Testament by David Morrell Read Free Book Online Page A

nothing. It could be just your mother.”
    “My mother’s been dead two years.” He picked up the phone, and it was one of Claire’s girl friends. That didn’t matter. He started shaking anyhow.
    “I know it’s late,” the woman said, “but I need to ask Claire about—“
    “She isn’t feeling well. She’ll call you back tomorrow.”
    “I hope it isn’t serious.”
    “She’ll call you back,” he said and hung up.
    He couldn’t help wondering if she was the same woman who had been breathing on the phone to Webster. No, he told himself. That’s insane. You need to stop thinking like that. She’s Claire’s best friend.
    But he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. “You look awful,” Webster told him. He came at seven the next morning with a new man for the phone. But Webster didn’t look good either. His big-boned face was slack and pale, and his eyes were for the first time dull, and he looked like he had been up all night himself. He even wore the same gray suit, out of shape now.
    “It was ethylene glycol,” Webster said. “And they didn’t get it from a plant nursery, they got it from a garage. Some kinds of antifreeze and windshield cleaners have it in them. It’s a little sweet, and if you’d swallowed some of it in the milk, you would maybe have noticed the taste just before it killed you. It only takes a drop or two. The trouble is, so many people buy antifreeze and windshield cleaner there’s no way to trace them all.”
    “You came all the way over here at this hour just to tell me you can’t trace whoever bought the poison?”
    “At least you know I’m being honest. If I tell you the worst, then you’ll know to believe me when I tell you something good.”
    “So for God sake tell me something good.”
    “Right now I haven’t anything. You were right, the FBI couldn’t help us much. The man who delivered the milk seems like he wasn’t involved, but we’re watching him anyhow. He left the milk around six, so there was plenty of time for somebody else to slip the poison into it. The autopsy’s finished. You can have your child’s body released to the undertaker.”
    At first he didn’t know what Webster was talking about. Then he realized. A funeral. He had so little accepted Ethan’s death that he hadn’t even thought there would be a funeral.
    “What is it?” Webster said. “What’s the matter?”
    He shook his head and phoned the church as soon as Webster left.
    “I’m sorry,” the housekeeper said. “The fathers are all out saying Masses now. The rectory hours aren’t until nine.”
    So he waited and smoked from the new pack of cigarettes that Webster had given him before he left. They tasted like musty cotton batting, hard to draw on, and he wouldn’t have trusted them if he had not already without thinking smoked the others Webster had given him the day before. “You take some slivers from this plastic. You slip them into your target’s cigarette. The fumes are so lethal, one drag later and he’s dead.” He had used that in his article, making certain not to mention the kind of plastic. But what was the difference? he thought emptily. Christ, wasn’t there anything that couldn’t be used to kill someone?
    The priest said there was an opening for a funeral in two days. He looked in the phone book for undertakers, but there was no listing. See FUNERAL DIRECTORS, it said. Sure. Of course, he told himself. That’s what I need. A damned director. His instinct was to pick the first name on the list and be done with it. But he kept thinking of Kess and how the first name on the list was obvious, so he slid down to the next from the last. He knew it wouldn’t take long for Kess or his men to find out which undertaker he was using, but at least this way he wasn’t helping them any to set up some kind of trap.
    “There’s been an extensive autopsy,” he told the man on the phone. “I’m not sure if my son can lie in open state.”
    The voice was warm