No Place Like Home by Mary Higgins Clark Read Free Book Online

that gun. It’s not the kind with a hair trigger that just keeps going off.”
    I struggled free from his embrace. With his preconceived notion, how could I possibly tell Alex the truth now? “Are all those people gone?” I asked, glad to realize that my voice sounded somewhat normal.
    â€œYou mean the media?”
    â€œThe media, the ambulance, the cop, the neighbor, the real estate agent.” I realized that I was gaining strength from my anger. Alex had been willing to accept Marcella Williams’s version of what had happened.
    â€œEveryone’s gone except the movers.”
    â€œThen I’d better pull myself together somehow and tell them where I want the furniture placed.”
    â€œCeil, tell me what’s wrong.”
    I will tell you, I thought, but only after I can somehow prove to you, and to the world, that Ted Cartwright lied about what happened that night, and that when I held that gun I was trying to defend my mother, not kill her.
    I am going to tell Alex—and the whole world—who I am, but I’m going to do it when I am able to learn everything I can about the full story of that night, and why Mother was so afraid of Ted. She did not let him in that night willingly. I know that. So much of the period after Mother died is a blur. I couldn’t defend myself. There must be a trial transcript, an autopsy report. Things I have to find and read.
    â€œCeil, what is wrong?”
    I put my arms around him. “Nothing and everything, Alex,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean that things can’t change.”
    He stepped back and put his hands on my shoulders. “Ceil, there’s something not working between us. I know that. Frankly, living in theapartment that was yours and Larry’s made me feel like a visitor. That’s why when I saw this house, and thought it was the perfect place for us, I couldn’t resist. I know I shouldn’t have bought it without you. I should have let Georgette Grove tell me the background of the place instead of cutting her off, although, in my own defense, from what I know now, she would have glossed over the facts even if I had listened to her.”
    There were tears in Alex’s eyes. This time it was I who brushed them dry. “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “I promise I’m going to make it be all right.”

8

    J effrey MacKingsley, Prosecutor of Morris County, had a particular interest in seeing that the mischief that had once again flared up at the Barton home be squelched once and for all. He had been fourteen and in his first year in high school when the tragedy happened twenty-four years ago. At that time, he lived less than a mile away from the Barton home, and when the news spread through town about the shooting, he’d rushed over and been standing there when the cops carried out the stretcher with the body of Audrey Barton.
    Even then he’d been avidly interested in crime and criminal law, so as a kid he’d read everything he could about the case.
    Over the years, he had remained intrigued with the question of whether ten-year-old Liza Barton had accidentally killed her mother and shot her stepfather in defense of her mother, or was one of those kids who are born without a conscience. And they exist, Jeff thought with a sigh. They sure do exist.
    Sandy-haired, with dark brown eyes, a lean athletic body, six feet tall, and quick to smile, Jeff was the kind of person law-abiding people instinctively liked and trusted. He’d been Prosecutor of Morris County for four years now. As a young assistant prosecutor, he’d understood that if he’d been defending instead of prosecuting a case, he often could have found a loophole that would allow a felon, even a dangerous felon, to walk. That was why, when he’d been offered potentially lucrative positions in defense attorney firms, he elected instead to stay in the prosecutor’s office, where