You belong to me by Mary Higgins Clark Read Free Book Online

my savings in the agency.
    Uncomfortably she remembered how she had railed at Susan, telling her that she didn't understand what it was like to lose a husband.
    I'm sorry I missed her at Dad's party yesterday, Dee thought, but I'm glad I called her this morning. I meant it when I said that Alex Wright is terrific.
    A smile played on Dee's lips as she thought of the good-looking man with the warm, intelligent eyes- attractive, appealing, a sense of humor, an air of breeding. He had asked if Susan was involved with anyone.
    At his request she had given him Susan's office number. She couldn't refuse that, but she decided against offering her home phone.
    Dee shook her head at the flight attendant's offer to refill her Perrier. The empty feeling that had begun with the visit to her mother, and that had grown with the sight of her father and his second wife toasting each other, threatened to deepen.
    She missed being married. She wanted to live in New York again. It was there that Susan had introduced her to Jack; he had been a commercial photographer. Shortly after they were married, they moved to Los Angeles.
    They had five years together; then, two years ago, he'd insisted on skiing that weekend.
    Dee felt tears sting her eyes. I'm sick of being lonely, she thought angrily. Hastily she reached for her voluminous shoulder bag, fished inside it and found what she was looking for: a brochure describing a two-week cruise through the Panama Canal. Why not? she asked herself. I haven't taken a real vacation in two years. Her travel agent had told her that a good cabin was still available for the next slated cruise. Yesterday her father had urged her to go. "First class. On me, honey," he had promised.
    The ship was sailing from Costa Rica in a week. I'm going to be on it, Dee decided.
    14
    Pamela Hastings did not mind an occasional evening alone. Her husband, George, was on a business trip to California; her daughter, Amanda, was away at college, a freshman this year at Wellesley. It had been less than a month since Amanda's classes had begun, and as much as Pamela missed her, she acknowledged a guilty pleasure in the soothing silence of the apartment, the quiet of the telephone, the unnatural state of neatness in Amanda's room.
    Last week had been a busy one at Columbia, what with staff meetings and student conferences, in addition to her normal teaching schedule. She always looked forward to Friday evening, a much anticipated and appreciated oasis, and the get-together at Carolyn's with the "gang of four," as they used to call themselves in the old days, had been fun but had left her with an emotional hangover.
    The urgent sense of evil that she had experienced when she held that turquoise ring still frightened her. She hadn't spoken to Carolyn since that evening, but as Pamela turned the key in the lock of her apartment on Madison and Sixty-seventh Street, she made a mental note to call her friend and tell her to get rid of the ring.
    She glanced at her watch. It was ten of five. She went straight to the bedroom, exchanged her conservative dark blue suit for comfortable slacks and one of her husband's shirts, fixed a scotch, and settled down to watch the news. This was going to be a peaceful evening, just hers alone.
    At five after five, she stared at the image of the cordoned-off section of Park Avenue and Eighty-first Street where there was a massive traffic jam, and crowds of spectators were observing a blood-spattered van with a smashed-in grill.
    In stunned disbelief she listened as the off-camera commentator said, "This was the scene at Park and Eighty-first, where a short time ago, apparently due to the pedestrian crush, forty-year-old Carolyn Wells fell into the path of a speeding van.
    "She has been rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital, with multiple head and internal injuries. Our reporter at the scene spoke with several of the eyewitnesses to the accident."
    As Pamela jumped to her feet, she heard the smattering of comments: