FAMILY FALLACIES (The Kate Huntington mystery series #3) by Kassandra Lamb Read Free Book Online

looking
forward to Friday evening, Eddie.
    Oops! That was a
no-no. For some reason, Eddie never answered her when she tried to talk to him
about Skip. Could ghosts get jealous?
    I love you, Eddie ,
Kate reassured him.
    I love you, too ,
came the echoing reply, a bit fainter than usual.
    When Kate arrived at
the center, Pauline informed her that Audrey had called, practically in
hysterics, asking if she could get in to see Kate that day. “See if she can
come in during my four-thirty break,” Kate said. It would make her long day
incredibly intense to work straight through the afternoon and evening, but
Audrey was not the hysterical type. This could not be good.
    When the woman arrived
at four-thirty, she looked like the sole survivor of a train wreck. Her clothes
were rumpled, her hair sticking up. Her face was tear-stained. “I’m sorry,
Kate, but I just had to see you,” she said, her voice a bit shaky.
    “My God, Audrey, what
happened?” Kate exclaimed as they sat down across from each other.
    Audrey’s voice
gradually steadied as she talked. The previous afternoon, she’d had yet another
argument over the phone with her mother, when she’d refused to let Alicia spend
the weekend at her grandparents’ house. Her mother had kept demanding an
explanation.
    Audrey had finally told
her that she was having dreams, and sometimes little flashbacks during the day,
that her therapist thought might mean she had been sexually abused as a child.
Then, not sure where to go from there–she didn’t dare imply to her mother that
she thought her abuser was her father or her uncle–she’d ad-libbed. The
memories were vague and she didn’t know who it was, but she thought it might
have been one of her friends’ fathers, during a sleep-over. Until she and her
therapist could sort out the memories better, she just felt too uncomfortable
letting Alicia spend the night away from home, even at her grandparents’ house.
    This explanation had
seemed to appease her mother, but not her father. He had called an hour later,
yelling his usual litany of insults, that she was stupid, crazy, an ingrate.
Audrey had hung up on him, but the verbal abuse had set off her worst anxiety
attack yet.
    “When Ted came home
from work, and saw the state I was in, he suggested I go out for awhile. Go to
Starbucks, get a latte and read.” Kate knew this was something that often
helped Audrey get herself grounded again.
    “But when I got there,
this man... He was sitting alone, minding his own business. But I could have
sworn he wasn’t wearing any pants. Just a tee shirt. I was afraid to look at
him. I knew any minute he was going to turn toward me and...” Her voice choked
on a sob.
    “I get the picture,
Audrey. Did you report him to the staff?”
    “But that’s just the
thing, Kate. He was wearing pants. After a few minutes he got up to
throw his coffee cup away and he had on khaki slacks. I had an anxiety attack,
right there in Starbucks. It was all I could do to get home.
    “And then it happened
again. When we were getting ready for bed. Ted started to take his pants off
and I freaked out. I went out and slept on the couch, or tried to sleep. I
couldn’t be around him, couldn’t see him, couldn’t stand the thought of him
touching me.” The words were coming fast now. “Oh, my God! I can’t do this to
him. He’s been so good to me.”
    Kate went over to kneel
beside Audrey’s chair and gathered the sobbing woman into her arms. “Sh, sh,
it’s going to be okay. We’ll get you through this. Ted and I are going to help
you get through this. He’s a good man, Audrey. He’ll understand.”
    When Audrey was finally
relatively calm, they went over her journal entries from the weekend. There was
one, about the man in the flashbacks wearing a plaid shirt, that Audrey didn’t
remember writing.
    “That’s not totally
unusual,” Kate reassured her. “I’ve had clients remember an entire memory one
session, and by the next week, their