Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

“Your dad was thinking of getting a new phone,” Duckworth said.

That hit me. “How did you know that?”

“He told me. That’s how it happened.”

I gripped the arms of my chair, like I was strapping myself in for a rough ride. “Go on.”

“Your dad wanted a cell phone that would do lots of fancy things, instead of just being a phone. Me, I got a phone that does a lot of things but I don’t know how to do hardly any of them. Had it a year before I could figure out how to take a picture with it. But that was the very thing your dad was interested in having a phone for. To take pictures.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“He told me he’d been looking at a few of them, but getting recommendations from store people, you don’t know whether to trust them. Maybe they’re just trying to sell you the most expensive kind. You want to know what your friends got, what they have to say. Word of mouth, you know?”

“Sure.”

“So your dad happened to be with one of his friends, he told me-this would be the same friend your brother had accused way back when-and he picked up his phone to have a look at it. Just curious. This friend wasn’t in the room at the time, but your dad didn’t think anything of it. Didn’t think he’d mind. He wanted to see how the camera worked on this phone, so he pressed the whaddyacallit, the camera app, and up it came. And then he tapped again, so it brought up the pictures that had already been taken.” Duckworth paused to catch his breath.

“What?” I said.

“He didn’t like what he saw.”

I swallowed. “What were the pictures of?”

“Boys,” Duckworth said. “Pictures of young boys. These weren’t friendly family pictures, if you get my drift. These were young boys-ten, twelve, thirteen years old-in provocative poses and positions. Your dad, he could barely describe them to me, they upset him so.”

“These were pictures his friend had taken.”

Duckworth nodded. “Seems he’d just come back from some trip. A place where a person with those kinds of tastes can find just what he’s looking for. And in that instant, when he saw those pictures, he realized that what your brother had said years ago was the truth. He hadn’t been making it up. A man who would take these kinds of pictures was the sort of man who would have assaulted your brother.”

“Who?” I asked, but I believed I already had the answer.

Duckworth held up his hand again. “Let me tell this. So when this friend of your dad’s came back into the room, your dad confronted him with it. Asked him what the hell it was. Said he now realized it had to be true, what Thomas had told him.”

“What did the man say?”

“Denied it to hell and back, of course.”

“What’d my dad do?” One thing I was pretty sure he must have done was a search on his laptop for child prostitution.

“I guess he stewed about it for a while. Finally, he called me. He said he was just sick about it, that he’d tried to apologize to your brother about it, that they’d had a fight over it. He wanted to know whether the man could still be charged, for what he did to Thomas. I told him it was pretty unlikely. It happened so long ago, and given your brother’s tendencies, it would be pretty hard to get a conviction.”

“What about the pictures on the man’s phone?”

“Your dad knew he’d probably deleted them right away, soon as he left, but even so, he was asking me, could someone go after him, for paying to have sex with kids in some foreign country.”

“Thailand,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“I think we’re probably talking about Thailand. I know it’s not the only country in the world where that sort of thing is available-hell, I’m sure it goes on in this country-but one of Dad’s friends has traveled to Thailand.”

“I haven’t answered your question about who the friend is,” Duckworth said, “because I don’t know. Your dad never told me, because he hadn’t decided what to do about this man.” He sighed. “And then he had that accident. And died.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He had that accident.”

“Len Prentice,” I said.

“Say again?” Duckworth said, getting out his notebook.

“Dad worked for him for years. They’d been friends a very long time. Thomas has never liked him. Len came by here the other day, tried to force Thomas to have lunch with him. Maybe he was trying to find out what Dad might have told him before he died.” I thought a moment. “And he takes trips without his wife, to Thailand.”

“Well,” Duckworth said. “That’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?”

I felt exhaustion wash over me. All that had happened in the last few days, and now this. “The son of a bitch. The fucking pervert. He forces himself on Thomas, and knows he can get away with it, because if Thomas ever says anything, Len can just say, ‘Hey, you know that kid-he’s nuts.’”

“It’s part of the pattern,” Duckworth said. “They target the vulnerable, people they can control.”

Blood pulsed in my temples. I wanted to get in the car, go over to Len Prentice’s house, and throttle him. Strangle the bastard with my bare hands.

“Thomas went years without ever talking about this,” I said.

“Because he got into so much trouble before, when he told his father about it,” Duckworth said. “He just wanted it to go away.”

“And when my father brought it all up again, when he tried to tell my brother that he now believed him, how must that have made Thomas feel?” I wondered aloud. “It must have made him angry. That now, finally, Dad was prepared to do something about it. When the damage was already done.”

Duckworth nodded solemnly. “Maybe so.”

I clasped my head with my hands. “I’m on overload.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

We were both quiet for a moment. I was the one who finally spoke. “There’s something that’s been troubling me from the moment I came home, after I got word that my father was dead.”

Duckworth waited.

“The circumstances. They’ve always bothered me.”

“How so?”

“I know it looked like an accident. He was riding the tractor along the side of a steep hill, and rolled it. But he’d been mowing like that, safely, for years.”

“A lot of people do the same foolish thing for years, and one day it catches up with them,” Duckworth offered.

“I know, I know. But when I went down to bring the tractor back to the barn-it hadn’t been moved since the accident, other than when Thomas pushed it off Dad-I noticed that the key was in the OFF position. And the housing for the blades? It was raised. It was what he’d have done if someone had come down the hill and wanted to talk to him. He would’ve had to turn off the engine, and he would have lifted the blades up, because he wasn’t cutting grass anymore.”

“No one ever came forward to say they’d talked to your father before the accident. That they were there when it happened.”

“Who would?” I asked. “If they’d pushed him over.”

Duckworth thought about that. “I don’t know, but that’s an interesting theory.”

“While Dad was debating what to do about Len Prentice, Len Prentice must have been going out of his mind. Would Dad go to the police-well, he did, but he never gave you a name. Or would Dad tell Len’s wife, his friends? If he couldn’t actually bring him up on any kind of charges, maybe he’d try to ruin his reputation. Let everyone know just what kind of man Len Prentice was.”

“It’s possible.”

“Len gets so worried, he comes out to the house one day, trying to talk Dad out of doing anything, maybe coming up with some cockamamie explanation for why there are pictures of naked boys on his cell phone. Finds Dad cutting grass on the side of the hill. Dad stops the tractor, they get into an argument, Len gives Dad a shove, and he goes back, taking the tractor with him, and it kills him. Len might have had time to get help, or get the tractor off Dad, but he chooses not to. Len’s known, for years, that my Dad took chances on that hill. Mom used to beg Len to tell him not to do it.”