“How are you, Charlie?” His face was grave and kind.
Charlie shrugged. “I'm okay. I've been better, but I'll survive.”
“I'm sorry I haven't phoned. I'm a coward, I guess. If I talk about it, she'll cry, I told myself. And I can't avoid talking about it because if I do, it'd be like ignoring an alligator in your bathtub. But I don't want to make her cry. She's cried enough already. She might even be feeling better and there I'd be, making her live through everything again.” He pulled out a chair and sat. “I'm sorry.”
“He was having an affair, wasn't he?”
Terry jerked back against his seat, apparently startled by this frontal attack. “Eric?”
“I'd thought he was at first. Then I'd changed my mind. Well, he convinced me, really. But now… He was having an affair, wasn't he?”
“No. God, no. What makes you think—”
“All the changes, Terry. The Harley and the tattoo for starters.”
“This county's filled with guys in their forties who spend their weekends riding around on Harleys. They've got wives, kids, cats, dogs, car payments, and mortgages and they wake up one morning and say, This is all there is? And they want more. Midlife crisis. They want the edge back. Harleys give it to them. That's it.”
“There were phone calls. Late nights he supposedly spent at work. And a woman came by the house to look through his things. She said she was Sharon Pasternak, a molecular biologist at Biosyn. She said they were working on a report—she and Eric, Terry, why would Eric have been working on a report with a biologist, for God's sake?—and he had some data she said she needed in order to put the report together by herself now he's gone. But when she left, she took nothing with her. What's that supposed to tell me?”
“I don't know.”
“I think it's obvious enough. She was looking for traces.”
“Of what?”
“You know. He was seeing someone. Maybe it was her.”
“That's impossible.”
“Why? Why is it impossible?”
“Because… God, Charlie. He was crazy about you. I mean crazy about you. Had been since the day you two met.”
“Then she was looking for something else. What?”
“Charlie, jeez. Take it easy, okay? You look like shit, pardon my French. Have you been sleeping? Are you eating? Have you thought about getting away for a few days?”
“He lied to me about his family. He had pictures. He used them to pretend… You saw them, Terry. You've been at our house. You saw those pictures and you know his family. You grew up with him. So you must have known…” Charlie clutched the table as a cramp gripped her stomach. Her bowels felt loose. Her palms were wet. She was falling apart and she hated the fact, and the hate made her raise her voice and cry, “I want the information. I have the right to it. Tell me what you know.”
Terry looked puzzled more than anything else. “What pictures?” he asked. “What're you talking about?”
Charlie told him. He listened, but he shook his head, saying, “Sure, I knew Eric's family. But that was just his mom, his dad, and his brother. Brent. And even if I studied those pictures— which I didn't… I mean, who studies family pictures in other people's houses? You just glance at them when you walk by, don't you?—I wouldn't have recognized anyone. Eric's mom died when we were around eight and even before that she was in bed for five years with a stroke. I saw her what? maybe once, so in a picture … No way. I wouldn't even know her. And I haven't set eyes on Brent or Eric's dad for years. At least ten, maybe more. So if there was a picture of either of them or all of them or someone else, I wouldn't have known the difference.”
Charlie listened through a roar in her ears. “Brent?” she said in a whisper. “He died. The accident. And then Eric's mother and his father—”
“What accident?” Terry asked.
“The shotgun. Hunting birds. The desert. Eric tripped and Brent was…” She couldn't finish because Terry's face was telling her more than she wanted to know. She felt her own face crumple. “Oh God. Oh God.”
Terry said, “Jeez. Jeez, Charlie.” Awkwardly, he patted her hand. “Jeez. I don't know what to say.”
“Tell me what you know. Tell me why he lied. Tell me who she is. Tell me who he was.”
“I swear to God—”
She smacked her hand on the table. “He was your best friend!”
Terry glanced over his shoulder to the counter, where the Starbucks clerk was beginning to show more interest in them than in the lattes she was making. He turned back to Charlie. “There was a blowup in his family. This was years ago. That's all I know. He didn't talk about it and I didn't ask.”
“So why didn't he tell me that? Why'd he pretend—”
“I don't know. Maybe it sounded… more glamorous or something.”
“To have shot your own brother? I don't believe that. The only reason a man would tell a woman that tale would be to keep her from wondering why he never mentioned a family, why he never saw them or heard from them. And why would he do that in the first place, Terry? You know as well as I: if he had another life that they knew about. Right?”
“That's not the case.”
“How do you know?”
“Look. Do you know how much planning it would take to have a double life like the kind you're imagining? Jeez. Do you know how much plain old cash it would take? He didn't have that kind of money, Charlie. All he had was pipe dreams like the rest of us.”
“What sort of pipe dreams?”
“He talked through his hat. You know how he was.”
“Talked about what?”
“I need a cup of coffee.” Terry got up and went to the counter, where he placed an order, dug out his wallet, and waited.
Biding his time, Charlie thought. Establishing his story. For the first time since Eric's death, she wondered if there was anyone whom she could trust and at this thought, she sank back in her seat and felt ill to her soul.
