What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin Read Free Book Online

crashing in, turning to dust. Cameras flashing at her and men with mean voices shouting her name, but all she’d heard was the hum of that imaginary fuse box. All she’d seen were the two long rows of switches, shutting down one by one.
    And she’d smiled.
    â€œMrs. Marshall,” he said. “Were you at your father-in-law’s last night?”
    â€œYou need to leave,” she said. “You have no right to be here. You have no right to question me in my house, without a lawyer present.”
    The detective took a long drag off his supersweet coffee, then placed the cup back onto the saucer. The clink hurt Kelly’s ears. The whole time, he never took his eyes off of hers, the green of them glittering with something . . . knowledge or hate. Or maybe it was both. That’s what all this technique was, wasn’t it? A combination of knowledge and hate, cooked up and heaped on you like teaspoons of sugar.
    â€œWe’ll be in touch, Ms. Lund,” he said.
    AFTER HE LEFT, KELLY LOCKED THE DOOR. AND AS SHE TRANSFERRED her clothes and shoes into the dryer, she thought of Sterling Marshall’s letter again—the only letter he’d ever written her, outside of the holiday cards addressed and signed by Mary, his wife. A letter sent to a prison fifteen years ago, when Kelly was thirty-two but still seventeen inside because prison locks you up in other ways, not just physically. And so, before starting to read Sterling Marshall’s words, Kelly had spent a good amount of time marveling at the creamy paper, the glossy ink. She’d run her fingertips over the gold-embossed name and felt, for a time, special. A letter from the Sterling Marshall. Written in his own hand. To her.
    She remembered how beautiful Sterling Marshall’s signature had looked, even after she’d read the letter—a letter asking her to get rid of her baby and not to tell her husband about the pregnancy, ever.
    She remembered what Sterling Marshall had written, just before signing it: Family means everything to me.
    To this day, she still had no doubt he’d meant it.

CHAPTER 4
    SHOTGUN WEDDING! “MONA LISA” KILLER TIES THE KNOT WITH MOVIE STAR’S SON
    I now pronounce you man . . . and murderer?
    In a top-secret ceremony behind the barbed wire gates of Carpentia Women’s State Correctional Facility, Shane Marshall, 25, wed Kelly Michelle Lund, 32—the dead-eyed former teen drug addict currently serving 25 years to life for the brutal slaying of Oscar-nominated director John McFadden.
    The son of movie legend Sterling Marshall, boyishly handsome Shane wore a charcoal gray suit and dark glasses as he entered the prison on May 15, his mother, Mary, at his side. “Shane’s been visiting Kelly at least once a week for years,” a prison insider tells the Enquirer. “To say they’re an odd couple would be a pretty big understatement!”
    Shane’s mom was the only family member present at the wedding, which lasted 15 minutes and was performed by the prison chaplain. “My son is in love. I can’t stand in the way of that,” Mary said ina statement. But Shane’s big sister Bellamy Marshall, 32, wasn’t so accepting. “I wasn’t invited to the wedding,” said the art world superstar, whose chilling piece Mona Lisa immortalized the coke-addled murderess at her sentencing. “I don’t agree with or understand my brother’s decision.”
    Like it or not, though, the arty beauty may be an aunt soon! The Enquirer has learned that Carpentia allows conjugal visits. And according to our prison source, sexy Shane wasted no time shacking up with his killer