Maggy's Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

her in their frenzy of excitement at being released for their morning walk.
    “Cool it, guys,” she said, rubbing first one importunate gray head and then the other before setting off along the driveway with a sharp whistle that brought them to heel. She didn’t really feel like walking this morning, but their early-morning outing was the highlight of the dogs’ day, and she hadn’t been able to bring herself to disappoint them, so here she was. She was tired, bone-tired, and not just because she had gotten so little sleep the night before. What she was suffering from was not so much physical as spiritual exhaustion. She was tired of her life. Desperately tired of it, and she could see no way out. She was trapped, a prisoner with no hope of parole. The knowledge sucked the energy from her.
    Feathers of fine white mist rose lazily from the ground as she turned off the driveway and headed down toward the woods that covered the hillside that made up the bulk of the property. The woods were thick and overgrown except where paths had been worn or cut through them, and she generally confined her walk to a favorite path that wound down and around to the gatekeeper’s cottage before meandering back up again. As she reached the path and began to follow it downhill, she flipped the hood of her anorak over her head. It was appreciably darker and colder here where the sun didn’t quite reach. But dense as the treetops were, a few stray beams managed to penetrate the gloom with slanting bands of soft yellow light. The effect was eerily beautiful, and it was one of the reasons that Maggy had originally chosen the woods for these early-morning rambles. No matter how bad her life might seem, the sheer beauty of the earth never failed to lightenher heart. She felt the magic begin to work this morning, too, as some of her sense of hopelessness eased.
    Scorning the path, Bridey and Seamus bounded ahead through the undergrowth, barking joyously as they chased squirrels and leaves and shadows and anything else that had the poor judgment to move. They knew the morning routine as well as she did, and Maggy had no fear that they would get lost. Most of the twenty acres of the estate was surrounded by a three-foot-high stone wall, with another two feet of iron fence set into the top of that. As the high-profile owner and publisher of Kentucky Today , the venerable part-gossip, part-news magazine that had been commenting on personalities and events of interest to Kentuckians for nearly a hundred years, Lyle was careful about security, and the fence and gated entry were part of his precautions. There were always threats, especially when Lyle personally wrote editorials espousing unpopular views. But he had not written any new ones lately, and so, with just the normal degree of hate simmering in the minds and hearts of Lyle’s enemies, Maggy really had no fears of being attacked on her own property.
    Which was why, when she saw the glowing red tip of a cigarette in a patch of shadows near the path, she kept walking toward it for a couple of paces before registering that, yes, there really was a man leaning against the trunk of a large ginkgo tree, taking a long drag from a cigarette as he watched her approach.
    Maggy stopped dead. In the distance, the dogs started to bay as one or the other of them scented a rabbit and took off in hot pursuit. Where she was, the woods seemed very still suddenly. Not so much as a leaf rustled.
    “Good morning, Magdalena.”
    She had known who it was even before he stepped away from the tree and spoke: Nick. Her heart, which had speeded up in response to fear of the unknown, continued to pound with another kind of fear as Nick tossed his cigarette on the damp path, crushed it out with asneakered foot, and came toward her. Fine beads of moisture glinted in his black hair as he walked through a shaft of gossamer sunlight that shimmered between them. More drops of moisture gleamed on the shoulders of his tan car