“Would Thomas deliberately lie to you?”
I’d never really thought about that. “I guess it’s possible. But when I asked him about this thing that happened with Dad, about pushing him on the stairs, he admitted it. Although it wasn’t like he volunteered the information.”
“He pushed your Dad down the stairs?”
I shook my head, like I didn’t have the energy to get into it now. “When there’s something Thomas doesn’t want to tell you, or own up to, he just keeps quiet. He clams up.” I stopped, watched the creek water trickling past. “Well, he lied to Dr. Grigorin. He told her he’d watched a movie with me when he hadn’t, trying to get her off his back, I guess. God, I just don’t know.”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“I’ll try. In the meantime, like I told you, Harry knows a guy, a detective with the Promise Falls police. He’ll bounce all this off him so I don’t have to worry about making a fool of myself with another call to the cops.”
“That’s good,” Julie said. “Duckworth is a good guy. He doesn’t instinctively hate reporters.”
I said, “Some other stuff’s nagging at me.”
“Like?”
I opened my arms, gesturing to where we were standing. “This is where it happened. This is where my father died.” I pointed to the hill. “That was where the tractor rolled. Stopped about here. This is where Thomas found him.”
She looped her arm into mine. “I’m sorry.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about him. About Dad. And about Thomas. He told me when they had this incident on the stairs, it was about something that had happened to him when he was thirteen. Something he didn’t want to talk about. And Dad, according to Thomas, was trying to tell him he was sorry, that he’d understand if Thomas didn’t forgive him.”
“He didn’t say what it was about?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. But”—and I hesitated—“there’s something more.”
Julie looked at me and waited.
“I haven’t talked to anyone about this, but there was something kind of weird on Dad’s laptop.” I told her about what I’d found in the search history.
“Child prostitution?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s kinda strange.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Julie shook her head strongly. “I didn’t know your dad, Ray. Why’s this got you worried? You think he was into something weird?” Then the implications started to sink in further. “God, you don’t think your dad assaulted Thomas when he was a kid, do you? You think that’s what he was talking about when he said he’d understand if Thomas didn’t forgive him?”
“It’s a huge leap, putting it together like that,” I said, “but without any real facts, your mind starts going places it shouldn’t.”
“Did your father, with you, did he ever—”
“Never,” I said. “Absolutely never.”
“Then that’s not it,” Julie said with finality. I liked it that she’d defend my father even without knowing him. “What else?” Julie asked. “I can tell there’s something else on your mind.”
“It’s…it’s nothing.”
“Talk to me. You’ve got all these things weighing on you, and you haven’t had anyone to talk them over with. What is it?”
I slowly shook my head, looked down. “I think there’s something funny about how Dad died.”
“Funny how?”
“It’s just, okay, the way they say it happened, he rolled the tractor while he was on the side of the hill here. And that’s probably what did happen.”
“So what’s the problem, then?” she asked.
“They never brought the tractor up. It was still down here by the creek. Not upside down, of course, because Thomas had managed to get it off him before the paramedics got here.”
“Okay, I’m not getting this,” Julie said.
“I came down here to see if it would start, to take it back up to the barn. And it did start. But the key was already in the OFF position, and that thing that goes around the lawnmower blades was raised, like he’d stopped cutting grass.”
Julie thought about what I was saying. “So, you think he rolled the tractor after he’d turned it off.”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“Isn’t that possible? That maybe the tractor was acting up, and he stopped it to see what was wrong? I don’t know a lot about riding lawnmowers, but if something gets caught in the blades, wouldn’t you have to turn everything off to see what was the matter? And wouldn’t you have to lift up that thingie so you could look under there to see what it was?”
I felt like I’d been hit in the side of the head with a two-by-four. I laughed, put my hands on Julie’s shoulders, and said, “You’re a genius.”
“I am?”
“Here I was, driving myself crazy, thinking this was some goddamn locked-room mystery, and the answer’s so fucking simple.”