Free Mortal Sin by Laurie Breton

“I’ve just been so scared. So afraid she was dead. Is he absolutely certain it was her?”
    “He says it was Kit. That’s not the name she gave him, but he insists it was her.”
    She dropped the wadded napkins onto the table. “Do you think she’ll come back? Did he offer her a job?”
    The priest shook his head. “She refused to give him an address or a phone number, and that made him suspicious. He figured she must be a runaway, and he didn’t want to get mixed up with that kind of trouble. So he told her the job was filled.”
    “A real Samaritan.”
    “Sarah, this is good news. It means Kit’s somewhere nearby, and now that we’ve wallpapered downtown Boston with her picture, more people will come forward to say they’ve seen her.” He set down his coffee cup, reached across the table as though to take her hand, then seemed to think better of it, retreating an instant before flesh would have touched flesh. “Sooner or later,” he said, returning his hands to his coffee cup, “we’ll catch up to her.”
    Discouragement, heavy and dank, flooded her. “In the meantime, what are we supposed to do?”
    He picked his cup back up, his long fingers wrapped around it. “We’ve cast our bait,” he said. “Now we do what every good fisherman does. We sit back and wait for a nibble.”
     
    Kit spent seven fruitless days looking for a job, seven days of aching feet and dashed hopes and continual rejection. She got absolutely nowhere with any of the theaters. Discouraged, she moved on to the restaurants and fast-food outlets, the dry cleaners and the copy shops. But they weren’t interested, either. After several potential employers refused to even look at her application because she hadn’t included a phone number or a home address, she wised up and fabricated them.
    She lied about her experience, said she had waitressed for two years and that she knew how to type, and how to run a cash register. After all, how hard could it be? Any idiot could make change or find the right letters on a computer keyboard. She could probably type forty words a minute with two fingers.
    But she hadn’t counted on how many other people were also looking for work, most of them overqualified and as desperate as she was. She didn’t stand a chance against some twenty-four-year-old with a master’s in English and six years of waiting tables while he put himself through school. And there wasn’t much call for unskilled labor. For even the dumbest of jobs, they wanted you to have either a college degree or experience, experience, experience.
    So with sixty-two bucks left in her pocket and a trail of rejection behind her, Kit reluctantly packed her things and checked out of the Sir Charles. It might be a dump, but it had begun to feel like home. The noisy plumbing and the paper-thin walls had become familiar. Now her stomach was empty, her money was almost gone, and she had no place to sleep tonight. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out she had a big problem.
    It was about to get bigger. As she passed a downtown restaurant, her eyes were drawn to a flyer tacked up in the window. Beneath the word MISSING, printed in huge, bold type, her own face smiled cheekily back at her.
    Kit stopped abruptly, nearly causing a multi-pedestrian pileup, and gaped in amazement at her likeness. When she recovered her wits, she ducked into a nearby alley, away from the crowds of tourists jamming the sidewalks. Heart thudding, she shoved her hair up under her knit cap and scrabbled through her backpack for her Ray-Bans. With her hair and her eyes hidden, nobody on the planet would recognize her as the kid in the dorky ninth-grade school picture.
    It didn’t take long to discover that the flyers were taped to windows from Kenmore Square to the waterfront. Kit wanted to cry. She’d never get a job now, not with her face plastered all over the city like some kidnapped kid on a milk carton. She’d have to wear a Halloween mask if she didn’t