The Beach House Read Online Free PDF Page A

reflection. It was a surreal moment, one fragmented by time. Back here in her old room, she half expected to see the skinny, stringy-haired child that had once stared at this mirror with tear-filled eyes. That poor, pitiful girl.
    By Southern belle standards, Cara wasn’t considered the beauty her mother was. All Cara’s parts were too big. At five feet ten inches, she was too tall, her body too thin and her chest too flat. Her feet were enormous and her lips too full for her narrow face. And her coloring was all wrong. She used to curse God for His mistake of giving her her father’s tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed genes and Palmer their mother’s small-boned, blond-and-blue-eyed genes.
    Lovie, however, adored her daughter’s dark looks and used to call Cara her Little Tern because of her dark, shining eyes and her glistening, black-crested cap. And sometimes, teasingly, she called her a Laughing Gull, another black-headed bird but with a loud, cackling call.
    Cara leaned closer to the mirror and brought her hand up to smooth the flesh of her cheeks. All nicknames aside, the South of the sixties and seventies was not an easy place for a skinny, unattractive girl to grow up in. But this ugly duckling grew up to be a dark swan. Cara’s once-mocked gangling looks had matured into what colleagues now referred to as “strikingly attractive” and her previously scorned aggressive intelligence was described as “the appealing confidence of a successful career woman.”
    Tonight, however, even those descriptions felt woefully out-of-date. She was neither a child nor a young woman. In her reflection she saw the new fragility of her skin, the fine lines at the eyes and corners of her mouth and the first strands of gray at the temple. She thought with chagrin that she was no longer striking nor successful. Rather, she appeared as tired and sagging as the old beach house.
    I’ll just lie down for a minute, she told herself, turning away from the mirror and slipping from her clothes. She left them in a pile on the floor. Wearing only her undies and a T-shirt, she pulled back the covers and stretched out upon the soft mattress, yawning. Just long enough to rest my eyes.
    The old linen was crisp, and ocean breezes, balmy and moist, whisked over her bare skin. Her mind slowly drifted and her eyelids grew heavy as she felt herself letting go, bit by bit. The life she’d led mere hours ago seemed as distant from her now as the city of Chicago. As her mind stilled, the quiet deepened further. Outside her window, she listened to the ocean’s steady, rhythmic motion, lulling her to sleep, like the gentle rocking of a mother’s arms.
    Her mind floated as helplessly as a piece of driftwood through the turbulence of the past few days’ events that had sent her on this journey. It began on Tuesday morning when her office phone rang and she was invited, without warning, to Mr. David Alexander’s office. Dave was executive vice president of the chopping block. Everyone knew that an invitation to his office was the equivalent of an invitation for a long car ride in the Mafia.
    Why didn’t they just shoot her, she’d wondered wildly as she rode the elevator to the thirtieth floor. She was a workaholic mainlining hours of work and she was about to be cut off from her supply. She’d lost a major account, but that happened in the advertising business. She had a great track record. Wasn’t she already hot on the trail of another account? As she walked through the halls she was aware of an unusual, tense silence in the spread of gray cubicles and cramped offices broken only by an occasional ring of the phone followed by a muffled sob. Empty file boxes lined the halls, and most frightening of all, armed guards stood by the elevators. She swallowed hard and walk stiff-leggedly through the maze of halls and rooms. The rumors were true, after all. Heads were rolling on a mass scale.
    By the time she’d arrived in Mr. Alexander’s office, her