The Mirror and the Mask by Ellen Hart

Author:Ellen Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312375270
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

With a frigid midnight wind wheezing through the porch screens, Jane opened the kitchen door and let Mouse, her brown Lab, back into the house. He trotted behind her to the living room, where she’d built a fire. As the wood snapped and blazed in the hearth, she resumed her seat on the rocking chair and picked up her second brandy of the evening. Mouse curled up on the rug at her feet.

“You haven’t met Annie,” she said, confiding, as she often did, in her dog. “The whole situation has me mystified.” She took a sip, mulling over what she’d learned from her Internet search. “On the one hand, Annie seems so decent, so likable. But she’s secretive. And, as much as I hate to say it, she hasn’t been telling me the truth.”

Mouse stretched out on his side, gave a deep sigh.

“You still listening?” asked Jane.

His tail thumped the rug a couple of times.

“Good. Now, here’s the real story. Annie’s birthday is October ninth. She turned eighteen at the beginning of her senior year in high school. Two weeks later, she applied for a driver’s license in Boulder, Colorado. That means she never graduated, even though she said she didn’t leave home until she had. She did earn a degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, so she must have gotten a GED somewhere along the line. Now, here’s the really troubling part.

“Annie was picked up for prostitution three months after she arrived in Boulder. It’s a class 3 misdemeanor in Colorado. Since it was a first offense, she got off with a hundred-dollar fine. But she was picked up again eight months later for the same thing. That time, she was fined five hundred dollars. And then, a year later, she was arrested a third time. Again, for prostitution. She paid another fine but also had to serve a month in jail. After that, her record is clean.”

Jane looked down at Mouse and saw that his eyes were closed. “That’s okay, boy. You don’t know her.”

Jane had learned something else in the last couple of days. Background searches were frustratingly silent about everything you really wanted to know. Had Jack molested Annie as a teenager? Was that part of the reason she’d fallen into prostitution? Was she still a prostitute? She did work at a resort in Steamboat Springs, but it was part-time. Jane doubted she earned much money.

“How much pressure does it take before a young mind fractures?” she asked Mouse, watching his sleeping eyes flutter. “Who is Annie Archer?”

Nolan would tell her to back off, leave it alone. He might be right. Humans were never simple. Or logical. And there was never just one. Of anyone.

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