The Cinderella Murder Read Free Page B

filled with tawdry innuendo, left Laurie feeling sick. The author hinted, with no factual support, that Susan’s desire to be a star may have made her willing to do anything to land a plum role with an emerging talent like Parker. She speculated, again with no proof, that a consensual liaison may have “gone wrong.”
    Laurie could not imagine what it would have been like for Rosemary Dempsey to read those words, written by a person she had trusted enough to confide her feelings to about the loss of both her daughter and her husband.
    So when Laurie called Rosemary Dempsey about the possibility of participating in Under Suspicion , she had understood precisely what Rosemary meant when she said she’d been burned before. Laurie had made a promise to do her very best, both for her and her daughter. And she told Rosemary how she knew from experience what it was like not knowing.
    Last year, when the police had finally identified Greg’s killer, Laurie had learned what people meant when they used the word “closure.” She didn’t have her husband back, and Timmy was still without his father, but they no longer had to fear the man Timmy had called Blue Eyes. It was closure from fear but not from heartbreak.
    “That damn shoe,” Rosemary had said about the “Cinderella Murder” nickname. “The irony is that Susan never wore anything so flashy. She’d bought those shoes at a vintage store for a seventies party. But her agent, Edwin, thought they were perfect for the audition. If the public really needed a visual image to hang on to, it should have been her necklace. It was gold, with the sweetest little horseshoe pendant. It was found by her body, the chain broken in the struggle. We bought it for her on her fifteenth birthday, and thenext day, she landed the lead role as Sandy in her high school’s production of Grease . She always called it her lucky necklace. When the police described it, Jack and I knew we’d lost our baby.”
    Laurie had known at that moment that she wanted the murder of Susan Dempsey to be her next case. A young, talented girl whose life had been cut short. Greg was a brilliant young doctor whose life had been cut short. His murderer was dead now. Susan’s was still out there.

6

    R osemary Dempsey juggled two overflowing brown paper grocery bags, managing to close the hatchback of her Volvo C30 with her right elbow. Spotting Lydia Levitt across the street, she quickly turned away, hoping to slip from the driveway to her front door unnoticed.
    No such luck.
    “Rosemary! My goodness. How can one person eat so much food? Let me help you!”
    How could one person be so rude? Rosemary wondered. Rude, and yet at the same time so kind?
    She smiled politely, and before she knew it, her across-the-street neighbor was at her side, grabbing one of the bags from her hands.
    “Multigrain bread, huh? Oh, and organic eggs. And blueberries—all those antioxidants! Good for you. We put so much junk into our bodies. Personally, my weakness is jelly beans. Can you believe it?”
    Rosemary nodded and made sure Lydia saw her polite smile. If Rosemary had to guess, she’d have said the woman was in about her midsixties, though God knows she didn’t care.
    “Thank you so much for your help, Lydia. And I’d say jelly beans are a relatively harmless vice.”
    She used her now-free hand to unlock the front door of her house.
    “Wow, you lock your door? We don’t usually do that here.” Lydia set her bag next to Rosemary’s on the kitchen island, just inside the entryway. “Well, about the jelly beans, tell that to Don. He keeps finding little pink and green surprises in the sofa cushions. He says it’s like living with a five-year-old on Easter Sunday. Says my veins must be like Pixy Stix, filled with sugar.”
    Rosemary noticed the message light blinking on her telephone on the kitchen counter. Was it the call she was waiting for?
    “Well, thank you again for the help, Lydia.”
    “You should come down