Testament Read Free Page B

before, but the pills were clouding his mind so much that he couldn’t place them.
    “Well, do you know how the baby got his hands on it?”
    “Yes. It was in the milk that came this morning.”
    “The milk?” Webster asked incredulously. He and Ford looked sharply at each other.
    “That’s right. My cat died from it too. I put her over on the cellar steps.” The pills were certainly fixing him. His voice sounded to him as if it came from somewhere outside his head.
    Ford went to see the cat, stepping over the milk and broken glass by the stove. He seemed to take a very long time to cross the last few feet toward the cellar door. Tired of waiting for him to get there, he himself turned slowly in his chair, and from where he sat at the kitchen table he could see out the big front window in the living room to where the driver had backed the ambulance out of the driveway and parked it at the curb between the two fir trees. He could see the driver sitting behind the steering wheel out there, looking in the rearview mirror, combing his hair.
    “I asked you a question,” Webster was saying. “I asked you if you had any idea how the poison got in the milk.”
    “Kess,” he answered, still looking toward the ambulance. The curtains on the side were drawn; there was a small object outlined behind them, but he couldn’t be sure it was Ethan. He thought of the rough starchy white sheets that Ethan must be lying on but couldn’t feel.
    “How’s that?”
    “A man named Kess did it.”
    “You know this man? You know for a fact that he did this?”
    “Not personally. I mean, I know him, but I don’t think he did it personally. He likely ordered someone else to do it. I met him early this year for an article I was working on.” His voice sounded even farther outside his head. He was having trouble now getting enough breath to say all the words.
    Outside, the ambulance driver finished combing his hair.
    “Please look at me,” Webster said.
    He managed to turn to him.
    “What do you mean an article you were working on?”
    “I’m a writer.”
    “Hey, no kidding,” Ford said, interested, coming back from the cellar door. That was the first he had spoken. “What do you write? Maybe I’ve read your stuff.”
    “Novels. Stories.” It was all too complicated to explain. Because of his writing, Ethan was dead, but he was losing the strength to tell them, and finally he had to fall back on the standard modest reply he always gave to strangers who asked him about his work. “I got lucky three years ago with a novel that made the best-seller lists and was turned into a movie.” He gave the name.
    “I must have missed that one,” Ford said.
    Webster looked around at the kitchen and the living room. The place was more than a hundred years old, its inside walls made of brick and oak. The money from the book had meant that he could afford to buy it and restore its features. It had the feel of old photographs, of solid deep-grained dark wood and heavily mortared walls and things that were built to outlast the men who fashioned them. Webster obviously was thinking, yeah, you got lucky all right. “What about this article?” he asked.
    “When I’m having trouble with a book, I sometimes let it rest and try an article. God help me, last December some things happened with Kess that made me want to write about him.”
    “Who is this guy anyway?” Ford asked.
    It was all too much to explain. He had the sensation that his brain was slowly revolving inside his skull, and when he concentrated to stop it, the kitchen shifted on an angle. He stood off-balance, steadied himself, and made his way off the cold hardwood floor onto the deep soft rug toward the wall of bookshelves in the living room.
    “What’s the matter?” Webster asked. “What are you doing?”
    “Getting you this,” he answered, wondering if he would be able to get back and sit down again, opening a copy of the magazine with his article in it. “I don’t