.

“Do I know you?” he asked, shoving some eggs into his mouth.

“No,” I said.

“But you’re asking around for me. First at Mike’s, then at my place of business.”

“Yes,” I said. “It wasn’t my intention to alarm you.”

“‘Wasn’t my intention,’” he parroted. The man I now knew to be Vince Fleming speared a sausage with his fork, held it in place, then picked up the steak knife and cut off a piece. He shoved it into his mouth. “Well, when people I don’t know start asking around for me, that can be a cause for concern.”

“I guess I didn’t fully appreciate that.”

“Given the kind of business I do, sometimes I run into people with unorthodox business practices.”

“Sure,” I said.

“So when people I don’t know start asking around for me, I like to arrange a meeting where I feel I have the advantage.”

“I think you do,” I said.

“So who the fuck are you?”

“Terry Archer. You know my wife.”

“I know your wife,” he said, as if to say, So? “Not anymore. But a long time ago.”

Fleming scowled at me as he took another bite of sausage. “What is this? Did I fool around with your old lady or something? Look, it’s not my fault if you can’t keep your woman happy and she needs to come to me for what she needs.”

“It’s not that kind of thing,” I said. “My wife’s name is Cynthia. You would have known her when she was Cynthia Bigge.”

He stopped in mid-chew. “Oh. Shit. Man, that was a fucking long time ago.”

“Twenty-five years,” I said.

“You’ve taken a long time to drop by,” Vince Fleming said.

“There have been some recent developments,” I said. “I take it you remember what happened that night.”

“Yeah. Her whole fucking family vanished.”

“That’s right. They’ve just found the bodies of Cynthia’s mother and brother.”

“Todd?”

“That’s right.”

“I knew Todd.”

“You did?”

Vince Fleming shrugged. “A bit. I mean, we went to the same school. He was an okay guy.” He shoveled in some more ketchup-covered eggs.

“You’re not curious about where they found them?” I asked.

“I figure you’re going to tell me,” he said.

“They were in Cynthia’s mother’s car, a yellow Ford Escort, at the bottom of a lake in a quarry, up in Massachusetts.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

“They must have been there awhile,” Vince said. “And they were still able to tell who they were?”

“DNA,” I said.

Vince shook his head in admiration. “Fucking DNA. What did we ever do without it?” He finished off a sausage.

“And Cynthia’s aunt was murdered,” I said.

Vince’s eyes narrowed. “I think Cynthia talked about her. Bess?”

“Tess,” I said.

“Yeah. She bought it?”

“Someone stabbed her to death in her kitchen.”

“Hmm,” Vince said. “Is there some reason why you’re telling me all this?”

“Cynthia’s missing,” I said. “She’s…run off. With our daughter. We have a daughter named Grace. She’s eight.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I thought there was a chance Cynthia might have come looking for you. She’s trying to find the answers to what happened that night, and it’s possible you might have some of them.”

“What would I know?”

“I don’t know. But you were probably the last person to see Cynthia that night, other than her family. And you had a run-in with her father before he brought Cynthia home.”

I never saw it coming.

Vince Fleming reached across the table with one hand, grabbed my right wrist with his left, yanked it across the table toward him, while his other hand grabbed the steak knife he’d been using to cut his sausage. He swung it down toward the table in a long, swift arc, and the blade buried into the wood table between my middle and fourth finger.