Angel Falling Softly Read Free Page B

acceptable?”
    “Eight o’clock? Um, tonight?” The woman’s hesitation was obvious.
    “Would seven be better?”
    LaDawn collected herself. “Oh, sure!” she burst out, revealing a Midwestern accent tinged with Scandinavian roots. “The address is 1204 Larkspur Lane. Do you need directions?”
    “I’m sure my driver can find it.”
    “That’s just great. I’ll see you tonight, Miss Daranyi.”
    “Seven o’clock,” Milada confirmed. After hanging up the phone, she opened the folder and thumbed through the SEC filings. LaDawn, she repeated to herself. In her long life, she’d never met a woman named LaDawn before.
    It briefly occurred to her that she had no good idea about what she was getting herself into. She kept too many secrets not to know what she was getting herself into every minute of her life.

Chapter 7
    Don’t judge a book by its cover
    I n purely utilitarian terms, being the mother of a dying daughter was not that difficult.
    Every morning Rachel had someplace to go and something to do. It was almost like having a job again. She hustled the husband and the daughter out of the house, showered and dressed. And then hung around children for several hours in a teaching institution staffed by busy, competent professionals. Yes, many of the children were dying, but other than that . . . And it was only part-time employment. She was done every day by noon, one o’clock at the latest.
    And so the days came and went.
    In Sandy she stopped at Smith’s to get a few things, a few things that quickly filled her shopping cart. How many people had they invited to family home evening, again? Charlene was bringing a tossed salad. She’d talk to Doris at church on Sunday and get everything else on Monday.
    She moved to the checkout queues. “Rachel!” A woman hurried up to her, a woman in her late forties stuffed into a Liz Claiborne pantsuit that would look much better if the person inside it lost twenty pounds and didn’t use quite so much makeup.
    “Guess what!”
    Rachel didn’t guess. A tree falling in a forest wouldn’t make a sound until LaDawn Gunderson told somebody about it.
    “I’ve rented out the Lindstrom place!”
    “The Lindstrom place? Oh, yes, the Lindstroms.”
    “You’re going to have quite an interesting neighbor.” LaDawn spoke with an almost rapturous intensity. “Though I don’t think she’s a member. Didn’t seem at all like the kind of person you’d expect at Relief Society, if you know what I mean.”
    “Not a family?”
    “Oh, no. Single, early twenties. Very professional. Immaculately dressed. Quite attractive. The whitest skin you’ve ever seen. Rather a strange girl. No, eccentric, that’s the word. She wanted to see the place at night! Probably one of those supermodels you’re always reading about—doesn’t want to be seen in public. I didn’t recognize her. She drove up in this fancy car with her own chauffeur and everything!”
    LaDawn lowered her voice to a whisper. “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said, patting her friend’s arm for emphasis, “but she paid six months all in advance. Wrote out a twelve-thousand-dollar check, just like that—like she was buying groceries! Can you imagine?”
    “Ma’am?” said the checkout clerk, leaning over the scanner to get her attention.
    “Sorry,” said Rachel.
    LaDawn said, “Well, I’d better get going, myself.” She stopped and asked, “And how is Jennifer doing?”
    “She’s doing fine.”
    Such transparent lies no longer bothered Rachel when it came to greasing the wheels of social conviviality.
    She pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto Sego Lily Drive.
    Cottonwood Estates was the quintessential Salt Lake subdivision. Pluck this plot of earth out of the ground and deposit it outside the beltway of any Midwestern American city, and nobody would notice.
    It was so unremittingly normal that the developers felt compelled to mess up Brigham Young’s commonsensical east-west,