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.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
“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.”
I went to my phone, went looking for a number that turned out not to be in its memory. I needed a phone book.
“We’ll talk later, okay, Thomas?” I said. “And go get you a computer?”
“Okay,” he said. “Do you want me to make dinner?” It was such an unexpected offer I thought I might cry.
“I don’t even know if we have anything,” I said. “We’ll sort it all out when I get back.”
I came down the stairs, glanced outside, saw Detective Duckworth standing out on the porch, waiting for me. I found the phone book in a drawer in the kitchen, opened it, looked up a home number for Len Prentice.
“Hello?” It was Marie.
“Hi, Marie. It’s Ray.”
“Oh Ray, oh my, Len and I, we heard about you and Thomas on-”
“I have a quick question for you. I just need you to answer this for me.”
“What? What do you want to know?”
“When Len went to Thailand, I know you didn’t go with him, but did anyone else?”
“Yes, of course. Harry went with him. Harry Peyton. Although Len was a bit disappointed because Harry was always off doing his own thing. Tell me how you and Thomas are-”
I hung up, went out on the porch to join Duckworth.
“Change of plan,” I said.
ON the way into town in Duckworth’s car, I tried my best to explain what I believed had happened. That when Harry Peyton found out Dad knew about his Thailand adventures, and that Dad now believed Thomas’s tale of what Harry had done to him when he was a boy, Peyton panicked.
“I think he killed my father,” I said. “Or at the very least, did nothing to save him. And maybe even before Dad died, and certainly after, Harry started calling my brother on his line, played into his delusion. He was trying to make sure Thomas didn’t talk about what Harry had done to him, I think. Figured Thomas would keep quiet about it if it was a presidential order.”
“This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever come across,” Duckworth said. “And believe me, I’ve come across some things.”
“What did Harry say when he called you?” I asked. “About Thomas, and what he’d seen on the Whirl360 site?”
