Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

Detective Duckworth pursed his lips while he thought about all this.

“You think a guy’s going to keep those kinds of pictures on his phone?” he asked. “His wife might find them.”

I put up my hands. “I don’t know. Marie, she’s not much of a gadget person. Look, I don’t have all the answers, but there’s something wrong with that man. I can just feel it.”

“I suppose,” he said, “that at the very least it might be worth going over to talk to him about it. See what he has to say.”

“Yeah, let’s do that,” I said.

“Whoa,” he said, putting up his hand.

“I’m coming. I have some things I want to ask him. If you don’t let me come with you, I’m going to be banging on his door two seconds after you leave.”

Duckworth considered this. “You let me do the talking.”

I said nothing.

“Okay, let’s take a ride over there. You can direct me?”

“I can,” I said. “First, I want to tell my brother I’m heading out for a little while. And there’s just one other thing I have to do.”

“I’ll be waiting for you out on the porch.”

Duckworth got up and was heading outside as I went up the stairs.

Maps still hanging everywhere. They had, for the first time, a comforting effect on me. I went into Thomas’s room.

He was sitting in his computer chair, staring at his computer monitor and keyboard. Without the tower, they were a car with no engine.

“Are we going to get a computer now?” he asked.

“Not right this second,” I said. “You be okay here for a while, on your own? There’ll still be a cop out by the road.”

“I guess. Where are you going?”

“I’m going over to see Len Prentice.”

Thomas frowned. “I don’t like him.”

I considered asking Thomas, right then, to tell me what had happened to him, who had done it, but decided not to. He’d been through enough in the last few days without me forcing him to talk about that event.

“I don’t like him, either,” I said.

I turned my attention to the phone on his desk. “Have you touched this?” I asked.

“You told me not to.”

“I was just asking.”

“I haven’t touched it.”

I reached across the desk, pulled the phone closer to me. I hit the button that would give me the call history.

There had been no calls to this phone since the night we’d been abducted.

There was a call at 10:13 p.m. that night. It was the only number in the call history.

It was, I was pretty sure, a local number.

“Thomas,” I said, “this is showing only one call to this phone, ever. You’ve never gotten any other calls up here? Not even telemarketers?”

“I always delete the history after every call,” he said. “That’s what President Clinton started telling me to do.”

But Thomas hadn’t been able to erase the history that night, when Lewis Blocker answered the phone.

I didn’t think it was smart to dial this number directly from Thomas’s phone. I used my cell. I entered the number, put the phone to my ear, and listened.

“Who are you calling?” Thomas asked. “Are you calling the president? He told me never to call him myself. And if that’s his number it should have been deleted.”

I held up a hand to silence him. The phone at the other end rang once.

Then a second time.

A third.

Then a pickup. Some fumbling, and finally, a voice.

“Hello, Harry Peyton here.”

“Hello?” Harry said again. “Someone there?”

“It’s Ray,” I said, when I’d found my voice.

“Ray!” Harry exclaimed, his voice full of exuberance. “Jesus Christ! You’re back!”

“We’re back,” I said.

“My God, what happened to you? The details coming out on the news are sketchy, but you found out Morris Sawchuck’s wife had been murdered? Good God, man, how on earth did you get all mixed up in that? Well, okay, I know Thomas had something to do with it, but Christ almighty, you could have ended up dead.”

“Came close to it,” I said, thinking. Trying to put it together.

“We called your place a few times, couldn’t reach you. At first we figured maybe you’d gone back to Burlington for a couple of days and took your brother with you.”

“No.”

Harry laughed. “Yeah, well, we know that now, don’t we? Are you okay? I mean, physically? You guys all right?”

“Wrists a bit sore,” I said. “Kind of hurt all over.”

“Hell of a thing,” Harry said. “Listen, these things I need you to sign, we can do that anytime. You get your life back to normal and then-”

“No,” I said. “Let’s do it now.”

“Well, sure, let me just check my book-”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Ray, wait. Ray? You know you called me on my personal cell. Why didn’t you call on the office line? Where’d you get this number?”

“See you soon,” I said, and ended the call.

Thomas looked at me. “How’s the president?” he asked.

I walked down the hall to my father’s room, closed the door, and sat on the edge of the bed. I set the phone on the bedspread, ran my hands across the fabric, feeling the texture of its ridges on my palms.

What the hell was going on?

Harry Peyton had phoned the house pretending to be former president Clinton. The only person he could have hoped would have believed it was my brother. Harry knew about my brother’s fantasies.

He was playing into them.

The call Lewis took couldn’t have been the first one. No, there had to have been others before that. Calls my brother took. Conversations my brother believed he was having with Bill Clinton.

But I also knew, from my own observations, that Thomas had had these conversations when there really was no one on the other end of the line. I’d seen him conducting imaginary chats without the aid of a telephone.

Harry Peyton knew about those chats.

And had decided to make them real.

I grabbed my phone, came out of Dad’s room, and went back in to see Thomas, who was still sitting, dejectedly, in his computer chair.

“When you’d get a call, on that phone, from…you know, what would he tell you?”

Thomas blinked. “You remember I told you, how he hadn’t been as nice lately?”

“Yeah.”

“He said something bad would happen to us if I talked to you about things. About things that had happened to me, and things that the president was telling me now. He’d say everything was just between us, and he wanted to know about me personally, about you, and Dad. He didn’t used to ask those kinds of questions, when he would talk to me without the phone. When I would just hear him.”

“What did he ask about Dad?”

“He wanted to know if he talked about his friends, whether Dad had told me anything bad about them. Because Mr. Clinton had to be sure that no one in my circle was an enemy or a spy or anything.”

“What did you tell him?”

Thomas shrugged. “Not that much. I told him I didn’t like Len Prentice, and that I really didn’t like Mr. Peyton, which was why I didn’t go to Dad’s funeral, because I figured he would be there.”

“Thomas,” I said gently, “the thing that happened to you, a long time ago, in the window, it was Mr. Peyton who did that, wasn’t it?”

His eyes looked distant. “Dad said I wasn’t supposed to talk about that. Ever. Even after he said he was sorry, after he knew it was true. He said I couldn’t talk about it until he knew what to do about it. But then, eventually, I might have to.” He looked away. “I didn’t want to ever do that. Dad made me try to forget about it for so long, I didn’t think I could do that. Tell the police, or talk about it in a courtroom. No, never.”