No Safe House by Linwood Barclay Page B

was a terror at that age. But she also knew, despite the headache she must have been to her parents—at least while she was still in their lives—that she was a pretty good kid. True, she made some stupid choices, like all teenagers. She shouldn’t have been out that night with Vince Fleming, who was seventeen and had what they called back then a “reputation.” It wasn’t just that he liked to raise a little hell, drove too fast, drank too much. His father was a known criminal, and, to recollect a phrase both her mother and her aunt Tess used to say, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
    Even though she was half in the bag at the time, she could recall every detail of that night back in May 1983. At least the parts before she got home and passed out. She remembered her father tracking her down, finding her in that Mustang withVince, how he dragged her out, drove her home. The ugly scene that followed.
    And the horrible, horrible events that happened after that. Waking up the next morning to an empty house, and not knowing for another two and a half decades what had happened to her mother and father and brother. And then struggling to come to terms with knowing her family—that family, the one she grew up with—was now forever gone.
    But none of it was her fault.
    After all these years, it was one of the few things she’d finally accepted, thank you very much, Dr. Naomi Kinzler. The irony was, her bad behavior that night when she was fourteen, her excessive drinking, undoubtedly saved Cynthia’s life. She’d passed out, missed the whole thing.
    Stop dwelling on the past…
    But that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? She couldn’t stop. When you suffer a trauma in your teens, it never really leaves you. She knew these deep-rooted anxieties fed her worries about Grace, and Terry, too. It wouldn’t matter how perfect their lives were—she’d always be steeling herself for what was around the next corner.
    There were medications she could take, of course. But she didn’t like how they made her feel, and really, wasn’t it a good thing to always be on guard? To be ready for whatever bad thing that might come along? You couldn’t allow yourself to be lulled into a false sense of security, right?
    Except it was no way to live.
    And she didn’t want to live here, in this apartment, nice as it was. A combined living room and kitchen, plus bedroom and bath. Nathaniel across the hall. Downstairs, Winnifred the librarian and Orland, the lonely old guy. Not exactly a place where you had to be worried about loud parties.
    The only one she’d really gotten to know was NathanielBraithwaite. A very distinguished name for a man who made his living taking people’s pets for a stroll while their owners were at work.
    Cynthia chided herself for mocking him in her thoughts. Nathaniel was a nice man. Thirty-three, jet-black hair, slim. From the looks of him, walking dogs got you in as good a shape as if you went to the gym. He told her he covered probably ten miles a day. Plus, all that bending over to clean up after them—well, it was the next best thing to calisthenics. Lots of stretching.
    He’d had his own software company in Bridgeport, designing apps for that cell phone company that went bankrupt a couple of years back. He’d had the fancy car, a condo overlooking the sound, a place in Florida. But when his major client went under and failed to pay Nathaniel’s company the millions he was owed, his company got dragged down with it.
    Nathaniel didn’t just lose the company and the condo and just about every dime he had in the bank.
    He lost his wife, too. She’d met Nathaniel as he was riding the wave and had grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle. When it ended, so did the marriage.
    And then, as he’d told Cynthia during the chats they’d had in the hall or when they met on the stairs, he lost his mind.
    He called it a nervous breakdown. A mental collapse, with a dollop of depression thrown in for