A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly by Charlaine Harris

Author:Charlaine Harris [Harris, Charlaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625672766
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2017-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

NONE OF US quite felt up to eating the turkey, so we ended up having ham for Thanksgiving. And we held the feast in the evening instead of at noon. After being up almost all night, we had slept late.

Cully had to do most of the cooking, since Mimi, Barbara, and I were too sore; besides, Mimi’s arm gash was bandaged, and so was the bite on Barbara’s hand. Charles was pretty incompetent as a chef’s aide. He turned up about one o’clock and made a laudable attempt to be useful, but it became obvious he’d never chopped an onion before.

Before he got there – while Barbara was still asleep in the upstairs guest bedroom and Cully was rattling pots and pans – Mimi finally explained about Charles. She had been aware all along, of course, of my bewilderment at her shift in attitude. As it turned out, she’d had some hurt and confused feelings of her own to handle.

‘I really was just being hysterical that morning he came to the door,’ she said through stiff lips. ‘I infected you with it.’ She was curled up at the end of my bed along with Attila the Hero. ‘I did finally talk to him when he came by my office at the college, and we had a long showdown on the phone.’ I remembered that evening; I’d had to wait for her to help with the dishes.

Mimi took a deep breath. ‘Because of our weird behavior the morning he came by, he thought I already knew what he was going to confess to me; otherwise I guess he never would’ve told me . . . This is going to sound like a soap opera, Nick. Charles thought I was so upset with him not because of the tussles in the car but because I’d somehow found out he’d slept with Sally, the woman whose party you and Cully went to last night.’

Oh dear, oh dear. Right after Richard’s defection to the woman in Albuquerque. Mimi’s pride.

‘Of course I didn’t know anything about it. But when he asked me to forgive him, he also told me which night he spent with Sally; it was the night Alicia was killed. So he was guilty of screwing another woman, but he wasn’t guilty of something far worse. Sally’s husband was on a hunting trip, and she invited Charles over – she’d dated him years ago – and things just went from there. He was mad at me when he went to see her. For various reasons.’

Uh-huh. Mimi wouldn’t go to bed with him. And that must have been an extremely thorough confession, because that was how Mimi knew about the picture on Sally’s bedside table.

‘I was hurt and disappointed. I’m still not over that. We’re going to have to have a few more talks,’ Mimi said grimly.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked bluntly.

‘I just couldn’t. I knew you were thinking some kind of awful thought, I knew you were upset, but you know how critical you’ve always been of the men I’ve dated.

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