The Girl in Times Square by Paullina Simons Read Free Book Online

demons swallowing her.
    Lily believed that the portholes that allowed random tragedy to fall in were also the portholes that allowed lottery tickets to fall in. Out of control SUVs at state fairs. A sunspot in your eye, and wham, your child is dead. Plane crashes, ten-car collisions, freak lightning storms, fatal infections from a harmless day at the farm, and 1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49. All from the same place. All leading to the same place—destruction.
    And Lily Quinn prided herself all her life on being exactly the kind of girl who’d never won a single thing. Her karma had been being not just an un-winner, but the anti-winner. In fact, she could be sure that if she picked it, it would never win. She couldn’t win so much as a pack of cigarettes on a free tour of the Philip Morris tobacco factory in North Carolina. She couldn’t win a no-homework weekend when there were only ten entrants and the professor picked three names. She didn’t win the short or the long straw. She didn’t get to lose and clean the toilet, or come up to the headmaster and ask for more gruel, any more than she got to win a prize at a baby shower contest. She played a game at her sister’s shower called, “How well do you know your sister?”—and came in third!
    49—for the year her mother and grandmother came to America.
    45—for the year of the end of the war that changed the world.
    39—for its beginning.
    24—for her age. Last year Lily played 23.
    18—Because it was her favorite number.
    1—because it was the loneliest number.
    She bought herself a lottery ticket every single week for six years, playing the numbers that meant something to her not because she had hope, but because she wanted to reaffirm the order of her quiet universe. Because she truly believed that the Force that let her numbers never be pulled out of a hat at Saturday night’s drawing was the same Force that did not place the titanium rod at her two feet of life.
    Unable to draw or read or focus, Lily concentrated all her efforts on getting a tan. In a secluded part of a small semi-circle of the local beach near Wailea, Lily took off her bikini halter and sunbathed topless, getting a very thorough tan indeed. After almost three weeks her breasts looked positively Brazilian and even her nipples got dark brown.
    In the first week of June, Lily was sitting outside on the patio,home from the beach, thinking about what to do for the rest of her day—for the day was so loooong—when the phone rang. The phone never rang! Lily was so excited, she nearly knocked over a chair getting to it.
    “Hello?” she said in an eager-lover voice.
    “Lilianne Quinn?” said an unfamiliar man’s baritone on the other end.
    “Yes?” she said, much more subdued, in a voice unfamiliar to herself.
    “This is Detective O’Malley of the NYPD. I’m calling about your roommate, Amy McFadden.”
    Excitement was instantly supplanted by something else—worry. “Yes? What’s happened?” From his tone, Lily thought Amy might have been in a car accident.
    “Have you heard from her?”
    “No.” She paused. “I’m here in Hawaii.”
    “Well, I know,” said the detective. “I’m calling you there, aren’t I?”
    That was true. “What’s happened?”
    “She seems to have disappeared.”
    “Oh.” Lily immediately calmed down. “Hmm. Have you checked with her mother?”
    “Her mother is the one who reported her missing, which is why I’m calling you. According to Jan McFadden, Amy hasn’t called home in three weeks. Their repeated attempts to reach her at the apartment have failed. Do you recall the last time you saw her?”
    “I don’t know,” Lily said, deflecting. “I’d have to think about it.”
    There was silence on the other end. “Are you thinking about it now?”
    “Detective, I don’t know. I’ve been here three weeks. I guess I saw her right before I left.”
    “When was that?”
    “I…I can’t remember now.” Dates had been singed out ofher head by