Читать книгу Rachel Dahlrumple - Shea McMaster - Страница 10

Chapter 5

A very important truth hit me, something I’d taken for granted, much the same as most people do.

When disaster strikes, you find out who your true friends are.

I opened my eyes enough to see Mark and Carl exchange a look much like the one Dan and John had exchanged the previous night. Par for the course. Most of the time they thought I was either crazy or too dense to understand the look. I was smarter than people tended to give me credit for, but I forgave them because although they didn’t understand me much, they tolerated my oddities–if curling up with a good book instead of hunting for snakes and spiders was considered odd, which it had been back then–when I displayed them, as I’d tolerated, or rather ignored, theirs. Snakes and spiders–ugh. For the most part, people, and by people I mean grownups rather than my littlest customers, never noticed me any more than they noticed last month’s bestsellers on the library shelves. But no matter what they thought of my quirks, we’d stood together more than once through the years.

Dan’s hand skimmed up my back and under my hair, until his large, warm hand gripped my nape. Thinking he might be preparing to push my head down between my knees again, I leaned back into his hold. It was an intimate touch, far more than the situation required; however, the contact felt right and I didn’t move away. Neither did he.

“Rachel,” Carl tried again, this time leaning forward, elbows on his knees, looking deadly earnest with gray hair at his temples blending into black. When had that happened? “Burt’s body is being brought back from the casino by ambulance. It’s going to the morgue at the Naval hospital. Since he’s a veteran and all.”

“Always a good place for a body, I suppose.” Something glittery shimmered before my eyes. I blinked to clear them. “Unless you want to send it straight to Ever Faith Mortuary.”

“Rachel, you need to know…to understand…” Pity filled his eyes and I leaned into Dan a little more. Cyndi shoved a tissue wad into my hand, then used another to dab at her eyes.

“I understand,” I said. “He’s not coming. I get it. That’s fine. The party can still go on. It’s not like he does much to help out.” I looked to Cyndi. “You’ll tell John? I’ll need help cleaning up the yard tomorrow. Maybe he can organize a few of the neighbors to help.” I almost blurted out the fact that I’d be tossing Burt’s clothes along with the party trash, but both Cyndi and Dan squeezed my hands like they were juicing lemons.

“Oh, honey.” Cyndi sniffled, her big blue eyes looking more so as they filled with fresh tears that leaked over the edges, streaking what little mascara remained right down her cheeks. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“I’m not worried.” I shook her hand enough to get her to relax her grip and turned back to the men watching me from across the coffee table.

Another vehicle pulled up in the half circular drive and parked carefully in front of Dan’s cruiser. Everyone in the living room turned to see who it was. Pastor McHugh and Dr. Sorrenson climbed out of the doctor’s shiny black sedan. Wow, all the heavy hitters were turning out. Behind them, a county paramedic unit pulled up, blocking the rest of the wide drive. Had they brought Burt here by mistake?

Mark stood and opened the door to the newcomers. Dr. Sorrenson held up his hand and no one climbed out of the ambulance. Was this a new service? Emergency people anticipating a potential emergency? Did they expect one here? Okay, so I’d had ambulances called for me a couple times due to asthma, but those had been completely different situations during especially heavy pollen years. Certainly not in the last six years, unless people insisted on counting the call to Miguel the previous night. Why now? Because of that minor incident?

Down the street, neighbors left their houses, coming out to stand on their lawns, their faces turned in the direction of my house. For a moment I imagined myself out there with them, people drifting together one and two at a time. What’s happening? they’d ask each other. I don’t know. The sirens weren’t blaring…

A pair of my visitors moved the coffee table back and Pastor crouched at my feet, his frail-looking, elderly hand resting on my knee. He’d been my pastor my entire life; from baptism to confirmation, first communion and marriage, he’d been there for the milestones of my life. A new associate pastor had been brought in to help him ease off a bit and begin edging toward retirement. Not that we’d seen any difference.

“Rachel?” His voice carried more strength than one would imagine. Going on seventy-five if he was a day, he moved with more grace and vigor than men half his age. I’d always imagined I could see a clean, pure white aura shimmering around him, pulsing with heavenly energy. That aura seemed sharper, yet warmer right then. Someone carried in a chair from the dining room for him, but he waved it away. “Rachel, child, tell me what you’re thinking.”

“No one has volunteered to take over Burt’s spot at the beer table for the party tonight. If we could get that matter settled…” I wanted to rub the building ache in my temples, but my bookends still imprisoned my hands.

“Don’t worry, lass. The party will be taken care of. Would you like us to cancel it?”

“No, don’t do that. What would I do with all the…stuff? No need to cancel the party.” I could just see cases of drinks and stacks of paper and plasticware filling the garage for months.

“Fine, fine.” He patted my knee. “We’ll turn it into a grand wake, shall we?”

“A wake?”

Dan’s hand tightened gently on my neck, giving silent approval. It felt good.

“Yes, lass. A wake to celebrate Burt’s life. A chance for people to process.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

“Now, Rachel, about Burt. Do you want to go to the morgue and identify the body?”

The question hit me as odd. “If you know it’s him, then he’s been indentified, right?”

