Nowhere To Run by Carolyn Davidson Read Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t the time for hand holding, they were in the middle of a murder case.
    Hopping back into the Nissan Susan slapped her police light on the roof of the vehicle and headed back to the Wiarton OPP station at top speed, cruise control forgotten.
    *
    The Owen Sound College campus was well suited to the season at hand; amber leaves offsetting the grey brick buildings and the young adults’ red cheeked faces. Too early in the semester to be worn down by the constant grind of essays and exams, as far as Constable Emily Beckstead remembered. You’re not old enough for nostalgia, she chided herself. Three years on the job; still new enough to the work force to be excited by the deposit of her paycheck every other week. To still occasionally feel like a teenager playing dress up when she took her laundered police uniform off its hanger.
    Focus girl, she told herself firmly. Time enough for fantasies of student life on the weekend, not that she was getting one these days, or would expect to until there was progress in the case. Emily directed her attention back to the girl in front of her, who was shaking her head side to side in thoughtful emphasis.
    “Not really,” Stephanie further expressed her bafflement with a shrug of her shoulders. “She was the same as usual. You know, she was excited about getting married.” Emily studied the girl’s face, her features freckled and curving with plumpness left over from adolescence’s recent departure. “She even dropped out of our first year of college to focus on planning the wedding, I mean she was supposed to be doing the nursing program with me.”
    They were standing in front of the College’s biology building, to which Stephanie kept sending longing glances over her shoulder. It always amazed Emily how much people begrudged time spent speaking to the police. Or how nervous it made them, something she sometimes thought depended more on the number of police shows they watched on television than to their level of involvement or guilt regarding the crime at hand.
    “Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Sarah? Anyone who would have a grudge against her?”
    “Oh no, Sarah wasn’t the type to get in fights with anyone. She kept pretty much to herself.”
    “Sounds like her future was planned out,” Emily considered aloud. “Marrying her high school boyfriend, probably a big home with kids soon to follow.”
    “Not Sarah,” Stephanie shook her red ringlets with emphasis. “She didn’t want kids.”
    “Really?” Emily enquired curiously. “Seems like the usual next step.”
    “No way. Sarah always said there’s no way she’d have kids. She said the idea of something growing inside her creeped her out.”
    “How did Tommy feel about that?” Emily wondered out loud.
    “I’m not sure that she told him,” Stephanie shook her head. Her frequent hair shaking was beginning to get on Emily’s nerves. “Sarah was pretty secretive, you know.”
    “What other secrets did she have?” Emily asked. She stepped closer and put her hand on Stephanie’s arm when she saw the girl bite her lip in hesitation. “Remember Stephanie, anything you tell us could be helpful in finding the person who did this to Sarah.”
    “She never actually said it in so many words.” the girl rubbed the toe of her sneaker in the dirt in front her. “But I think she had been seeing someone else.”
    “You mean she was having an affair?” Emily prodded.
    “Not having, but I think there was definitely someone in the past.”
    “When was this, Stephanie?” Emily tried to keep her voice casual.
    “Up until sometime last summer I think. It went on for a couple years. Sometimes she’d ask me if I’d vouch for her, say that she slept over at my folk’s place, or that we went to a movie together. But then she must have broken it off – it was like she was relieved or something, and all of a sudden everything was about planning the wedding with Tommy.”
    “You have no idea who