I Heard That Song Before by Mary Higgins Clark Read Free Book Online Page B

on the terrace. I’d been playing tennis all afternoon and was tired. I parked my car in the garage and went into the house through the side door, straight upstairs to my room and to bed. I fell asleep instantly.”
    See no evil, hear no evil, Barbara thought. Interestingly enough, he used the same story the night his wife drowned in the pool.
    She glanced at her watch. It was time to go. She had been sitting in on a homicide trial, just observing. Closing arguments were about to begin. In this case, the identity of the killer was not in question; rather it was a matter of whether the jury would find the defendant guilty of murder or of manslaughter. A domestic quarrel had turned violent, and now the father of three young children would probably spend at least the next twenty-five to thirty years in prison for killing their mother.
    Let him! Because of him, these kids have nothing, Barbara thought as she stood up to head back to the courtroom. He should have taken the twenty-year plea we offered him. Nearly six feet tall, and always fighting a weight problem, she knew her nickname around the courthouse was “the linebacker.” She reached for a final sip of coffee from the cup on her desk.
    As she did, the newspaper picture of Peter Carrington and his new wife again came into her line of vision. “You’ve had twenty-two years of freedom since Susan Althorp disappeared, Mr. Carrington,” she said aloud. “If I ever get a chance to get my hands on you, I can promise you one thing: There won’t be any plea to manslaughter. I’ll try you for murder and I’ll get a conviction.”

10
    T he two weeks we spent on our honeymoon were idyllic. We had married so quickly that we were finding out new things about each other every day, little things, like me always wanting a midmorning cup of coffee, or the fact that he loves truffles and I hate them. I hadn’t realized how basically lonely I had been until Peter was there with me all the time. Sometimes I would wake up at night and listen to his even breathing, and think how incredible it was that I was now his wife.
    I had fallen so intensely in love with him, and Peter seemed to feel exactly the same way about me. When we’d started to see each other daily, he had asked, “Are you sure you can be interested in a man who is a ‘person of interest’ in two deaths?”
    My answer was that long before I knew him, I absolutely believed that he was a victim of circumstances, and I knew how horrible that must have been, and, of course, continued to be for him.
    “It is,” he said, “but let’s not talk about it. Kay, you give me so much joy that I can really believe there is a future, a time when the answer to Susan’s disappearance will be solved and people will know with certainty that I had nothing to do with it.” And so, during our courtship, we never talked about either Susan Althorp or Peter’s first wife, Grace. He did talk lovingly about his mother—it was obvious they had been very close. “My father was constantly traveling on business. My mother had always accompanied him. But after I was born she stayed home with me,” he reminisced.
    I wondered if it was after he lost her that the look of pain had settled into his eyes.
    On our honeymoon I was somewhat surprised that there were no calls to or from his office. Later I learned the reason.
    The paparazzi hung around the gates of the villa he had rented, and, except for one brief walk on the public beach, we stayed on the grounds. I called to check on Maggie every day, and she grudgingly admitted that the stories about Peter had disappeared from the tabloid magazines. I began to hope that Nicholas Greco had run into a blank wall in his investigation of the Susan Althorp disappearance; a blank wall at least as far as Peter was concerned.
    I found out soon enough that I was living on false hope.
    Home: It seemed impossible to me that I would ever call the Carrington mansion home. As we were driven through the