Read Online Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay - Free Book Online Page A

in.
    “The appointment’s at eleven,” I said.
    “Eleven, eleven, eleven,” he said, casting his eyes upward, like he was trying to remember what he’d written down in his datebook.
    “I’m pretty sure you’re free,” I said. “We’ll need to leave here around ten thirty.”
    Thomas got out of his chair, took his bowl over to the sink, and rinsed it under the tap. He always left the cleanup to me, so I had an idea just how much he wanted to avoid me.
    “Don’t walk away, Thomas.”
    “I really have a lot to do,” he said, starting to walk out of the kitchen. “You don’t understand how important it is.”
    “You can fiddle around with the GPS in the car.”
    That stopped him. “You have a navigational system?”
    “Built right into the dashboard,” I said.
    He looked at the closet by the front door, where his jacket was hanging. “We could go now.”
    “It’s only eight thirty. We don’t want to sit around waiting for the doctor for two hours.”
    He thought about that. “Okay, I’ll be ready at ten thirty. But you have to promise to talk to the doctor about your behavior.”
    “I promise,” I said.
    AFTER Thomas had gone up to his room, and I’d finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I decided it was time.
    I headed out the back door, walked across the yard that was, a full week after it had last been cut, in need of a trim, then came to a stop where the ground sloped down to the creek.
    It was, as I’d told Harry Peyton, a steep hill. The kind that, if you felt you had to cut the grass on it, you’d be best doing it with a weed trimmer, or maybe a hand mower. If it got away from you, the worst that could happen is it would bounce down the hill and end up in the water.
    A lot of people, had they owned this place, would have been content to end landscaping duties at the hill’s crest. Let the grass and weeds grow wild on the slope. But Dad liked the idea of a groomed yard that went right to the water. The creek didn’t exactly make the Kilbride homestead a beach house, but Dad figured it was as close as he was ever going to come. So every week, spring, summer, and fall, Dad did the hill when he cut the grass on the rest of the property.
    I remember Mom asking me, during one of our phone chats about a year before she died, to talk my father out of his practice of riding the mower on this hill, side to side, leaning into the slope to keep the machine from tipping over.
    “He’s going to get himself killed,” she’d said.
    “He knows what he’s doing, Mom.”
    “Oh, you men,” she’d said exasperatedly. “I tried to get Harry and Len to talk some sense into him and they said the same thing.”
    Turned out the men were wrong.
    The tractor, with a green hood and fenders and yellow seat, was sitting upright at the bottom of the hill. The hood was sitting askew over the engine and the tops of the back fenders were scuffed and scraped. The steering wheel was bent.
    My understanding was, the tractor had rolled once and landed on Dad. When Thomas got there, it wasn’t possible to roll the tractor back up the hill. It would have been too hard to go in that direction. So he’d given the tractor a shove downward. It had rolled a couple more times and landed on its wheels on level ground just before the creek.
    It had been there ever since.
    I walked carefully down the hill. It was easy to see where it had all happened. The grass was about three inches high going down the side of the hill, then jumped up to about five. At that point, the ground was torn up where the mower had dug in as it rolled.
    I stood a moment, one foot ahead of the other for balance, looking down at the place where my father had taken his last breath. Where that last breath had been crushed out of him. I felt a lump forming in my throat. Then I went down the rest of the way to the machine.
    I didn’t know whether I’d be able to get it back to the barn. The accident might have damaged the engine. When it was flipped