I, Richard - Elizabeth George [51]
“Maybe the ex didn't—what's her name?”
“Paula.”
“Maybe Paula didn't pass on the word. If the divorce was nasty…was it?”
“Fairly. There was another man involved. Eric fought Paula for custody of Janie.”
“That could've done the trick.”
“It was years ago.”
“Put the screws to him in death. Some people can never let go.”
“D'you think she might not have told his parents?”
“Sounds about right,” Bethany said.
It was the thought that Paula, in a last stroke of posthumous revenge upon her erstwhile husband, might have refused to pass along the news to Eric's parents that made Charlie decide to contact the elder Lawtons herself. The problem was that Eric had long been estranged from his parents, a sad fact that he'd revealed to Charlie during their first holiday season together. Close to her own family despite the distance that separated them all, she'd brought up “making arrangements for the holidays. D'you want to spend them with your family or mine? Or should we divide them up? Or have everyone here?”
Here at that time was a two-bedroom condo in the Hollywood Hills from which Eric ventured forth each day to his job in the distant suburbs while Charlie dashed off to her casting calls with the hope that something other than being the mom-with-the-perfect-family on WoW! soap commercials might be in her future. A two-bedroom condo with an airliner-sized kitchen and a single bathroom was not the ideal spot for entertaining mutual families, so she had prepared herself for the inevitable division of time between the end of November and the beginning of January: Thanksgiving in one location, Christmas Eve in another, Christmas Day at a third, and New Year's Eve together at home alone in front of the artificial fire, with fruit and champagne. Only, that wasn't how the holidays played out because Eric told her the painful story of his estrangement from his parents: about the hunting accident that had caused the estrangement and what had followed that accident.
“I tripped and the gun went off,” he confessed one night in the darkness. “If I'd known what to… I didn't know what to do. I had no first aid. He bled to death, Char. With me shaking him and yelling his name and crying and telling him, begging him, to hold on, to just hold on.”
“I'm so sorry,” she'd said and she'd pulled his head to her breast because his voice had broken and his body trembled and he clung to her and she wasn't used to a man showing emotion. “Your own brother. Eric, what a horrible thing.”
“He was eighteen. They tried to forgive me. But he was… Brent was like the crown prince to them. I couldn't take his place. I drifted off eventually. Just a bit at first. Then more and more. They decided to let me. It was best for us all. We couldn't get over it. We couldn't get past it.”
Charlie tried to imagine what it had been like for him: growing to adulthood and then toward middle age and always knowing he'd shot his own brother. They'd been birding, out at dawn at the edge of the desert where the doves wintered. They'd hunted birds from childhood, first with their father and then— when Brent was old enough to drive—on their own. And on their second such trip together, the worst had happened.
“They probably forgave you years ago,” she'd said to her husband loyally. “Have you tried to contact them?”
“I don't want to see it in their eyes. The looking at me and trying to seem like there's nothing beneath that look but love.”
“Well, there's not hate beneath it.”
“No. Just sorrow, which I put there. Being dumb. Being slipshod. Not holding the gun right. Not watching my feet.”
“You were only fifteen,” Charlie protested.
“I was old enough.”
For what? she'd wondered. But she worked out the answer eventually: old enough to disappear.
They had a right to know that he was dead, however. So even though Charlie had no idea where Marilyn and Clark Lawton lived, she determined she would find them