I looked over the pastor’s shoulder toward the Sheriff. “Mark? He’s been identified, right?”

“Yes, Rachel.” Mark looked away with a small cough. “I answered the call with my deputies. It was him.”

Relief flooded me. Between my grandparents and my mother, I’d seen enough dead bodies to last me a lifetime. “Oh, well, then that’s all right.” It occurred to me Dan had been trying to tell me something earlier. “Where did you find him?”

Throats cleared and Pastor made room for the doctor in front of me. Dr. Sorrenson’s hand gripped my chin and tilted my face up so he could see my eyes. “Rachel,” he said in his calm, soft way. “How are you feeling? Lightheaded at all?” His other hand wrapped around my right wrist, strong fingers searching for my pulse. “Your eyes are a bit dilated, your face a tad pale even for you. Are you up to hearing the details? How’s your breathing? Is that a touch of wheezing I detect?”

No wheezing, so I shrugged off his questions. “I suppose I’ll have to hear it sooner or later. Might as well get it over.”

“Brace yourself, honey,” Cyndi whispered from my side and I felt a prick of annoyance. All these people knew?

I managed to turn my face toward Dan. Had we been alone, I could have leaned forward an inch and touched my lips to his. “Just tell me.”

Emotion I couldn’t define filled his eyes and he swallowed before soldiering on with the rest of the news. “He was at the Tachi casino, in the hotel, with a woman. He died while…”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t need to hear the rest. With all the evidence in front of me, I could no longer hide from the truth. So many people thought I had the perfect life. A handsome, popular husband, a big house, land, and a good job. I’d even once had the one vital thing that had faded away. Love. Well, love and trust.

For months I’d made him wear condoms the few times we’d had sex, claiming I couldn’t orgasm without the stimulation of a certain ribbed brand. Instead of fixing our problems, I’d brought home the highly specialized condoms and insisted they were necessary to my pleasure. Necessary to keeping me disease free was more like it, if I’d never been brave enough to acknowledge my suspicions.

A doormat. That’s what most people thought of me. A mousy personality to go with my mousy-colored, lifeless hair. Submissive and compliant to any strong figure. Where did the trait come from? My mother certainly wasn’t submissive to my father. She’d run the show, with a very few notable exceptions. My name for one. And my grandmothers, well, there’d never been a more domineering pair of females ever created. Not that my father or grandfathers were weak men. Absolutely not. They were strong men, well matched with strong women, providing absolutely no answer whatsoever for my personality, or lack thereof.

“Rachel, you can change your mind about the wake.” Dan got through to me as the doctor’s fingers tightened on my wrist, shifting as if he’d lost contact with my pulse.

“Do we…” Oh Lord. We lived in a small town. And he’d died less than twenty miles away from home. As I’d begun to suspect, presumably everyone already knew about Burt’s philandering. How many had seen him at the casino flaunting his mistress? As recently as that day I’d seen people flush guiltily and stop their conversations as I approached on the street. I’d seen the smug looks from certain females of my acquaintance. Was I the last one in town to open my eyes?

“Doc, I think she’s going into shock,” Dan said calmly.

“Who?” I managed to whisper past my tightening chest. It came out on a wheeze.

Someone held my forgotten glass of iced tea in front of my face.

“Take this, Rachel, it’s for your asthma,” Dr. Sorrenson insisted, with a pill held to my mouth. He dropped it in and pressed the iced tea glass against my lips. The pill felt like an antihistamine I took on a regular basis. I swallowed.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cyndi spoke up.

“It matters. Who?” I repeated, and sipped more before tea ran down my front.

“No one from Bonchamps,” Mark answered. “A woman from San Jose, according to her license.”

Oh. Worse, in a way. Someone Burt had probably known from the years we’d lived in Silicon Valley while he worked for a semiconductor company. Had their affair been going on that long? Ten years or more? Was this the reason we’d never had children? If so, Burt had been the world’s biggest fool. Children would have kept me busy. More than one doctor had assured me the problem didn’t lie with me and could find no reason for me to not conceive, yet it had never happened. Tests had proven Burt capable, but somehow the two ingredients had never mixed properly. At one point, I’d privately wondered if he’d had a vasectomy on the sly and used someone else’s samples for testing, but that line of reasoning had never made sense. Then John had moved home with the wife he’d found while stationed in Florida and their babies became mine, Cyndi my sister, and the pain of no children of my own slowly atrophied into a numb spot in my heart.

“Who?” I demanded.

Mark pulled a small notebook from his shirt pocket and flipped through several pages. All for show, I was sure. The man had a mind like a steel trap and could remember every time I’d ever dunked his skinny butt in the city pool. “According to her license, her name is Julianna Worthington. Age thirty-two, with an address in Los Gatos. Know her?”

“No.” Not really. Maybe I’d heard the name before as someone Burt did business with. As in, “You remember Julianna from the Christmas party at Worthington and Smythe Semiconductor. Old man Worthington’s daughter. He’s put her in my old position and is grooming her to take over when he retires. He asked me to give her a hand. Good business networking is all it is.” The Speech. From about a year before. Or was it the prior month? I’d heard The Speech several times, of course the names and circumstances changed from time to time, but the basic lines were standard Burt.

