For days after Jake’s death I’d felt numb, unable to cry, unable to confront Ray with the fact that I knew what he’d done. I even tried to deny it myself, pretend I hadn’t seen the mid air struggle; it seemed too monstrous an act for the man I’d lived with for a quarter of a century. But then a violent scene from five years before escaped from where I’d buried it in my memory: Ray raging at me, having found out about the second of my two brief affairs. His face red and contorted, his eyes wild, he’d accused me of repeated infidelities throughout our marriage. Berated me for sleeping with a member of his mountain-climbing team. Screamed: “I’ll kill him! I swear, on the next climb I’ll grab hold of him and pitch him off Denali! If I have to go down with him, I will!”
He hadn’t, of course. Instead, he’d spent five years nursing his rage and imagining I was sleeping with every man I met. And when that rage was at a fever pitch, he’d turned it on Jake. Killed his friend because he overheard a phone call between us. Killed him because another so-called friend had told him of seeing Jake and me in intimate conversation in a neighborhood cocktail lounge. I’d denied either when he asked me about them; now I wished I had told him why I’d been talking to Jake.
I laid my aching head on the desk and moaned. Finally the tears that shock had frozen began to flow.
Why did you kill him, Ray?
Why didn’t you just kill me?
Ray
Emptying my stomach didn’t help much. I still felt sick and shaky when I came out of the downstairs bathroom. This wasn’t the flu or any other kind of natural illness; there was no doubt of it now. Call nine-eleven, I thought, ask for medical assistance. But it would take a while for an ambulance or medevac helicopter to get here from Jackson or Sonora and I could be dead by then.
What kind of poison had she used? If I knew that, there might be something I could take to counteract it. At least I could tell the emergency operator, who could then alert the paramedics.
It was an effort to climb the stairs to the upper floor. Ray Porter, who had climbed mountains, hiked through jungles and across deserts-so damned weak he couldn’t mount a dozen steps without streaming sweat and hanging onto the railing with both hands. It enraged me, the idea of dying this way, weak and helpless. Yet the funny thing was, most of the rage was at myself for allowing such a thing to happen.
My fault, as much as Melissa’s. I’d driven her into Jake Hollis’s arms, the arms of all the others. I’d destroyed her, slowly and surely, with the heat of my passions. And in the process I’d sown the seeds of my own destruction.
But not blaming her or hating her didn’t mean I would let her get away with what she’d done. Life was still precious to me, and I wouldn’t let go of it without a fight.
She wasn’t in the kitchen. She had been, though; as I passed the stove, I smelled a sour odor and saw that she’d thrown up in the sink. My God! Maybe she hadn’t been faking in Murphys or on the way up here; maybe she’d poisoned herself, too. Hollis was dead, she couldn’t have him, and she didn’t want me anymore, so what did she have left to live for? It was just like her to concoct a quixotic Shakespearean finish for both of us.
I stumbled into the living room. She wasn’t there, either, but I could hear her-low sobbing sounds coming from out on the balcony that ran across the entire rear of the lodge. I almost fell before I reached the open balcony doors; I had to clutch at the glass for support, all but drag myself around the jamb. The weakness and the cramping pain made me even more determined.
Melissa was sitting on one of the redwood chairs, her arms wrapped across her middle, rocking slightly and grimacing. A closed book lay in her lap. A book, for God’s sake, at a time like this!
“Melissa.”
She stiffened and her head turned toward me. Her eyes were enormous, luminous with pain. In spite of what she’d done, in spite of myself, I experienced a surge of feeling for her-compassion, protectiveness, even tenderness, like suddenly materialized ghosts from the past.
“Why, Ray?” she said. “Why did this have to happen?”
“You know the answer to that better than I do. But it’s not too late. I won’t let it be too late.”
“I don’t want to die. I thought I did, for a while, but I don’t.”
“Neither of us is going to die. I’ll call for emergency medical help…but I have to know what it was first.” She shook her head as if she didn’t understand.
“The poison,” I said. “What kind of poison?”
“How should I know! Ray, don’t torture me any more…”
“Listen to me. It’s not too late. An antidote, some kind of emetic…what did you use?”
“I didn’t…I didn’t…”
I lurched toward her, fell to my knees beside her chair. “How long ago? What kind of poison? How much?”
“Stop it! You know it wasn’t me!”
“Melissa…”
“You did it. You, you, you!”
I stared at her in disbelief. “That’s crazy. I wouldn’t do a thing like that to you, to myself. I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“But if you didn’t poison us…?”
“I didn’t.” Confusion gripped me now; I couldn’t seem to think clearly. “And you swear you didn’t?”
“I swear!”
“If it wasn’t poison, then what…” I broke off, staring at the book in her lap, seeing its title for the first time. Symptoms: The Complete Home Medical Encyclopedia.
I reached out to it-and the pain came again, a sudden wrenching so violent it brought an involuntary cry from my throat. Gagging, I clutched at Melissa. Felt her hands on me. And then we were clinging to each other, holding tighter than we had in a long, long time.
Melissa
As Ray kneeled beside my chair and we held each other, I felt something that I’d never felt for him before: compassion. He’d never needed it, never wanted it, and he probably wouldn’t now. But a man who had climbed mountains, who had been unafraid to step out into space with only a parachute to depend on-it tore at my heart to see him reduced to this sweating, trembling weakness by…what?
He was staring at the home medical encyclopedia I’d found on the shelf above the kitchen desk. Now he raised his eyes to mine and said thickly: “Did you look up our symptoms in there?”
“No, not yet…”
He reached again for the book, but another wave of pain drove him down into a sitting position, forehead against my knees.
“Can’t do it,” he said. “My eyes…”
The admission seemed to rob him of his last strength. Ray had always taken charge, always, in every situation.
A sharp spasm wrenched my stomach. When it eased, I put my hand on the back of his head and said: “I can.”
It was a huge volume, and for a moment I couldn’t focus on how to use it. Then I realized the first part was a reverse dictionary of symptoms; you looked yours up, and it referred you to the causes described in the second section. I started with the section on nausea and vomiting.
“This doesn’t help,” I muttered after scanning the entry. Vomiting…Characteristic of nearly all infectious diseases, none of which it was likely we’d both come down with…Wait, here was vomiting coupled with headache…
Ray grabbed onto my calves now, his fingers spasming along with his body. More cramps, worse than what I was experiencing. I gripped his shoulder reassuringly and read on.
Brain tumors, migraine headache, acute glaucoma…
Oh, God, this was no good! I felt the beginnings of panic, took a deep breath, and continued skimming the entry. It told me nothing.
Ray moaned, his face contorted.
I flipped to the front of the book, looking for a table of contents. An encyclopedia of symptoms-wouldn’t they expect that a user might be in pain, want answers in a hurry? Why wasn’t there…?