Melissa didn’t want to leave the bench. “It’s already too late, isn’t it?” she said dully.
“Too late for what?”
“Oh, God, Ray, I can die here as well as anywhere else. It’s peaceful here…”
“Die? Don’t be silly, you’re not going to die.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, grimacing, and wouldn’t say another word.
I was tempted to let her sit there with her stomachache and suffer. She could be exasperating sometimes, when she was in one of her moods. She tended to exaggerate and overdramatize situations even at her best, and, whenever she was hurt or upset or angry, she retreated so deeply inside herself that no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I couldn’t reach her.
Not that I’d ever been able to get to the core of her, really, except in small ways and for short glimpses. There was just no common ground for us. I live in the real world; I don’t believe in anything I can’t touch or see or smell. I have strong appetites-sex, food, danger. I take life in both hands and squeeze hard. Melissa is just the opposite. She’s a romantic, a sentimentalist; she lives in a fantasy world of dreams and ideals, searching for comforts and fulfillments that I can’t give her, that nobody can, because even she doesn’t understand exactly what it is she wants out of life. “Little girl lost” is an apt description of her. Dorothy wandering around in some fantastic Oz of her own devising, where everything and everybody is strange and bewildering.
That lost quality was part of what attracted me to her in the beginning. It’s very appealing in a beautiful young woman; it makes her more desirable, the chase and catch more exhilarating. Chase and catch weren’t enough for me in Melissa’s case, though. Before we slept together the first time, I knew I was in love with her. But how can you keep on loving someone you can touch only part of the time, like a ghost who drifts in and out of your life and bed, substantial for a while and then little more than vapor? I don’t deal well with frustration or failure, yet that’s what Melissa had come to represent.
It was the same for her, I suppose. I’m not what she wants or understands, either. That’s why she keeps drifting from one affair to another-looking for someone who’s more like she is, who can give her what she wants or thinks she wants. A satisfaction I could always take until recently is that none of the men measured up anymore than I have. None until the last one.
Jake Hollis. My good skydiving pal, Jake. He must have measured up. He must’ve been what she wanted. Otherwise, why would the two of them have plotted to kill me?
She had to have been part of it, much as I hated the thought. It’d been her idea that Jake and I go jumping that day; I remember her suggesting it. And she’d gone along with us, the first time in years she wanted to be in the plane for one of my dives. I don’t know why I agreed. I knew by then she was sleeping with Hollis. But murder…the possibility never even occurred to me. His hands on my back, clawing at my chute…I can still feel them. Trying to rip the pack off so I’d plummet to my death. A few years younger, a little stronger, but not as determined to survive as I’d been. That’s the main reason his chute was the one damaged in the struggle, his body the one that plummeted 2,000 feet to shatter on the hard earth.
She didn’t cry for him, at least not in front of me. Shock, horror, but no tears. Retreated inside herself to that place no one else can ever go-like the Cheshire cat when it vanished. If she had cried in front of me, I think I would’ve confronted her then and there. Two weeks now since it happened and I still haven’t done it. And I don’t know why. This trip to the Sierra foothills, the pretense that everything is reasonably normal between us…it’s a fool’s game. If she and one of her lovers had tried to kill me in the past, I wouldn’t have hesitated to accuse her, throw her out, take some sort of revenge. Now…I don’t know. I’m still hanging on to life with both hands, but the grip isn’t as strong as it used to be. Neither are the highs nor the lows, the emotions that once raged in me like torrents. It’s as if part of me, or something within me, did die that day, along with Jake Hollis.
I ought to hate her, but I don’t. I feel sorry for her.
She was still sitting with her eyes closed, her hands clutched at her middle, her mouth twisted. Typical of her. An upset stomach, and she turns it into high drama.
“Melissa,” I said, “we’re going back to the lodge. Right now.”
She didn’t object this time. “All right.”
I helped her up, put my arm around her, and led her to the car. People watched us, one or two with concerned expressions or small, approving smiles. Solicitous husband helping unwell wife. The scene was so outwardly caring, loving, that I felt an urge to laugh. But I didn’t. There was nothing left to laugh about.
And now my stomach was beginning to bother me. Sharp little cramping pains. Sympathy pains? That was almost funny, too-but not quite.
I helped Melissa into the car and took us away from the watching eyes, away from Murphys. Tom Moore’s hunting lodge was eight miles higher up in the mountains-a secluded retreat, a place for lovers. Why had I agreed to come here? Why had Melissa agreed? What was the sense in us getting away alone together, with the end for us so near?
Halfway to the lodge, the cramps grew worse. The pain was stabbing and I was feeling nauseous by the time I reached the turnoff. Beside me, Melissa sat hunched over, holding her stomach, her face pale. Pretending, to throw me off guard? Those thoughts came on the heels of the other one, the one that made me jerk and clench my hands tightly around the wheel.
Christ, what if she’d poisoned me?
Melissa
In the car on the road leading to our borrowed mountain cabin Ray asked me in what way I wasn’t feeling well. Nausea and stomach cramps, I told him, as well as a headache.
“Must be the flu,” he said. “I feel the same way, except I’ve also got chills.”
“A little while.”
Then why had he eaten with apparent enjoyment a huge helping of the chicken pasta I’d fixed for lunch? Why had he suggested we drive into town and then spent so long browsing in the bookshop if he was feeling bad? Faking, of course, so I wouldn’t guess the truth. Except that I’d already guessed it.
“How awful for you,” I said.
“You’re certainly the sympathetic one.”
I turned my face to the side window and didn’t reply. My cramps were growing worse; the poison was doing its work.
At the rustic wood-and-stone lodge belonging to Tom Moore, his former business partner, Ray pulled the car close to the front steps, jumped out, and rushed up them without waiting for me. By the time I made my way inside, he was in the bathroom off the front hallway, making violent retching sounds. Acting again.
He was a consummate actor, I thought as I went upstairs to the living room and slumped in one of the armchairs in front of the huge fireplace. All those years of high-level business dealings, all those years of pretending interest in and affection for the children and me-they had polished his art. And now he was playing his biggest role of all, unaware that his audience of one wasn’t the slightest bit fooled.
I leaned my head back against the chair, narrowed my eyes, and looked around. Knotty pine everywhere. God, how I hated knotty pine! Every uncomfortable mountain or lakefront cabin I’d ever stayed in was paneled in the stuff, and now I was going to die surrounded by it.
A violent surge of nausea swept through me; bile rose in my throat. Ray was still in the downstairs bathroom, and I’d never make it upstairs in time, so I rushed to the kitchen and was sick in the sink. Leaning with my hands braced against the countertop, I thought distractedly:
His poor wife died…
That’s what they’d be saying about Ray soon. What did he plan to tell people? That I’d been poisoned by accident? Or did he intend to get rid of my body? Claim I’d disappeared? Bury me some place in these woods…?
