Evasion

Chapter Eighteen

Even in the relationship that Scott had built up with Mr. Prescott, much of the mystique had been held together. Scott knew the man’s first and middle names.

But he’d never used the first name.

No, despite the fact he knew that Mr. Prescott used his middle name, Tim, He had even heard other teachers call him that. But he still had always thought of him as Mr. Prescott and not James Timothy Prescott or even Tim, as he was known to his friends.

He called Mr. Prescott and they met at a café in downtown Toronto, where Scott told him everything he had seen that morning.

When he’d finished laying out the details of that morning at Exhibition GO station, Scott started to run down the possibilities he had kept only in the back of his head.

“I don’t know what to think, Mr. Prescott. Do you think, perhaps that this could be a long lost twin brother?”

Prescott leaned forward, offered the beaming smile that warmed so many high school students to him within seconds of him entering their first class with him; it was a smile that peeked out playfully from behind the thick Tom Selleck style moustache that would, normally, appear as if his face was meant only for a serious presentation to the world.

“Scott, please, call me Tim. My Dad’s name is Mr. Prescott. Cut this guy a little bit of slack, would you? I already feel over the hill, being retired, having passed sixty a few years back, being a grandfather and all that other ‘old guy’ jazz like seniors discounts, regular prostrate exams and everything.

“If you call me Tim you’ll help me feel younger and better about myself. Deal?”

“Deal.” Scott smiled. The man’s ability to make the person or classroom he was speaking with feel one hundred percent at ease had not been reduced in any way. If anything, it was more refined, stronger, more powerful than before. “So, do you, think, Tim, that the man I saw could be my father’s twin brother?”

“It might be possible,” Prescott said, looking down into his coffee as he worked through the logic. “But you don’t think that the fact he had a twin brother would have come up at all in any conversations or mentioned at any family gatherings over the years?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they had a falling out, my dad and his brother. Maybe something so terrible happened that caused a rift between them. Something big; something major. So big that nobody dared mention dad’s brother to him. One of those: ‘you’re dead to me!’ sentiments you sometimes hear about.”

“That is possible. But what about pictures? You’d mentioned knowing very little about your dad’s childhood. But weren’t there any pictures of your dad that would include his brother? Wouldn’t you have seen any?”

Scott thought back about it. “Well, there weren’t all that many pictures of Dad when he was younger. But, you’re right. None of them include a brother.”

“So the twin brother hypothesis seems unlikely then.”

“I don’t know. What if the falling out was so bad that my dad destroyed all of the pictures, not wanting to have anything there to remind him of the man.”

“Now you’re stretching it, Scott. You need to come back to the simpler solution, don’t you think?”

Scott took a sip of his coffee, and, even though it was fixed exactly the way he liked it he picked up the glass container of sugar from the center of the table and tipped it over the coffee, sprinkling in another large spoonful. It was a gesture designed to stall, to pause. When Scott looked back up at Mr. Prescott he knew the man knew exactly what he was doing.  Prescott raised his bushy black eyebrows high onto his forehead and his playful smile peeked out from under the moustache.