Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

Dad went out, they both returned home pretty frazzled. Moving him out, settling him in someplace else, it’s not something I look forward to.”
    Harry said, “Well, I’ll get the ball rolling here. The great thing for you, being an executor, is there really isn’t all that much to do, except to come in here the odd time and sign some papers. There’ll be the occasional item I’ll need your take on, and I’ll have Alice give you a dingle. You might want to get the property appraised, tell you what it could go for.” He ruffled through his papers. “I got all your numbers and e-mail address here I think.”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “And you probably knew—your dad had sent me a copy of the policy for his files—that there was an accidental death provision in his life insurance.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “Another fifty thousand. A little something else to go into the pot.” Harry paused while I digested this news. “So, you’re going to be hanging around for a while, then, before you head back to Burlington?”
    “Until I sort things out.”
    We were done, at least for now. As Harry led me out of the office, he put his hand on my arm.
    “Ray,” he said tentatively, “do you think if your brother had noticed how long it had been since your dad had been in the house, if he’d gone out looking for him a little sooner, it would have made any difference?”
    I’d asked myself the same question. Dad, pinned to the ground just over the hill, probably several hours before my brother found him. There had to have been quite a racket when it happened. The tractor flipping over, the rotating blades roaring.
    Did Dad scream? And if he had, would he have been heard over the noise of the mower? Would any of the sounds have carried up over the hill to the house?
    My brother probably never heard a thing.
    “I tell myself it wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said. “There’s no point thinking otherwise.”
    Harry nodded understandingly. “I guess that’s the best way to look at it. What’s done is done. No turning back the clock.” I wondered if Harry was going to offer up another cliché, but instead he said, “He’s really off in his own little world, isn’t he?”
    “You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

Two
    I got into the car and drove back to my father’s house.
    After Mom had died, I’d still thought of it for the longest time as my parents’ place, even though Dad was living there without her. It took a year or so for me to move past that. With Dad dead less than a week, I knew it was going to take a while before I could think of it as anything but his place.
    But it wasn’t. Not anymore. It was mine.
    And my brother’s.
    I’d never lived here. There was a guest room where I always slept when I came to visit, but there were no mementoes from my childhood here. No dresser drawer with stashes of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
, no model cars on the shelves, no posters on the walls. My parents had bought this place when I was twenty-one. I’d already moved out of our house on Stonywood Drive, in the heart of Promise Falls. My parents had hoped one of their sons would make something of himself, but put that dream on hold when I bailed on my university career in Albany and gotten a job at a Beekman Street art gallery in Saratoga Springs.
    My parents were never farmers, but when they’d spotted this place, it fit the bill. First, it was out in the country, several hundred yards from the closest neighbor. They’d have their privacy. Some isolation. It reduced the likelihood of another incident.
    Second, it was still a relatively short drive to work for Dad. But instead of driving into Promise Falls, through the downtown, and out the other side, he’d take the bypass they finished back in the late 1970s. Dad liked working for P&L. He didn’t want to look for something closer to home.
    Third, the house was charming, with its dormer windows and wraparound porch. Mom had loved to sit out there, three seasons out of the year. The place came with a barn, which Dad didn’t have much need for, other than to store tools and park the lawn tractor. But they both loved the look of the structure, even if it wasn’t storing hay every fall.
    There was a lot of property, but my parents maintained only about two acres of it. Behind the house, the yard stretched out flat for about sixty feet, then sloped down and out of sight to a creek that wound its way to the river that flowed into the center