Trust Your Eyes (30 page)

“I think you’re right. What’s done is done,” Nicole said. “No one has ever really said anything like this to me before.”

“I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“I used to do searches of you online, wondering what happened to you. But there haven’t been any stories in years.”

“No,” Nicole said. “I left that life behind. I left…it all behind.”

“I did read stuff about how much everyone expected of you, the pressure that got put on you.”

Nicole smiled, to think that anyone still remembered. “My coach, he was furious with me. And my own father, he wouldn’t talk to me. He disowned me after that.” Nicole paused. “I guess he was living out his dream through me and I blew it for him.”

“You’re kidding,” Rochelle said. “That’s horrible.”

“Well,” Nicole said.

“The whole reason I’m telling you this is, I know it might seem kind of stupid, but you were a real inspiration to me then. I had a picture of you taped to my bedroom wall.”

“My picture?”

“I still have it. Not on my wall anymore. But I save stuff. I have it tucked away somewhere, with lots of clippings about you.
I figured you’d want to know, because there’s no way I’d ever say anything that would cause trouble for the great Annabel Kristoff.”

It had been her name then.

Nicole’s smile was not a happy one. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me that.” She swallowed to clear the lump that was forming in her throat, then turned over the phone and put it to her ear.

Kyle was in midwhisper. “—there? Are you there? Hello?”

“I’m here,” Nicole said, putting the phone to her ear.

“It’s done.”

“The image is gone?”

“Yes. The head’s been blurred out, and now the window just looks dark.”

“Are there any previous versions that can still be accessed?”

“No. They’re wiped. The database is clean.”

“That’s excellent.” Nicole smiled at Rochelle, who was smiling back and tearing up a little. “Okay, Kyle, I guess we’re done. Thank you for this. You’ll find Rochelle in the basement when you get home.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. Rochelle, say hello.” Nicole held out the phone.

“Hi, honey! I love you! I’m so sorry about this morning.”

“You, too, babe. I’ve been such an asshole. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Nicole pulled back the phone. “Okay, Kyle. Good-bye.”

She ended the call, and tossed the phone, which was Rochelle’s, onto the carpet. And then she just sat there, looking at the floor, resting her elbows on her knees.

Thinking.

“What?” Rochelle asked. “Aren’t you going to go? He did what you want, didn’t he?”

“He did,” Nicole said. “He did.”

Still have to do it
, she told herself.
Even if she is a fan.

Nicole picked up the plastic bag that had been on the woman’s head earlier.

“What are you doing with that?” Rochelle asked.

It took much longer than she would have liked. The woman fought her hard, harder than most. She thrashed her head violently back and forth for as long as she could before the air ran out. Long enough for a single tear to drop onto the outside of the bag.

When it was finally done, Nicole settled back into her chair and waited for Kyle Billings to come home.

THIRTY-EIGHT

LEN
Prentice’s attitude, and comments, had left me shaken.

Calling Thomas crazy, saying he should be committed to a “loony bin,” had made me furious, but his revelation that Thomas had tried to push our father down the stairs had left me deeply troubled. Was it as bad as it sounded? Had it really happened? Dad had never mentioned anything like this to me, but that didn’t mean the incident never occurred. It wasn’t in my father’s nature to burden his family with his problems. About ten years ago, when he noticed a lump on his testicle, he never said a word to Mom. He went to the doctor, had it checked out. When the tests came back, it turned out he was fine, and the lump receded on its own. It was only some time later, when Mom was feeling ill, that the doctor they shared happened to ask her how Adam was doing.

She gave him shit. She told me all about it, hoping I’d give him shit, too. I didn’t. That was the way Dad was, and I knew there wasn’t any changing him. Whatever problems he’d had sharing a house with Thomas he had kept from me. He’d probably
worried that if he had told me, I’d have felt obliged to help him out—something I’d like to think I would have done—but he wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d have seen Thomas as his responsibility, not mine. I had my own life to lead, he’d have reasoned.

