“Well,” Rochelle said emphatically, “that’s what I think. Although I guess it would be hard, after all these years, to get them to look into something like that.”
“I think you’re right. What’s done is done,” Nicole said. “No one has ever really said anything like this to me before.”
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I used to do searches of you online, wondering what happened to you. But there haven’t been any stories in years.”
“No,” Nicole said. “I left that life behind. I left…it all behind.”
“I did read stuff about how much everyone expected of you, the pressure that got put on you.”
Nicole smiled, to think that anyone still remembered. “My coach, he was furious with me. And my own father, he wouldn’t talk to me. He disowned me after that.” Nicole paused. “I guess he was living out his dream through me and I blew it for him.”
“You’re kidding,” Rochelle said. “That’s horrible.”
“Well,” Nicole said.
“The whole reason I’m telling you this is, I know it might seem kind of stupid, but you were a real inspiration to me then. I had a picture of you taped to my bedroom wall.”
“My picture?”
“I still have it. Not on my wall anymore. But I save stuff. I have it tucked away somewhere, with lots of clippings about you. I figured you’d want to know, because there’s no way I’d ever say anything that would cause trouble for the great Annabel Kristoff.”
It had been her name then.
Nicole’s smile was not a happy one. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me that.” She swallowed to clear the lump that was forming in her throat, then turned over the phone and put it to her ear.
Kyle was in midwhisper. “-there? Are you there? Hello?”
“I’m here,” Nicole said, putting the phone to her ear.
“It’s done.”
“The image is gone?”
“Yes. The head’s been blurred out, and now the window just looks dark.”
“Are there any previous versions that can still be accessed?”
“No. They’re wiped. The database is clean.”
“That’s excellent.” Nicole smiled at Rochelle, who was smiling back and tearing up a little. “Okay, Kyle, I guess we’re done. Thank you for this. You’ll find Rochelle in the basement when you get home.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. Rochelle, say hello.” Nicole held out the phone.
“Hi, honey! I love you! I’m so sorry about this morning.”
“You, too, babe. I’ve been such an asshole. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Nicole pulled back the phone. “Okay, Kyle. Good-bye.”
She ended the call, and tossed the phone, which was Rochelle’s, onto the carpet. And then she just sat there, looking at the floor, resting her elbows on her knees.
Thinking.
“What?” Rochelle asked. “Aren’t you going to go? He did what you want, didn’t he?”
“He did,” Nicole said. “He did.”
Still have to do it, she told herself. Even if she is a fan.
Nicole picked up the plastic bag that had been on the woman’s head earlier.
“What are you doing with that?” Rochelle asked.
It took much longer than she would have liked. The woman fought her hard, harder than most. She thrashed her head violently back and forth for as long as she could before the air ran out. Long enough for a single tear to drop onto the outside of the bag.
When it was finally done, Nicole settled back into her chair and waited for Kyle Billings to come home.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Len Prentice’s attitude, and comments, had left me shaken.
Calling Thomas crazy, saying he should be committed to a “loony bin,” had made me furious, but his revelation that Thomas had tried to push our father down the stairs had left me deeply troubled. Was it as bad as it sounded? Had it really happened? Dad had never mentioned anything like this to me, but that didn’t mean the incident never occurred. It wasn’t in my father’s nature to burden his family with his problems. About ten years ago, when he noticed a lump on his testicle, he never said a word to Mom. He went to the doctor, had it checked out. When the tests came back, it turned out he was fine, and the lump receded on its own. It was only some time later, when Mom was feeling ill, that the doctor they shared happened to ask her how Adam was doing.
She gave him shit. She told me all about it, hoping I’d give him shit, too. I didn’t. That was the way Dad was, and I knew there wasn’t any changing him. Whatever problems he’d had sharing a house with Thomas he had kept from me. He’d probably worried that if he had told me, I’d have felt obliged to help him out-something I’d like to think I would have done-but he wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d have seen Thomas as his responsibility, not mine. I had my own life to lead, he’d have reasoned.
But he must have felt the need to unload on someone, someone who wouldn’t feel they had to step in and actually help him with his situation. Len had been a sympathetic ear for my father, although there was nothing about his attitude that suggested sympathy to me. He was a simpleminded, judgmental asshole, as far as I could tell.
I wanted to ask Thomas about this, but was my brother a reliable witness to his own actions?
Driving away from the Prentice house, I felt myself getting swallowed into some kind of vortex. I’d come to Promise Falls from Burlington to deal with my father’s estate, set my brother up someplace, and get rid of the house, and really hadn’t made a dent in any of it. I kept finding myself sidetracked. Strange and unsettling words on Dad’s laptop. Thomas’s preoccupation with that goddamn face in the window. An unfortunate encounter between Thomas and Len Prentice, and apparently another, between Thomas and our father.
There was this other thing niggling away at my brain. The lawn tractor. The key in the OFF position. The blade housing raised, which indicated Dad had stopped mowing the lawn. But the job wasn’t finished, so why had he raised the blades?
It made me wonder whether he’d been interrupted. Was it possible someone had come down the side of the hill to talk to him? It was almost impossible to carry on a conversation with the tractor running, so Dad would have turned off the ignition. And if he thought this interruption was going to be an extended one, he’d have brought up the blades.
Was that what happened? Had someone stopped to chat? It wasn’t the best place for a conversation. It was a precarious spot, given how steep the slope was. Dad, sitting on the tractor, would have had to continually lean into the hill to keep the machine from tipping. Sitting straight up in the seat might have been all the leverage that was needed to topple the damn thing.
Which, in the end, was what happened.
But if the tractor rolled, and killed him, when it was already stopped, and if the reason Dad had come to a stop was because someone had wanted to talk to him, then who the hell was that person, and why hadn’t they called for help right away?
Thomas had been the one who finally dialed 911. After he’d found Dad, already dead, pinned by the machine.
Unless…
Unless Thomas was the one Dad had stopped for. To have that conversation. If it had turned into a heated argument, a simple shove would have been all Dad needed to go tumbling, taking the machine with him.
No.
