Whispers and Lies by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online

house and cottage burned to the ground?
    Maybe I should have been more careful, more circumspect, less trusting.
    But I wasn’t.
    Besides, what is it they say about letting sleeping dogs lie?
    Anyway, I left Alison sleeping in my bed, like Goldilocks, I remember thinking, chuckling as I tiptoed down the stairs in my clunky white nurse’s shoes, opening and closing the front door as silently as possible. My car, a five-year-old, black Nissan, was parked in the driveway beside the house. I cast a desultory glance down the empty street, hearing the faint hum of traffic several blocks away. The city was waking up, I thought, wishing I could trade my polyester white uniform for my white cotton nightgown and crawl back into bed. Luckily, I wasn’t as tired as I’d feared I might be. In fact, I was feeling surprisingly well.
    I backed the car onto the street, opening the windows to let in the cool morning air. November is a lovely time of year in South Florida. The temperature usually stays on thecomfortable side of eighty; the oppressive humidity of the summer months is pretty much gone; the threat of extreme weather is over. Instead, the sky provides a continually shifting combination of sun and clouds, along with the occasional burst of welcome rain. And we get more than our fair share of absolutely flawless afternoons, days when the sun sits high in a borderless panorama of shiny Kodacolor blue. Today looked as if it might be that kind of day. Maybe when I got home, I’d see if Alison was feeling well enough to go for a walk on the beach. There’s nothing like the ocean to heal the spirit and calm the troubled soul. Maybe it could work its magic on a migraine headache, I thought, glancing up at my bedroom window.
    For a minute, I thought I saw the curtains move, and I hit the brake, inched my face closer to the glass of the car’s front window. But on closer inspection, it appeared I’d been mistaken, that it was only the outside shadows of nearby trees that were dancing against my bedroom window, creating the illusion of movement from inside the house. I sat watching the window for several seconds, listening to the whispering of the palm fronds in the breeze. The curtains at my bedroom window hung undisturbed.
    My foot transferred from brake to gas pedal, and I proceeded slowly for several blocks along Seventh Avenue until I reached Atlantic, where I turned left. The normally congested main thoroughfare of Delray is largely empty at this hour of the morning, one of the few perks of having to be at work so early, and I had an unencumbered view of the many smart shops, galleries, and restaurants that had redefined the city in recent years. To the surprise of many, myself included, Delray had become somethingof a “hot spot,” a destination as opposed to a drive-through. I loved the unexpected changes, the aura of excitement, even if I was rarely part of it. Alison, I knew instinctively, would love it here.
    I passed the tennis center on the north side of Atlantic, where every spring they hold the Citrix Open, past the Old School Square on the northwest corner of Atlantic and Swinton, continued on past the South County Courthouse and the Delray Beach Fire Station on my left. I took the underpass at I-95 to Jog Road, then headed south. Five minutes later I was at the hospital.
    Mission Care is a small, private health facility housed in a five-story building, painted bubblegum pink, that specializes in chronic care. The majority of patients are elderly and in considerable distress, and as a result, they’re often angry and upset. Who can blame them? They know they aren’t going to get better, that they’re never going home, that this is, in fact, their final resting place. Some have been here for years, lying in their narrow beds, blank eyes staring at blank ceilings, waiting for the nurse to bathe them or adjust their position, longing for visitors who rarely come, silently praying for death while stubbornly clinging to