I, Richard - Elizabeth George [71]
He hadn't been able to.
“Getting old,” he said. “Everything goes to hell after forty. Sorry.”
And it had got worse from there. He'd been gone more; he'd become preoccupied once again—more than ever this time—he'd closeted himself away and spent hours on the phone; he'd invested days, it seemed, on the Internet “doing research,” he'd told her when she asked him. Finally, when the phone had rung one evening, she'd overheard him say, “Look, I can't make it tonight, all right? My wife's not well,” and she'd suffered a rebirth of all her suspicions.
It was two days later that he'd come home from work and found her under a blanket on the sofa, dozing off a combination of headache and muscle pain that she'd assumed she'd brought on herself with a lengthy hike on the slopes of Saddleback Mountain. She'd been asleep and hadn't awakened upon his entry. Only when he dropped to his knees beside the couch did she stir with a start.
“What is it?” he'd asked her. Was it fear in his voice and not concern as she'd thought at the time? “Char, what's wrong?”
“Achy all over,” she replied. “Too much exercise today. Got a headache, too.”
“I'm going to make you some soup,” he told her.
He'd gone into the kitchen and banged about. Ten minutes later, he brought a tray into the living room where she lay.
“Sweet,” she murmured. “But I can get up. I can eat with you.”
“I'm not eating,” he said. “Not right now. You stay put.” And he'd lovingly and gently fed tomato soup to her a slow and patient spoonful at a time. He'd even wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. And when she'd laughed a little and said, “Really, Eric, I'm all right,” he hadn't made a reply.
Because he'd known, Charlie thought. The process had begun.
First the sudden onset marked by headache and muscle pain. A slight fever to accompany them. Chills and an inability to eat hard upon the heels of the fever.
And after that? What she'd marked as mourning first and denial second, both of them made manifest in her body: sore throat, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. But she hadn't been reacting to her husband's death. She'd been reacting to what he'd done in his life. Or what he'd tried to do and what he would have done had she not broken the bottle in which the virus was sealed before he had the chance to give it to its purchaser.
How torn he must have been, she realized. There he was: caught in the middle of something gone terribly wrong, the best-laid plans come to nothing. With nothing to give in exchange for the down payment he'd received for the Exantrum, with a wife fatally exposed to the virus he himself had stolen. And knowing that that wife was going to die, as surely as he must have known thousands—millions—of others would have died had fate, in the person of Charlie's jealousy, not stepped in to prevent that from occurring.
He'd fed her the soup and studied her face as if such a study would allow him to take the image of her into the grave and beyond. When she was finished eating, when she could swallow no more, he put the spoon in the bowl and the bowl on the tray. He'd leaned forward and kissed Charlie on the forehead. He'd adjusted the covers up to her chin.
“Remember, I'll always love you,” he'd said.
“Why're you telling me that? Like that?”
“Just remember.”
He'd taken the tray from the room. She heard the sound of it being set on the counter in the kitchen. A moment later he returned and sat opposite her, in an easy chair, with a pillow behind his head.
“Do you remember?” he asked.
“What?”
“What I said. Remember. I'll always love you, Char.”
Before she could respond, he took the revolver from within his jacket. He put the barrel in his mouth, and he blew off the back of his head.
So this, Charlie thought, was what it felt like to know you were going to die. This sense of drifting. No panic as she'd once thought she might panic if handed a death sentence like pancreatic