Free Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay Page A

undoing what he’d done.
    “Make a right turn.”
    “No! We’re not doing it!” Thomas yelled at the dash.
    I reached over, fiddled with the settings, and shut her down.
    “It’s over,” I said. “I turned her off.”
    Thomas sat back in the leather seat and took a few deep breaths. Finally, he looked at me and said, “You should get rid of this car.”

EIGHT
    ONCE there was no more fun to be had with the car’s GPS, Thomas became sullen and asked me to turn around and go home. But I stuck to my guns and said he had an appointment, and we had to keep it.
    He sulked.
    I took a seat in the waiting room while Thomas went in for his session with Dr. Grigorin. There was one other patient waiting to see her. A very thin woman, late twenties, with long, scraggly blond hair that she kept twisting around her index finger. She was studying a spot on the wall with great interest, like there was a spider there that only she could see.
    I glanced at my watch, figured I had a bit of time, and stepped out into the hall. I took out my cell phone, looked up a number online, and tapped to connect.
    “Promise Falls Standard,” a woman’s recorded voice said. “If you know the extension, enter it now. To use the company directory, press 2.”
    I struggled through the process until an actual phone rang.
    “Julie McGill.”
    “Julie, hi, this is Ray Kilbride.”
    “Oh, hi, Ray. How are things?”
    “Things are, you know, they’re okay. Listen, am I catching you at a bad time?”
    “Just waiting on another call,” Julie said, her words coming quickly. “I thought this was going to be the principal from Promise Falls High. Trying to get some details on a small explosion in their chemistry class.”
    “Jesus.”
    “No one got hurt. But they could have. What can I do for you?”
    “I wanted, first of all, to thank you for coming to my dad’s funeral. That was really good of you.”
    “No problem,” she said.
    “I wondered, if you had a second, if we could grab a coffee so I could ask you a couple of questions about my father. Since you did the piece for the paper.”
    “It was pretty short. Not much more than a digest item. I don’t have a lot of detail.”
    I was picking up, from her tone, that she was worried her other call was going to come in. I was about to tell her to forget about it, apologize for taking up her time, when she said, “But sure. Why don’t you come by around four? We’ll grab a beer. Meet you out front of the paper.”
    “Yeah, sure, that would be—”
    “Gotta go.” She hung up.
    As I stepped back into the waiting room, the doctor and Thomas were emerging from her office. Dr. Grigorin was saying, “Don’t be such a stranger. You need to come see me more often. It’s good that we stay connected.”
    Thomas pointed to me. “So you’ll talk to him.”
    “I will.”
    “Tell him to stop telling me what to do.”
    “You got it.”
    Dr. Grigorin—her first name turned out to be Laura—had fiery red hair that would have fallen to her shoulders if she hadn’t spun it up into a bun, and stood about five-four in her heels, which I guessed added at least three inches. She was a striking woman in her early sixties. Rather than wearing typical doctor garb, she wore a red blouse and a straight black skirt that came to just below her knees.
    “Mr. Kilbride,” she said to me. “Won’t you come in.”
    “Ray,” I said. “Call me Ray.”
    She told Thomas to take a seat in the waiting room while we spoke.
    “I’m supposed to prescribe you something,” she said, smiling and motioning for me to take a chair. Rather than sit behind her desk, she took a chair across from me and crossed her legs. They were nice legs.
    “To keep my controlling nature in check,” I said.
    “That’s right.” I liked her smile. She had the tiniest gap between her front teeth. “How does he seem to you?” she asked.
    “It’s hard to tell. I know my father’s death has to have affected him, but he’s not