Beyond Reach Read Online Free PDF

and held all of the power. From the beginning, Lena had only wanted to break out.
    She pushed in the cassette tape again, twisted the knob to lower the sound to a low, angry growl.
     
    I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation…
     
    The sisters had sung this as teenagers, their anthem against Reese, the backwater town they lived in until they were old enough to get the hell out. With their dark complexions and exotic looks that came courtesy of their Mexican-American grandmother, neither one of them had been particularly popular. Other kids were cruel, and Lena’s strategy was to take them on one by one while Sibyl kept to her studies, working hard to get the scholarships she needed to continue her education. After high school, Lena had spun her wheels for a while, then entered the police academy, where Jeffrey Tolliver plucked her from a group of recruits and offered her a job. Sibyl had already taken a professorship at the Grant Institute of Technology, which made the decision to accept the job that much easier.
    Lena found herself thinking about her first weeks in Grant County. After Reese, Heartsdale had seemed like a major metropolis. Even Avondale and Madison, the other cities that constituted Grant, were impressive to her small-town eyes. Most of the kids Lena had gone to school with had never traveled outside the state of Georgia. Their parents worked twelve-hour days at the tire plant or drew unemployment so they could sit around and drink. Vacations were for the wealthy—people who could afford to miss a couple of days of work and still pay the electric bill.
    Hank owned a bar on the outskirts of Reese, and once he had stopped injecting the profits into his veins, Sibyl and Lena had lived a fairly comfortable life compared to their neighbors. Sure, the roof on their house was bowed and a 1963 Chevy truck had been on blocks in the backyard for as long as she could remember, but they always had food on the table and each year when school came around, Hank drove the girls into Augusta and bought them new clothes.
    Lena should have been grateful, but she was not.
    Sibyl had been eight when Hank, on a drunken bender, had slammed his car into her. Lena had been using an old tennis ball to play catch with her sister. She overthrew, and when Sibyl ran into the driveway and leaned down to pick up the ball, the bumper of Hank’s reversing car had caught her in the temple. There hadn’t even been much blood—just a thin cut following the line of her skull—but the damage was done. Sibyl hadn’t been able to see anything after that, and no matter how many Alcoholics Anonymous meetings Hank attended or how supportive he tried to be, in the back of her mind, Lena always saw his car hitting her sister, the surprised look on Sibyl’s face as she crumpled to the ground.
    Yet, here Lena was, using up one of her valuable vacation days to go check on the old bastard. Hank hadn’t telephoned in two weeks, which was strange. Even though she seldom returned his calls, he still left messages every other day. The last time she had seen her uncle was three months ago, when he’d driven to Grant County—uninvited—to help her move. She was renting Jeffrey’s house after he’d found out his previous tenants, a couple of girls from the college, were using the place as their own personal bordello. Hank had said maybe a handful of words to her as he moved boxes, and Lena had been just as chatty. As he was leaving, guilt had forced her to suggest dinner at the new rib place up the street, but he was climbing into his beat-up old Mercedes, making his excuses, before she got the words out of her mouth.
    She should have known then something was wrong. Hank never passed up an opportunity to spend time with her, no matter how painful that time was. That he had driven straight back to Reese should have been a clue. She was a detective, for chrissakes. She should notice when things were out of the ordinary.
    She also shouldn’t have