Lie Down with the Devil by Linda Barnes Read Free Book Online

underwear made my forehead feel too tight and my eyes burn.
    I turned to the third carton. Heavy corrugated cardboard like the rest, it looked new, purchased, not a grocery store throwaway. I turned it on its axis, searching for a logo that might identify a moving company, thinking maybe the moving company would give me the name of the storage facility, thinking I could rescue Sam’s cashmere sweaters and silk ties.
    The sides of the container were unmarked. Maybe the bottom would give a clue. I’d check it later, when I had time to unpack the boxes.
    Label the third carton miscellaneous. Ropes of lacy ribbon, crinkled wrapping paper, two copper-colored bangle bracelets, a photo of Sam, thinner and younger, posing with his feet up on his old desk at the Green and White Cab Company. No gray in his hair, no lines at the corners of his eyes.
    Was all that eye shadow mine? I buried the thought, provoked more by Jonno’s observation about panties than by my own insecurity. What was a little infidelity after all, compared to murder, the murder of a woman, a personal, face-to-face murder?
    When my on-again, off-again lover, my fiancé, a man I’d come to know when he was the boss and I was young and almost a virgin, first told me he couldn’t return to the United States, I’d flat-out assumed it had to do with gaming or racketeering or conspiracy because the Gianelli name is so entwined with the history of the Boston mob that no one bothers to separate the two. I’d further assumed it had to do with Sam’s current quest to move mob assets into legitimate businesses, a quest made tougher by the current anti-terrorism laws. I’d been stunned to learn that Sam had been named in a murder indictment, but still I’dassumed it had to do with the family business, with a long-ago murder, some rival crook found stuffed in a submerged trunk, a death two or three times removed from the man I slept with, the man I’d agreed to marry.
    Something happened in Las Vegas.
    I bit my lip. Yanked my hair and wondered how Paolina’s shrink would interpret the impulse. A woman … Someone Sam had slept with during one of the many gaps in our togetherness? I’d never expected him to practice abstinence while we were apart. I certainly hadn’t been any plaster saint. And whenever we renewed the relationship it was without any awkward confessions; neither of us felt the need to discuss extracurricular flings.
    Dammit, where was it? The miscellany box had summer clothes wedged at the bottom, a pair of sandals, a single flattened house slipper, a pamphlet issued by a consumer group on new methods of identity theft. Aha! Two purses, small date-night purses rather than serious handbags for carrying daily essentials like flashlights and lock-picks. I opened the first, found tickets to a Huntington Theater production of
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
, tissues, lipstick. The second purse jingled promisingly and opened to reveal not money, but the object of my quest: Sam’s spare car key. The key to an indigo Jaguar XK.
    Driving in Boston is basically a contact sport, and because it’s a contact sport and because I have a native Detroiter’s love of glossy high-powered automobiles, I made the decision long ago to drive a “sensible” car in this city. When my serviceable Toyota got its first scratch, I left it as a talisman, hoping it would ward off the dings, dents, and bumps to follow. If you’re going to drive in the Commonwealth, yourcar’s going to get salt on it every winter and suffer from potholes and acid rain and crazy drivers. It’s going to spend time in the shop, getting retouched and repainted. I’d always shaken my head at Sam’s expensive vehicles, but I’d driven them eagerly whenever he offered, enjoying the speed, the handling, the quick acceleration, racing cheerfully along Route 2 or speeding through the Big Dig tunnels, foot hard on the gas, eyes peeled for state troopers.
    If Jonno hadn’t changed the locks at Charles