The Ex Who Wouldn't Die by Sally Berneathy Read Free Book Online Page B

those answers would be anything she wanted to hear, but she needed to know the truth. There'd been little enough of that since she married Charley Randolph.
     
    ***
     
    Amanda's first chan c e to talk to her father alone came that evening when she s ettled inside his silver Mercedes for the drive home. She perched tensely on the edge of the leather seat as they pulled out of the garage into the pleasant May evening.
     
    The neighborhood had a rich aura, cool and shady and prosperous. Mature trees lined both sides of the street, and the low sunlight touched the leaves , spinning the greens from light to dark as they fluttered in the gentle breeze . Though she couldn ' t hear birds from inside the well-insulated car, she knew the lilting songs of the robins and cardinals, the raucous summer calls of the blue jays and the ever-changing chorus of the mockingbirds . If you didn ' t look too closely behind the solid wooden doors of the houses on this street , the neighborhood was Utopian.
     
    The drive from her parents ' house in Highland Park to her place off Harry Hines Boulevard was only a few miles, but the distance was more than spatial, a journey from the upper crust to the lower, to an area where Amanda could operate her motorcycle shop, live above it and have relatively low mortgage payments.
     
    " It ' s going to be all right, " her father said, turning the corner and heading away from the quiet , tree-lined street. " They have no evidence against you that isn ' t circumstantial. "
     
    Amanda studied his profile, the strong nose, stubborn jaw and clear brown eyes. He had always been her hero , her best friend and her opponent. Her inheritance of his ind ependence and his obstinacy guaranteed t he two of them would butt heads, b ut he ' d never lied to her. At the moment, however, she suspected he was making an ef fort to divert her from asking for the truth, from forcing him to either admit to something awful or to lie to her. He wouldn't lie. She couldn't believe he'd lie.
     
    But he c ould refuse to tell her .
     
    " How long have you known about Charley ' s family? "
     
    For a couple of blocks they rode in silence.
     
    Eventually, her father did not disappoint her.
     
    " I ran a complete background check on him as soon as you said you were thinking about marrying him. "
     
    " Why didn ' t you tell me? "
     
    Another long silence. " Charley didn ' t want you to know. "
     
    Amanda ' s head snapped in her father ' s direction. " You hated Charley! Why would it matter what he wanted? "
     
    "Mandy , Charley is dead. Soon the police will find who killed him, or at least be certain you didn ' t, and everything…your marriage, the things he did…it will all be over. Charley is dead, and you need to put it behind you and get on with your life. "
     
    Amanda shook her head and laughed, angry and amused at the same time. " Stop that slippery lawyer talk! You know better than to think I ' m going to let this go until you give me a straight answer. "
     
    Emerson ' s lips lifted in a faint smile. " You are definitely your father's daughter. You'd have made a good lawyer, you know." For a moment, his eyes gaze d into the distance. H e gave a resigned sigh. " So what do you want to know about Charley ' s family? They ' re small town, hard-working but uneducated. Blue collar. Maybe he was ashamed of them. Charley always pretended to be somebody he wasn't . "
     
    "That's nuts. He'd make up a story about a drug dealer and a prostitute mother to cover the fact that his parents were blue collar? I don't think so. I think he'd have hidden his family no matter who they were. Charley was always pretending, always lying about who he was. Maybe he had to disconnect from everything and everybody real in his life so he could live the fiction he created."
     
    "That's possible," her father agreed, eyes on the road ahead. "Perhaps in order to become the persona or personas he became, he needed to block out the truth even from