Last Kiss Goodbye Read Online Free PDF Page B

cement truck.
    His claustrophobia mounted.
    One day the real killer would know what it was like to lie in a cramped, six-by-six cell and piss in a pot in front of strangers. He would know what it was like to suffer.
    To lose everyone he cared about. His entire future.
    Yes, Matt Mahoney had been innocent when he’d gone to jail.
    But he wasn’t innocent any longer.
    Now he would finally confront Ivy Stanton and force her to admit the truth about what had happened that night. Find out why the hell she hadn’t spoken up years ago and defended him.
    Then he’d make her pay for keeping quiet.
    THE VOICES WOULDN’T BE quiet.
    And the color red was back.
    But only in Ivy’s dreams.
    They had become more frequent since she’d seen that newscast of Matt Mahoney’s release. And even more intense since she’d come to Kudzu Hollow the week before. Nightmares of blood and screams, of that last kiss goodbye, the cold unbending skin of her mother’s lips, the eyes wide open in death…
    Ivy shivered, willing away the vivid images as she clutched the metal fence surrounding the junkyard, but the photos and article chronicling her parents’ brutal murders remained etched in her mind forever.
    There was no turning back now. She’d come here for answers and she couldn’t leave until she had them. The only way for her to move forward in her life was to travel backward in time.
    She’d spent the last week incognito, using her pseudonym, Ann Ivy, so the locals around Kudzu Hollow wouldn’t know her true identity. She’d driven the countryside and town taking photographs and studying the people. Soon, maybe she’d gather enough nerve to approach the locals about her parents’ murders.
    And to visit their graves.
    But one step at a time.
    Having finally gotten up the courage to stop by the junkyard today, she studied the landscape. Rusted and stripped vehicles of all sizes and models filled the overgrown yard, everything from Corvettes to pickups and broken-down school buses that had transported their last group of kids. Weeds choked the land, and kudzu climbed like snakes up the broken windows, over tires and hubcaps and scattered car parts. Tall trees dropped dead leaves, adding a layer of brown and gold to the dilapidated site, a reminder that winter was on its way. Winter and death.
    Ivy tried to banish her anxiety, then imagined her father working the lot, selling off parts as needed, trying to rebuild an engine in the station wagon he’d kept, huddling with a cigarette as he swiped at grease on his coveralls. That brief memory seemed to stir the pungent air with the scent of those filterless Camels he liked so much, the smell of his booze, the sound of his angry booming voice as his boots pounded on the squeaky floor of the trailer.
    She shuddered and clutched her jacket around her, willing other memories to follow, but the door slammed shut with a vicious slap, and there was nothing but emptiness. And the sense that she had run from the trailer to the junkyard more than once. Taken solace in the rusted old cars. Pretended they weren’t broken, that they could magically transport her far away from her miserable home.
    Frustrated, she yanked her gaze sideways, beyond the junkyard to the trailer park where she’d lived. Weeds choked the brown grass, and the trailers were faded and rusted, although families still dwelled in some of the same single-and double-wide mobile homes that had stood for twenty years. A few new ones had been added, she noted, although the rain had washed mud and leaves onto the aluminum sides, aging them automatically. Several small children in ratty jackets and jeans played chase in the yards just as she had probably done, and two neighborhood women sat on a sagging porch, chatting. Tricycles and plastic bats and toys littered the ground, and a couple of stray cats slept beside a double-wide while a mangy dog scrounged for food in the overflowing garbage.
    Although the scenery seemed familiar, Ivy