The Grip Read Free Page B

had swept over Millingham the night before, leaving the roads slick and shiny. The sky was low and thick with heavy gray clouds that threatened to open up at any moment. Samantha Crow stared out the police car window. She loved the stillness, the clean feeling after a rain, the way the air smelled soggy.
    A steady clicking sounded from the car dashboard. Her father, Steven Crow, the city’s sheriff, made a lazy left-hand turn.
    “People driving slow this morning,” her father said. He fancied a white handlebar mustache—a carryover from his hero, Wyatt Earp. “Good thing, ‘cause it’s slippery out there and we need to get you to school. Couldn’t afford to be pulling anyone over, now could I?” He winked at her, twitching a matching white bushy eyebrow, and she smiled weakly in return.
    “You’re gonna have to think about a graduation dress, you know,” he said.
    Samantha remained silent, eyes closed.
    “You know, I asked your mother to prom. I don’t think I was her first choice, though.” He laughed, the way older people often laughed at the humorless things they said. “Had her eye on a boy named Billy Dobbins. But I never gave up, Sam. Went out and bought myself a nice new suit.”
    Samantha’s blackened lips began to tighten.
    Her father combed his mustache with the flat tips of his fingers. “She was a good woman, your mother.” He glanced over and caught her change of expression. “I’m just thinking that with the way you dress. What do they call it? Goth? I just wouldn’t be surprised if some nice boy might pass you up.”
    “I’m not a Goth.” Her laugh bore a threatening edge. “And what’s wrong with the way I dress?” She crossed her arms, glaring straight ahead.
    “No, not wrong…” he said. “Definitely not wrong, honey, just different. We don’t live in the big city, where people wear leather trench coats and knee-high boots.” His expression darkened. “I spoke to Mike Spiolis last week. You know, my friend over at the NYPD. He was telling me how a young boy and his father were waiting for the subway train when a man who lost his job as a middle school janitor came up behind them and pushed them both onto the tracks. Boy’s father managed to throw his son clear in time, but he stepped on the third rail trying to get out and jolted himself with 750 volts of electricity. When they asked the guy afterward why he had done it, you know what his answer was?”
    Sam’s face was blank.
    “He said he wanted someone else to know how it felt to lose something they loved.”
    Samantha sighed, tired of her father’s horror stories. “I’d rather take my chances with lunatics trying to push me in front of subway trains than spending my life living in a bubble.”
    “You know, your mother and…”
    “Can we not talk about Mom like she’s still around?”
    He pushed his glasses up on his face. “The day your mother died was the worst day of my life. Thank God you’re too young to know what it feels like to turn over at night and not have that person there anymore. You have no idea. No idea.”
    Whatever pity had started welling up within her was squashed flat when she remembered what had happened at the house this morning.
    She had gone into her father’s room to ask him for lunch money and had found his girlfriend, Sheila Evans, jiggling the bathroom door handle. The bathroom where her mother’s body had been found. The one nobody went into anymore.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Samantha screamed, her anger fueled more by her hatred for the woman than by what she was trying to do.
    Sheila’s face blanched. One of her sagging breasts lolled out of the satin negligee she was wearing. She fumbled it back inside, embarrassed. “I was just…”
    “Going to use the washroom… He didn’t tell you, did he?”
    Sheila was beginning to regain her composure, and anger was replacing shock. “Tell me what, Samantha?”
    “That the day my mother died, the day