Sacred: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

devastated a girl on their own. First, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and then a boy she’d dated in college died.”
    “How?” Angie said.
    “He drowned. Accidentally. But Desiree, you see, had been, well, insulated most of her life by her mother and me. Her entire existence up until her mother’s death had been charmed, untouched by even minor tragedy. She always considered herself strong. Probably because she was headstrong and stubborn like me and she confused that with the kind of mettle one develops under extreme opposition. So, you understand, she was never tested. And then with her mother dead and her father lying in intensive care, I could see that she was determined to bear up. And I think she would have. But then came the cancer revelation followed almost immediately by the death of a former suitor. Boom. Boom. Boom.”
    According to Trevor, Desiree began to disintegrate under the weight of the three tragedies. She became an insomniac, suffered drastic weight loss, and rarely spoke as much as a full sentence on any given day.
    Her father urged her to seek counseling, but she broke each of the four appointments he made for her. Instead, as Lurch, the Weeble, and a few friends informed him, she was sighted spending most of her days downtown. She’d drive the white Saab Turbo her parents had given her as a graduation present to a garage on Boylston Street and spend her days walking the downtown and Back Bay greens of the Emerald Necklace, the seven-mile park system that surrounds the city. She once walked as far as a stretch of the Fens behind the Museum of Fine Arts, but usually, Lurch informed Trevor, she preferred the leafy mall that cuts through the center of Commonwealth Avenue and the Public Garden that abuts it.
    It was in the Garden, she told Trevor, that she met a man who, she claimed, finally provided some of the solace and grace she’d been searching for throughout the late summer and early autumn. The man, seven or eight years older than her, was named Sean Price, and he too had been rocked by tragedy. His wife and five-year-old daughter, he told Desiree, had died the previous year when a faulty air conditioning unit in their Concord home had leaked carbon monoxide into the house while Sean was out of town on business.
    Sean Price found them the next night, Desiree told Trevor, when he returned home from his trip.
    “That’s a long time,” I said, looking up from my notes.
    Angie raised her head from Jay Becker’s reports. “What’s that?”
    “In my notes, I have it that Desiree told Trevor that Sean Price discovered his wife and child almost twenty-four hours after they died.”
    She reached across the table, took her own notes from where they lay by my elbow, leafed through them. “Yup. That’s what Trevor said.”
    “Seems a long time,” I said. “A young woman—a businessman’s wife and probably upscale if they were living in Concord—she and her five-year-old daughter aren’t seen for twenty-four hours and nobody notices?”
    “Neighbors are less and less friendly and less and less interested in their fellow neighbors these days.”
    I frowned. “But, okay, maybe in the inner city or the lower-middle-class burbs. But this happened in Concord. Land of Victorians and carriage houses and the Old North Bridge. Main Street, lily-white, upper-class America. Sean Price’s child is five years old. She doesn’t have day care? Or kindergarten or dance classes or something? His wife doesn’t go to aerobics or have a job or a lunch date with another upper-middle-class young wife?”
    “It bugs you.”
    “A bit. It doesn’t feel right.”
    She leaned back in her chair. “We in the trade call that feeling a ‘hunch.’”
    I bent over my notes, pen in hand. “How do you spell that? With an ‘h,’ right?”
    “No, a ‘p’ for pinhead.” She tapped her pen against her notes, smiled at me. “Check out Sean Price,” she said as she scribbled the same words on the upper