Tell Me No Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page B

developing. No, she wouldn’t do this, Jess thought, scanning the courtroom, a dreaded tingling creeping in her arms and legs. She fought the urge to flee.
    Calm down, she castigated herself silently, feeling her breathing constrict, her hands grow clammy, her underarms become moist. Why now? she wondered, fighting the growing panic, trying to will herself back to normalcy. Why was this happening now?
    She forced her eyes back to the woman juror, who was leaning forward in her chair. As if aware of Jess’s renewed interest and determined not to be intimidated by it, the woman turned to look her squarely in the eye.
    Jess caught the woman’s gaze with her own, held it suspended for an instant, then closed her eyes with relief. What had she been thinking of? she wondered, feeling the muscles in her back start to uncramp. What could have possibly triggered such an association? The woman looked like no one she knew, no one she had ever known. Certainly nothing at all like the woman she had fleetingly imagined her to be, Jess thought, feeling foolish and a bit ashamed.
    No, nothing remotely like her mother at all.
    Jess lowered her head so that her chin almost disappeared into the pink collar of her cotton blouse. It had been eight years since her mother disappeared. Eight years sinceher mother had left the house to keep a scheduled doctor’s appointment and was never seen again. Eight years since the police gave up searching for her and declared her the probable victim of foul play.
    In the first few days, months, even years after her mother disappeared, Jess had often thought she’d seen her mother’s face in a crowd. It used to happen all the time: She’d be grocery shopping and her mother would be pushing an overflowing cart down the next aisle; she’d be at a baseball game when she’d hear her mother’s distinctive voice cheering for the Cubs from her seat on the other side of Wrigley Field. Her mother was the woman behind the newspaper at the back of the bus, the woman in the front seat of the taxi going the other way, the woman struggling to catch up to her dog as they ran along the waterfront.
    As the years progressed, the sightings had diminished in frequency. Still, for a long while, Jess had been the victim of nightmares and panic attacks, attacks that struck whenever, wherever, attacks so virulent they robbed her of all feeling in her limbs, all strength in her muscles. They would start with a mild tingling sensation in her arms and legs and develop into virtual paralysis as waves of nausea swept over her. They would end—sometimes in minutes, sometimes after hours—with her sitting powerless, overwhelmed, defeated, her body bathed in sweat.
    Gradually, painfully, like someone learning to walk again after a stroke, Jess had regained her equilibrium, her confidence, her self-esteem. She had stopped expecting her mother to come walking through the front door, stopped jumping every time the phone rang, expecting the voice onthe other end to be hers. The nightmares had stopped. The panic attacks had ceased. Jess had promised herself that she would never be that vulnerable, that powerless, again.
    And now the familiar tingle had returned to her arms and legs.
    Why now? Why today?
    She knew why.
    Rick Ferguson.
    Jess watched him push through the doors of her memory, his cruel grin surrounding her like a noose around her neck. “It’s not such a great idea to get on my bad side,” she heard him say, his voice tight, his hands forming fists at his sides. “People who annoy me have a way of … disappearing.”
    Disappearing.
    Like her mother.
    Jess tried to refocus, concentrate all her attention on what Judge Earl Harris was saying. But Rick Ferguson kept positioning himself directly in front of the prosecutor’s table, his brown eyes daring her to provoke him into action.
    What was it about her and men with brown eyes? Jess wondered, a collage of brown-eyed images filling her brain: Rick Ferguson, Greg Oliver,