Blake Pierce: Mystery Bundle by Blake Pierce

Author:Blake Pierce [Pierce, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2016-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

*

Riley sat crying alone at the picnic table after Bill left.

I thought I was okay, she thought.

She’d really wanted to be okay, for Bill. And she’d thought she could actually carry it off. Sitting in the kitchen talking about trivialities had been all right. Then they had gone outside and when she had seen the file, she’d thought she’d be okay, too. Better than okay, really. She was getting caught up in it. Her old lust for the job was rekindled, she wanted to get back in the field. She was compartmentalizing, of course, thinking of those nearly identical murders as a puzzle to solve, almost in the abstract, an intellectual game. That too was fine. Her therapist had told her she would have to do that if she ever hoped to go back to work.

But then for some reason, the intellectual puzzle became what it really and truly was—a monstrous human tragedy in which two innocent women had died in the throes of immeasurable pain and terror. And she’d suddenly wondered: Was it as bad for them as it was for me?

Her body was now flooded with panic and fear. And embarrassment, shame. Bill was her partner and her best friend. She owed him so much. He’d stood by her during the last weeks when nobody else would. She couldn’t have survived her time in the hospital without him. The last thing she wanted was for him to see her reduced to a state of helplessness.

She heard April yell from the back screen door.

“Mom, we gotta eat now or I’ll be late.”

She felt an urge to yell back, “Fix your own breakfast!”

But she didn’t. She was long since exhausted from her battles with April. She’d given up fighting.

She got up from the table and walked back to the kitchen. She pulled a paper towel off the roll and used it to wipe her tears and blow her nose, then braced herself to cook. She tried to recall her therapist’s words: Even routine tasks will take a lot of conscious effort, at least for a while. She had to settle for doing things one baby step at a time.

First came taking things out of the refrigerator—the carton of eggs, the package of bacon, the butter dish, the jar of jam, because April liked jam even if she didn’t. And so it went until she laid six strips of bacon in a pan on the stovetop, and she turned on the gas range under the pan.

She staggered backward at the sight of the yellow-blue flame. She shut her eyes, and it all came flooding back to her.

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