Life Penalty Read Free

you would be justly rewarded. If asked to sum herself up on one word, Gail Walton would have chosen “content.” She was everything she had ever wanted to be.
    And then it was seventeen minutes after the hour of four on an especially warm, sunny April day, and everything changed.

TWO
    S he saw the police cars as soon as she turned the corner, and knew immediately, instinctively, that they were parked in front of her house. Her first reaction was panic. She dropped the few parcels she was carrying and stood, unable to move, staring straight ahead, her breath holding her stomach in tightly, pressing into her back. In the next instant she was running toward her house, unmindful of the bags she had dropped, seeing only the police cars, knowing as she glanced down at her watch and saw that it was seventeen minutes after four, that for her time had stopped.
    Later, much later, when the sedative they would give her was starting to take effect and her mind was hovering in the mid-ground between dreams and reality, her thoughts would keep returning to how her day had been spent, how things might have been different. That somehow it was her fault. She had changed the routine.
    Lesley Jennings’ mother had called first thing in the morning, just after Jack and the girls had left, to tell her that Lesley had spent the better part of the night throwing up and must have picked up some flu bug at school and therefore would not be able to have her regular Friday afternoon piano lesson. Gail had commiserated with the young mother, remembering how upset she used to getwhenever Jennifer came down with anything, realizing how calm she was with Cindy, and telling the young woman what she was sure her doctor had already told her, to keep the child quiet and in bed, no solid foods and lots of liquids. Mrs. Jennings seemed grateful for the advice, confiding with obvious guilt that she was desperately trying to locate someone to come and stay with Lesley while she ran off to work. Gail told her about the daughter of a friend who had recently dropped out of school and might be interested in picking up a few extra dollars by baby-sitting, and again Mrs. Jennings was grateful, adding that she hoped Gail’s children would be spared the flu bug which seemed to be sweeping the Livingston school system, probably because of all the rain they’d been having lately and wasn’t it just typical that the child would get sick when it finally looked as if the weather was starting to break. Children were just little incubators for germs, Gail remembered thinking as she hung up the phone.
    On impulse, and because it was such a surprisingly nice day, too nice to spend indoors, she had picked up the phone again and called her friend Nancy, the most frivolous of all her friends, frivolous because Gail doubted that a serious thought had ever passed through the woman’s head. She was forty-two years old; her husband had left her five years earlier for a younger woman, and now Nancy Carter divided her time between visits to her masseuse and tennis lessons at her club. She was an avid, no, a
fervent
consumer, and she was never happier than when spending money, specifically her ex-husband’s money. She was a follower of astrology, the occult and ESP. She believed that she could tell the future, although when her husband had announced his intention to leave her for the woman who regularly manicured his nails, she had been the only one in their immediate circle who wassurprised. She never read past the entertainment section of the newspaper, and would have been hard-pressed to name either of her state’s senators, although she knew all about Dustin Hoffman’s private life and Joan Collins’ rather more public affairs. Despite what her other close friend, Laura, referred to as Nancy’s lamentable lack of depth, Gail had always found her shallowness and utter self-absorption entertaining, and today a little light gossip and some heavy-duty shopping seemed just what