No Safe House by Linwood Barclay Read Free Book Online Page B

the woman in her phone’s contact list. Whenever Grace met someone new, Cynthia would manage to get all their particulars in case she might need them later.
    Maybe, if I’d been through what Cynthia had, this kind of thoroughness would be second nature to me, too.
    I liked to think I kept a close eye on Grace, but there was no doubt I didn’t watch her the way her mother did. I cut her some slack. If she was ten minutes past curfew, I didn’t launch into the Spanish Inquisition. I kept the waterboarding to a minimum. I wanted to be able to trust her. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I wanted to trust that she had some common sense. But no teenager is trustworthy. I wasn’t at that age, and Cynthia was the first to admit she wasn’t, either.
    So much about being a parent is holding your breath and hoping everything will be okay.
    So yeah, I gave Grace more freedom. I made deals with her. I told her I’d cut her more slack if she’d promise me that even while her mother was living elsewhere, that when we were all together as a family, she’d dial it down. Not everything had to be an argument.
    Grace said okay.
    But now she’d burned me.
    I could sit here and wait for her to show up, or I could strike out looking for her. Trouble was, I had no idea where to begin. And the odds were, the moment I left, she’d show up here. I wanted a word with her the moment she came through that door.
    I was standing in the kitchen when the phone rang. I had the receiver to my ear before the end of the first ring. But before I said a word, I saw from the caller ID that it was not Grace.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “You must have been sitting on the phone,” Cynthia said.
    “Just in the kitchen, sneaking a cookie,” I said. “What were you doing?”
    “Nothing. Just … I felt bad about the beer.”
    “The what?”
    “When you came by. I didn’t offer you a beer.”
    “I didn’t even notice.”
    “When you left, I realized what I’d done. Sat there and had one right in front of you. It was rude.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” I said.
    She hesitated. “It was deliberate.”
    “Oh.”
    “I needed that time, just for me. I thought if I offered you a beer, you’d have—I feel sick about this.”
    “It’s okay,” I said.
    “The thing is, the moment you left, I burst into tears and hated myself for not getting you one. Because I realized then I didn’t want you to go. Jesus, Terry, I’m a mess. I really am.”
    “Have you seen Naomi this week?”
    “Yeah. I look at her sometimes and think she must be so fucking tired of me. Listening to me still whining after all these years.”
    “I doubt that.”
    “It’s just, I can’t shake this post-trauma. That’s what’s making me hell to live with for Grace.” A pause. “Is she back from the movies yet?”
    “No,” I said honestly.
    Even though she wasn’t here, in this house, Cynthia often needed to know that Grace was safely home before she could get to sleep at her place.
    “When was she supposed to be back?”
    “Cyn,” I said.
    “I know, I know. All I was thinking was, since she works tomorrow, I hate her to be out too late, to go to work tired. You can get hurt in a kitchen if you’re not paying attention.”
    Grace had a summer job at the Milford Yacht Club, waiting tables in the dining room.
    “Don’t worry. She’s only a few minutes late. I texted her a couple of minutes ago. Everything’s fine.”
    Not quite a lie.
    “Okay,” Cynthia said.
    “What’d you do tonight?”
    “I had to go over and see Barney. I forgot this was the day I was supposed to pay the rent, and he likes cash, so I went to an ATM a couple of hours ago and drove over to his place to pay him.”
    “He offer you any marital advice?”
    Cynthia laughed, but not hard. “He says to me, ‘I’ve been alone my whole life, never had anyone. You don’t know how lucky you are to have somebody, so don’t throw that away.’ That’s what he said.”
    And she went