I, Richard - Elizabeth George [57]
As she told the tale, Charlie wiped her eyes and even laughed shakily at her own behavior: She'd been like a character in an afternoon soap opera, a woman whose life goes from bad to worse but all the time at her own hands. She'd studied telephone bills for strange numbers; she'd gone through her husband's address book, looking for cryptic initials that stood in place of a mistress's name; she'd examined his dirty laundry for telltale signs of lipstick that was not her own; she'd rustled through his dresser drawers for mementos, receipts, letters, messages, ticket stubs, or anything else that might give him away; she'd picked the lock of his briefcase and read every document inside it as if the convoluted reports from Biosyn Inc. were love letters or diaries written in code.
She'd been forced to confess to all of this, however, when she sank to the depths of opening up a prescription cough syrup she'd found in his bathroom—not even knowing why she was opening it…what did she expect to find in there? A genie who would tell her the truth?—only to have it slip from her fingers and smash and spill upon the limestone floor. That had served to bring her to her senses: that rising sense of frustration at not being able to prove what she believed to be true, that muttered aha! when she saw the bottle, that clutching to her bosom of the medicine itself and unscrewing its top with unsteady hands and watching dumbly as it flew from her fingers and broke on the floor, spilling out the syrup in an amber pool. When this occurred, she had realized how futile her investigation was and how ugly it was making her. Which was why she finally confessed to her husband. It seemed the only way to get herself beyond what was troubling her.
“He listened. He was terribly upset. And after we talked, he just went into himself. I thought he was punishing me for what I'd done, and I knew I deserved it. What I did was wrong. But I thought he'd get past it, we'd both get past it and that would be the end of it. Only, a week later he was dead. And now…” Charlie glanced at the door of Time on My Side. “We know, don't we? We know what. We just don't know who. Let's go home, Beth.”
Bethany Franklin was reluctant to believe the worst of Eric
Lawton. She pointed out to Charlie that Charlie's own search had turned up nothing and that, for all she knew, Eric had been squirreling away Christmas presents for her. Or birthday presents. Or Valentine's presents. Some people buy things when they see them, Bethany pointed out, and just hang on to them till the appropriate day.
But that hardly explained the pictures, Charlie said. He'd “bought” his family at Time on My Side. And what did that mean?
That he had another family somewhere, she decided. Beyond his earlier marriage to Paula, beyond his daughter Janie, and beyond herself.
For the next two days, Charlie fought off a relapse of the flu and used her bed time to sort out who among Eric's limited number of friends might be able and willing to tell her the truth about her husband's private life. She decided that Terry Stewart would be the man: Eric's attorney, his regular tennis partner, and his buddy from their days in kindergarten. If there was a hidden side to Eric Lawton, Terry Stewart had to know it.
Before she could phone him and make an arrangement to see him, however, she received her first hint of what Eric's second life might be. One of his colleagues came to call, a woman Charlie had never met, had never even heard of. She was named Sharon Pasternak (“No relation,” she said with a smile when she introduced herself at the front door), and she apologized for stopping by without phoning. She wondered if she could have a look through Eric's work papers, she said. The two of them had been assembling a report for the board of directors, and Eric had taken most of the paperwork home to put it together in a logical fashion.
“I know it's awfully soon after… well, you know. And I'd wait if I could, honestly,” Sharon Pasternak said as Charlie admitted her into the house. “But the board meets next