Little Mercies by Heather Gudenkauf

Author:Heather Gudenkauf [Gudenkauf, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Morning sun peeked from behind the bedroom window’s heavy blinds and, buried beneath piles of cotton sheets, blankets and a down comforter that felt like heaven against her skin, Jenny stretched her arms and legs luxuriously. She could lay here forever, she thought to herself. Back in Benton, in the places she and her father stayed, climate control was always a problem. In the winter, weak, ineffectual wafts or inconsistent blasts of hot or cold air would make the motel rooms unbearably cold or miserably hot.

This bedroom was perfect, Jenny decided. The temperature outside the confines of the blankets was cool, almost cold; the constant whir of the air conditioner had lulled her to sleep, despite nagging worries about the phone call from the police last night. For the moment she felt snug and safe beneath the weight of the fluffy, white comforter, and when she was reunited with her father and they were settled into their new home, she would ask him for a blanket just like this one. She wondered if the jail cell her father was in was like the ones she’d seen on television. Small and grim looking with bunk beds and a filthy toilet right out in the open. Her face burned with the injustice of someone having to actually pee, or worse, in front of complete strangers. She thought of her father, waking up on a narrow bunk bed, high above the ground, covered in a thin, smelly blanket. Her father did not like heights, often telling his friends that the pharmaceutical airline was the only way to fly. Jenny wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by this, but by the way they had laughed, casting shifty-eyed looks at one another, she figured it wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

She tried to imagine who his cell mate might be and hoped that he would have given her dad the lower bunk. Surely it wouldn’t be one of the men who had attacked him at the bus station. But they did that all the time on the cop show she and her father watched on the Friday nights they stayed at home. The police were forever putting suspects into cells with hulking men with dead eyes and tattoos of skulls, scorpions and spiderwebs crawling up their arms, in hopes of getting the guy to confess. But everyone liked her father. You just couldn’t help it. Even the men who had jumped him would like her dad if they took two minutes to talk to him. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity, also a common theme on the police shows they watched. A big mistake, Jenny realized, and exhaled in relief.

From the edges of the drawn window shades, Jenny could see that the sun had risen, but she was reluctant to leave the cozy nest of a bed, despite the rumbling of her stomach. She thought of the grandmother she almost met, could almost picture her in her mind. She snaked a hand from

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