The Secret Friend Read Free Page B

her call. He said it was urgent. She dialled his number.
    ‘Bryson.’
    ‘Tim, Darby McCormick. I just got your message. I’m on my way back to the lab, but I was wondering if we could set up a time to meet and talk.’
    ‘A call came in about a body floating in the Boston Harbor behind the Moakley courthouse.’
    ‘Is it Judith Chen?’
    ‘The clothes seem right,’ Bryson said. ‘I’m on my way to the morgue. We can talk there.’

4
    At 5:30 p.m. Hannah Givens stood under the roof of the Macy’s department store at Boston’s Downtown Crossing, waiting for the bus. This afternoon’s light snow had turned into a powerful storm. She wished she had taken an earlier bus instead of working overtime at the deli, helping clean up and do some food preparation for tomorrow morning’s weekend breakfast crowd – provided the city was open for business. The weathermen were predicting several feet of snow.
    Hannah tucked her hands deep in her down parka and looked over Macy’s lighted window displays where mannequins with perfect figures wore spring dresses. One caught her eye – a beautiful black cocktail dress with a revealing but tasteful slit up the leg. Northeastern University’s spring formal was coming up in three weeks and no one had asked her.
    In a strange way, she was relieved. Even if someone asked her, she couldn’t afford a new dress – not unless she was willing to pull extra shifts at the deli as well as dipping into her grocery money for the next two months. The idea of eating Raman noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner wasn’t appealing, and besides, it wasn’t like she could fit into any of these dresses. She would never be thin, not like the girls in the magazines, not like this mannequin or even her two roommates, Robin and Terry, who got up every morning to work out at the gym and ate nothing but salads sprinkled with goat cheese.
    Hannah knew she wasn’t much of a looker. She was tall, almost six feet in heels, a big-boned, curvy woman with nice hair and a pleasant face. She didn’t have much of a chest, thanks to her mother’s genes. From her father she had inherited SIS – Shitty Irish Skin that freckled from the sun. The Givens lineage had also given her a lazy eye that, despite her mother’s assurances, hadn’t corrected itself over time.
    The real problem, Hannah suspected, was her personality. She was boring. She was smart, hardworking and good with the books, real good, but that didn’t count for much until you got older, when the tables turned and things like brains and a high salary made men stop and take a second look. While Robin and Terry drank dollar drafts at dive bars on Thursday nights and worked the fraternity party circuit Friday through Sunday, Hannah was either working or studying. She wanted to have fun – honestly, she did – but with her two jobs and her course workload, she didn’t exactly have a lot of free time.
    While she waited for the bus, Hannah passed the time imagining herself five inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter wearing the black dress in the window and a stunning pair of Manolos as Chris Smith, the handsome lacrosse player from her Shakespeare class, escorted her to the spring formal. She’d look like Cinderella going to the ball.
    A car horn honked behind her. Hannah turned and saw a black BMW parked against the kerb on the corner of Porter and Summer Streets. The passenger’s side window was rolled down.
    ‘Hannah? Is that you?’
    A man’s voice. She didn’t recognize it. She couldn’t see who was sitting behind the wheel. The car’s interior was dark.
    ‘I’m in Professor Johnson’s calculus class,’ the man said. ‘I sit in the far back.’
    Hannah stepped up next to the open window. In the soft blue light coming from the dashboard, she saw the man’s face.
    He had been in some sort of accident, like a fire. His face was severely scarred, covered with makeup, his nose an awful, crooked mess of skin. His left eye was damaged,