Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) Read Free Page B

beside the highway, at three in the morning, standing behind an ambulance as EMTs loaded two victims of a car accident into the back.
    “Yes. I have a sister named Sunshine. She’s twice as bitchy as me.” I tried to smile, but my words didn’t come across as humorously as I wanted. The deputy’s eyebrows rose uncertainly like a farm boy coming face to face with his first big city hooker.
    “What happened to Graham Kinnon?” the deputy asked. “He always used to pick up on these things.”
    Graham Kinnon was the daytime cops reporter. I took the night beat. It kept me away from the demons that came to visit when the moon was high in the sky and sleep wouldn’t come.
    I glanced at the minivan on its top in the ditch and closed my eyes. The screams begin again, an explosion rocks the ground beneath my feet, but I clench my jaw and shake my head to control what I now know is not real—at least not tonight.
    “He’s still there, but he’s got a baby to care for now,” I said slowly, trying to look like I was making notes. “I’ve been covering nights for a while.”
    “Oh. OK.”
    The answer seemed to satisfy him. My vision faded and I got back on track with the story.
    “So tell me what we’ve got here,” I continued. “We have two victims being transported, I see…”
    The deputy launched into his spiel about the accident: A family—a man, his wife, their nine-year-old son and three-year-old twin daughters—were driving from Delaware en route to Gary, Indiana. Dad was a road warrior: rather than stop for coffee or a hotel room, he was bound and determined to make it to the Hoosier state when he nodded off at the wheel.
    Now Dad was dead, Mom and the son were seriously hurt and the only two uninjured parties were the little girls, who’d been safely strapped into their car seats when the minivan went left of center, careened across the oncoming lanes and rolled into the ditch.
    I got names, ages and learned the twins would be held at the sheriff’s office until Grandma could get here from Indiana. She would be arriving in a couple hours. The injured would be transported to the trauma center in nearby Collitstown.
    The ambulance pulled onto the highway. Our interview over, the deputy stepped back to the crash scene to talk to the responding firefighters and to begin his paperwork. I would follow up on the story as it got closer to our morning deadline, checking on the mother and son’s condition, but for right now, all I had to do was head to the newsroom and write up the first version of the story and put it up on the newspaper’s website.
    I walked back to my little red sedan, got inside and closed my eyes, trying to stave off the feral need to run, to scream, to react, building in my stomach.
    I was starting over again in Jubilant Falls.
    I’d made sure no one could find me. Today, I used the name Charisma Lemarnier, not the one most recognized by the rest of the world.
    I sighed, realizing yet again how lucky I was that the editor, Addison McIntyre, even took me on.
    As far as she was concerned, I was starting over after losing both my parents and my husband in a horrible car crash, which resulted in the scars that covered my face. Even the résumé I’d given her was false. The references I’d listed were friends and journalists who I could trust to tell the same tale I’d told her, listed as editors of made-up small town newspapers where I’d built my “career.”
    She bought the story hook, line and sinker, and never called to check my references.
    With Graham Kinnon, another young widower on staff, she believed me when I said my need to hide was partially to come to terms with my disfigurement, and to deal with my widowed grief. At least that much was true.
    Tonight, out of habit, I flipped the car visor down and touched my late husband’s photo, suspended there by rubber bands, before turning the key in the ignition and heading back to the newsroom.
    Somehow Addison never questioned the