Night Night, Sleep Tight Read Online Free PDF Page B

images, there were bruises under her eye and over her jaw, livid against skin that was otherwise flawless as bone china. She answered each question posed to her in a calm, quiet voice. It had been odd to see Sy Sterling, whom Deirdre had known forever as her father’s best friend, performing his courtroom role on TV, a scaled-down Perry Mason.
    “Why did you stay with a man who beat you?” Sy had asked, just a trace of his Russian accent surfacing: bitt you .
    “I was afraid,” Bunny said, staring down and kneading her hands together. “I had to do anything and everything he wanted or he said he’d ruin my face. He said I’d be sorry if I ever tried to leave him. He said if I told anyone, he’d get me where it hurt most. I knew what he meant.” She’d paused and her audience, including Deirdre, had leaned into the silence. “My daughter. He would have killed us both.”
    Deirdre had heard Bunny and Tito fighting some nights when she’d slept over. Angry shouting matches. Breaking glass. She could easily imagine herself in Joelen’s place, listening to Tito’s escalating threats and growing more and more terrified. Formulating a plan. Creeping downstairs to the kitchen. Pulling open a drawer and selecting the longest, sharpest, pointiest knife she could find. As she climbed the stairs, had Joelen thought about what would happen after? Did she hesitate as she approached the closed bedroom door? Did she have second thoughts as she stood in the hallway, screwing up her courage? Something must have spurred her to act at the moment that she did. Maybe it had been the sound of furniture breaking. Or a fist slammed into a wall. Or Bunny crying out.
    It hadn’t taken the coroner’s jury long. After a few hours they ruled. Justifiable homicide. It wasn’t not guilty, but it wasn’t guilty, either. The verdict kept Joelen from being indicted for murder.
    A real “David slays Goliath tale” was the verdict rendered by the TV newscaster Deirdre watched, lying on the living room sofa recovering from her first operation. She tried to call Joelen after the hearing but no one answered. She wrote to her but got no response. She begged her parents to drive her over there but they said there was no point to that. Bunny had left town. It was as if Deirdre’s friend had vanished into thin air.
    For months after, Bunny Nichol kept an uncharacteristically low profile too. Then came the news that she was back in town and married to a handsome young TV soap opera star, Derek Hutchinson. A few months later, the papers ran a photograph of the happy couple with a baby. Reporters were a tad more discreet in those days: Deirdre didn’t remember the press commenting on the obvious fact that Bunny Nichol had been pregnant when she’d had her final fight with Antonio Acevedo. Pregnant when she testified on nationwide TV. No one was surprised that the baby boy, with his head of dark hair, olive skin, and dark eyes, resembled Antonio Acevedo a whole lot more than he resembled Derek Hutchinson, who was slender and fair. But those rumors were a gentle breeze compared to the shit storm that got kicked up a few years later when Derek Hutchinson died of AIDS, one of the sad first wave that took out so many of Hollywood’s most talented.
    Deirdre was finally well enough to return to school near the end of the academic year. At least she walked back into class on crutches, not in a wheelchair. Even the high and mighty Marianne Wasserman was friendly and solicitous, organizing a posse of her friends to carry Deirdre’s books between classes. It made Deirdre queasy now, remembering the small amount of celebrity status she’d found herself basking in simply because she’d been Joelen’s friend. Even as she’d traded on her friendship with Joelen, it had occurred to her how toxic notoriety could be.

 
    Chapter 6
    I n the late afternoon, the pool was still cordoned off. Officers were searching the bushes surrounding the yard. Again. They’d