DeadlySuspicious.epub Read Free Page B

in his home for a week until she promised to behave. So she did. Promises to him meant nothing to Denby. She would have promised the devil, or in this case her father, for freedom. For a week after that promise she pretended to be good to lull her father, and those who were brought in to watch her, into a false sense of security. The first moment she got, Denby escaped. It wasn’t hard. She mentioned to one burly captor she had her periods and exaggerated the blood, pain and mess until he didn’t want to hear anymore and left her to lock herself in the bathroom to deal with it. As a teenager, Denby regularly climbed out of windows. The drop from this one was a couple of yards onto concrete below. She didn’t doubt it would hurt like hell but she also knew her fate would be worse if she stayed. Hearing her father talk of marrying her off made her sick to her stomach. She was a ‘thing’ and an inconvenience to him that had to be dealt with so he didn’t look bad.
    Three days later, Denby was at the bus station, propping up the battered ankle she had smashed in the fall from the window. It was swathed in a thick, crepe, elasticized bandage she had bought at a pharmacy. She had contemplated going to a doctor or the hospital but she didn’t want her father tracking her down due to any records kept. Denby could only guess at the reach the Jacobson Committee had. Before the bus station, she had holed up for three days in a local pub. The room cost twelve dollars and fifty cents a night, the bathrooms were shared and the cockroaches were free. That was okay. She didn’t plan on sleeping. Her plan was to lay low and then get out of town.
    In order to do that she had hocked the last thing she had of value. Denby had kept it hidden in a small compartment she had hacked out under the inner sole of her right boot. It was a solid gold child’s bracelet. It was one of the two things she had that belonged to her mother. She had found it when she was a teenager searching through her father’s office, looking for answers. He hadn’t been home at the time and she had taken the chance to see what she could find. Denby knew nothing about her father. That didn’t worry her. He was a bitter man, a viscous man. If he had dropped dead in front of her Denby would have stepped over him and not looked back. But her mother? That was different. She needed to know who she was, where she had gone and why. It plagued her. Even as a teenager, Denby had a fair idea her father’s extreme behavior had driven her mother off. She didn’t blame her for leaving. She did wish her mother had taken her with her but maybe, due to her father, that wasn’t possible. What evil drove someone to abandon their child?
    So Denby snooped around and found the bracelet. It had been inside a buff colored enveloped with a photo that was folded into quarters. When she flattened the picture out, she knew, without being told, she was looking into her mother’s eyes. They were her eyes also. She stared for a long time at the woman in the photo. She could barely remember her mother but Denby knew, looking into those eyes, her mother wasn’t happy. But she was beautiful and she existed and that gave her hope she had family out there somewhere and that she could find her mother.
    The gold bracelet fascinated Denby. She wondered if it had been her mother’s. “Or maybe mine.” There were no baby photos of Denby or indeed any of her growing up. Her father made no effort to take them. Because of that, she had no hesitation in taking the photo and the bracelet off her father. “To hell with him,” she murmured, folding up the photo and stuffing it and the bracelet in her bra.
    The decision to sell the bracelet hadn’t been a hard one and that had surprised Denby. She thought selling one of the few pieces of who her mother was would have closed the door to her existence a little further. However, in her heart, she knew her mother had to have made hard choices to survive.