Lethal Experiment

She suddenly pushed back out of the kiss, her eyes wide. “Oh, Donovan, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean that!”

“You didn’t?”

“I did, I mean I do—but…I didn’t mean to say it!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to scare you off .”

“But you do love me, yes?”

She tucked a thick rope of wet hair behind her ear.

“I do.”

I placed the palm of my hand against the side of her face. She looked into my eyes expectantly. A roar of thunder made her jump.

“Holy shit, Donovan! Hurry up and tell me you love me! Before we get killed!”

I laughed. “I love you!”

She threw her arms around me and hugged me as though her life depended on it.

She leaned her mouth into my ear and when she spoke, her voice was husky: “I’ve never been this happy in my whole life.”

I felt the same way, but I wasn’t ready to start wearing a dress over it. I said, “This isn’t pre-marital talk, is it?”

“Don’t spoil the mood, shithead!”

“I’m just saying…”

“Hush!”

She kissed me full on the mouth while I wondered if “hush!” meant yes or no regarding her marital expectations. Thankfully, Kathleen cleared things up.

“Relax,” she said. “I love you far too much to marry you.”

I let that comment rattle around in my brain a few seconds and decided I liked the sound of it.

“Then, yes. I’m happier than I have any right to be. Happier than I ever thought I could be. Happy as…”

“No need for a speech,” Kathleen said. “I get it.”

I brushed some of the rain from her forehead, then held her again. As we embraced, I looked over her shoulder, up the hill, at the Memorial and the chestnut oak and the newly-packed mound where, once again, Charlie’s parents stood praying.

Jerry and Jennifer Beck’s son had been a rotten, no good, son-of-a bitch who drugged and gang-raped women. He probably helped kill one of them, if the rumor was to be trusted. On the other hand, Charlie had been blessed with good looks and an abundance of charm and the ability to make my precious daughter fall in love with him. At the funeral numerous stories had been told of the generous and loving things he’d done for others, so he must have had some good qualities to go with the bad.

Standing there in the rain, watching the Becks, holding the woman I’d fallen in love with, I realized I’d never met a perfect person, and only a few that were one hundred percent evil. All of us fall to one side or the other of the line dividing the two extremes, and who could argue but that I fall farther on the wrong side than Charlie? After all, I don’t expect an abundance of warmhearted stories told at my funeral, and if you tried to match my crimes against Charlie’s, he’d come out looking like an altar boy. And yet here we both were, in Springhill Cemetery, on opposite sides of the dirt. Charlie’s mistake had been getting too close to my daughter. If that hadn’t happened, he’d be alive today.

I’d just professed my love to Kathleen. Somehow she’d been placed in my life at the perfect time to give me a chance to become a better man. I wondered if Kimberly had been placed in Charlie’s life by the same hand for the same reason. If so, had I interfered with some type of cosmic plan?

There on the hill, Jerry and Jennifer Beck stood ramrod straight, their bodies riddled with rain. Hand-in-hand, with heads bowed, they stared at the mound of dirt that marked the grave of the boy they’d raised and loved and lost.

Chapter 25

“What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done?” Kathleen said.