The Cynthia Freeman Collection Volume One by Cynthia Freeman

Author:Cynthia Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

LILY WAS SNUG IN the cozy living room of the Sutton Place apartment, bent over her needlepoint—a Metropolitan reproduction. A smile came to her lips as she reminisced about their happy Christmas vacation. She resolved that her children would have to come home for the summer vacation as well. And she had a feeling, given the Yuletide success, that no one—not Drew, not Randy, not Melissa, and certainly not Harry—would balk at the thought.

Just then the phone rang. Lily set aside her needlepoint and picked up the receiver. A voice greeted her before she had a chance to say hello.

“Mrs. Kohle? This is Dean Whittaker.”

“Dean Whittaker! Why, hello.” With a thrill, she thought, Could Jeremy have made the Dean’s list? How proud Harry would be!

“Mrs. Kohle,” said Dean Whittaker, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

“Bad news?” she repeated inquiringly. She couldn’t imagine any trouble Jeremy could be in.

“Mrs. Kohle, I’m afraid we’ve—lost Jeremy.”

“Lost him? Why, what do you mean?”

“I’m so sorry…. There’s no other way to tell you this. Jeremy committed suicide this morning.”

Lily dropped the phone and sat for a moment in stunned silence. Then she let out an anguished, horrified shriek. The door of Harry’s study flung open and he came racing out with Valerie Kirk on his heels.

“Lily! Lily, what is it?” he cried, seizing her by the shoulders. But Lily was sobbing too hysterically to speak. When she finally recovered enough for words, all she could utter was, “No, no, no!”

“Lily, please,” Harry begged her. “Please, tell me what it is.”

“Jeremy,” she gasped at long last. “Our Jeremy is—dead!”

“Lily, what are you saying?”

“He—he’s taken his life.” She sobbed again at hearing the awful truth coming from her own lips.

“Oh my God.”

“Oh, Harry. I want to see my baby.”

It was Valerie who finally noticed the dangling phone and replaced the receiver. Later it was she who made all the necessary calls and drove Harry and Lily up to New Hampshire to bring back the body. The parents remained in shock. Neither was eating. They barely slept; they didn’t talk.

As the car rolled along the scenic highway, Lily pondered again the unanswerable question that had plagued her every waking moment ever since the dean’s fateful call: Why? What had driven her firstborn to such a point of despair? Somehow, she could not turn to Harry for comfort. He was totally wrapped up in his own grief. If she had, she might not have counted on him for much solace.

Laird Phillips was the one to shed light on the events that led up to and surrounded Jeremy’s death.

“He was just terrified of failing, Mr. Kohle. You’ve never seen anyone study the way he did. He cracked the books constantly—had no social life at all. I tried to tell him to relax a little, but he’d never listen. He felt such tremendous pressure from you.”

Harry couldn’t let him go on. “At Christmas I told him that I would be proud of him, no matter what.”

“Well, that’s not the sense he came back with after the break.

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