Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [162]
“Yes,” Savich said. “Thank you, Tennyson. We want to be close.”
An hour later, after Savich had called his mother and told her not to worry and had spoken to his son, he climbed into the king-size bed beneath the sloped-ceiling guest room, kissed his wife, tucked her against his side, and said, “Why do you really think Mr. Elcott Frasier called us?”
“The obvious: he was worried about his daughter-in-law and wanted us to know right away. Very thoughtful. He thought it through and didn’t call your mom and scare the daylights out of her.”
“All right, maybe you’re right. After that heavy dose of craziness with the Tuttles, I guess my mind went automatically to the worst possible motive.”
Sherlock kissed his neck, then settled back in, her leg over his belly. “I’ve heard so much psychobabble about Lily. She tries to kill herself because it’s the only thing to do if she wants to gain peace. She has to drive her Explorer into a redwood to expiate her guilt. It doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound like Lily. Yes, yes, I remember the first time. But that was then.”
“And this is now.”
“Yes. Seven months. Lily isn’t neurotic, Dillon. I’ve always thought she was strong, stable. And now I feel guilty because we didn’t make an effort to see her over the last months.”
“You had a baby, Sherlock, not a week after Beth’s funeral.”
“And Lily was there for me.”
“She wasn’t there with you—not like I was. Sherlock, that was the longest day of my life.” He squeezed her so hard, she squeaked.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said.
“You never curse, but toward the end there you called me more names than I’d ever been called, even by linebackers during football games in college.”
She laughed, kissed his shoulder again, and said, “Look, I know Lily’s been through a very hard time. She’s been understandably depressed. But we’ve talked to her a lot since Beth died. I simply don’t believe she was in a frame of mind to try to kill herself again.”
“I don’t know,” he said. He frowned and turned off the lamp on the bedside table. He pulled Sherlock against him again and held her tight. “It really shakes me up, Sherlock, this happening to Lily. It’s so hard to know what to do.”
She held him hard. And she was thinking how fragile Lily had been seven months before, so hurt and so very broken, and then she’d taken those pills and nearly died. Savich and their mother had flown out to California for the second time, not more than a week after Beth’s funeral, to see Lily lying in that narrow hospital bed, a tube in her nose, an IV line in her arm. But Lily had survived. And she’d been so sorry, so very sorry that she’d frightened everyone. And she’d come back with them to Washington, D.C., to rest and get her bearings. But after three weeks, she’d decided to go back to her husband in Hemlock Bay.
And seven months later, she’d driven her Explorer into a redwood.
She squeezed more tightly against him. “I don’t know how I’d handle it if anything happened to Sean. I couldn’t bear that, Dillon. I just couldn’t. No wonder Lily didn’t.”
After a long time, he said, “No, I couldn’t bear it either, but you know what? You and I would survive it together. Somehow we would. But I think your instincts on this were right. You said something doesn’t feel right. What did you mean?”
She nuzzled her nose into his shoulder, hummed a bit, a sure sign she was thinking hard, and said, “Well, last week Lily sent us a No Wrinkles Remus strip she’d just finished, her first one since Beth was killed, and she sounded excited. So what happened over the past four days to make her want to try to kill herself again?”
FOUR
Hemlock Bay, California
“I stole the bottle of pills,” Savich said when he walked into the kitchen.
Sherlock grinned at her husband, gave him a thumbs-up, and said, “How do we check them out?”
“I called Clark Hoyt in the Eureka field office. I’ll messenger them up to him today. He’ll get back to me tomorrow. Then we’ll know, one way