The Reunion Read Online Free PDF Page A

later.”
    Carolyn sensed his impatience. She swung a leg over both of his to straddle him, seductively wiggling her bottom as she settled in his lap. “Avondale in Nichols Hills?” She brushed her lips along his neck. “Are you sure that’s the right address?”
    â€œJesus Christ, Carolyn, I’m a cop! Yes, I’m sure it’s right! I followed her home from the mall last night.”
    Carolyn’s eyes grew wide. “What does she look like?”
    He brusquely clutched the back of her blue jeans to pull her against his growing hardness. He lowered his head to her neck and began to nibble. “Nothing like you, baby, nothing like you,” he whispered.
    Carolyn rolled her head back and seductively wet her lips with a wickedness that surprised her. She started to grind. “You want that?”
    He grunted his appreciation.
    Although she’d thought herself capable of paying for his information in any coin, even the sex he craved, she was struck by a momentary flash of fear and began to tremble. It was a quake the policeman would misjudge as passion, but she knew it to be a jolt from the depths of her subconscious—a physical reminder of the person she had allowed herself to become to satisfy this cruel obsession.
    â€œDoes the woman live there alone?” she asked as she pushed herself against him more deliberately now.
    The cop’s face was still buried in her neck. “No. There’s two of them,” he replied in a husky voice. “The husband’s a doctor. Ear, nose, and throat is what it said in the phone book.”
    Her hands were wrapped around his neck. His shirt was drenched. She could feel the muscles tensing in his shoulders.
    â€œIf it’s Nichols Hills, it must be a big spread.”
    His breath was erratic. “Yeah. Mansion. Big iron gate, real money.”
    ***
    An hour later, as she left for work, Carolyn rolled down the car window, letting the cool evening air shake the last trace of dampness from her long blonde hair. She could quit her job now; there was no reason to stay. She counted the days in her head. It was Friday, but after five o’clock. They wouldn’t get her two week notice until Monday. That would put her last day in the third week of May. She shook her head. No, that was too long. She couldn’t last another day in that mindless clerical job. She would quit, effective immediately.
    Carolyn pulled into her numbered slot in the employee’s lot behind the hospital. Deaconess was a hodgepodge of wings and additions, but the only structures of any interest to her were the ones that were no longer there. For those who knew where to look, the foundations were still visible in the empty field adjacent to the hospital, six barren slabs of cement, cracked and long-hidden by the creeping strands of Bermuda grass. Those slabs were the last remnants of the Deaconess Home for Unwed Mothers, the place where Carolyn was born.
    Before 1969, the boot camp-style medical facility was Oklahoma’s only clearinghouse for single girls who found themselves in a family way. A young woman could stay in the barrack-style dormitories during the final months of pregnancy, away from the glaring, accusatory eyes of family and neighbors. The Free Methodist order promised each of the young mothers peace of mind, and an assurance from God that every baby would be placed with a loving family. For Carolyn, it didn’t quite work out that way.
    It was the summer between second and third grade that Carolyn noticed the change. Her adoptive mother became an insomniac who clanked around the house at all hours of the night. She cleaned, did laundry, anything to keep away the monsters that stalked her dreams. By Thanksgiving, her mother was a glassy-eyed stranger, slipping ever further into her own dark world, a place too terrifying to be shared with a little girl.
    The trauma of her mother’s illness climaxed in December, during