Front Page Fatality Read Online Free PDF Page B

given that it was more than my rent. But it was Gone With the Wind . Maybe I could survive on Ramen for a few weeks.
    I laid it on a high shelf and picked up a thick leather-bound Dickens tome. Shopping at Pages was like perusing some great collector’s personal library. Every visit was an experience.
    “Almost done,” Jenna called, clicking her mouse and twisting up the corners of her lips, which were seldom more than a twitch away from smiling.
    I admired the flowing simplicity of the wine-colored linen dress she wore. Like most of her wardrobe, it well suited her true passion: Jenna was a great book-buyer, but she was a better artist. “The bookstore definitely pays better,” she said whenever I asked if she thought she’d ever buy the store from its retired owner, “and I love the thrill of the hunt in my job. But I will always be an artist at heart.”
    I owed her friendship, and by extension my sanity, to the abstract of a mother and child I’d talked her into selling me right off the shop’s wall on my second visit. The painting had given us a reason to start talking, and once we had, we’d never stopped. I loved not knowing what I’d find when I popped into the store, and as I built a collection of books rivaled in my heart only by my shoe closet, Jenna and I had gone from casual acquaintances to the best of friends.
    By the time her little boy came along the previous spring, I was planning the baby shower and driving her to the hospital when her water broke at a Friday night karaoke experiment (our unscientific method determined that lack of intoxication made singing off-key in front of strangers a lot less fun, and also that drunk people were surprisingly eager to help when you went into labor in a bar, some more appropriately than others). She was my non-newspaper family.
    “Ready?” Jenna appeared at my elbow with her straw bag on her shoulder and her keys in her hand.
    “Starving,” I said, laying the book back on the shelf.
    We were quiet for a half-block or so, until we reached the brick sidewalk to an old row house painted bright purple and converted into the city’s best Mexican food restaurant.
    “You ready to talk about your week yet?” Jenna asked. “You know I get all my thrills vicariously through you.”
    “My week started and ended with gross crime scene photos. I think that entitles me to at least one margarita, so I guess we’ll just have to force ourselves to stay for a while.”
    “Ah, to not have to be home by the children’s bedtime! Leave nothing out.”
    We followed the hostess up the narrow stairs to a square table covered in brightly-hued paint. The top was lavender and each leg was a different shade of the rainbow.
    “Did you have time to actually read the paper today?” I asked, sinking into a ladderback chair just as colorful as the table.
    She wiggled one hand back and forth as she popped a blue corn chip into her mouth with the other. “I started your story, but I only got through the part on the front page before I got busy looking through the ads.”
    Jenna found a lot of the bookstore’s inventory at estate sales. She usually spent Fridays combing through the classifieds for the weekend and calling all the ones that mentioned books.
    I filled her in on the gory details of the trial as we waited for our drinks. When I got to the part about the murderer confessing to his mom, the color drained from Jenna’s face.
    “So, this kid really just walked into his mother’s kitchen splattered with other people’s blood and sat down and told her what he did?” She gaped at me, her hand fluttering to her throat. “As a mother, you want your kids to trust you enough to tell you anything, but…Oh, my God. I can’t even imagine.”
    “I know. That was the most dramatic part of the whole trial for me, when his mother testified. I felt so bad for that poor woman. Here her kid has done this horrible thing and she knows he did it and she kept looking at the victims’