SEVENTY-THREE
“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.”
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.
