Hide Yourself Away Read Online Free PDF Page B

her baths and showers in. Like most everything else in her father’s house, it was original to the 1960s construction. Scrubbed clean, but far from new and not yet old enough to be considered vintage and cool.
    How could she ever compete with the surroundings that Frank could offer? Would it be better for Lucy to live in a house like that?
    Stop it. Stop it right now.
    This couldn’t be about who had the nicer house. If that were the case, Grace would almost surely lose. She most likely would never, ever be able to offer Lucy the kind of surroundings that Frank could. Television news eventually offered a comfortable living, but except for the high-priced on-air talent, journalists didn’t make the kind of money investment bankers did.
    A judge would see that it wasn’t about the style of the house and creature comforts it afforded, wouldn’t he? A judge would know it was about stability and care and love. Those were the things a child needed.
    But was Grace going to have to compete with Frank’s new wife? If Jan was willing to be a stay-at-home mother, if she was going to be there every day when Lucy came home from school, would the judge think that was a better situation for Lucy? He couldn’t possibly think that being with a stepmother was preferable to being with the real mother, could he?
    Grace knew that, once, it had been almost a foregone conclusion that children stayed with their mothers. But times had changed, and fathers were demanding their rights. It wasn’t unheard of now for the father to get custody, as long as it was in the best interest of the child.
    Surely, it was in Lucy’s best interest to stay right where she was, safe with her mother. It was in Lucy’s best interest. Wasn’t it?

  CHAPTER  
7
    Before his shift was over, the rookie police officer Thomas James made a trip to the detectives’ bullpen. In case he was caught, he had his excuse prepared. He merely wanted to familiarize himself with the details of the Charlotte Wagstaff Sloane case. After all, he had been only twelve years old when the lady disappeared. If anything, his feigned conscientiousness would win him brownie points with the detectives working the newly reopened case.
    It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. Tommy had heard the detectives mention that there was a diary, a journal the woman had kept before she vanished. And here it was, or at least photocopies of the pages written in a long, flowing, feminine hand.
    Tommy read the notation on the cover page of the stack of papers: “Original returned to Agatha Wagstaff, sister.”
    He took the pile and nonchalantly made his way to the copying machine. As he fed the sheets into the tray, his heart beat faster. In part because he knew he was doing something wrong, very wrong. In part because he knew he would be seeing Joss in just anhour. He had missed her so, and she’d said she’d been thinking about him nonstop. He was thrilled that she might be his again.
    Ever since he met her, the summer before she started college, he had been smitten with Joss. He knew it was a long shot. A girl like that, from a family like hers, wasn’t going to be attracted to a basic guy like him. A guy from a working-class background who had to work his way through the University of Rhode Island, a guy whose highest aspiration was to become a detective on his hometown police force. Though he was six years older than she was, a sizable gap at their stage of the game, Joss was much more sophisticated than the local girls her age. She had seen and been exposed to things and places that the year-round Newport girls didn’t even know existed.
    Miraculously, though, as far as Tommy was concerned, Jocelyn Vickers had been at his side all that magical summer. Lying on the beach, dancing on the wharves, holding hands on long strolls in the moonlight on the Cliff Walk. The memory of the evenings spent making out on the bench at the top of the Forty Steps as the waves crashed