What Came Before He Shot Her Read Online Free PDF

married twice. Once a widow and now a divorcée, she liked to say that she’d done her time—with one winner and one utter loser—and now her second husband was doing his. She didn’t
mind
men, but she’d learned to see them as good merely for relieving certain physical needs.
    When those needs came upon her, Kendra had no diffi culty finding a man happy to accommodate her. An evening out with her best girlfriend was sufficient to take care of this, for at forty years of age, Kendra was tawny, exotic, and willing to use her looks to get what she wanted, which was a bit of fun with no strings attached. With her career plans in place, she had no room in her life for a love-struck male with anything more on his mind than sex with appropriate precautions taken.
    At the point when Kendra swung her car right to the narrow garage in front of her house, Joel and Toby—having returned from their outing to the Meanwhile Gardens duck pond—had been sitting in the frigid cold for an additional hour, and both of them were numb around the bottom. Kendra didn’t see her nephews on her top front step, largely because the streetlamp in Edenham Way had been burnt out since the previous October, with no sign of anyone’s having a plan to replace it. Instead, what she saw was someone’s discarded shopping trolley blocking access to her garage and filled to the brim with that person’s belongings.
    At first it seemed to Kendra that these were goods meant for the charity shop, and while she didn’t appreciate her neighbours dropping off their discards in front of her house instead of carting them up to the Harrow Road, she wasn’t one to turn goods away if there was a possibility that they might sell. So when she got out of the car to pull the trolley to one side, she was still in the good humour that sprang from having had a successful afternoon giving demonstration sports massages at a gym built under the Westway Flyover in the Portobello Green Arcade.
    That was when she saw the boys, their suitcases, and the carrier bags.
    Instantly, Kendra felt dread surge up from her stomach, and realisation followed in a rush.
    She unlocked the garage and shoved open the door without a word to her nephews. She understood what was about to happen, and the understanding prompted her to curse, her voice soft enough to ensure that the boys couldn’t hear her, but loud enough to give herself at least a modicum of the satisfaction that comes with cursing in the first place.
    She chose the words
shit
and
that goddamn cow
, and once she said them, she climbed back into the Fiat and pulled it into the garage, all the time thinking furiously of what she could possibly do to avoid having to deal with what her mother had just thrust upon her. She was able to come up with nothing.
    By the time she’d parked the car and gone around to the back of it to drag her massage table from the boot, Joel and Toby had left their perch and come to join her. They hesitated at the corner of the house, Joel at the front and Toby his usual shadow.
    Joel said to Kendra without hello or preamble, “Gran say she got to fix up a house first, for us to come to live in in Jamaica. She sendin for us when she got it fixed. She say we’re meant to wait for her here.”
    And when Kendra didn’t answer because, despite her dread, her nephew’s words and his hopeful tone made her eyes smart at her mother’s base cruelty, Joel went on even more eagerly, saying, “How you been, Aunt Ken? C’n I help you wiv dat?”
    Toby said nothing. He hung back and danced a bit on his toes, looking solemn and like a bizarre ballerina doing a solo in a production involving the sea. “Why the hell’s he wearing that thing?” Kendra asked Joel with a nod at his brother.
    “Th’ life ring? It’s wha’ he likes jus’ now, innit. Gran gave it him for Christmas, remember? She said in Jamaica he c’n—”
    “I know what she said,” Kendra cut in sharply, and the sudden anger she felt was