The Lost Book of Mala R. by Rose MacDowell

Author:Rose MacDowell [MacDowell, Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-52927-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Audrey had been in bed with William when Paige disappeared, and that was the problem.

In his attempt to be helpful in those first dramatic hours, after he noticed a cruiser parked at Linda and Peter’s house, assumed a health crisis, and rang the bell to offer the use of his home defibrillator—and after Linda told him everything in a tearful rush—Mark volunteered the information that his wife had left for a colleague’s birthday party in Garden Grove around seven-thirty that evening, and might have seen Paige or something that would aid the investigation.

“You told them what?” Audrey said, standing in the foyer just before midnight, her purse still over her shoulder, her chin raw from William’s stubble.

“A little girl is missing and that’s all you can say?”

“Is Jonathan all right?”

“Of course he is. He’s not the one who disappeared.”

“I have to go to Linda’s now?”

“I told the officers you would. You better hurry up before they leave.”

And so Audrey ended up on Linda’s front porch, one foot propped on the hedgehog shoe brush, lying to a policewoman. She knew she didn’t sound convincing—she stuttered when she described driving down to the main road from her house, and twice said Cerritos instead of Garden Grove—but she assumed this would be perceived as stress rather than deception. One thing she said was true: she had seen nothing unusual, no wandering child, no strange person in the neighborhood. Someone might very well have been there, Paige could have been screaming and flailing under a kidnapper’s arm, but Audrey had been too absorbed by anticipation and the thrilling scratch of lace underwear against her skin to see much past the hood of her car. She probably hadn’t been fit to drive.

She had hoped to make love with William one last time and then, with great wisdom and good humor, tell him it was time he started dating women his own age. But as soon as she’d seen him, leaning in the doorway with his shirt unbuttoned and his eyes focused so completely on her that she felt real for the first time in days, it scared her that she’d even considered it. And that weakness, that inability to do what was right, might have resulted in a child’s disappearance. If she had come back earlier, would she have seen Paige? Would Jonathan have been standing at his bedroom window, or Mark taking out the garbage, or would the simple fact that she was home have influenced the outcome? It seemed incredible that while a scarred young veteran was bringing her to orgasm and whispering Conway Twitty lyrics in her ear, a child was vanishing at the same moment. Why wasn’t there a safeguard against the concurrence of events so at odds with each other?

No one would look at her and believe that sex would be her undoing. By now, three weeks into their affair, she had expected her desire for William to be on the wane, but to her astonishment it was only increasing.

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