Last Seen Alive (46 page)

“Of course you didn’t!”

Beverly hung her head for a moment, then said, “That’s not quite true. Now that I look back on our marriage, I see things that didn’t quite add up—the amount of time Ned was gone, the way he looked sometimes when he came home from working late. At first I was just so in love with him I wanted to believe anything he said, and later I got so involved with the kids that I stopped paying as much attention to him as I should have.” She gave Chyna an agonized look. “Do you think that’s what caused him to do the things he did? My failings as a wife?”

“No, Beverly, absolutely not!” Chyna answered vehemently. “You were a wonderful wife. You always amazed me with how well you balanced Ned, and the kids, and a house, and did it all with such patience, such love. Besides, you know Ned tried to kill me when he was ten years old! There was always something wrong with him. I know he wanted to blame it all on my parents and Rex and even on me, but in spite of all the mistakes Mom and Dad and Rex made, and my colossal blunder of supposedly being smarter than Ned was, those weren’t the cause of his problems. At least, they weren’t the only cause.

“I’ve never been able to decide whether to believe in nature or nurture—that we’re born a certain way or we turn out the way we do because of how we’re reared,” Chyna continued. “Now I think it’s probably a combination of both. In Mom’s letter, she talked about what an unhappy baby Ned was, how even as a little kid he was prone to these awful, depressed moods. I think there was something lacking in Ned at birth. Add that to the tangled mess of my family and we ended up with the Ned who died last week.”

“I guess,” Beverly mumbled. “But Chyna, Ian and Kate are Ned’s children. Do you think that if something was wrong with him at birth it was passed on to them?”

At that moment, Beverly and Chyna heard the front door open. Next followed the voice of Scott yelling, “Bev, Chyna, we’re back from the park!” Then he spoke to the children. “Hey, you two, chill out! We’re home now. Time to behave.”

Michelle barked raucously and ran into the kitchen, where she made a beeline for Chyna. Chyna slid out of her chair and sat on the floor, letting the big golden dog clamber onto her lap. Ian and Kate were quick to follow, and within a minute the three of them were floundering on the floor, petting the dog, kissing one another, laughing from the depths of their being.

Chyna glanced up at Beverly, who was looking down at them with the first genuine smile she’d managed since Ned’s death. “He
never
acted like this when he was young,” Chyna said, knowing the kids were paying no attention to her. “In spite of everything, you have two healthy, happy,
normal
children, Bev. And I call that being one of the luckiest people in the world.”

Beverly smiled at the same time tears ran down her cheeks. Scott draped his arm over Beverly’s shoulder and he looked down at Chyna with love in his eyes. “You can trust what she says, Beverly, because my darling Chyna knows more and senses more than we can ever imagine.”