“He talked about Barbados. Grenada. The Bahamas.” Terry set a cappuccino on the table and tore the top off a packet of sugar. “He talked about putting his money there, having a new life, sleeping in a hammock on the beach, drinking piña co-ladas.”
“Dear God, what was going on?” Charlie cried.
“Don't you see? Nothing. He was forty-two. That's what was going on. He was talking, that's all. That's what guys do. They talk about investments. About offshore banking. About fast cars and women with big boobs and yachts and racing in the America's Cup. About hiking in the Himalayas and renting a palazzo in Venice. He was talking, Charlie. That's what guys do when they're forty-two.”
“Do you do that?”
Terry colored brightly. “It's a guy thing.”
“Do you do it?”
“Not all guys are the same.” And as he read the despair on her face, he hastened on with, “Charlie, it was nothing. It was going to blow over.”
“He felt trapped and he'd done something about it.”
“No way.”
“Except something happened to prevent him from going through with what he intended to do and then he was really trapped and then—”
“No! That's not it.”
“What is it, then? What was it?”
He grasped his cappuccino but he didn't drink it. “I don't know,” he said.
“I don't believe you.”
“I'm telling you the truth.” He gazed at her long, hard, and earnestly as if his look carried the power to convince and reassure her. “You need to come to the office,” he said. “We've got to go over his will. And there's probate to be handled… Charlie, I want to help you through this. I'm devastated, too. He was my closest friend. Can't we be there for each other?”
“Like Eric was there for both of us? What does that even mean, Terry?”
He was gone and that was difficult enough for Charlie to cope with. The manner of his going—the suddenness and the inexplicable horror of it—made the coping even more difficult. But now to have to fac
e the fact that the man she'd loved and lost had not even been who she'd thought he was… It was too much to bear and far too much to assimilate. She drove home feeling as if she'd been struck by the plague, a virulent interloper that was forcing her body to suffer what her mind could not begin to face.
Somatizing. Somehow she remembered the term from Psych all those years ago. She couldn't bring herself to embrace the full truth, but her body knew what that full truth was and it reacted accordingly. She wasn't suffering from the flu at all. She was somatizing. And now her body was trying to purge her of Eric's lies, because as she drove home, she was overcome by a nausea so fierce that she didn't think she would make it into her house without vomiting.
She didn't. Once pulled into her driveway, she shoved open the door of the car and stumbled out. On the pristine front lawn, she fell to her knees and spasm after spasm wracked her stomach, forcing its meager contents upward and outward in a humiliating and malodorous plume. She gagged on the taste and the smell of it, and she vomited more, until all that was left was the wretched heaving itself which she couldn't bring under control. Finally, she fell onto her side, panting, sweat heavy on her neck and her eyelids. She stared at the house and she felt the vomit slide across the sloping lawn and graze her cheek. Remember, I'll always love you.
She pulled herself up and staggered to the porch, thankful that like so many upscale suburban neighborhoods in Southern California, her own was deserted at this time of day. The two-income families who were her neighbors wouldn't return to their homes before night, so she hadn't been seen. There was blessing in that.
She didn't notice anything wrong until she got to her front door. There, she had her key extended when she saw the deep gouges around what remained of the lock.
Weakly, she pushed the door open but she had the presence of mind not to enter. From the porch, she could see all she needed to see.
“Jesus H,” the policeman muttered. “Fucking mess.” He'd introduced himself to Charlie as Officer Marco Doyle, and he'd arrived within ten minutes of her phone call with his lights flashing and his siren blaring as if that's what she paid her taxes for. His partner was a dog called Simba, a European import that looked like a cross between a German shepherd and the hound of the Baskervilles. “She's on duty,” Doyle had commented as he stepped inside the house. “Don't pet her.”
Charlie hadn't considered doing so.
Simba remained on the front porch on the alert as Doyle went inside. It was from the living room that he'd made the comment which Charlie, clutching at her cell phone like a life preserver, heard from just inside the entry.
Doyle said, “Simba, come,” and the dog bounded into the house. He directed her to sniff out intruders and while she did so—with Doyle on her heels going from room to room—Charlie examined the destruction.
It was obvious that the intent had been search and not robbery because her possessions were thrown around in a way that suggested someone moving quickly, knowing what he was looking for, and tossing things over his shoulder to get them out of his way when he did not find what he wanted. Each room appeared identical in its pattern of chaos: Everything was moved away from the walls; the contents of drawers and closets were dumped into the center. Pictures had been removed and books had been opened and flung to one side.
“No one here,” Doyle said. “Whoever it was, he moved fast. There're too many scents for her to pick up anything useful, though. You have a party lately?”
A party. “People were here. After a funeral. My husband…” Charlie lowered herself to a chair, her knees going and the rest of her following.
“Oh. Hey. I'm sorry,” Doyle said. “Hell. Rotten luck. Anything missing, can you tell?”
“I don't know. I don't think so. It seems like… I don't know.” Charlie felt so used up that all she could think about was crawling into her bed and sleeping for a year. Sleeping away the nightmare, she thought.
Doyle said that he'd be radioing for the crime scene people. They'd come and fingerprint and take what evidence they could find. Charlie would want to phone her insurance company in the meantime, though. And was there anyone who could help her clean up the mess when the crime scene people were finished?
