My stomach contracted again; another cramp, more intense than any pain I’d ever experienced outside of childbirth, left me weak and breathless. And suddenly the apathy I’d felt since Murphys was gone. I didn’t want to die this way, in agony. I didn’t want to die at all. I’d thought I already had, spiritually, as I’d watched Jake Hollis plummet through the air. But that simply wasn’t true. After a moment I felt well enough to move across the room to a little desk with shelves containing cookbooks and other house hold volumes. The chills Ray had mentioned were starting now. What kind of poison produced chills? Had Ray chosen it because its symptoms mimicked a bad case of the flu? He hadn’t wanted me to know I was dying.
Unlike Jake. He’d known in those last few awful minutes.
The scene I’d witnessed from the plane two weeks earlier replayed itself in my mind: Ray and Jake struggling in mid air, neither chute open. Ray’s suddenly blossoming upward, while Jake fell, arms and legs flailing. And when the pilot and I arrived at the airstrip, there was Ray, pretending to be completely broken up over our friend’s death. Over and over he repeated: “I just don’t know what happened.”
And I had kept my silence, even though I knew what had happened-and why.
Jake Hollis was dead. Perhaps the closest person to a friend Ray ever had. My friend, too; I’d turned to him in desperation when I sensed my marriage was finally about to end. Not for sex, as I had to two other men in the past, but for insight into what had brought Ray and me to this point. But although Jake had heard me out through two long lunches and an afternoon of drinks, he could shed no light on the situation. Ray had kept him as much at an arm’s length as he had me.
For days after Jake’s death I’d felt numb, unable to cry, unable to confront Ray with the fact that I knew what he’d done. I even tried to deny it myself, pretend I hadn’t seen the mid air struggle; it seemed too monstrous an act for the man I’d lived with for a quarter of a century. But then a violent scene from five years before escaped from where I’d buried it in my memory: Ray raging at me, having found out about the second of my two brief affairs. His face red and contorted, his eyes wild, he’d accused me of repeated infidelities throughout our marriage. Berated me for sleeping with a member of his mountain-climbing team. Screamed: “I’ll kill him! I swear, on the next climb I’ll grab hold of him and pitch him off Denali! If I have to go down with him, I will!”
He hadn’t, of course. Instead, he’d spent five years nursing his rage and imagining I was sleeping with every man I met. And when that rage was at a fever pitch, he’d turned it on Jake. Killed his friend because he overheard a phone call between us. Killed him because another so-called friend had told him of seeing Jake and me in intimate conversation in a neighborhood cocktail lounge. I’d denied either when he asked me about them; now I wished I had told him why I’d been talking to Jake.
I laid my aching head on the desk and moaned. Finally the tears that shock had frozen began to flow.
Why did you kill him, Ray?
Why didn’t you just kill me?
Ray
Emptying my stomach didn’t help much. I still felt sick and shaky when I came out of the downstairs bathroom. This wasn’t the flu or any other kind of natural illness; there was no doubt of it now.
What kind of poison had she used? If I knew that, there might be something I could take to counteract it. At least I could tell the emergency operator, who could then alert the paramedics.
It was an effort to climb the stairs to the upper floor. Ray Porter, who had climbed mountains, hiked through jungles and across deserts-so damned weak he couldn’t mount a dozen steps without streaming sweat and hanging onto the railing with both hands. It enraged me, the idea of dying this way, weak and helpless. Yet the funny thing was, most of the rage was at myself for allowing such a thing to happen.
My fault, as much as Melissa’s. I’d driven her into Jake Hollis’s arms, the arms of all the others. I’d destroyed her, slowly and surely, with the heat of my passions. And in the process I’d sown the seeds of my own destruction.
But not blaming her or hating her didn’t mean I would let her get away with what she’d done. Life was still precious to me, and I wouldn’t let go of it without a fight.
She wasn’t in the kitchen. She had been, though; as I passed the stove, I smelled a sour odor and saw that she’d thrown up in the sink. My God! Maybe she hadn’t been faking in Murphys or on the way up here; maybe she’d poisoned herself, too. Hollis was dead, she couldn’t have him, and she didn’t want me anymore, so what did she have left to live for? It was just like her to concoct a quixotic Shakespearean finish for both of us.
I stumbled into the living room. She wasn’t there, either, but I could hear her-low sobbing sounds coming from out on the balcony that ran across the entire rear of the lodge. I almost fell before I reached the open balcony doors; I had to clutch at the glass for support, all but drag myself around the jamb. The weakness and the cramping pain made me even more determined.
Melissa was sitting on one of the redwood chairs, her arms wrapped across her middle, rocking slightly and grimacing. A closed book lay in her lap. A book, for God’s sake, at a time like this!
“Melissa.”
She stiffened and her head turned toward me. Her eyes were enormous, luminous with pain. In spite of what she’d done, in spite of myself, I experienced a surge of feeling for her-compassion, protectiveness, even tenderness, like suddenly materialized ghosts from the past.
“Why, Ray?” she said. “Why did this have to happen?”
“You know the answer to that better than I do. But it’s not too late. I won’t let it be too late.”
“I don’t want to die. I thought I did, for a while, but I don’t.”
“Neither of us is going to die. I’ll call for emergency medical help…but I have to know what it was first.” She shook her head as if she didn’t understand.
“The poison,” I said. “What kind of poison?”
“How should I know! Ray, don’t torture me any more…”
“Listen to me. It’s not too late. An antidote, some kind of emetic…what did you use?”
“I didn’t…I didn’t…”
I lurched toward her, fell to my knees beside her chair. “How long ago? What kind of poison? How much?”
“Stop it! You know it wasn’t me!”
“Melissa…”
“You did it. You, you, you!”
I stared at her in disbelief. “That’s crazy. I wouldn’t do a thing like that to you, to myself. I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“But if you didn’t poison us…?”
“I didn’t.” Confusion gripped me now; I couldn’t seem to think clearly. “And you swear you didn’t?”
“I swear!”
“If it wasn’t poison, then what…” I broke off, staring at the book in her lap, seeing its title for the first time.
I reached out to it-and the pain came again, a sudden wrenching so violent it brought an involuntary cry from my throat. Gagging, I clutched at Melissa. Felt her hands on me. And then we were clinging to each other, holding tighter than we had in a long, long time.
Melissa
As Ray kneeled beside my chair and we held each other, I felt something that I’d never felt for him before: compassion. He’d never needed it, never wanted it, and he probably wouldn’t now. But a man who had climbed mountains, who had been unafraid to step out into space with only a parachute to depend on-it tore at my heart to see him reduced to this sweating, trembling weakness by…what?
