How I Spent My Summer Vacation Read Online Free PDF

do about him until some less enjoyable moment in our relationship.
    * * *
    That moment came—and it wasn’t even Mackenzie’s fault—via a telephone call to his hotel room at approximately one A.M. I could barely remember where I was, let alone where the telephone might be. Mackenzie reoriented himself more quickly, finding both a lamp switch and the receiver.
    I heard a deafening squawk from the other end. Yet another crank or drunk or pervert. “Hang up,” I said. “Just hang up. Don’t listen. Shouldn’t have turned on the light.” I replumped my pillow.
    “She’s right here.” Mackenzie handed me the receiver. “Sasha,” he said.
    “Mandy!” she shouted. “Thank God! I was going crazy! At first, I couldn’t remember where you’d be. Couldn’t remember—”
    Shades of my mother when I stayed out too late on a date. But this was Sasha and this was ridiculous. “What’s wrong with you? Stop shouting!”
    “—what hotel he’d said he was at, so how was I going to find you and—”
    Frankly, I had barely thought she’d notice my absence. “Calm down,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”
    She spluttered through every word I said. “Big deal? Mandy, you don’t—”
    “Calm—”
    “ Don’t tell me to calm down! I’ve been arrested for murder!”
    How do you respond to a statement like that? The replies that charged into my mind seemed clumsy and primitive, not to mention disloyal. Questions such as: who? why you? did you? Instead of asking any of them, I mouthed her words to Mackenzie, who glared at the phone. I held the receiver slightly out, between the two of us, so he also could hear.
    I took a deep breath. “Tell me about it,” I said.
    “I came back to the room an hour or so ago.”
    “Alone?” You couldn’t get into trouble if you came home alone. Wasn’t that what Mama always said?
    “Yes! If you’d just listen ! Alone. I thought you might be in there, remember? I wasn’t going to bring anybody in. But instead of you, there was a dead man in the bed, in my bed! And blood all over the place. And all over my clothing. That lamp—that gorgeous marble lamp, remember? The police think its base was what killed—oh, God—my clothing—my slip covered with blood on the floor!”
    Maybe my mind wasn’t willing to compute everything she was saying, so it fixated on the slip. I hadn’t known she wore such garments. They seemed too prissy and middle class for Sasha, wrong for her loose-flowing style. Whole or half? What color? What fabric? I had to literally shake my head to dislodge the issue of the slip.
    “My bra. My own things! Scattered around, as if I’d dropped them one by one. You know I didn’t. You were there when I left.”
    “Yes.” She left her room neat, Ma.
    “The beds had been turned down and all. There was still a chocolate on yours, Mandy!” Snuffling and nose-blowing.
    “Listen, calm—I’m sorry, didn’t mean to say that, but—”
    “There’s more. Worse. An open bottle of champagne and two glasses. A bloody washcloth, wet towels, as if I took a shower and washed off. I feel like I’m going crazy, and these cops, they act like it’s an open-and-shut case. I don’t think I even know the man!”
    “It’s obviously some horrible mistake.” I was on autobabble, putting out noise because I wished she hadn’t said think . “You mean there’s a chance you do—did know him?” I whispered.
    “I can’t tell. If you’d seen him—he was bloody, crushed—I couldn’t even look , let alone—” She inhaled and exhaled loudly. When she spoke again, her voice was firmer, more resolute. “I didn’t recognize him and I certainly didn’t kill him. But they found his card in a pair of my slacks in the closet. With a private phone number penciled on it. How did they find his card there?”
    I shook my head and made sympathetic noises. I didn’t have any answers. Surely not at 1:09 A.M. after forty-two minutes of sleep. I did have a question,