Some Choose Darkness by Charlie Donlea

Author:Charlie Donlea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2019-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHICAGO

August 1979

IT WAS THURSDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER THOMAS HAD ARRIVED home unexpectedly and surprised her in the garage. Twenty-two hours since she saw Clarissa Manning’s face staring back at her from the driver’s license she had found hidden in the shelves of her garage. Less than one full day since she had identified the mysterious necklace she had found weeks ago as belonging to Samantha Rodgers. Were there other pieces of jewelry there, too, belonging to the other women whose biographies she had compiled? Angela had spent most of Wednesday night pretending to sleep while her mind imagined the women’s possessions hiding on the garage shelves.

Like a slowly building pressure cooker, her paranoia grew each hour. She was convinced that Thomas knew about her discoveries. She had put the containers back on the garage shelf so haphazardly that he had to suspect she had been snooping through them. Thomas had canceled his trip to Indiana for today, and hadn’t gone to work. His concern about Angela seeing the doctor had been replaced now by a different preoccupation—the garage. She watched him all morning through the kitchen window, pulling at her lashes and pinching her eyebrows. Thomas would appear every so often in the frame of the utility door when he walked from the back of the garage out to his truck in the alley, arms filled with boxes and cartons.

She ran through the moment when the garage door had started opening the morning before. Somehow managing to get things back on the shelf, Angela had rushed into the kitchen and thought briefly of locking herself in the bathroom, to claim illness. Surely, she had been sick enough over the past couple of weeks for it to be a believable ruse. But she chose the basement and the laundry room instead. With the washer and dryer running she could pretend not to hear him come home, and then could feign being startled when he finally found her. It had provided her with an extra few minutes to hide Clarissa Manning’s driver’s license, which she had slipped down the front of her pants. Samantha Rodgers’s necklace had gone into the washing machine, along with the clothes that had been on the floor. Her skin had bubbled with itch and burn when she left Thomas alone in the laundry room. He had stayed there for a minute or two after Angela retreated upstairs, and she had worried that he would reach into the foaming water and somehow retrieve the necklace.

Now, as she sat in the kitchen on Thursday morning, her mind frantically scrolled through her options. She needed to find a way out of the house and away from her husband. She contemplated her options as she sat in the kitchen and watched Thomas empty the garage. She stopped herself from her initial instinct to run—to run through the front door and never stop. But where would she go? To Catherine’s? Certainly not. To the police? Possibly, she thought. But then she imagined the disparaging look in their eyes when Angela revealed her fantastic story.

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