Runner by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

children other than me. I was
his
child. She was right, in a way. All the money he got by selling his things he had to give to the company. It did him no good. All the things he or she had bought on credit that he returned to stores just went to lower the amount he still owed the credit card companies. That did nothing for him, either."
    "Did she pay for his defense lawyer?"
    "No. What she did was hire a lawyer to separate her assets from his, and she did that right away, so it would be a done deal before he was charged. That way, his creditors could come after her all they wanted, but get zero. This, you see, is a neat trick, because she'd never had a job. Her assets were all money he had earned, and probably even some of the money he stole. From her, Dad couldn't even get bail money."
    "I'm sorry."
    "The reason she could even hold on to the money was that he went along with all of it. He never contested anything. He signed every piece of paper her lawyer sent him, including things that were outright lies—that she had brought money with her when they were
married. Actually, when she moved into our house, I remember she had one small suitcase, and what was in it was an outfit to wear to go on her first shopping trip."
    "He probably thought if she had some money she'd take care of you and your brother and sister while he was away."
    "I suppose. What actually happened was that the minute we got home from seeing him off to Lompoc, Delia sat me down at the kitchen table and had a long talk with me. Or, at least she wanted it to be long. Have you ever noticed that the worst people in the world always want you to feel sorry for them?"
    "Yes," said Jane, "I have."
    "Well, that was Delia. While she was working up to throwing me out of the house, she was telling me how much she'd been suffering with my dad, and how hard it was on her. She even wanted me to feel sorry for her for the pain it gave her to refuse to give him the money to save himself. It had ruined her forever, she said. Her health was shot, and she was too old now to get a good enough job to support us all. She was crying, so I could barely understand her half the time. But what she was expecting was that I would throw my arms around her and tell her I was sorry for living, and would make it up to her by leaving."
    "You didn't?"
    "No, so she gave me a month to get out. And that was why I ended up getting a full-time job and an apartment and lying to say I was eighteen when I was sixteen."
    "Didn't you need papers to get the job?"
    "I used Delia's computer at home. An eight with a little white on the upper right side turns into a six. I did that to my birth certificate and made a copy of it on the printer. A Social Security card doesn't carry a birth date, but I made a copy of that, too. In California a
sixteen-year-old's driver's license has a birth date and a red stripe and a blue stripe saying when you'll turn eighteen and when you'll turn twenty-one. I scanned mine and Photoshopped it to change the years to make me eighteen. The day I started work I brought in the copies. There was no secretary—that was the job I was taking—so I put the copies in the file I made for myself. If my boss ever noticed anything odd, he must have realized I had given him proof that he wasn't the one at fault."
    "Pretty effective. You'll do well to get some sleep while you can. We'll have to make a stop in a couple of hours, and I'll wake you up then."
    "Okay." Christine's voice sounded small and distant now, and she fell asleep within a few minutes.
    As Jane drove on along the rural road, she thought about what she had heard. What Christine had said about Sharon was true. The voice on the recorded telephone message had been Sharon's. And Christine seemed to be telling the truth about the way she'd changed dates on papers. She might have been exaggerating the story about her childhood, but probably not much if she had been on her own young enough to have to obliterate dates.