Pretend You Don'T See Her by Mary Higgins Clark

Author:Mary Higgins Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

As she drove back into the city, Lacey felt a letdown setting in. As usual, she had no plans for the evening, and the thought of going back to the apartment and preparing another solitary meal was suddenly repugnant to her.

I’ll go to the gym and work out for a while, she decided. At least between that exercise and the run this morning, I may be tired enough to sleep.

When she got to the gym, Ruth Wilcox beckoned her over. “Guess what?” she said, her tone conspiratorial. “Tom Lynch was really disappointed when you didn’t show up this afternoon. He even came over and asked if you’d been here earlier. Alice, I think he likes you.”

If he does, he likes someone who doesn’t really exist, Lacey thought with a trace of bitterness. She stayed in the gym for only a half hour, then drove home. The answering machine was blinking. Tom had phoned at four-thirty. “Thought I might see you at the gym, Alice. I enjoyed Friday night. If you pick this up by seven and feel like having dinner tonight, give me a call. My number is—”

Lacey pushed the STOP button on the machine and erased the message without waiting to hear Tom’s phone number. It was easier to do that than to spend another evening lying to someone who in different circumstances she would have enjoyed dating.

She fixed herself a BLT on toast for dinner. Comfort food, she thought.

Then she remembered—this was what I was eating the night before Isabelle Waring died. Isabelle phoned, and I didn’t pick up. I was tired and didn’t want to talk to her.

Lacey remembered that in the message she had left on the answering machine, Isabelle said she had found Heather’s journal and declared that something in it made her think she might have proof that Heather’s death hadn’t been an accident.

But the next morning, when she phoned me at the office, she wouldn’t talk about it, Lacey recalled. Then she stayed in the library reading the journal when I brought Curtis Caldwell in. And a few hours later she was dead.

Mental images suddenly threatened to close her throat as she finished the last bite of the sandwich: Isabelle in the library, weeping as she read Heather’s journal. Isabelle with her last breath begging Lacey to give that journal to Heather’s father.

What is it that’s been bothering me? Lacey asked herself. It was something about the library that last afternoon, something I noticed when I spoke to Isabelle in there. What was it? She mentally revisited that afternoon, struggling to make the elusive image come into focus.

Finally she gave up. She simply couldn’t remember.

Let it go for now, Lacey told herself. Later I’ll try to put my mind in the search-and-retrieve mode. After all, the mind is a computer, isn’t it?

That night in her dreams she had vague visions of Isabelle holding a green pen and weeping as she read Heather’s journal in the last hours of her life.

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