The Thomas Berryman Number by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

…” she said, biting the tongue, “now what in the world does that
look
like?”
    Thomas Berryman cocked his head back and popped a biscuit-sized fruit into his mouth. “Tastes like strawberries,” he grinned. “Only they’re too big to be strawberries.” Juice ran over his chin and he dammed the flow with a forefinger.
    The cook moved over and nudged him away from her stove. She was half-playing now. “I’m really mad at you, Mister Shear.”
    She sidled him across the kitchen with her bony little hip. “You a bad influence comin up Lake Steven actin like that last night.”
    As further appeasement, it seemed, Berryman started to fill a row of four pewter coffee mugs on the counter. “Who’s who?”
    “Mister Ben an’ you the cream an’ sugar boys,” the old lady started. Then she reconsidered. “But you not bringin nothin’ to nobody. You must make it a big joke. Bit joke on Mrs. Bibbs, ha ha, very funny indeed.”
    “Put down the coffee,” she said. “
Down
boy.”
    As the little black woman returned to scooping eggs onto warmed, waiting plates, Berryman dropped small tablets into two of the coffee mugs. The tablets were a combination of iron sulfate, magnesium oxide, and ipecac.
    “What a sore sport,” he sucked his cheek as he watched the pills dissolve. “What a party pooper, Mrs. B.”
    As he continued to grin at her, the old woman finally looked up. She flashed a gold bridgework smile at him. As usual, he was forgiven.
    The youngest Shepherd brother, Benjamin, sat still as grass, glassy-eyed, chewing a breakfast muffin over and over like it was rubber tire. He thought he was having a heart attack.
    He could hear his big heart thumping and felt it could blow open his chest. His body was flushing blood. Numb fingers, toes. His lungs were filling up with fluids, and he was having regrets about the life he’d led.
    Pancakes were being passed by. His brother was kidding Thomas Berryman about the trip back to Michigan.
    Benjamin Shepherd slipped down to the floor, and began vomiting recognizable food.
    Charles and William Shepherd carried their brother to a first floor bedroom. They held him on a bed while his body convulsed. He dryheaved. His back arched like a drawbridge.
    Gradually it dawned on Charles Shepherd that his cook was screaming bloody murder in another room. Back in the dining room. She screamed for a long time, calling for Charles Shepherd and for Jesus.
    When his young brother finally fainted, Charles ran back to the dining room.
    What he found was Thomas Berryman lying across the rug. Berryman was holding his knees up around his chest. He’d kicked over the dining room table—at least it was turned over on its side. “Oh my God,” he kept gasping. “Oh God, it’s horrible.” He wasn’t having regrets about the life he’d led. He’d poisoned himself.
    The exact sound he made was: O g-a-a-ad.
    Late that afternoon the little cook, Mrs. Bibbs, sat on a tiny leather hassock in the front hallway of the Shepherd house. She’d cried until she had no control over her limbs. The sun was passing down through the glass portion of the front door. The woman slipped off the hassock onto the sunstreaked floor.
    The family doctor had just gone out the door. He’d said that both Berryman and Benjamin Shepherd had suffered from acute food poisoning. It was lucky for them, he announced with great pomp, that they’d both thrown up so violently.
    Orating in front of Charles and Willy Shepherd, the doctor had sternly and ridiculously questioned the cook about whether or not she’d washed her strawberries before serving them. “I think not,” he’d said. And who was she to argue with a doctor of medicine.
    That afternoon, Benjamin Shepherd was recuperating in his own bedroom.
    Propped in front of a Trinitron portable, eating ice cream like a tonsillectomy patient, his large head was positioned beneath a framed Kodachrome of Maria Schneider in
Last Tango in Paris.
The girl had more hair