Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

insisted he knew what he was doing. Thing is, that part of the property, it’s way back of the house, you can’t see it from the road or any of the neighbors’ places. The ground slopes almost forty-five degrees down to the creek. Dad would mow along there sideways, leaning his body into the hill so the tractor wouldn’t tip over.”
    “How long do they think your father was out there before they found him, Ray?”
    “Dad probably went out to cut the grass after lunch, and wasn’t discovered until nearly six. When the tractor flipped over on top of him, the top edge of the steering wheel landed across his middle”—I pointed to my own stomach—“you know, his abdomen, and it crushed his insides.”
    “Jesus,” Harry said. He touched his own stomach, imagining the pain my father must have felt for God knew how long.
    I didn’t have much to add to that.
    “He was a year younger than me,” Harry said, wincing. “We’d get together for a drink now and then. Back when Rose was alive, we’d play a round of golf every once in a while. But he didn’t feel he could leave your brother on his own for the time it took to play eighteen holes.”
    “Dad wasn’t very good at it, anyway,” I said.
    Harry smiled ruefully. “I’m not going to lie. Not a bad putter, but he couldn’t drive worth a shit.”
    I laughed. “Yeah.”
    “But once Rose passed, your dad didn’t even have time to hit a bucket of balls at the driving range.”
    “He spoke highly of you,” I said. “You were always a friend first, and his lawyer second.” They’d known each other at least twenty-five years, back to when Harry was going through a divorce and, after giving his house to his ex-wife, lived for a time above a shoe store here in downtown Promise Falls, in upstate New York. Harry used to joke that he had a lot of nerve, offering his services as a divorce attorney, after getting taken to the cleaners during his own.
    Harry’s phone emitted a single chime, indicating an e-mail had landed, but he didn’t even glance at it.
    “Last time I talked to Dad,” I said, nodding at the phone, “he was thinking about getting one of those. He had a phone that would take pictures, but it was an old one, and it didn’t take very good ones. And he wanted a phone that would be easy for sending emails.”
    “All this new high-tech stuff never scared Adam.” Harry said, then clapped his hands together, signaling it was time to move on to why I was here. “You were saying, at the funeral, that you’ve still got the studio, in Burlington?”
    I lived across the state line, in Vermont.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Work’s good?”
    “Not bad. The industry’s changing.”
    “I saw one of your drawings—is that what you call them?”
    “Sure,” I said. “Illustrations. Caricatures.”
    “Saw one in the
New York Times Book Review
a few weeks back. I can always tell your style. The people all have really big noggins and the tiny bodies, looks like their heads would make ’em fall over. And they all have these rounded edges. I love how you shade their skin tones and everything. How do you do that?”
    “Airbrush,” I said.
    “You do a lot of work for the
Times
?”
    “Not as much as I used to. It’s a lot easier to run a file pic than hire someone to do an illustration from scratch. Papers and magazines are cutting back. I’m doing more for Web sites these days.”
    “You design those things? Web sites?”
    “No. I do artwork for them and hand it off to the Web site builders.”
    “I would have thought, doing stuff for magazines in newspapers in New York and Washington, you’d have to live there, but I guess these days, it doesn’t much matter.”
    “Anything you can’t scan and e-mail, you can FedEx,” I said. When I said nothing else, Harry opened the file on his desk and studied the papers inside.
    “Ray, I take it you’ve seen the will your father drew up,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “He hadn’t updated it in a long time. Made a couple of changes after your mother died. The thing is, I ran into him one day, he was sitting there in a booth at Kelly’s having a coffee and he offered to buy me one. He was by himself, at a table by the window, staring out at the street, looking at the
Standard
but not really reading it. I’d see him in there every once in a while, like he just needed time alone, out of the house. Anyway, he waved me over and said he was thinking of amending it, his will, that is, that he might need