On the other hand, a touch of relief swept me. It wasn’t one of the handful of single women in town such as Cecile the florist, Sonja from the hotel, C.C. Gibbs who’d cared for Mom, or heaven forbid, our tenant Ohm, with the new age jewelry shop.

I saw the people gathered around me exchanging furtive glances. Had they expected me to react differently? When had plain old Rachel ever fallen apart? They’d never seen me crumple and cry. Not when my grandparents died one after the other, and not when my mother finally succumbed to cancer. My father had cried buckets at my mother’s funeral, but not me. I’d wrapped my arm him and changed out the tissues he soaked, but I didn’t advertise my misery or produce gallons of tears.

I’d had a deal with Cyndi and her children. I was the calm one in the center of the storm. I supplied the bandages, ointment, kisses and hugs chased by the cookies and lemonade she provided to soothe any remaining hurts. She was bon-bons, I was boo-boos. And they expected me to change in the face of Burt’s ignominious death?

“Tell me the rest.” As long as we were on a roll, they might as well tell me everything now, like a surgical strike.

“Rachel, I don’t think…” Dr. Sorrenson began but I shook my head.

“No, there’s more, and I’m sure I don’t want to know, but it seems the rest of you do know. I can’t stand the pity looks, so tell me.”

Yes, guilt did flush several faces.

“They were…in the act,” Dan said gently. “He died…on top of her.” He cleared his throat. “This morning. Just before noon.”

Catching one last quickie before heading home to the ball and chain? Had there ever been an ethics seminar? Certainly hadn’t been a golf game on a big name course.

“Is that how they were found?” Burt was–had been–a big man. Six feet, three inches, and inching closer to two hundred fifty pounds every year, despite working out and my attempts to provide a healthy diet. I knew exactly how heavy he was. Had he collapsed on me, I would have been trapped. And I didn’t qualify as a tiny thing of fluff. If I had the picture of the right woman in my head, lil ol’ Julianna qualified as pretty tiny. Amazing, really, that he hadn’t crushed her to death. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe Julianna was the tall, athletic brunette. No, she would have been able to push Burt off and perform CPR. Must have been the tiny redhead.

“Yes.” Dan’s calm response solidified the images in my head.

Shamefully, a giggle escaped me. My heart barely beat, an icy block settled in my chest, and I felt dizzy and sick, but a sense of the ridiculous touched me. “Was she…is she…” I couldn’t even ask, not quite knowing how to phrase the question.

“She was trapped for about twenty minutes,” Mark said. “It took her that long to, uh, loosen the knots…” He cleared his throat and looked away. “She’s traumatized.”

Shaking Cyndi’s hand loose, I could finally use mine to speak for me and held it up to stop any further words of description. Loosen knots? He’d had her tied up? Well, chalk that one up in the TMI column. I didn’t care about Julianna whatsherface’s frame of mind. Served her right. Call me bitchy, but she’d been the one sneaking around with a married man pushing fifty. A man well past his prime, though still fairly handsome. Frankly, his age and size were the reasons I’d begun to insist on the top position. The thought of him having a heart attack in the midst of orgasm had occurred to me more than once–a la the beginning of Private Benjamin–and Burt, being somewhat lazy, hadn’t argued. Said he liked the view. I hadn’t cared about that. Besides, I could only get a decent orgasm on top.

“So, you’re telling me an untold number of emergency personnel, hotel employees, and the entire town council, know the details?”

Several heads nodded solemnly.

“Is it too much to hope everyone will keep their mouths shut about the circumstances?”

Doubt filled the silence. Small town, county grapevine syndrome. The details would eventually spread and the pitying looks would follow me throughout town. Nothing new there.

“For tonight, please, keep it as quiet as possible…” My small spurt of defiance left me and weariness filled the hole left behind. Dr. Sorrenson pressed the iced tea glass to my lips again and I drank deeply, more to please him than from any great thirst.

Finished, I pushed the glass away and leaned against Dan. Why? I’d already come to rely on his strong, solid presence, which fit me comfortably in a way I’d never imagined. I’d known him, known these people around me, more than half, if not my entire, life. Until that day, I’d never once imagined turning to Dan. We’d never been friends. Distant acquaintances, but not friends, casual or close.

“Rachel, do you have pictures? Scrapbooks?” Pastor McHugh would think of something like that. I privately thought of him as an expert in the matter of death. His guidance had been invaluable with all those other deaths in my life.

Sniffling, Cyndi answered for me as I began to cough. “I know where they are. I’ll get together a remembrance book. People can write in it tonight.”

A hand patted mine as my coughing eased for a moment and my head began to float off my shoulders. Good thing Dan’s hand held it in place.

“Your inhaler, Rachel.” Good old Doc held it to my mouth and I obediently inhaled. Almost immediately my chest began to ease, taking away the feeling of constriction in my lungs.

“Don’t worry, lass. We’ll do up a right and proper wake tonight.”

I nodded once before my eyes closed and blackness enfolded me.