Free Red by Erica Spindler Page A

take care of herself, no one else would. And as much as she loved her mother, she couldn’t help her, couldn’t save her from the fate she had resigned herself to.
    Becky Lynn leaned her head against the tub-back and pictured the places in her magazines, clean and lovely, populated by beautiful smiling people. She pictured the brilliant sun and the warm breeze, imagining both against her skin. It never rained in those places. There wasn’t any dirt, nor the lingering smell of sweat and rotting fields. In the places of her magazines, boys didn’t hurt girls just because they were ugly and poor.
    She would go there, to California; she would start a new life.
    Becky Lynn pulled the stopper from the drain and stood. Shivering, she dried herself, then wrapped the threadbare towel around her. She went to the bathroom door and cracked it open. The house slept. In the next room, her father snored.
    Even though he was impossible to wake out of his drunken slumber, Becky Lynn tiptoed across the hallway and into her room. She dressed quickly and quietly, then threw her remaining clothes into a duffel bag, her few knickknacks and toiletries, she retrieved her toothbrush, the shampoo and toothpaste. She’d saved everything she’d made at the Cut ‘n Curl over the past couple of years, everything left over after her father had taken his share, and hidden it under a loose floorboard. Careful not to make a sound, she retrieved and counted it, then stuffed it into her jeans pocket.
    Nearly two hundred dollars. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
    She hesitated outside her parents’ door, then crept into their room. Her father’s slacks lay in a heap on the floor. She picked them up and searched one pocket, then the other. Her fingers closed over a couple crumpled bills. Hands shaking, she pulled them out. Twenties? Where had he gotten this money? she wondered. She didn’t care, he would only waste it on drink.
    She took the money, keeping one twenty and putting the other into her mother’s secret grocery stash on her way out of the house.
    At the front door, she stopped and turned back, taking one last look at the place she had called home for nearly seventeen years. She had called it home, but it had never been one. She had never been safe here, had never been loved.
    She would never be trapped again.
    As she slipped through the door, she thought she heard the sound of weeping—her mother’s weeping. Becky Lynn paused, her chest tightening. “Mama,” she whispered, taking an involuntary step back inside.
    The smell of whiskey filled her head, a sense of smothering gray with it. She shook her head and her senses cleared, a familiar picture filling her head. Of blue skies and palm trees, of brilliant sun and smiling faces. Becky Lynn squared her shoulders. She couldn’t help her mother, couldn’t save her, no matter how much she wanted to.
    The time had come to save herself.
    Hiking her duffel bag higher on her shoulder, Becky Lynn turned her back on the house and life she had always known, and stepped out into the cold, black night.

Book Two
Jack

7
    Los Angeles, California
1972
    T he way eight-year-old Jack Gallagher figured it, women were about the best things in the whole world. He loved the way they smelled, sweet like flowers, fresh like sunshine. He loved the way they felt, soft and warm and smooth; he loved their curves, their pillows of perfumed flesh, loved the way they spoke to him, in voices that were gentle and mostly lilting.
    Jack’s earliest remembrances were not of his mother, his crib or toys, but of the changing parade of girl-models who had cuddled and stroked him, the girls who had given him kisses and candy, who had wiped his baby tears and brought him gifts.
    Many a time as an infant and toddler he had nestled his face into a pair of smooth, soft breasts, and basked in the pure joy of it. His mother, the most wonderful of all the wonderful