I, Richard - Elizabeth George [52]
She went to these pictures the day after his funeral, lightheaded and sore-muscled after the trauma of the past week. The grieving tightness in her throat was still there—had been there since the night Eric died—and so was the sickly, feverish sensation she'd had for days. She couldn't remember how it was to feel normal any longer. But things had to be done.
The pictures were in the living room, standing like deliberate, intrusive thoughts at intervals among the books on either side of the fireplace. She knew who every individual was because Eric had told her several times. But he'd identified most of them by first name only, which wasn't helpful in the present circumstances: Aunt Marianne at her high school graduation, Great-Aunt Shirley with Great-Uncle Pat, Grandma Louise (on which side of the family, Eric?), Uncle Ross, Brent at seven, Mom at ten, Dad at thirteen, Mom and Dad on their wedding day, Grandpa and his brothers, Nana Jessie-Lynn. But aside from his parents' last name, she knew no one else's. And a look in the phone book told her no Lawtons named Clark or Marilyn lived nearby.
Not that she had expected them to be near. She'd hoped for that, but at the same time she'd already realized that hunting trips taken by teenaged boys to the edge of the desert suggested a town not far away from a place even more arid than the LA suburb where she and Eric had bought their home.
She got out a map of California and considered beginning her search in the south, right at the state border. She could call information for every town that sided the slice of land that was Highway 805. But she got not much farther than Paradise Hills before she reconsidered this painstaking approach.
She went back to the pictures and took them down. She carried them into the kitchen and set them carefully on the granite counter. They were all old pictures, the most recent being Brent at seven, and some of them were tintypes assiduously preserved.
Still, sometimes, she knew, families made note of the subjects of photographs and the locations where the pictures had been taken as well. And if that was the case with Eric's family pictures, there might be a clue as to the current whereabouts of his relatives.
So she eased off the back of each of the frames, and examined the reverse side of the photographs. Only two provided writing. A delicate hand had written Brent Lawton, seven years old, Yosemite on the back side of the picture of Eric's brother. A spidery pen had placed Jessie-Lynn just before Merle's wedding on the picture of one of the grandmothers in Eric's life. But that was it.
Charlie sighed and began to reassemble the frames and their contents: glass, photograph, cardboard filler, and velvet-covered backing. When she got to the Lawtons' wedding picture, however, she discovered that something besides the glass, the photo, the filler, and the backing had been put into the frame. Perhaps it was because the more recent the photo, the thinner the paper on which it had been printed. But the wedding picture had required something extra to fill up the space between it and the backing. This something was a folded paper, which unfolded turned out to be a blank receipt. Printed at the top of this was Time on My Side and an address on Front Street in Temecula, California.
Charlie got out her map again. A shot of excitement and certainty flashed through her when she found Temecula at the edge of the desert, sitting alongside another desert freeway, as if waiting for her to discover its secrets.
She didn't go at once. She planned to head out the very next day, but she awakened to find that the tightness in her throat had become a burning and the soreness in her muscles had metamorphosed into chills. It was more than simply exhaustion and grief, she realized. She'd come down with the flu.
She felt resignation but very