Now You See Her Read Online Free PDF Page A

how utterly exhausted she was. She closed her eyes. Almost immediately, the phone started ringing.
    Marcy’s eyes popped open, her head swiveling toward the sound, a new thought piercing her brain, like an ice pick to the back of her skull.
    Could it be Devon? she was thinking as she stared at the ringing black telephone. Was it possible she’d been aware of her mother’s presence all along, that she’d spied Marcy through the pub’s window at the precise moment Marcy had spotted her? Had she watched her mother’s frantic search from a safe distance, and had she been thinking of coming forward when Vic Sorvino suddenly appeared? Had she followed them to the bus terminal, watched them board the bus back to Dublin, then started calling every first-class hotel in the city in a desperate effort to track her mother down? Was it possible?
    Slowly, carefully, her heart careening wildly between her chest and her throat, Marcy removed the receiver from its carriage and lifted it to her ear.
    “Marcy? Marcy, are you there?” Peter’s voice filled the large, elegant room. “Marcy? I can hear you breathing. Answer me.”
    Tears of disappointment filled Marcy’s eyes. “Hello, Peter,” she said. It was all she could think of to say to the man with whom she’d shared the last twenty-five years of her life. “How are you?”
    “How am I?”
he asked incredulously.
“I’m
fine. It’s
you
I’m worried about. I’ve called half a dozen times, left messages.…”
    “How did you know where to find me?”
    “Your sister called,” he told her. “She’s frantic, says you’vegone off to Ireland by yourself, that you think you’ve seen—” He broke off, took a second to regroup. “I remembered the name of the hotel in Dublin where we …”
    “Were supposed to stay together?” Marcy finished for him.
    A second’s silence, then, slowly, cautiously, almost lovingly, “You have to come home, Marcy. You have to come home now.”
    “Why?”
    “Why?”
    “I saw her, Peter. I saw Devon.”
    He sighed. “This is crazy talk, Marcy. You know that.”
    “I know what I saw.”
    “You only
think
you saw Devon,” Peter told her gently, the hint of impatience in his voice tempered by his obvious concern. Marcy could almost feel him shaking his head.
    Poor Peter, she thought. After all these years, he still had no idea what to make of her. “I
did
see her.”
    “You saw a girl who looked like her.…”
    “No.”
    “A pretty girl with long dark hair and high cheekbones, who maybe walked the way Devon walked and held her cigarette the same way.…”
    “I saw Devon.”
    “Just like you saw her all those other times you were so convinced?”
    “This time is different.”
    “This time is exactly the same,” Peter insisted. “Marcy, please. I thought we got past this.”
    “No,
you
got past it.”
    “Because I had to. Because there was no other choice. Our daughter is dead, Marcy.”
    “They never found her body.”
    Another silence. Another sigh. “So, you’re saying … what? That she faked her own death …?”
    “Maybe. Or maybe it was an accident and she saw an opportunity …”
    “An opportunity for what, for God’s sake? Why would she do something like this? Why would she let us think she was dead?”
    “You know why!” Marcy shouted, silencing him. She imagined Peter hanging his head, closing his eyes.
    “How did she get there?” he asked quietly.
    “What?”
    “She didn’t have a passport. She didn’t have any money.…”
    Marcy brushed aside these new questions with an impatient wave of her hand. “She could have had money put away. She could have arranged for a passport. She had friends, Peter, friends we knew nothing about.…”
    “Think about what you’re saying, Marcy.”
    “I don’t have to think about it,” Marcy insisted, refusing to be swayed. “Our daughter is alive, Peter. She’s here in Ireland.”
    “And you just happened to run into her.”
    “She walked right by