Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(47)
“That’s great, but…I don’t think it would help me.”
“I wouldn’t have thought it would help me, either. But then I realized I never prayed so hard as I did when my kids—when their lives were hanging in the balance. And those prayers were answered.”
That might very well be true.
But how many others—including Marin’s own—haven’t been?
“I’m fine,” Marin tells her. “Trust me, I don’t need a shrink, or church. All I need is time, and everything will be just fine.”
Case closed.
I may not be able to pay my cable bill next month, Meg thinks as she settles on the couch in her basement family room, but at least I’ve been home to watch Oprah every day this week.
Not only that, but the kids aren’t even around to drive her nuts. Feeling vaguely guilty for not missing them, she reaches toward the decidedly guilt-free array of healthy snacks she prepared for the occasion. Low-fat Pringles, reduced-fat Oreos, mini rice cakes spread with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff, and a bag of Jelly Bellys, which she recently discovered have always been nonfat, same as marshmallow fluff.
“That stuff’s not good for you,” her teenage know-it-all daughter—who clearly knows very little—would probably say.
Grabbing a stack of Pringles from the can, Meg waits for the endless array of commercials to give way to Oprah. Floor wax, support pantyhose, line-reducing face lotion…
And I can’t buy any of it, even if I wanted to.
Munching moodily, she thinks about the stack of overdue bills sitting on the kitchen counter. She’s managed to pay the most important ones this month—the mortgage, the electric bill—but most of the others, like the orthodontist and her life insurance policy, will have to wait. As she told one of the girls at work last night, it’s not as if Dr. Lichtman is going to come over here and rip the braces off her youngest son’s teeth, and it’s not as if Meg’s going to drop dead tomorrow.
Sooner or later, she’ll get her regular hours back. That, or she’ll win the lottery. She plays Power Ball every chance she gets, fantasizing about all the things she’ll do if she wins even a small jackpot.
First and foremost, of course, she’ll have the bunion surgery. It’ll be covered by insurance, but she can’t afford to be laid up for all the time it’ll take to heal unless she has some other source of income. Then—
“Today, on Oprah…”
Meg sits up expectantly. It’s about time. As she reaches for a rice cake, a shadow crosses the small window high in the wall behind her. She looks up, startled, just in time to see a pair of denim-clad legs stride past.
One of the kids, she thinks absently—before remembering that the kids are out of town with their father.
Her next thought is of her trampled herb garden, and it’s enough to make her put down the rice cake and jump up off the couch. She hurriedly climbs the steps to the kitchen, licking the peanut butter and marshmallow goo off her fingers, and goes straight to the door overlooking the side yard.
Sure enough, someone is there, apparently having cut through the Cavalons’ yard and into her own. A kid, obviously, wearing a big black sweatshirt with the hood up.
“Hey!” Meg calls, determined to give him a piece of her mind.
He goes absolutely still, but doesn’t turn around.
“What are you doing?” She descends the steps to the yard, careful not to trip on the flats of herbs she bought from the nursery, or the shovel leaning against the rail.
Why is he keeping his back to her?
He must be someone she knows—maybe one of her oldest son’s friends. He’s fallen in with a couple of troublemakers lately.
“I can call the police on you, you know,” she tells him as she strides across the grass toward him. “You’re trespassing on private property!”
At last, the figure turns toward her.
The face isn’t familiar after all.
This isn’t going to go well, is Meg’s first thought when she sees the look in the stranger’s eyes, and she braces for a tense verbal confrontation.
Then she spots the cold glint of the blade as it arcs toward her, feels the burning pain as it slices into her neck, chokes on the sudden hot gush of blood in her throat.
Meg Warren’s final stunned, helpless thought, as she falls to the wet grass, is of her lapsed life insurance policy.
Lauren might not have known Marin Quinn for years as she has other friends, like Trilby, but she knows enough about human nature to realize something is seriously wrong today. The way Marin keeps chewing on her lip, toying with her hair, checking her cell phone messages…
She obviously isn’t going to bring up whatever it is that’s bothering her. Lauren has given her plenty of conversational openings as they sit in her living room sipping coffee and eating chocolate chip cookies.
Well, Lauren eats them. Marin has been nibbling the same one for the better part of an hour now, picking it up and putting it down, often without even taking a bite.
She’s saying all the right things, but her mind isn’t entirely focused on the conversation, which has meandered from kitchen renovation to kid-friendly summer movies to Lauren’s upcoming meeting with the estranged former mother-in-law she never met.
Nick’s mother had left him and his dad when he was just a kid, and he never heard from her again—nor did he want to. But after he’d gone missing last summer, Lauren was afraid his mother, wherever she was, would hear about it in the press. With her blessing, the detectives on the case managed to track her down in Hawaii, where she’s been living for years.