I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel by Laura Lippman Read Free Book Online

in her day, pointing out the former houses of various boyfriends, providing little biographies of each one. The sports played, hair color, the cars driven. Eliza knew the instructor did this only to girls she perceived to be popular, so she accepted this strange patter as a compliment. But it was irritating, too, a form of bragging, an unseemly competitive streak in a woman who should be past such things. Once, when the driving teacher directed Eliza down a section of Route 40, narrating her romantic adventures all the way, Eliza had wanted to say: “You see that Roy Rogers? That’s where I was headed the day I met the first man who would ever have sex with me. He didn’t play anysports, but he had dark hair and green eyes and drove a red pickup truck. And when he broke up with a girl, he usually broke her neck. Except for me. I was the only one he didn’t kill. Why do you think that was?”
    â€œMommy?” Albie said from the backseat. “You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.”
    â€œNo, honey, I’m—” Oh God, she was. She pulled the steering wheel more sharply than necessary, horrified by what she had done, only to glimpse a flash of something white zipping behind the car.
    â€œWhat was that?” Albie asked.
    â€œA deer,” Iso said, utterly bored by their brush with death.
    â€œBut it was white.”
    â€œThat was the tail.”
    A deer. Eliza was relieved that her children had seen it, too. Because, like Albie, she wasn’t sure what had dodged their car. For a moment, she thought it might be a girl, blond hair streaming. A girl, running for her life.

6
    1985
    â€œWANNABE,” HER SISTER SAID.
    â€œI’m not,” Elizabeth said, but her voice scaled up because she didn’t know what Vonnie meant, and Vonnie pounced on that little wriggle of doubt, the way their family cat, Barnacle, impaled garden snakes.
    â€œIt’s a term for girls like you, who think they’re Madonna.”
    â€œI don’t think I’m Madonna.”
    But Elizabeth secretly hoped she looked like her, a little, as much as she could within the restrictions her parents had laid down. It was rare for her parents to make hard-and-fast rules. They gave Vonnie a lot of leeway—no curfew, although she had to call if she was going to stay out past midnight, and they trusted her never to get in a car with someone who had been drinking. But this summer, Elizabeth had suddenly discovered that there were all sorts of things she was forbidden to do. Dye her hair, even with a nonpermanent tint. Spend her days at the mall or the Roy Rogers on Route 40. (“Watch all the television you want, take long walks, go to the community pool, but no just hanging, ” her mother had clarified.) And although she wasn’t actually prohibited from wearing the fingerless lace gloves she had purchased when a friend’s mother took them to the mall, her mother sighed at the mere sight of them.
    Elizabeth put those on as soon as Vonnie left for her job at a day camp for underprivileged kids, checking herself in the mirror. She had a piece of stretchy lace, filched from her mother’s sewing basket, tied in her reddish curls, and a pink T-shirt that proclaimed WILD GIRL , which even she recognized was laughably untrue. Although it was a typical August day, hot and humid, she had layered a bouffant black skirt over a pair of leggings that stopped at her knees, and she wore black ankle boots with faux zebra inserts worked into the leather. She thought she looked wonderful. Vonnie was jealous.
    Vonnie simply didn’t like Elizabeth, she was sure of it. Her mother said this wasn’t true, that sisters were never close at this age, but it was an essential stage through which they had to pass. Her mother sounded hopeful when she laid this out, as if saying it might make it true. Elizabeth was fifteen years old now to Vonnie’s soon-to-be eighteen and all her