Virtue Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

state’s dole in this plush nursing home.
    Whenever George was around, the women in the facility were frightened of Charles.
    Whenever George was around, Charles always wished he had learned how to fight, because someone needed to teach George manners.
    But Charles knew he wasn’t the one to do it, so he ignored George.
    Right now, Charles steadily ate the last of his dessert, even though George stood directly behind his chair and deliberately bumped it.
    “Mr. Cook, I wish you would sit down.” Nurse Yvonne sounded exasperated, but she made no attempt to relocate George Cook. None of the female nurses ever tried to move him on their own.
    George Cook snickered. “What? You don’t like to be reminded of how your favorite patient killed his wife? With the scissors … stabbed her … took her body apart piece by piece … so he could loll around in prison while I worked all my life in a sawmill … until the goddamn Chinese took the wood and I don’t have a job…”
    “Mr. Cook, please sit down.” Nurse Yvonne sounded stern.
    Not that it mattered to George. “Charles Banner held the scissors just like this, ripped her throat out, because she’d been fucking around.”
    One of the female patients whimpered and clutched her throat.
    “If he’d been a real man, she wouldn’t have had to fuck another guy.” George started bumping Charles’s chair again. Humping it. “Stabbed her, stabbed her, stabbed Misty, stabbed her, stabbed her…”
    Abruptly, memory clawed at Charles, and he froze.
    He’d stood in the house, seen the blood, didn’t understand what had happened. He’d looked at his own hands; blood covered them. In an ever-increasing panic, he looked for Misty, for Elizabeth …
    His hand holding the fork began to tremble.
    “Mr. Banner?” Nurse Yvonne’s voice was concerned. “Are you all right?”
    “Ooh! Look! He’s going to stab me with his fork! I’m scared, so scared of the little geologist.” George slammed himself into the back of Charles’s chair, crushing Charles into the edge of the table. “C’mon, you coward, fight me! Stab me!”
    The dining room erupted into pandemonium. Nurse Yvonne sounded the alarm. Medical personnel rushed in. Patients cried and screamed, and fled toward the doors and their rooms.
    Charles’s pulse accelerated until he was breathless, his heart pounding.
    The blood. The blood. Misty. Elizabeth. Misty.
    A woman’s gentle voice called him. “Charlie, dear, I hate to interrupt you when you’re eating, but would you come over here?”
    At once, Charles’s heart rate calmed.
    The wonderful thing about the Honor Mountain Memory Care Facility was … Misty visited him here.
    As always, the sight of her made him breathless with awe. She was as beautiful as ever, her white-blond hair styled loosely, her blue eyes gently smiling. She stood off to the side of the dining room, beckoning him toward the wall away from the windows.
    Charles pushed back his chair and without a glance at George, or at the patients, or at the staff, he walked over to his beautiful wife. “Of course, my dear. What can I do for you?”
    She stroked his hand. “Stay here with me for a moment, and be safe.”
    *   *   *
    That was why, when the earthquake hit, and the ceiling fell in over the middle of the dining room, George Cook was knocked unconscious—and Charles didn’t get a scratch on him.

 
    CHAPTER SIX
     
    As Rainbow put a slice of blueberry pie on the table, Elizabeth Banner looked up from her notes to say, “I ate most of the fries.”
    “Hm.” Rainbow eyed the plate. “I don’t know how you manage to drag your skinny rear all the way out to the river every day.”
    “It’s not far.”
    Rainbow picked up the remains of the burger. “Two miles.”
    “One-point-six miles according to my pedometer.” Elizabeth thought that was a reasonable answer. It was, after all, the truth. But all her precision got her was a disgusted look from Rainbow.
    Conversation was