Linwood Barclay: Trust Your Eyes

Or screaming.

It was, he thought, as though a white stocking had been pulled down over someone’s head. But the material’s sheen still made him think it was plastic.

That wasn’t a very smart thing for someone to do. To put a plastic bag over their head. You could suffocate yourself doing something stupid like that.

A person would have to be pulling on the plastic bag, twisting it from behind, to make it conform so tightly to the contours of their face. But he didn’t see this person’s arms or hands doing anything like that.

Which made him wonder if someone else was doing it.

Oh. Oh, no.

Was that what he was witnessing? Someone putting a bag over another person’s head? Cutting off their air supply? Smothering them? Could this account for the mouth that seemed to be struggling for air?

Who was this happening to? A man? A woman? And who was doing it to them?

Suddenly he was thinking about the boy in the window. A different window. Many years ago.

But the person in this window, right now, didn’t look like a boy, or a girl. This was an adult.

An adult whose life was coming to an end.

That certainly was how it looked to him.

He felt his heart begin to beat more quickly. He’d seen things before on his travels. Things that weren’t right.

But they were minor compared to this. Never a murder.

That’s what he was sure this was.

He didn’t shout out. He didn’t reach into his jacket for a cell phone to call 911. He didn’t spring into the nearest shop and tell someone to call the police. He didn’t charge into the building and race up two flights of stairs in a bid to stop what was happening behind this third-floor window.

All he did was reach out, tentatively, as though it were possible to touch the smothered face of this person on the third floor, to feel what was wrapped around his or her head, make some sort of assessment as to-

Knock knock.

Then, maybe then, he’d have a better idea what was actually happening to this person in-

Knock knock.

He’d been so transfixed by what was happening at the window that he did not, at first, realize someone was trying to get his attention. Someone was at the door.

He took his hand off the mouse, spun around in his padded computer chair, and said, “Yes?”

The door opened an inch. From the hallway, someone said, “Get your ass down for dinner, Thomas.”

“What are we having?” he asked.

“Burgers. From the barbecue.”

The man sitting in the computer chair said flatly, “Okay.”

He spun around and resumed looking at the frozen image of the window on his oversized computer monitor. The blurry, white, wrapped head suspended there. A ghostly visage.

Had anyone seen this at the time? Had anyone looked up?

No one had seen the boy when he was in the window. No one had looked up. No one had helped him.

The man left the image on his screen so he could study it more closely when he came back up after dinner. Then he’d make a decision about what to do.

“Come on in, Ray.”

Harry Peyton shook my hand and led me into his law office, pointing me toward the red leather chair opposite his desk. About the same age as my father, he looked years younger than Dad had. He was six feet, trim, with a head smooth as a melon. Baldness aged some guys, but not Harry. He was a long-distance runner, and his expensive suit fit him like a second skin. His desk was a testament to orderliness. A computer monitor, keyboard, one of the latest smartphones. And one legal file folder. The rest of the desk was as clean as a canvas before the first brushstroke.

“Again, I’m so sorry,” Harry said. “There are a hundred things one could say about your dad, but Reverend Clayton summed it up nicely. Adam Kilbride was a good man.”

I forced a smile. “Yeah, the minister did a pretty good job, considering he’d never met Dad. He wasn’t much of a churchgoer. I guess we were lucky to find anyone to preside. Thanks for coming to the service. It almost got us up to a dozen.”

Eleven people showed up for the funeral, and that was counting the minister and myself. There was Harry, and three of Dad’s coworkers from the company he’d worked for, including his onetime boss, Len Prentice, and Len’s wife, Marie. Also there were a friend of Dad’s who ran a hardware store in Promise Falls before the Home Depot opened up outside of town and put him out of business, Dad’s younger brother Ted and his wife, Roberta, from Cleveland, and a woman named Hannah whose last name I never got who lived just down the road from Dad. And there was a woman Thomas and I knew from high school, Julie McGill, who worked for the local paper, the Promise Falls Standard, and had written the story about Dad’s accident. She hadn’t come to report on the funeral-how Dad died had made him a small news item, but he wasn’t citizen of the year or head of the Rotary or anything. His service to the community was not newsworthy. Julie had come to pay her respects, simple as that.

The funeral home had a lot of egg salad sandwiches left over. They insisted I take some back to the house for my brother. I’d explained his absence by saying he wasn’t feeling well, but no one, at least no one who knew my brother, believed it. I was tempted to pitch the sandwiches out the car window on the way home. Let the birds enjoy them, instead of my brother. But I didn’t. I took them home, and they all got eaten.

“I’d hoped your brother might have come,” Harry said. “It’s been some time since I’ve seen him.” At first I thought he meant to this meeting, which puzzled me, since my brother was not an executor. Then I realized Harry meant the funeral.

“Yeah, well, I gave it my best shot,” I said. “He wasn’t really sick.”

“I figured.”

“I tried to talk him into it, but it was pointless.”

Peyton shook his head sympathetically. “Your father, he tried to do his best by him. Just like when your mother-Rose, God bless her-was still with us. How long’s it been?”

“She passed away in 2005.”

“After that, it must have been even more difficult for him.”

“He was still with P amp;L then,” I said. Prentice and Long, the printers. “I think, maybe, after he took that early retirement not long after that, it got tougher. Being there, all the time. It got to him, but he wasn’t the kind of man to run away from something.” I bit my lip. “Mom, she found ways not to let it bother her, she had a way of accepting things, but it was tougher for Dad.”

“Adam was a young man, really,” Harry said. “Sixty-two, for Christ’s sake. I was stunned when I heard.”

“Yeah, well, me, too,” I said. “I don’t know how many times Mom told him, over the years, that cutting grass on that steep hill, on the lawn tractor, was dangerous. But he always insisted he knew what he was doing. Thing is, that part of the property, it’s way back of the house-you can’t see it from the road or any of the neighbors’ places. The ground slopes almost forty-five degrees down to the creek. Dad would mow along there sideways, leaning his body into the hill so the tractor wouldn’t tip over.”

“How long do they think your father was out there before they found him, Ray?”

“Dad probably went out to cut the grass after lunch, and wasn’t discovered until nearly six. When the tractor flipped over on top of him, the top edge of the steering wheel landed across his middle”-I pointed to my own stomach-“you know, his abdomen, and it crushed his insides.”

“Jesus,” Harry said. He touched his own stomach, imagining the pain my father must have felt for God knew how long.

I didn’t have much to add to that.