Testament by David Morrell Read Free Book Online

of the dome light on top of what must be a police car.
    All the same, he closed the drapes. The dark of the room constricted him. He switched on a dim yellow light in the corner that would not cast his outline through the drapes. He turned toward the bed, and Claire’s eyes were open.
    Blank. Unregistering.
    But at least they were open.
    Slowly they came into focus. “Ethan?” she said, and closed them and opened them. Her lips were thick and cracked and very dry. She edged her tongue along them. “Ethan?”
    “Ssshh,” he said. “Take a while to get awake. The doctor gave you a sedative and you’ve been asleep all day.”
    “The doctor?” she murmured. Her lips were barely open as she spoke. She raised her hands to her face and drew them down her cheeks and left them listless on her breasts. “What doctor?” she wanted to know faintly. “Where’s Ethan? Were there enough clean diapers for him?”
    He looked past her toward the shadowed wall.
    “Oh dear Jesus,” she whispered. “He’s dead.”
    It swept through him again. The numbness when he’d seen Ethan choke and stiffen and die.
    “How do you feel?” he asked.
    “How do you think I feel?”
    “The doctor said I was to make you some soup.”
    “I don’t want any.”
    “The doctor said that too, but he said I was to make you eat some anyway.”
    She didn’t answer, just stared up at the ceiling. Every so often she blinked. Otherwise, her hands on her chest, she looked as if she were laid out in death. He sat there, watching her uncomfortably, and in a while he got up to go downstairs and make the soup. He didn’t want to go away from her. All the same, he felt relieved.
    Her voice stopped him at the door. “Don’t bring any milk.” The strength in it surprised him. He stood rigidly, his back to her, and looking out the open doorway he saw Sarah small and gray in the blackness of the hall. “What was wrong with it?” Claire asked behind him.
    He waited and turned. “Poison.”
    She kept staring at the ceiling. He didn’t move.
    “Natural or what?”
    “Do you mean was it put in the milk?”
    “That’s exactly what I mean.”
    He couldn’t understand it. She should have been half-unconscious.
    “Kess,” he said. “Or some of his men.”
    “Because of the article?”
    “It looks that way.”
    Slowly she turned her head to him. Her eyes had no whites.
    “You killed Ethan.”
    Out in the hall he heard Sarah stop breathing.
    “No,” he said quietly. “It was Kess or some of his men.”
    “No, you killed Ethan.”
    The drug, he thought. It hadn’t done any good at all. It had maybe even made her worse.
    “Please, Claire,” he said. “Sarah’s listening out in the hall. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
    Her voice was even stronger. “I know you didn’t need to write those things. You knew what might happen if you did.”
    “I didn’t write anything Kess didn’t say I could.”
    “That’s not the way he wanted you to write them. You made a deal with him. Remember?”
    He had to look away.
    “Didn’t he warn you? Didn’t he say that if you treated him like all the others had”—she took a long breath—“and made him out to be some lunatic he was going to get you?”
    He couldn’t answer.
    “Didn’t he?”
    “But he went into hiding. He was in so much trouble, who’d have thought he’d make good on his threat?”
    “You killed my baby. I’m warning you myself now. Don’t go to sleep. You go to sleep and so help me God I’ll kill you.”

14
     
    He spent the night downstairs in the living room. He tried to read but couldn’t. Trying to write was impossible. He kept thinking of the phone, and it finally rang at eleven. Even expecting it, he was frozen a second before he was up and hurrying down the hall to answer it. If Claire picked up her extension and the voice started rasping, that would be her limit.
    The man on duty already had the reels turning on the tape recorder. “Who knows, maybe it’s