Silver Girl by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online Page B

trench coat were subjected to scrutiny. Meredith was patted down—roughly—by a female officer twice her size. The woman did everything but pick Meredith up, turn her upside down, and shake her. She didn’t say so, but she must have recognized Meredith and felt the predictable contempt. At the end, she shoved Meredith, just for fun.
    Meredith didn’t protest. She was too nervous to protest because she was being escorted through locked doors and down long, stark hallways, to see Freddy. Meredith had promised herself she wouldn’t break down. She would fight off sentimentality and longing. She would simply ask Freddy the questions she needed the answers to, maybe not all eighty-four—there wouldn’t be time for that—but the top two or three: Where was the rest of the money? What could they do to clear Leo’s name? How could she prove to the world she was innocent? At this point, Freddy was the only person who could help her.
    When she finally did see Freddy, she lost her legs. The guard had her firmly by the arm and kept her upright.
    Freddy!
A voice inside her head was echoing down a long tunnel.
    He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, just like the prisoners they’d seen on countless reruns of
Law & Order;
his hands were cuffed behind his back. His hair, which had been salt-and-pepper curls, was shaved down to the scalp, and nearly white. He was fifty-two; he looked seventy-five. But it was him just the same, the boy who had accosted her in the stacks of the Princeton bookstore. They had been enrolled in the same anthropology course, and Meredith had picked up the last used textbook, thinking she would save her parents some money. Freddy had begged her for it. He’d said,
I can’t afford a new textbook, so if you buy that one, I’ll have to go without, and if I go without, I’ll fail the course. You don’t want me to fail the course, do you?
And she’d said,
Who are you?
And he’d said,
I’m Freddy Delinn. Who are you?
    She’d told him her name was Meredith Martin.
    He said,
You’re very pretty, Meredith Martin, but that’s not why I’m asking you for the book. I’m asking you because I’m here on six different scholarships, my mother works at a bottling plant during the day and at Kmart as a cashier at night, and I need that used book.
    Meredith had nodded, taken aback by his candor. Growing up on the Main Line, she had never heard anyone admit to poverty before. She liked his black hair and blue eyes and his pale, smooth skin. She would have mistaken him for just another beautiful, assholish upperclassman had it not been for his humility, which pierced her. Meredith had found him instantly intriguing. And he had called her pretty! Toby had broken up with Meredith only a few months earlier, and he had so decimated her self-esteem that she’d been certain no one would ever call her “pretty” again.
    She handed Freddy the used book and took a new book, at more than double the price, for herself.
    This entire memory was encapsulated in a single moment as she looked at Freddy. Meredith thought,
I never should have given him that book. I should have said, “Tough luck,” and walked away.
    The warden released Freddy’s wrists from the cuffs so he could talk to Meredith on the phone.
    Meredith found herself unable to speak. She didn’t pick up the phone and neither did he. He had always believed that Meredith was smarter than he was—true—that she was classier, better bred, more refined. He had always treated her like a rare, one-of-a-kind treasure; he had lived in awe of her. Deep in her heart, she worried—God, how she worried—that he had started all of this as a way to impress her.
    She picked up the phone. “Fred.”
    The guard standing behind Freddy helped him pick up the phone and put it to his ear.
    “Fred, it’s Meredith.” Saying this made her feel idiotic, but she wasn’t sure he recognized her. She had pictured him crying, apologizing; she had, at the very least, pictured him