The Good Partner Read Online Free PDF

and TV business, Sarah guarded her privacy well. Or thought she did.
    He could have found out from the article in TV Guide that mentioned she lived in Malibu. Which wasn’t quite true. Strictly speaking, the house was in Pacific Palisades, close to the Los Angeles city limits, but that probably didn’t sound quite as glamorous to Josephine Q. Public, Ottumwa, Iowa, who liked to read about actors and actresses in TV Guide.
    All in all, Sarah supposed, the secrecy was probably something of an illusion. When it came down to it, no address was that hard to come by in Hollywood. Everything was for sale.
    Stop worrying, she told herself, folding the letter and putting it back in its envelope. There are millions of perverts out there drooling over actors and rock stars, and this is probably just one of them. A harmless one, more likely than not.
    She imagined some overweight, pimply nerd with Coke-bottle glasses, dandruff and halitosis masturbating in a candlelit room with nude pictures of her plastered all over the walls. Somehow, it wasn’t a comforting image.
    Sarah slipped the letter in her purse and decided to take a walk on the beach. She slid open the door, walked down the wooden steps from the deck to lawn, then down the stairs carved in the rock. At the bottom stood a gate made of six-foot-high metal railings, painted black, all with very sharp points. It didn’t offer much security, though, Sarah realized. Anybody who really wanted to could climb up the rocks beside it easily enough.
    On the beach, she slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes in the sand. Though the sun was only a white ball through the haze, its brightness made Sarah squint and reach in her purse for her sunglasses.
    There was hardly anyone around. For Sarah, the mid-sixties was warm enough for sunbathing, but it was chilly to the natives. Also, while this area of the beach wasn’t exactly private property, access was difficult because of the solid wall of houses, flanked on both sides by low-rise office buildings.
    Out toward the horizon, water and sky merged in a white glare. A light ocean breeze ruffled Sarah’s cap of short blond hair. It would soon dispel the sea-mist. She walked with her hands in her pockets, eyes scanning the beach for interesting shells and pebbles.
    To the north, the mountains were almost lost in the haze, and to the south she could just about make out the Santa Monica Pier with its restaurants and amusement palaces. Funnily enough, it reminded Sarah of childhood holidays in Blackpool, staying at Mrs. Fairclough’s boardinghouse. Of course, it was rarely over sixty degrees in Blackpool—more often than not it was about fifty and raining—but her mum and dad would always splurge on one good variety show at the pier theater, and it was there that her love of show business had begun. And just look at her now. Top of the world, Ma. Well, getting there, anyway. Such a long journey, such a long, long way from Blackpool to Hollywood.
    As usual, thinking of her mum and dad brought her other problem to mind: the family she had put off dealing with for too long. She hadn’t been home in two years now. Her mother was dead, had been since long before the rift, but there were still Paula, her dad and the kids. Well, she would be facing them at Christmas.
    And now, on top of everything else, the letters.
    As she walked along the edge of the beach, Sarah felt uneasy. Not for the first time these past couple of weeks did she keep looking over her shoulder. And whenever she did notice anyone walking toward her, she felt herself tense, get ready to run.
    There was something else as well. Earlier that morning, when she was coming back from her run, she had seen something flash in the sun, way up on the crest of the hills above the Coast Highway. Of course, there were a lot of houses up there, and there could be any number of explanations—windows opening, even car windshields glinting in the