But he must have felt the need to unload on someone, someone who wouldn’t feel they had to step in and actually help him with his situation. Len had been a sympathetic ear for my father, although there was nothing about his attitude that suggested sympathy to me. He was a simpleminded, judgmental asshole, as far as I could tell.

I wanted to ask Thomas about this, but was my brother a reliable witness to his own actions?

Driving away from the Prentice house, I felt myself getting swallowed into some kind of vortex. I’d come to Promise Falls from Burlington to deal with my father’s estate, set my brother up someplace, and get rid of the house, and really hadn’t made a dent in any of it. I kept finding myself sidetracked. Strange and unsettling words on Dad’s laptop. Thomas’s preoccupation with that goddamn face in the window. An unfortunate encounter between Thomas and Len Prentice, and apparently another, between Thomas and our father.

There was this other thing niggling away at my brain. The lawn tractor. The key in the OFF position. The blade housing raised, which indicated Dad had stopped mowing the lawn. But the job wasn’t finished, so why had he raised the blades?

It made me wonder whether he’d been interrupted. Was it possible someone had come down the side of the hill to talk to him? It was almost impossible to carry on a conversation with the tractor running, so Dad would have turned off the ignition. And if he thought this interruption was going to be an extended one, he’d have brought up the blades.

Was that what happened? Had someone stopped to chat? It wasn’t the best place for a conversation. It was a precarious spot,
given how steep the slope was. Dad, sitting on the tractor, would have had to continually lean into the hill to keep the machine from tipping. Sitting straight up in the seat might have been all the leverage that was needed to topple the damn thing.

Which, in the end, was what happened.

But if the tractor rolled, and killed him, when it was already stopped, and if the reason Dad had come to a stop was because someone had wanted to talk to him, then who the hell was that person, and why hadn’t they called for help right away?

Thomas had been the one who finally dialed 911. After he’d found Dad, already dead, pinned by the machine.

Unless…

Unless Thomas was the one Dad had stopped for. To have that conversation. If it had turned into a heated argument, a simple shove would have been all Dad needed to go tumbling, taking the machine with him.

No.

That was unthinkable. My thoughts were running wild again, even worse than when I’d found “child prostitution” in the search field of Dad’s laptop. My mind was going places it had no business going.

It was stress, I told myself. The stress of losing my father, of having to take responsibility for Thomas—it was taking a toll.

I hadn’t even taken time to grieve. When had I had a chance? From the moment I’d arrived at my father’s house, I’d been thrown right into it. Making funeral arrangements, meeting with Harry Peyton, looking after Thomas, taking him to see Laura Grigorin.

Only now was I realizing how adrift I felt without Dad, without his guidance and steady hand.

“I miss you,” I found myself saying aloud, my hands gripped on the steering wheel. “I need you.”

I steered the car over to the shoulder, stopped, put it in park,
and rested my forehead on the top of the steering wheel for a moment.

I hadn’t cried once since getting the phone call from the Promise Falls police about my father’s death. Now it was taking everything I had to keep the lid on. Maybe I was more like my father than I’d realized. I kept things bottled up, didn’t share my problems with others.

I loved my father. And I felt lost without him here beside me.

I got out my phone. A few seconds later, someone said, “
Standard.
Julie McGill here.”

“Why don’t you come out to the house for dinner tonight?”

“Is this George Clooney?”

“Yes.”

“Sure.”

WHEN
I walked into the kitchen I saw a tuna sandwich sitting on a plate on my side of the table. There was a napkin folded at the side, and an opened bottle of beer that was now warm to the touch.

“Son of a bitch,” I said to myself. “He made my lunch.” I knew I’d asked him to, but I guess my expectations had been low. I felt bad.

I knocked on Thomas’s door and stepped in.

“Thanks for making me a sandwich,” I said.

“No problem,” he said, his back to me.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“London,” he said.

“How is it?”

“Old,” Thomas said.

“Did you eat? I hope you weren’t waiting for me.”

“I ate. And I put my plate and my glass and the bowl I mixed up the tuna and mayonnaise in into the dishwasher.”

“Thanks, man. We’re going to have a guest for dinner.”

