I, Richard - Elizabeth George [60]
“Tell me what you know. Tell me why he lied. Tell me who she is. Tell me who he was.”
“I swear to God—”
She smacked her hand on the table. “He was your best friend!”
Terry glanced over his shoulder to the counter, where the Starbucks clerk was beginning to show more interest in them than in the lattes she was making. He turned back to Charlie. “There was a blowup in his family. This was years ago. That's all I know. He didn't talk about it and I didn't ask.”
“So why didn't he tell me that? Why'd he pretend—”
“I don't know. Maybe it sounded… more glamorous or something.”
“To have shot your own brother? I don't believe that. The only reason a man would tell a woman that tale would be to keep her from wondering why he never mentioned a family, why he never saw them or heard from them. And why would he do that in the first place, Terry? You know as well as I: if he had another life that they knew about. Right?”
“That's not the case.”
“How do you know?”
“Look. Do you know how much planning it would take to have a double life like the kind you're imagining? Jeez. Do you know how much plain old cash it would take? He didn't have that kind of money, Charlie. All he had was pipe dreams like the rest of us.”
“What sort of pipe dreams?”
“He talked through his hat. You know how he was.”
“Talked about what?”
“I need a cup of coffee.” Terry got up and went to the counter, where he placed an order, dug out his wallet, and waited.
Biding his time, Charlie thought. Establishing his story. For the first time since Eric's death, she wondered if there was anyone whom she could trust and at this thought, she sank back in her seat and felt ill to her soul.
“He talked about Barbados. Grenada. The Bahamas.” Terry set a cappuccino on the table and tore the top off a packet of sugar. “He talked about putting his money there, having a new life, sleeping in a hammock on the beach, drinking piña co-ladas.”
“Dear God, what was going on?” Charlie cried.
“Don't you see? Nothing. He was forty-two. That's what was going on. He was talking, that's all. That's what guys do. They talk about investments. About offshore banking. About fast cars and women with big boobs and yachts and racing in the America's Cup. About hiking in the Himalayas and renting a palazzo in Venice. He was talking, Charlie. That's what guys do when they're forty-two.”
“Do you do that?”
Terry colored brightly. “It's a guy thing.”
“Do you do it?”
“Not all guys are the same.” And as he read the despair on her face, he hastened on with, “Charlie, it was nothing. It was going to blow over.”
“He felt trapped and he'd done something about it.”
“No way.”
“Except something happened to prevent him from going through with what he intended to do and then he was really trapped and then—”
“No! That's not it.”
“What is it, then? What was it?”
He grasped his cappuccino but he didn't drink it. “I don't know,” he said.
“I don't believe you.”
“I'm telling you the truth.” He gazed at her long, hard, and earnestly as if his look carried the power to convince and reassure her. “You need to come to the office,” he said. “We've got to go over his will. And there's probate to be handled… Charlie, I want to help you through this. I'm devastated, too. He was my closest friend. Can't we be there for each other?”
“Like Eric was there for both of us? What does that even mean, Terry?”
He was gone and that was difficult enough for Charlie to cope with. The manner of his going—the suddenness and the inexplicable horror of it—made the coping even more difficult. But now to have to face the fact that the man she'd loved and lost had not even been who she'd thought he was… It was too much to bear and far too much to assimilate. She drove home feeling as if she'd been struck by the plague, a virulent interloper that was forcing her body to suffer what her mind could not begin to face.
Somatizing. Somehow she remembered the term from Psych all those years ago. She couldn't bring herself to embrace the