Rachel Dahlrumple. Shea McMaster

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СКАЧАТЬ and identify the body?”

      The question hit me as odd. “If you know it’s him, then he’s been indentified, right?”

      I looked over the pastor’s shoulder toward the Sheriff. “Mark? He’s been identified, right?”

      “Yes, Rachel.” Mark looked away with a small cough. “I answered the call with my deputies. It was him.”

      Relief flooded me. Between my grandparents and my mother, I’d seen enough dead bodies to last me a lifetime. “Oh, well, then that’s all right.” It occurred to me Dan had been trying to tell me something earlier. “Where did you find him?”

      Throats cleared and Pastor made room for the doctor in front of me. Dr. Sorrenson’s hand gripped my chin and tilted my face up so he could see my eyes. “Rachel,” he said in his calm, soft way. “How are you feeling? Lightheaded at all?” His other hand wrapped around my right wrist, strong fingers searching for my pulse. “Your eyes are a bit dilated, your face a tad pale even for you. Are you up to hearing the details? How’s your breathing? Is that a touch of wheezing I detect?”

      No wheezing, so I shrugged off his questions. “I suppose I’ll have to hear it sooner or later. Might as well get it over.”

      “Brace yourself, honey,” Cyndi whispered from my side and I felt a prick of annoyance. All these people knew?

      I managed to turn my face toward Dan. Had we been alone, I could have leaned forward an inch and touched my lips to his. “Just tell me.”

      Emotion I couldn’t define filled his eyes and he swallowed before soldiering on with the rest of the news. “He was at the Tachi casino, in the hotel, with a woman. He died while…”

      I closed my eyes. I didn’t need to hear the rest. With all the evidence in front of me, I could no longer hide from the truth. So many people thought I had the perfect life. A handsome, popular husband, a big house, land, and a good job. I’d even once had the one vital thing that had faded away. Love. Well, love and trust.

      For months I’d made him wear condoms the few times we’d had sex, claiming I couldn’t orgasm without the stimulation of a certain ribbed brand. Instead of fixing our problems, I’d brought home the highly specialized condoms and insisted they were necessary to my pleasure. Necessary to keeping me disease free was more like it, if I’d never been brave enough to acknowledge my suspicions.

      A doormat. That’s what most people thought of me. A mousy personality to go with my mousy-colored, lifeless hair. Submissive and compliant to any strong figure. Where did the trait come from? My mother certainly wasn’t submissive to my father. She’d run the show, with a very few notable exceptions. My name for one. And my grandmothers, well, there’d never been a more domineering pair of females ever created. Not that my father or grandfathers were weak men. Absolutely not. They were strong men, well matched with strong women, providing absolutely no answer whatsoever for my personality, or lack thereof.

      “Rachel, you can change your mind about the wake.” Dan got through to me as the doctor’s fingers tightened on my wrist, shifting as if he’d lost contact with my pulse.

      “Do we…” Oh Lord. We lived in a small town. And he’d died less than twenty miles away from home. As I’d begun to suspect, presumably everyone already knew about Burt’s philandering. How many had seen him at the casino flaunting his mistress? As recently as that day I’d seen people flush guiltily and stop their conversations as I approached on the street. I’d seen the smug looks from certain females of my acquaintance. Was I the last one in town to open my eyes?

      “Doc, I think she’s going into shock,” Dan said calmly.

      “Who?” I managed to whisper past my tightening chest. It came out on a wheeze.

      Someone held my forgotten glass of iced tea in front of my face.

      “Take this, Rachel, it’s for your asthma,” Dr. Sorrenson insisted, with a pill held to my mouth. He dropped it in and pressed the iced tea glass against my lips. The pill felt like an antihistamine I took on a regular basis. I swallowed.

      “It doesn’t matter,” Cyndi spoke up.

      “It matters. Who?” I repeated, and sipped more before tea ran down my front.

      “No one from Bonchamps,” Mark answered. “A woman from San Jose, according to her license.”

      Oh. Worse, in a way. Someone Burt had probably known from the years we’d lived in Silicon Valley while he worked for a semiconductor company. Had their affair been going on that long? Ten years or more? Was this the reason we’d never had children? If so, Burt had been the world’s biggest fool. Children would have kept me busy. More than one doctor had assured me the problem didn’t lie with me and could find no reason for me to not conceive, yet it had never happened. Tests had proven Burt capable, but somehow the two ingredients had never mixed properly. At one point, I’d privately wondered if he’d had a vasectomy on the sly and used someone else’s samples for testing, but that line of reasoning had never made sense. Then John had moved home with the wife he’d found while stationed in Florida and their babies became mine, Cyndi my sister, and the pain of no children of my own slowly atrophied into a numb spot in my heart.

      “Who?” I demanded.

      Mark pulled a small notebook from his shirt pocket and flipped through several pages. All for show, I was sure. The man had a mind like a steel trap and could remember every time I’d ever dunked his skinny butt in the city pool. “According to her license, her name is Julianna Worthington. Age thirty-two, with an address in Los Gatos. Know her?”

      “No.” Not really. Maybe I’d heard the name before as someone Burt did business with. As in, “You remember Julianna from the Christmas party at Worthington and Smythe Semiconductor. Old man Worthington’s daughter. He’s put her in my old position and is grooming her to take over when he retires. He asked me to give her a hand. Good business networking is all it is.” The Speech. From about a year before. Or was it the prior month? I’d heard The Speech several times, of course the names and circumstances changed from time to time, but the basic lines were standard Burt.

      On the other hand, a touch of relief swept me. It wasn’t one of the handful of single women in town such as Cecile the florist, Sonja from the hotel, C.C. Gibbs who’d cared for Mom, or heaven forbid, our tenant Ohm, with the new age jewelry shop.

      I saw the people gathered around me exchanging furtive glances. Had they expected me to react differently? When had plain old Rachel ever fallen apart? They’d never seen me crumple and cry. Not when my grandparents died one after the other, and not when my mother finally succumbed to cancer. My father had cried buckets at my mother’s funeral, but not me. I’d wrapped my arm him and changed out the tissues he soaked, but I didn’t advertise my misery or produce gallons of tears.

      I’d had a deal with Cyndi and her children. I was the calm one in the center of the storm. I supplied the bandages, ointment, kisses and hugs chased by the cookies and lemonade she provided to soothe any remaining hurts. She was bon-bons, I was boo-boos. And they expected me to change in the face of Burt’s ignominious death?

      “Tell me the rest.” As long as we were on a roll, they might as well tell me everything now, like a surgical strike.

      “Rachel, I don’t think…” Dr. Sorrenson began but I shook my head.

      “No, there’s more, and I’m СКАЧАТЬ