Read Online Here Comes the Corpse by Mark Richard Zubro - Free Book Online Page B

that always meant I want the truth and I want it now. I’d long since built up immunity to blabbing under that fearsome glare. My mother was good. Even though I had nothing to tell, I was not immune to the tendrils of accompanying guilt that followed when I was the recipient of that storied gaze.
    I confirmed her statement. “If I knew, I would tell.”
    Big sigh from both Gahains.
    “We can’t go down to St. Louis to talk to people,” Mrs. Gahain said. “We’ve got to arrange the wake, the funeral. They’re going to be here, where he grew up.” Trembling pause. “Get used to him being gone.” She began to weep. We were all silent. My mother patted her hand. Mr. Gahain put his arm around his wife’s shoulder. Tears coursed down his cheeks. I didn’t have the comfort of tears.
    Some minutes later when they were more composed, Mrs. Gahain said, “We’re wondering if there isn’t some clue, some reason. We knew almost nothing about his current life.” She gulped. “I’m almost afraid what we’d find if we went down there.”
    Mr. Gahain said, “We want to know why this happened.”
    I asked, “Ethan was being secretive about what he wanted to say. Do you have any reason to believe his reluctance might have been because he was involved in something criminal?” I was certainly not going to ask his parents if they knew their son was into making and distributing pornography.
    “No,” Mr. Gahain said, “but he was always so distant. We rarely talked.”
    Mrs. Gahain began to cry again. “We tried to be good parents.”
    My mother said, “You were and are good parents.”
    “He loved you,” I said. “That I do know for sure. He told me so.” And he had. Years ago we were sitting in a bar with a crowd of friends the night after he had come back from college graduation. The same night he had also said his parents drove him nuts even faster than his wife did. At the time he was married to wife number one.
    Mrs. Gahain turned her teary eyes on me. “We want to find out what happened. Would you go to St. Louis and look in his house? We’re the executors of his estate. We’ll pack it up at some point in the future, but maybe there’ll be a clue there, a hint, a reason.”
    And sometimes there weren’t reasons or rational explanations. Sometimes, many times, I found that which is irrational ruled the world. (Think the Taliban, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson.) I wasn’t about to mention that either. This was no time to be less than comforting.
    My mother said, “You’ll go, Tom, won’t you?” Her best friends were in pain. I knew she was, too. She’d watched Ethan grow up and genuinely liked him. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to know who this Michael was that Ethan used his last breath to mention.
    I asked, “Had he given out even the smallest hint about what was bothering him?”
    Mr. Gahain said, “No. We’ve gone over and over everything we can remember that he said to us since he came home. We can’t think of one thing.” He shrugged.
    “He didn’t reveal anything specific, but you suspected?”
    “Something was wrong,” Mrs. Gahain said. “We had no idea what or how serious it was. I think he was frightened of something. He should have known he could talk to us. He always could.”
    I was glad they believed that.
    I asked, “Did he have any enemies that you know of?”
    “No,” Mrs. Gahain said, “although we didn’t know a lot of his friends either.”
    Mr. Gahain added, “At least one of his ex-wives hated him.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “I think there were some alimony and custody issues,” Mr. Gahain said. “We never knew precisely what the problem was.”
    Ernie and my sister had sat silently through all this. I turned to them. “Do either of you have a notion about what was bothering him?”
    Caroline said, “No,” quickly and emphatically. My sister was always good at being definitive.
    Ernie said, “We haven’t been close in a long time. Our age