One of Those Malibu Nights Read Online Free PDF

to get out of the stifling small town you lived in, away from the alcoholic father, and from the worn-out, depressed mother you dread becoming?”
    A shudder shook her slender frame and she frowned. “Away from the brutality and the grinding poverty, and the stifling grayness of a life with no prospect of a silver lining. Away from the small-town high school football heroes who lied about their conquests with the shy pretty blond teenager simply to add to their own macho luster. And away from the preacher who from the pulpit kept on spelling out a life of damnation for the fallen, and then afterward would try to grope you?”
    She stopped and gave Mac that haunted look again. “Do you know what it feels like, Mr. Reilly, to wake up to the factthat in order to get out of there, there is only one thing you can sell. And that is your beauty. Because that’s all you have.”
    Her sigh dredged up like an ill wind from her past. “At least,” she said, looking squarely at him, “if I had to do it, I decided it would be to the highest bidder. There was just one rule. He had to marry me.”
    “And you stuck to your plan?”
    “I married rich men. And I kept my part of the bargain. I was a good wife for a while. But eventually they got bored with looking at me, I guess. Anyway, I had always wanted to be an actress—a movie actress. And now I have all the money in the world—and possibly even more when Ron Perrin comes through with the divorce settlement. Not that I need it. I’m successful in my own right, more successful than some men. And y’know what, Mr. Reilly? I’m still not a happy woman.”
    Her eyes met his. “You’re judging me, because I told you the truth.” She lifted a shoulder in a delicate shrug. “Obviously you don’t know what it is to have no choice.”
    Mac said nothing because it was true. Yet he understood.
    She got to her feet and went and stood close to him. “Look into my face,” she said. “What do you see written here?”
    Actually, Mac could see nothing. Although she must have been coming up to forty, there were no time wrinkles,no laughter lines, no marks of sorrow. Just a very beautiful face that photographed really well.
    “Discontent, Mr. Reilly,” she said quietly. “That’s what you see. I’m the archetypical woman who has everything. Oh, believe me, there are dozens of us in this town, maybe even hundreds. And we all have the same expression. As though life passed us by. Real life, that is.”
    She walked away, staring through the picture window at the ocean throwing itself lustily onto the shore in a flurry of spray. “But one day,” she said softly, “one day I’m going to find that ‘real’ life, y’know that?” She swung round. “I’ll be me again. Mary Allison Raycheck.”
    Mac said, “Back to that.”
    “I see you know everything about me, even my real name. I guess I should have expected that from a private investigator.”
    “Actually, your husband told me.”
    She gave a short bark of a laugh. “Of course. But then, he would, wouldn’t he?”
    She slumped onto the La-Z-Boy and flipped the lever, stretching out as it lifted into position under her long, slender limbs.
    “God, I always loved these things,” she said, half to herself. “Once, I thought the epitome of being rich was to have a leather La-Z-Boy and a coffee table from Sears with a glass top and gold legs. My, my, how times have changed.”
    A tear trickled down her lovely face and dropped with asplash off the cliff of her cheekbone onto the gray cashmere. “Now I have all this furniture an expensive decorator chose for me because it’s in perfect taste. I wear designer clothes because that’s what I’m supposed to wear. I eat the right diet at the right restaurants, attend the right parties.” She glanced despairingly Mac’s way. “You see, Mr. Reilly, what my trouble is, don’t you? I just don’t know who I am anymore. It’s still the way it’s always been. What you see