Elizabeth George - I, Richard

“Maybe the ex didn't-what's her name?”

“Paula.”

“Maybe Paula didn't pass on the word. If the divorce was nasty…was it?”

“Fairly. There was another man involved. Eric fought Paula for custody of Janie.”

“That could've done the trick.”

“It was years ago.”

“Put the screws to him in death. Some people can never let go.”

“D'you think she might not have told his parents?”

“Sounds about right,” Bethany said.

It was the thought that Paula, in a last stroke of posthumous revenge upon her erstwhile husband, might have refused to pass along the news to Eric's parents that made Charlie decide to contact the elder Lawtons herself. The problem was that Eric had long been estranged from his parents, a sad fact that he'd revealed to Charlie during their first holiday season together. Close to her own family despite the distance that separated them all, she'd brought up “making arrangements for the holidays. D'you want to spend them with your family or mine? Or should we divide them up? Or have everyone here?”

Here at that time was a two-bedroom condo in the Hollywood Hills from which Eric ventured forth each day to his job in the distant suburbs while Charlie dashed off to her casting calls with the hope that something other than being the mom-with-the-perfect-family on WoW! soap commercials might be in her future. A two-bedroom condo with an airliner-sized kitchen and a single bathroom was not the ideal spot for entertaining mutual families, so she had prepared herself for the inevitable division of time between the end of November and the beginning of January: Thanksgiving in one location, Christmas Eve in another, Christmas Day at a third, and New Year's Eve together at home alone in front of the artificial fire, with fruit and champagne. Only, that wasn't how the holidays played out because Eric told her the painful story of his estrangement from his parents: about the hunting accident that had caused the estrangement and what had followed that accident.

“I tripped and the gun went off,” he confessed one night in the darkness. “If I'd known what to… I didn't know what to do. I had no first aid. He bled to death, Char. With me shaking him and yelling his name and crying and telling him, begging him, to hold on, to just hold on.”

“I'm so sorry,” she'd said and she'd pulled his head to her breast because his voice had broken and his body trembled and he clung to her and she wasn't used to a man showing emotion. “Your own brother. Eric, what a horrible thing.”

“He was eighteen. They tried to forgive me. But he was… Brent was like the crown prince to them. I couldn't take his place. I drifted off eventually. Just a bit at first. Then more and more. They decided to let me. It was best for us all. We couldn't get over it. We couldn't get past it.”

Charlie tried to imagine what it had been like for him: growing to adulthood and then toward middle age and always knowing he'd shot his own brother. They'd been birding, out at dawn at the edge of the desert where the doves wintered. They'd hunted birds from childhood, first with their father and then- when Brent was old enough to drive-on their own. And on their second such trip together, the worst had happened.

“They probably forgave you years ago,” she'd said to her husband loyally. “Have you tried to contact them?”

“I don't want to see it in their eyes. The looking at me and trying to seem like there's nothing beneath that look but love.”

“Well, there's not hate beneath it.”

“No. Just sorrow, which I put there. Being dumb. Being slipshod. Not holding the gun right. Not watching my feet.”

“You were only fifteen,” Charlie protested.

“I was old enough.”

For what? she'd wondered. But she worked out the answer eventually: old enough to disappear.

They had a right to know that he was dead, however. So even though Charlie had no idea where Marilyn and Clark Lawton lived, she determined she would find them and give them the information. She knew that Eric would want it that way. The very fact that he had a virtual gallery of family pictures told her that he had never stopped feeling the aching loss of a place in his parents' hearts.

She went to these pictures the day after his funeral, lightheaded and sore-muscled after the trauma of the past week. The grieving tightness in her throat was still there-had been there since the night Eric died-and so was the sickly, feverish sensation she'd had for days. She couldn't remember how it was to feel normal any longer. But things had to be done.

The pictures were in the living room, standing like deliberate, intrusive thoughts at intervals among the books on either side of the fireplace. She knew who every individual was because Eric had told her several times. But he'd identified most of them by first name only, which wasn't helpful in the present circumstances: Aunt Marianne at her high school graduation, Great-Aunt Shirley with Great-Uncle Pat, Grandma Louise (on which side of the family, Eric?), Uncle Ross, Brent at seven, Mom at ten, Dad at thirteen, Mom and Dad on their wedding day, Grandpa and his brothers, Nana Jessie-Lynn. But aside from his parents' last name, she knew no one else's. And a look in the phone book told her no Lawtons named Clark or Marilyn lived nearby.

Not that she had expected them to be near. She'd hoped for that, but at the same time she'd already realized that hunting trips taken by teenaged boys to the edge of the desert suggested a town not far away from a place even more arid than the LA suburb where she and Eric had bought their home.

She got out a map of California and considered beginning her search in the south, right at the state border. She could call information for every town that sided the slice of land that was Highway 805. But she got not much farther than Paradise Hills before she reconsidered this painstaking approach.

She went back to the pictures and took them down. She carried them into the kitchen and set them carefully on the granite counter. They were all old pictures, the most recent being Brent at seven, and some of them were tintypes assiduously preserved.

Still, sometimes, she knew, families made note of the subjects of photographs and the locations where the pictures had been taken as well. And if that was the case with Eric's family pictures, there might be a clue as to the current whereabouts of his relatives.

So she eased off the back of each of the frames, and examined the reverse side of the photographs. Only two provided writing. A delicate hand had written Brent Lawton, seven years old, Yosemite on the back side of the picture of Eric's brother. A spidery pen had placed Jessie-Lynn just before Merle's wedding on the picture of one of the grandmothers in Eric's life. But that was it.

Charlie sighed and began to reassemble the frames and their contents: glass, photograph, cardboard filler, and velvet-covered backing. When she got to the Lawtons' wedding picture, however, she discovered that something besides the glass, the photo, the filler, and the backing had been put into the frame. Perhaps it was because the more recent the photo, the thinner the paper on which it had been printed. But the wedding picture had required something extra to fill up the space between it and the backing. This something was a folded paper, which unfolded turned out to be a blank receipt. Printed at the top of this was Time on My Side and an address on Front Street in Temecula, California.

Charlie got out her map again. A shot of excitement and certainty flashed through her when she found Temecula at the edge of the desert, sitting alongside another desert freeway, as if waiting for her to discover its secrets.