Wild Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

leaping out of bushes.” She winced for effect, and Jay was already putting the camera down. Most people just needed the domino effect explained to them. How one picture could bring down her whole world. “I came here—”
    “To write about the murder.” Monica didn’t correct him; it seemed like too much effort. “I know. Gwen said. My dad was at The Pour House that night, with my uncle and a bunch of his friends. I bet you could talk to him. I bet you could talk to all of them!”
    “That’s great, Jay,” she lied. It wasn’t great. The thought made her nauseous. But the reality was, talking to people who’d been there that night was exactly what she needed to do. In her last book, Wild Child , she’d just opened a vein and bled all over the page, but she was only six the night of the shooting. And her memories were hazy, most of them willingly buried. She was going to have to talk to some people who remembered the event better than she did.
    And she had no doubt this town was going to love that. If there was one universal in this world, it was humanity’s love of scandal and suffering.
    “And I’ll keep that in mind, but I came down to see if there were any messages. If anyone called.”
    “No calls. But here.” Jay held out another folded piece of stationery. Notes. She was passing notes with a man named Jackson Davies.
    Sometimes her life seemed weird even to her.
    Dinner will be at six , the note said. Please join me for a cocktail at five .
    His address was written at the bottom.
    Thank you, I’ll see you at five , she wrote, folded the note, and handed it to Jay. Who, as solemnly as if she’d handed him the Treaty of Versailles, took it from her, setting it on the edge of the desk.
    “I’ll have someone run this over to him,” he said, confirming that, yes, she’d slipped down a rabbit hole and gone back in time.
    Monica thanked him and left, wondering what she was going to wear.
    And what she would do with the damn dog.
    A half hour later, the doorbell rang, a gong that echoed through the house. Jackson sprinted down the stairs and slid across the foyer to check his look in the mirror over the buffet in the dining room. He patted down his hair and straightened his tie. It had been a drama picking out that tie, but in the end he’d gone for the yellow. Suddenly he wished he’d picked the blue.
    For a moment, feeling strange and disjointed, he wished he could slip out the back. Across the garden to the fields past the trees. He’d just keep walking. Across the border into Mississippi. He’d change his name. Change his whole story. Get blind drunk, have sex with a woman he didn’t know. Start a fight.
    He’d never been in a fight. Wasn’t that weird? Most men had been in a fight by the time they were twenty-nine, right? He was totally missing out.
    The doorbell gonged again.
    Right. Real life. Dinner and the salvation of Bishop, Arkansas .
    He stepped into the hallway and through the warped glass of the windows framing the door he saw a thin figure, wearing a skirt. A woman. Interesting . And she was alone, it would seem.
    Marianne, their housekeeper, had made way too much food.
    He opened the door. “Welcome—”
    The words died on his lips. It was a beautiful woman—more than beautiful, actually. She was erotic in her black skirt with the red belt and the green blouse that hugged her waist and her lush breasts, inviting his eyes and hands to do the same. It was a trick some women knew, how to stay totally covered, but utterly suggestive all the same. He loved that trick, highly approved of that trick. She wore red shoes, high heels with peekaboo toes.
    He approved of the shoes, too.
    Jackson didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about all the sex he wasn’t having in this town that expected him to be father figure and monk, rolled into one. It would send him over the edge if he did. But looking at this woman, and the bright pink of her toenail polish, he was painfully,