Life Sentences Read Online Free Page A

not a journalist. She wrote that book, the one about her, um, father? Father. I read it for book club? I mean, I did, I read it for book club.”
    â€œPretty young girls go to book clubs? I thought those were for ugly old broads such as me. Not that you’ll catch me in a room full of women, drinking wine and talking about a book. Drinking, maybe.”
    The girl’s eyes skittered around the room, trying to find a safe place to land. Clearly, she was unsure if she was obliged to contradict the inescapable truth of Gloria’s appearance or if she should pretend that she hadn’t yet noticed that Gloria was old and ugly.
    â€œIt was a mother-daughter book club,” she said at last. “I went with my mom.”
    â€œThanks for the clarification, dearie. Otherwise, I might think you went with your prepubescent daughter, conceived, in the great local tradition, when you were a mere middle schooler.”
    The girl took a few steps backward. She had that breathtaking freshness seen only in girls under twenty-five when everything—hair, eyes, lips, even fingernails—gleamed without benefit of cosmetics. The whites of this girl’s eyes were more startling to Gloria than the light-blue irises, the shell-pink ears as notable as the round, peachy cheeks. And she had the kind of boyish figure that was increasingly rare in this era of casual plastic surgery, when even the thinnest girls seemed to sprout ridiculously large breasts. Gloria remembered the tricks of her youth, not that she had ever bothered with them, the padded bras, the wads of Kleenex. They had been far more credible in their way than all these perky cantaloupes, which looked, in fact, as if they had been molded with very large melon ballers. Real breasts weren’t so round. She hoped this girl wouldn’t tamper with what nature had allotted her.
    â€œI grew up in Ruxton?” the girl said, and it was clear that she intended the well-to-do suburb to establish that she was not the kind of girl who had a baby at age twelve. Oh, you’d be surprised, dearie, Gloria wanted to say. You’d be shocked at the wealthy families who have sat in my office, trying to decide what to do when one of Daddy’s friends—or Daddy himself—has helped himself to an underage daughter. It happens. Even in Ruxton. After all, Buddy Harrington happened in a suburb not that far from Ruxton.
    â€œI’m sure you did,” Gloria said. “So Cassandra Fallows wants to write a book about Buddy Harrington? She must be one of those true-crime types who specialize in whipping books out in four to six weeks. We’ll give her a wide berth.”
    Buddy Harrington was, as of this third full week in February, being held responsible for 80 percent of the murders in Baltimore County this year. Granted, the county had only five homicides so far, as compared to the city’s thirty or so. Still, Harrington was charged with four of them—his mother, father, and twin sisters, all shot as they slept. The sixteen-year-old had called the police on a Thursday evening two weeks ago, claiming to have discovered the bodies after returning home from a chorale competition in Ocean City. He had been charged before the day was out, although he had yet to confess and was pressing Gloria to let him tell his story far and wide. She was holding him back precisely because of that eagerness, his keenness to perform. For Buddy Harrington was not the kind of boy who inspired the usual descriptions of those who snap—quiet, introverted. He was an outstanding student, a star athlete, and a gifted singer, well liked by classmates, admired by teachers. The community was stunned.
    Gloria, who had spent several hours with Buddy since his arrest, was not. She also knew that all the things that Buddy considered his assets—his good looks, his normalcy—would undercut him. Nothing terrified people more than an all-American sociopath. And