Marcia Muller: Crucifixion River

I helped Melissa into the car and took us away from the watching eyes, away from Murphys. Tom Moore’s hunting lodge was eight miles higher up in the mountains-a secluded retreat, a place for lovers. Why had I agreed to come here? Why had Melissa agreed? What was the sense in us getting away alone together, with the end for us so near?

Halfway to the lodge, the cramps grew worse. The pain was stabbing and I was feeling nauseous by the time I reached the turnoff. Beside me, Melissa sat hunched over, holding her stomach, her face pale. Pretending, to throw me off guard? Those thoughts came on the heels of the other one, the one that made me jerk and clench my hands tightly around the wheel.

Christ, what if she’d poisoned me?

In the car on the road leading to our borrowed mountain cabin Ray asked me in what way I wasn’t feeling well. Nausea and stomach cramps, I told him, as well as a headache.

“Must be the flu,” he said. “I feel the same way, except I’ve also got chills.”

Liar , I thought. This was like no flu I’d ever experienced. “How long have you felt sick?”

“A little while.”

Then why had he eaten with apparent enjoyment a huge helping of the chicken pasta I’d fixed for lunch? Why had he suggested we drive into town and then spent so long browsing in the bookshop if he was feeling bad? Faking, of course, so I wouldn’t guess the truth. Except that I’d already guessed it.

“How awful for you,” I said.

“You’re certainly the sympathetic one.”

I turned my face to the side window and didn’t reply. My cramps were growing worse; the poison was doing its work.

At the rustic wood-and-stone lodge belonging to Tom Moore, his former business partner, Ray pulled the car close to the front steps, jumped out, and rushed up them without waiting for me. By the time I made my way inside, he was in the bathroom off the front hallway, making violent retching sounds. Acting again.

He was a consummate actor, I thought as I went upstairs to the living room and slumped in one of the armchairs in front of the huge fireplace. All those years of high-level business dealings, all those years of pretending interest in and affection for the children and me-they had polished his art. And now he was playing his biggest rôle of all, unaware that his audience of one wasn’t the slightest bit fooled.

I leaned my head back against the chair, narrowed my eyes, and looked around. Knotty pine everywhere. God, how I hated knotty pine! Every uncomfortable mountain or lakefront cabin I’d ever stayed in was paneled in the stuff, and now I was going to die surrounded by it.

A violent surge of nausea swept through me; bile rose in my throat. Ray was still in the downstairs bathroom, and I’d never make it upstairs in time, so I rushed to the kitchen and was sick in the sink. Leaning with my hands braced against the countertop, I thought distractedly: All the work I did cleaning up in here…ruined. Not that Tom would care. The man’s become a slob since his poor wife died.

His poor wife died…

That’s what they’d be saying about Ray soon. What did he plan to tell people? That I’d been poisoned by accident? Or did he intend to get rid of my body? Claim I’d disappeared? Bury me some place in these woods…?

My stomach contracted again; another cramp, more intense than any pain I’d ever experienced outside of childbirth, left me weak and breathless. And suddenly the apathy I’d felt since Murphys was gone. I didn’t want to die this way, in agony. I didn’t want to die at all. I’d thought I already had, spiritually, as I’d watched Jake Hollis plummet through the air. But that simply wasn’t true. After a moment I felt well enough to move across the room to a little desk with shelves containing cookbooks and other house hold volumes. The chills Ray had mentioned were starting now. What kind of poison produced chills? Had Ray chosen it because its symptoms mimicked a bad case of the flu? He hadn’t wanted me to know I was dying.

Unlike Jake. He’d known in those last few awful minutes.

The scene I’d witnessed from the plane two weeks earlier replayed itself in my mind: Ray and Jake struggling in mid air, neither chute open. Ray’s suddenly blossoming upward, while Jake fell, arms and legs flailing. And when the pilot and I arrived at the airstrip, there was Ray, pretending to be completely broken up over our friend’s death. Over and over he repeated: “I just don’t know what happened.”

And I had kept my silence, even though I knew what had happened-and why.

Jake Hollis was dead. Perhaps the closest person to a friend Ray ever had. My friend, too; I’d turned to him in desperation when I sensed my marriage was finally about to end. Not for sex, as I had to two other men in the past, but for insight into what had brought Ray and me to this point. But although Jake had heard me out through two long lunches and an afternoon of drinks, he could shed no light on the situation. Ray had kept him as much at an arm’s length as he had me.

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?

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.