Yes, Charlie told him cooperatively. She had a friend who would help.
“Need me to call her?”
No, no, Charlie said. She'd place the call. No point in doing so till the crime scene people looked for evidence, though.
Doyle said this was sensible and he told her he'd wait outside with the dog for the crime scene team to show up. Which they did in an hour, pulling up in a white sedan with Crime Scene Investigation printed in subtle gray on the doors.
While they went through the motions of looking for evidence in the debris that was Charlie's house, Charlie herself sat in the backyard, staring numbly at the picturesque fountain that she and her husband had two years ago debated removing “once the babies come.” It all seemed so much a part of another life now, a life that not only bore no resemblance to her present one but also had been a fabrication.
“Wow, this guy's too good to be true,” her sister Emily had murmured the first time she'd met Eric.
And that had apparently been the case.
When the crime scene people were done with their work, they left Charlie with the name and phone number of someone who specialized in “fixing up after this kind of thing,” they said. “You can get her to help you clean up. She's reasonable.”
Charlie didn't know if they meant her personality or her expense.
In either case, it didn't matter. She wanted no other professionals traipsing through the wreckage of her world.
So she forced herself to deal with the wreckage alone, and she began where she knew, without wanting to admit it to herself, that the intruder had begun: in Eric's study.
This was owing to Sharon Pasternak, Charlie thought as she stood in the doorway, slumped against its jamb. She would have to be every which way a complete fool not to put together this break-in with Sharon Pasternak's visit “to find some papers.” Failing to find whatever she'd been looking for, she'd called in someone with a little more imagination in the searching arena. And here before Charlie was the result.
She stepped over a pile of file folders and went to Eric's desk. She began with the easiest task: putting the drawers back in and reassembling their contents. And it was in the midst of doing this that she found an indication of where—if not what—the “papers” were that Sharon Pasternak and the intruder who followed her had wanted. For dumped alongside Eric's desk, as if they'd been contained in one of its lower drawers, was a set of documents that were out of place: the deed to the house, the pink slips to the cars, insurance papers, birth certificates, and passports. All of this belonged in their safe-deposit box at the bank, not here at home. Which made Charlie wonder what, if anything, had replaced these documents in that protected vault.
She didn't go until the following day. In the afternoon, following a morning in which she lay in bed fighting against an inertia that threatened to keep her there permanently, she fumbled her way to the bathroom, shuffled through the debris, and ran the water in the tub. She soaked until the water was cool, when she refilled the tub and languidly washed. She tried to remember another time when everything—even the slightest movement—had been such an effort. She couldn't.
It was two o'clock when she finally walked into the bank with her key to the safe-deposit box in her hand. She tapped the bell for assistance and a clerk came to help her, a girl who couldn't have been much older than college age, with jet-black hair, jet-black eyeliner, and a name tag identifying her as Linda.
Charlie filled out the appropriate card. Linda read her name and the number of her deposit box and then looked back up from the card to Charlie's face. She said, “Oh! You're… I mean, you've never—” She stopped herself as if remembering her place. “It's this way, Mrs. Lawton,” she settled on saying.
The deposit box was one of the large ones on the bott
om row. Charlie inserted her key in its right lock as Linda inserted her key in its left. A twist and the box slid out of its compartment. Linda heaved it up and onto the counter. She said, “Is there anything else I can do for you, Mrs. Lawton?” And she watched Charlie so intently when she asked the question that Charlie wondered if the girl was part of Eric's secret life.
“Why do you ask?” Charlie said.
“What?”
“Why do you ask if there's anything else you can do for me?”
Linda backed away, as if suddenly aware that she was in the presence of a crazy woman. “We always ask that. We're supposed to ask. Would you like some coffee? Or tea?”
Charlie felt her anxiety dissipate. She said, “No. Sorry. I haven't been well. I didn't mean…”
“I'll leave you then,” Linda said and seemed glad to be doing so.
Alone in the vault, Charlie took a deep breath. It was an airless space, overheated and silent. She felt watched inside, and she looked around for cameras, but there was nothing. She had all the privacy she needed.
It was time to know what Sharon Pasternak had wanted in Eric's study. It was time to know why an intruder had broken into her house and torn it apart.
She eased the top of the deposit box open, and she drew in a sharp breath when she saw its contents: Neatly stacked in rows and bound in their centers by rubber bands, thick packets of one-hundred-dollar bills shot the odor of age, use, and malefaction into the air.
Charlie whispered, “Oh my God,” and slammed the lid of the deposit box home. She leaned over the counter, breathing like a runner and trying to account for what she'd just seen. The packets looked to be fifty bills thick. There were… what?… fifty, seventy, one hundred packets in the deposit box? Which meant… ? What? It was more money than she'd ever seen outside of a motion picture. God in heaven, who was her husband? What had he done?
A movement at the edge of her vision prompted Charlie to turn her head. In the crack that existed between the side of the vault and its door, the girl Linda was watching. She moved away quickly—back-to-business personified—when she saw Charlie's gaze fall upon her.
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