Darkness Before Dawn by Ace Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

voice came back on the line.
    “Okay, thanks, I’ll see you tomorrow at work.”
    Repeating the process, Meg called over a dozen different friends and the seven she
     actually reached all gave the same response. No one knew. She looked up at the living
     room clock. It was 11:17. Still wrapped in a towel, her hair now damp not wet, she
     got up and walked around the couch toward the kitchen, nearly tripping over the morning
     paper.
    That’s it, the paper. Okay, the accident happened on Thursday night, so the story
     would be in Friday morning’s
Herald.
I didn’t read it, but Mom brought it in when she came over. Where did I put it? The
     trash, I pitched it
.
    Pulling out a large, white, plastic trashcan from the pantry, she dug through empty
     cans and bottles until she found a newspaper. Yanking the plastic wrapper off, she
     unrolled it. Reading the masthead, the words “Friday Edition” jumped out. Quickly
     she scanned the front page, and then page two, and so on and so on. Sitting in the
     middle of a week’s worth ofkitchen trash and a now dried Coke spill, surrounded by pieces of broken glass, she
     desperately searched for some report, only to find nothing.
    Come on, Steve was a pretty well-known guy. Where’s the story?
As her hunt bore no fruit, she grew angry. It just seemed the world was out to keep
     her from getting the information she needed!
    Shoving the pages to one side, she looked around the kitchen. Suddenly her eyes lit
     up. Almost startling herself with her own voice, she all but yelled, “Of course, it
     happened too late for Friday’s paper; it’s got to be in Saturday’s.”
    Standing up, she once again tightened her towel and looked into the trash can, but
     the paper wasn’t there. Wandering back into the living room, she frantically scanned
     the area hoping that the paper would jump into sight. When it didn’t, she screamed,
     “Where are you?”
    Wanting to cry, she fell in a heap on the couch and tried to remember what she’d done
     with it. There might have been no one to hear her words, but she put voice to her
     thoughts. “Okay, I got up yesterday morning, got dressed, and drove to Mother’s. I
     had to have walked by the paper, so I must have picked it up and done something with
     it . . . but what? The car, that’s it, I tossed it in the back seat of my car.”
    She was about to get up when it hit her—the information would likely be online. Firing
     up her laptop, she did a search for the
Herald’s
website. A roadblock once more greeted her. The paper was now subscription only.
     She didn’t have the patience to dig out a credit card and sign up, so she turned her
     focus back to the paper she’d tossed in the Mustang.
    Jumping up from the couch, she opened the apartment’s door, charged down the steps,
     up the front walk, out to the curb, and threw open her yellow Mustang’s passenger
     door. Not once did she notice the cold wind, the snow on her bare feet, orthe fact that she was dressed in only an oversized bath towel. Reaching over the front
     passenger bucket seat, she tossed aside a pile of old clothes and a tennis racket
     and grabbed the paper. Running back up the walk and the stairs, she raced through
     her open apartment door and went directly into the kitchen. As soon as she had spread
     the paper out on the counter top, a front-page headline leaped out at her.
    L OCAL C PA D IES I N A UTO C RASH
    Her eyes focused on the words that followed.
    Steven J. Richards, 28, was pronounced dead on arrival at Springfield Community Hospital
     due to injuries that occurred when his 2005 Buick Century collided with a 2010 Ford
     Explorer driven by a local teenager. A blood test indicated that the seventeen-year-old
     youth was legally intoxicated at the time of the accident
.
    Accident! What kind of word was that to describe what amounted to cold-blooded murder?
     Why didn’t the writer report it the way it really happened? This was no accident.
     Wiping away