Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

I could see through to the kitchen. “Shit,” I said under my breath.

Dirty dishes littered the table. Not just from breakfast, but lunch, too. Dinner I wasn’t too sure about. I put my hand on the half-full container of milk left sitting out. Room temperature. I gave it a sniff.

“Jeesh,” I said, and upended it in the sink. Then I noticed the peanut-butter-smeared knife stuck to the counter next to the open jar.

I mounted the stairs to the second floor and knocked on Thomas’s door ever so quietly. When there was no response, I eased it open.

I didn’t need to turn on a light to see whether he was in his bed. Moonlight streaming through the window illuminated the covers. The bed was empty. At that point, I flicked on the light.

The computer tower was still humming but the screen had gone to black from disuse. It was Thomas’s routine to shut everything down when he was done for the day.

I stepped out into the hall, traveled a few steps down to the bathroom. The door was open. I hit the light.

No sign of him there.

“Thomas!” I called out, no longer worried about making too much noise. “Thomas! I’m home!”

Unease washed over me. I never should have gone into Manhattan and left him for an entire day. He’d gotten into some kind of trouble, but what, exactly? I hoped to God the FBI hadn’t returned and taken him away.

I returned to the first floor, made my way to the door to the basement that was off the kitchen. “Thomas?”

No reply, but I descended the steps, anyway. Using light from the kitchen to reach the bottom, I then pulled the chain to turn on a bare bulb fixture. This room was used mostly for storage, and there were innumerable boxes of things my parents had stored over the years. An awful lot of stuff to have to go through. I walked around the room, peeked behind the furnace. Thomas was not down here.

I went out the kitchen door and took a few steps into the yard. The air was cool, the landscape lit softly by the moon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and if I’d ever studied astronomy I might have been able to pick out some constellations other than the Big Dipper.

“Thomas!” I shouted, then, under my breath, said, “Goddamn.”

I wondered whether I should call the police. I decided to do more searching first. Starting with the barn. I sprinted across the yard and slid open the broad, towering door. Once inside, I found the large electrical box screwed into a vertical beam and turned on the lights.

There wasn’t much in here, aside from the lawn tractor that had killed our father.

“Thomas! Damn it, if you’re hiding from me-”

I cut myself off, knowing how unlike Thomas it would be to play hide-and-seek. Displays of playfulness were rare from him. Once I’d stopped shouting, I listened. There was the nightly chorus of crickets, the kind of noise that’s always there, but that you really don’t notice. Not far from me, there was rustling in the bits of leftover straw that had been there for several decades, back to the time when this building was actually owned by a farmer.

A mouse scurried along, looking for safety.

I took a few steps into the structure, running my hand along the cracked hood of the tractor as I passed it. I wished, at this moment, that Thomas owned a cell phone. I would have tried calling him.

Struggling to think where he might be, I wondered whether he’d gone down to the creek, to where he’d found Dad. I killed the barn lights and ran to the crest of the hill behind the house. “You down there, Thomas?”

Nothing.

Who was there to call, other than the police? Thomas had no friends. It wasn’t like he’d gone to a sleepover.

This wasn’t like him.

I went back inside, decided I couldn’t wait any longer, and called the Promise Falls police. I told them my brother was missing.

“Sir, we’ll have an officer out to your place as soon as possible,” said the female dispatcher, “but in the meantime, I need you to provide a description of your brother. First of all, how old is he?”

I had to stop and think. “Thirty-five? He’s a couple of years younger than me.”

“And when did he go missing?”

“I don’t know. I was out for the day and I just got home and he’s not here.”

“Uh, well, hang on a second, Mr. Kilbride. This is a grown man of thirty-five you’re talking about? And for all you know he might have stepped out just before you returned? Maybe he went to the store or something, or for a drive.”

“No, it’s not like that. He doesn’t leave the house.”

“Maybe he finally got tired of being cooped up.”

This was going to take too long to explain. “Thomas is a psychiatric patient. Okay, not a patient, exactly, but he does see a psychiatrist on a regular basis, and this is not normal for him, to leave, to not be here.”

“You left a psychiatric patient on his own, Mr. Kilbride?”

“Jesus, it’s not-could you just send someone out and I’ll try to explain it to them?”

“We’ll send a car around, sir. But-”

“I have to go,” I said.

I didn’t want to spend my time arguing with the dispatcher the whole time I waited for a cop to show up.

Even after I called the police, my unease was evolving into panic. I went out to the porch, looking out to the road and to the left where, about a hundred yards away, our closest neighbor lived. A woman who’d been on her own since her husband died several years ago. I didn’t see anything else I could do right now aside from waking her up.

That was when a car started slowing along the highway, coming from the direction of town. About two car lengths from the end of our driveway, it edged off the pavement, tires crunching on gravel.

The car turned and started approaching the house. I came down the porch steps, worried that this was not someone bringing Thomas home, but someone bringing me bad news about him.

With the headlights shining directly at me, I couldn’t make out the car or tell whether anyone was in it beside the driver. It pulled up just behind and on the other side of mine, so that when the passenger door opened, I could see Thomas getting out, but not the person behind the wheel.

“Thomas! Where the hell have you been?”

He was holding something in his hand, about half the size of a clipboard. I realized it was one of those high-tech tablets that allowed you to do a hundred things, including surf the Web. He didn’t look the slightest bit concerned about the worry he’d caused me. “I went out to get something to eat. KFC. This thing is way better than the GPS in your car. What did you find out in New York? I want to hear everything. Come into the house because it’s cold outside.”

He strolled right past me, went up the steps into the house.

I heard the driver’s door open and close. Seconds later, someone appeared, looked at me, and smiled.

“Hey,” Julie said. “Your brother’s something else. We had a great time. And this thing about somebody’s head in a bag? Man, that’s some kind of story.”

Before saying a word to either Thomas or Julie, I took out my cell and called the police back and told them my brother was home safe. Then I said to Julie, “What’s going on?”

“You said drop by. I dropped by. You were out. Thomas was home. He was puzzling over what to do about dinner so I asked him if he wanted to go out and grab a bite and he said sure. You asking me in for a drink or am I gonna have to drive home sober?”

“What did you find out?” Thomas shouted. He’d come back out and was standing on the porch with the tablet in his hand.

“Give me a second here,” I said to him. “I’ll be right in.” To Julie, I said, “Where’d he get the thing?”