“Who?”

“Julie.”

“Okay.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, which put me at a ninety-degree angle to him as he stared at the screen.

Thomas said, “Let’s say you come out of the Opera House on Bow Street in Covent Garden and you want to get to Trafalgar Square. Do you turn right and walk down to the Strand, or left and go up to—”

“Thomas, stop. I need to talk to you.”

“Just tell me which way you think.”

“Left.”

“Wrong. The faster way would be to go right, down to the Strand, then right and keep on going.” He turned and looked at me. “You can’t miss it.”

“Can you stop for a second?”

Thomas nodded.

“I want to ask you a few things. Things about Dad.”

“What?”

“Okay, first, the day Dad died, did you go out and talk to him when he was cutting grass on the side of the hill?”

Thomas cocked his head to one side. “I was going to. I was looking for him.”

“You didn’t go out, even to give him a phone message or anything? Something that made him turn off the machine and lift up the blades?”

“No,” he said again. “The only time I went out was to find him because I was hungry.”

“And he was trapped under the tractor.”

He nodded.

“The two of you, you got along pretty well most of the time, didn’t you?”

“Sometimes he got angry with me,” Thomas said. “You’ve asked me about this before.”

“Did you—I don’t know how to ask this without it sounding like I’m accusing you of something.”

Thomas showed no concern. “What is it?”

“Did you try to push Dad down the stairs?”

“Did Dad tell you about that?”

Would it be better if he thought our father had told me, or to admit I’d learned this from Len Prentice?

I sidestepped. “Is it true?”

Thomas nodded. “Yes. Sort of.”

“What happened? When was this?”

“About a month ago.”

“Tell me about it.”

“He wanted to talk about something that happened a long time ago,” Thomas said, glancing back at the London street scene on his monitor.

“What? Something that happened to Dad?”

“No. Something that happened to me.”

“To you? What happened to you?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about it. Dad told me not to.” He paused. “At the time. He told me I wasn’t ever to talk about it or he’d get really angry with me.”

“Jesus, Thomas, what are you talking about here? When was this?”

“When I was thirteen.”

“Dad did something to you when you were thirteen that he told you never to talk about?”

My brother hesitated. “Not…no, not exactly.”

“Thomas, look, whatever happened, it was a long time ago, and Dad’s gone. If there’s something you need to tell me, then you can do it.”

“There’s nothing I want to tell you. President Clinton says
I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff. It makes me look weak. And I’m just on my way to Trafalgar Square.”

“Okay, but, Thomas, can we just go back to the thing that happened a month ago. What was that about?”

“Dad wanted to talk about the thing that happened when I was thirteen.”

“Had you ever talked about it all these years?”

Thomas shook his head. “No.”

“But out of the blue, Dad wanted to talk about it again?” I was grasping here, trying to figure out what the hell Thomas was talking about, what this thing was that had happened twenty-two years ago.

“Yes.”

“Why?’

“He said maybe he was wrong, maybe he’d done a bad thing, and that he was sorry about it. Dad was following me up the stairs, saying he wanted to talk to me about it, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I’d tried really, really hard not to think about it for all those years and so I stopped and turned around and said I didn’t want to talk about it and that if he didn’t want to listen to me when I was thirteen why did he want to listen to me now and I put my hand out to stop him from following me and I didn’t push hard but he tripped on the stair and he fell a little bit.”

“Fell a little bit?”

Thomas nodded.

“Could you explain that?”

“We were on the fourth step going up, so he didn’t fall very far. He landed flat on his back.”

“Jesus, Thomas. What did you do?”

“I said I was sorry, and I helped him get into the chair and I got him one of his ice packs. I was sad that he fell.”

“Did he go to the hospital? Or the doctor?”

“No. He took some extra-strength Advils.”

“He must have been furious with you.”

Thomas shook his head in the negative. “No. He said it was okay. He said he understood. He said I was entitled to be mad, and if I didn’t forgive him, he’d live with that. And the pills started to work, and he started to feel better, but it hurt for about a week.”