The First Wives Club Read Online Free PDF

service on time? She wanted to demand an explanation, but his distraught look stopped her.
    After all, what could be done now?
    ”I should have known that you would come, Annie. Loyal to the end.”
    His eyes filled with tears, and he patted her shoulder. Much as he might a well-behaved dog, she thought, which was what she felt like right now.
    “I’m so very sorry.”’ “Me, too. I just found out. I was in Japan. I can hardly believe it.” He stopped, and tears began to spill out of his eyes. ‘Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
    Annie didn’t know if he meant he was sorry he was crying or sorry about Cynthia, or both. There was nothing to say, so she took his hand and squeezed it. He pressed back, desperately.
    ”Annie, can I go with you?”
    “Yes, of course, Stuart.”
    “Thank you. Thank you.”
    Together they rode through the rain along the dripping Hutchison River Parkway, past the New York-bound traffic. Stuart cried for most of the trip, then was silent. By the time they reached City of Angels the rain had turned into a downpour.
    Cynthia was gone. Annie looked at the small bonsai boxtree she had been holding all morning. She placed it gently on the lowering casket and cried for her friend. I won’t let him get away with this, Cynthia.
    I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll try, Cyn.
    She stood at the graveside and watched as the shoveled mud slid onto Cynthia’s coffin.
    Elise.
    Elise walked through the drizzle as she headed downtown to Madison Avenue. It was only a quarter to eleven. She nodded at Cynthia’s brother as he emerged from a taxi outside the funeral home. A bit late wasn’t he? she thought. The whole affair was a travesty. Cynthia Griffin’s life had been summed up and disposed of in less than half an hour. And while Elise hadn’t been close to Cynthia for years, she had known her and her family well at one time. The Swanns were a part of the old guard, the Greenwich crowd, a privileged world to which Elise, also, belonged. She had always believed that Cynthia had married beneath her, and the way Gil Griffin had behaved today proved it. Poor Cynthia.
    Elise had told her driver to meet her at one at the Carlyle—who could have predicted a twenty-minute funeral?—and after the service she had no stomach to do anything other than head in the direction of the hotel where her car would eventually be waiting. At one time she could have distracted herself with shopping, but that had become boring. Besides, she couldn’t bear looking at herself in the mirror anymore. There was never any good news there. She actually avoided her reflection in the windows of the stores. That and her pain prevented her from noticing she was being followed.
    Larry Cochran tried to keep a discreet distance away. He knew his quarry was elusive and self-protective, there were few candid pictures of her, which was what would make these valuable. He walked on the opposite side of the street from her, using a zoom lens, he had already shot a whole roll of film. When they came to Seventy-ninth Street, he caught a real break when she crossed over to him, and he realized he might be able to squeeze off full-face shots.
    Maybe, if it clouded over more, she might take off her dark glasses.
    That would be a real coup.
    Looking through his lens, he saw her do just that. And there it was —her face in clear close-up! It was such a perfect face, but contorted now by so much pain that it literally took his breath away.
    He touched the shutter and found his hand was shaking. What an astonishing face! A face of desolation, a soul in the desert.
    He squeezed off two shots before she passed him and turned. She seemed not to notice. He was right behind her now, and he watched the smooth mechanism of her hips and legs as she moved. She was tall, maybe five ten and a half, but she didn’t stoop. She glided with a strong pelvic lead, like a model, her hips seemed to arrive before the rest of her.
    Larry felt a stirring in his own pelvic