Hush by Kate White Read Free Book Online Page B

she’d wiped it clean. It wasn’t hard to imagine the scenario the cops would form in their minds. A recently dumped, possibly drunk, possibly unstable divorcée sleeps with a hot doctor. She asks when she’ll see him again, he makes it clear he isn’t interested. In a drunken rage, she takes a butcher knife to him while he sleeps. Even if she weren’t arrested immediately, she would be a “person of interest,” like in those cop shows.
    Jack would have a field day with that. He’d convince a judge to give him custody until her situation was resolved. And that’s what Hotchkiss had warned her about. He’d said that it was almost impossible to regain custody once it had been lost temporarily. So even if her name was cleared, she could end up without the kids.
    That meant she couldn’t tell the police. She flashed back to Keaton’s loft, making certain in her mind that she’d grabbed everything of hers. There was still evidence of her there, of course. Her bodily fluids in the bed perhaps, her fingerprints on the cognac glass. But from what little she knew, she was pretty sure that the police couldn’t ask for her DNA or fingerprints unless they had legitimate reason to suspect her. And what reason could there be? She’d never spoken to Keaton at dinner and she’d left alone.
    She wondered whether she should call someone—Molly, for instance—and ask for guidance. But wouldn’t that put the person in some kind of legal jeopardy?
    What she did have to do, she knew, was to go to the clinic today—as horrible as that would be. She would have to act normal and be cooperative when the police arrived—as they surely would.
    She stayed in the diner for another half hour. At seven-thirty she left and just walked, back and forth along the side streets, slowly making her way home to West End Avenue and Eighty-fourth—keeping her eyes down the entire time in case someone she knew was nearby.
    Half a block away from her building, she stopped and positioned herself by a parked truck, watching the front. A light drizzle had begun, which was lucky for her. She could see that Ray, the morning doorman, was busy trying to flag down a cab for someone. Having no luck, he moved farther up the street to the corner. The person waiting stood under the building’s awning keeping an impatient eye on the corner. Fortunately Lake didn’t recognize him and she saw her chance. She bolted to the main door and slipped inside.
    Rather than chance the elevator, she took the stairs, two steps at time. When she finally slammed her apartment door behind her, she let out the strangled sob that had been lodged in her throat for hours.
    In the kitchen she poured a glass of water and gulped it down, and then, as she sat at the table, she let the tears come. A man who had made love to her had been murdered. And though she’d escaped death, she wasn’t safe. Everything in her life was in jeopardy now.
    She showered, scrubbing her body red with a loofah, and then dressed in a white shirt and dark-blue pencil skirt for work. Staring at her reflection, she wondered ruefully if things would have gone differently last night if she’d worn something other than the sundress. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt so sexy for the first time in ages, so ready to be seduced. As she remembered the sundress still in her purse, her stomach tightened. She would take it—and the trench coat, too—to the dry cleaner’s on the way to work, just in case.
    Lake arrived at the clinic shortly before ten. A few women sat in the waiting room, leafing listlessly through magazines. As she headed down the corridors past the nurses’ station, it was clear from the easy manner of the staff that no one had heard anything yet. For the first time she recalled what Keaton had said to her inthe Balthazar lounge—that he might not be joining the clinic after all. What had that been about?
    After opening her laptop in the small conference room, Lake went to the kitchenette and