The Benedict Bastard (A Benedict Hall Novel) by Cate Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

think of you now? You’re fast, that’s what you are. You’re fast, and everyone knows it!”
    Willy forestalled the rest of their argument by calling from behind the bar, “Closing time, ladies and gents! Drink up!”
    Bronwyn spun on her toes, and marched past the handful of remaining customers to the door. Johnnie shouted after her, “Hey, princess, gotcher carriage out there?”
    She heard titters of laughter, and though her neck burned, she lifted her head higher and walked with a determined step. When she reached the doorway she paused. The lights from the street above shone down on her head. Deliberately, she drew a fresh Lucky Strike from her bag and fitted it into her cigarette holder. A man near the door jumped up, grinning, and struck a match to light the cigarette.
    Bronwyn drew on it, and blew a cloud of smoke back into the room before she turned, the cigarette holder poised at a jaunty angle, and went out into the night. She maintained her attitude as she climbed the stairs, and walked up Water Street with smoke trailing behind her until she left the glow of the streetlights and reached total darkness. There she pulled the cigarette out of the holder and threw it into the gutter.
    Johnnie wasn’t the first to think because Bronwyn Morgan drank Fallen Angels, and because in the eyes of the town she was one, she would open her knees for any man. As if one lapse had determined her entire life.
    It had, though. At this inescapable thought, all the elation of alcohol and dancing drained away from her in an instant. One lapse had determined her life and stolen her future. It had left her with nothing but ruins.
    She shouldn’t be here in the lower town at all, she knew, and especially not at night. The businesses were shuttered, but the alleys were alive with loiterers. There were men too drunk to make it home, and sailors loath to return to their uncomfortable bunks. There were streetwalkers calling out to the men who could still stand and might have money in their pockets. Bronwyn gripped her handbag and hurried her pace, pursued by an occasional catcall. Every stone and curb bit her soles through her soft shoes as she half ran until she reached Monroe. There, panting, she began the long hike up the hill.
    The moist air from the Sound filled her lungs, and cooled her burning cheeks as she trudged along the steep street toward home. There were no footsteps behind her. Johnnie must have given up. She felt now as if she hadn’t drunk a thing. All the feelings she had tried to submerge welled up again in a tide that nothing could stem. In the darkness, spring flowers glowed faintly against the dark shrubbery, peonies and rhododendrons and azaleas, their beauty mocking her misery.
    It was her own fault for bringing out the clipping once again. She should have burned it the moment it came into the house.
     
    Daddy had carried the copy of the Times home in his Gladstone bag after a business trip to Seattle. When he unpacked the bag to bring out the perfume and taffy he had brought home for his wife and daughter, he took out the paper and laid it on the Westinghouse radio in its place of honor on the sideboard in the breakfast room. Absently, knowing her mother didn’t like anything on top of her brand-new wireless set, Bronwyn picked up the newspaper.
    She hadn’t meant to read it. Since that day when she read about the fire, and the death of the youngest Benedict son, she hadn’t once touched the Times . She read the Leader, and the fashion magazines, and she read library books. The Times she avoided as if the newspaper itself had been responsible for the tragedy that had left her bereft, grieving her lost love.
    But on this day, before she realized what it was, it was in her hand. It was already, for some reason, folded to the society page. She couldn’t help seeing the headline.
    The type had been set in the florid font used for the society pages, with lavish curlicues and sweeping capitals. It practically