Sweet Paradise by Gene Desrochers (most read books in the world of all time .txt) 📕

way over the gravel toward the building. Dana went to the door and called out. Walter entered my office for the first time without a body on the floor.

“We need to talk,” Dana said as she motioned for him to sit. He looked dried out, dusty. I set a glass of water on my desk in front of him.

“You got something for me?” Walter said.

Dana fidgeted with her phone and adjusted her hat before she said, “You could say that.”

Walter threw her his thousand-yard stare. His dark brown eyes caught the diffuse light from the window. Dana didn’t meet his eyes for a moment, then she brought her head up, let her shoulders relax and set her jaw.

“I know. I just told Boise, so he knows too. Please don’t waste our time denying.”

He kept staring at Dana. Two people on stage, me in the audience. Behind him, a roach inched along the edge of the wall. It found a crack and scurried into it.

“What is it I should be denying?” Walter intoned. “Did I kill someone?”

“Walter, no one’s suggesting that,” I said, trying to sound as neutral as possible. My heart thumped. Cornered animals were dangerous. If Walter had actually done something, there was no telling what he’d do next, no matter how confident Dana was in a peaceful resolution. This confrontation could escalate rapidly. I squeezed the pepper spray in the pocket of my shorts.

“No one’s talking to you,” he said, his eyes still fixated on Dana. “Tell me exactly what you know about whatever it is I’m accused of.”

“You’re gonna make me say it?”

He gave a solemn nod.

“I saw you go home with Kendal’s widow last night. I saw you put your arm around her waist and when she opened the door to that dead man’s house.” She paused, giving him a chance to interject a defense. When no parry came, she continued. “I waited three hours. You never left that house.”

Walter’s nostrils flared. His chest rose and fell like a buoy in the ocean before a storm. I wanted to throw him a life preserver, but I owed it to Kendal and perhaps Francine to get some answers or at least come up with more questions.

Two minutes felt like an hour as we all let the room settle. He could have denied it. He could have said he slept on the couch as a kindness to a woman who just lost her husband. He could have said nothing happened, and how dare Dana and I insinuate impure motives to a man and woman of such high moral character as Walter Pickering and Savannah Kendal. It occurred to me as a non-sequitur that both Kendals had location-based first names: Savannah and Adirondack. A town and a mountain range. North and South. High and low. Walter’s name didn’t fit in that geographic montage. His was merely a name. He had disrupted the perfect symmetry with his blatant non-geography.

My father had cheated on my mother and Evelyn had done the same to me shortly before her death. A silent, yet poetic expression of guilt and denial radiated out of Walter, absent verbal confirmation. A visceral urge to tackle and beat him buzzed in my ears. Stars swam into my vision, the rage whip-sawing against my civilized conformity. My clenched jaw ached as my crumpled fist thumped my hip. No sinking into this abyss. Not today. Keep a clear head. He still wasn’t answering Dana’s question.

“That superior look of smug indignation isn’t fooling anyone,” I said in a deep, hateful voice. “Answer the fucking question. Own it. Or, so help me ... ” I advanced toward him.

His façade of chief and president at The Daily News collapsed. He was not a man interested in physical confrontation. Words were his arena.

“Yes! All right, yes!” he squealed, fear in full bloom. “She and I, we had a relationship.”

The armpit of his shirt, the Van Heusen brand he always wore in the same eggshell color, betrayed a ring of yellow damp. What had that commercial said? Never let ‘em see you sweat.

The face of the man who had cuckolded me throbbed on the edge of my vision and superimposed itself on Walter’s face. Although I’d never seen them together in a compromising position, in my twisted version of events, he laughed at me while fucking Evelyn. That image continued to haunt me.

Didn’t these swine have any notion of what they did to the people who lived in a marriage when they inserted themselves? Did they consider karma? I prided myself on my empathy, but I could not, would not, give them that benefit.

I sneered at him. “Is that what you call it? A relationship.”

“We care about each other,” he said in a small voice.

“That’s easy to do when you don’t have to live with each other or support each other day in and day out. It’s fun. Like being an aunt, who thinks because she comes over once a week to babysit, she knows what it is to raise a child. Marriage is a child. Yeah, you are a murderer.”

Walter and Dana both stared at me. The stillness of my office, of the entire afternoon, felt like a pointed finger. I blamed myself for Evelyn’s cheating. What more could I have done to make her happy? Lots. There was always lots more to be done. I still had to believe it didn’t excuse her behavior. How else could I live with myself?

“So, what? Are you gonna marry that woman?” I said.

Walter’s eyes were still wide as craters. He knew this went beyond his ordeal.

“Boise,” he said.

Some of his bravado was coming back, his politician’s mind sorted through options on how to get back to respectability. Walter couldn’t exist for long without it. These few minutes were driving him mad. The fear that we would spread his disrespectability like a virus to the rest of his staff and the island.

He sat up a little straighter, his hands out in a plea. “Boise. Dana. I really