Free On the Street Where you Live by Mary Higgins Clark

another chef he’d better take a cooking class so he can step in and take over the kitchen himself.” Natalie shrugged and grinned. “I feel better talking to you. You can’t have had lunch yet. Let’s go get something to eat.”
    â€œI was going to send out for a sandwich.”
    â€œNo you’re not. We’re going to eat at The Old Mill. Come on. I need company.”
    When they went out to the street, she tucked her hand under his arm.
    â€œPeople may talk,” he suggested, smiling.
    â€œOh, so what? They all resent me anyhow. I toldBob we should have moved. This town is too small for me and his first wife.”
    As he held the car door open for Natalie and she ducked her head to get in, sunbeams made her long blond hair glisten and sparkle.
    For a reason unknown to him the prosecutor’s statement raced through Will’s mind. “Strands of long blond hair were found on the remains.”
    Bob Frieze, like his trophy wife, was known to have a roving eye.
    Especially for beautiful women with long blond hair.

fourteen ________________
    D R. L ILLIAN M ADDEN, a prominent psychologist who used hypnosis regularly in her practice, firmly believed in reincarnation and would regress appropriate patients to previous lifetimes. She believed that emotional trauma suffered in other lives might be the source of emotional pain in present-day experience.
    Very much in demand on the speakers’ circuit, she expounded a favorite premise, that the people we know in this life were most likely people we knew in other lives. “I do not mean that your husband was your husband three hundred years ago,” she would tell her enthralled listeners, “but I do believe he mayhave been your best friend. In the same way, a person with whom you have had a problem may also have been an adversary in another life.”
    A childless widow with her home and office in Belmar, a town bordering Spring Lake, she had heard about the discovery of Martha Lawrence’s body the night before and experienced the communal sorrow that afflicted the residents of all the nearby towns.
    The idea that a grandchild was not safe while jogging on a summer morning seemed incomprehensible to all of them. To find that the slain body of Martha Lawrence had been buried so near her grandparents’ home convinced everyone that someone who had seemed trustworthy must be guilty of the crime. Someone who conceivably would be welcome in any one of their homes.
    After she heard the report, Lillian Madden, a lifelong insomniac, had spent sleepless hours meditating on the finality of the tragic discovery. She knew that Martha’s family had undoubtedly still been hoping against hope that one day, miraculously, she would return unharmed.
    Instead they now lived with the cruel knowledge that any number of times they had passed by the property where her body was buried.
    Four and a half years had passed. Had Martha returned in a new incarnation? Did the baby just born to Martha’s older sister house the soul that had at one time dwelt in Martha’s body?
    Lillian Madden believed it was possible. Her prayer for the Lawrence family was that they mightsense that in welcoming and loving the baby they might also be welcoming Martha home.
    Her morning schedule of patients began at 8:00 A.M. , an hour before her secretary, Joan Hodges, came in. It was noon before Dr. Madden talked to Joan at her desk in the reception room.
    Joan, dressed in a tailored black pantsuit that showed off her recently achieved size 12, did not hear her come in. She was pushing back a strand of frosted blond hair from her forehead with one hand and scribbling a message with the other.
    â€œAnything important?” Dr. Madden asked.
    Startled, Joan looked up. “Oh, good morning, Doctor. I don’t know how important they are, but you’re not going to like these messages,” she said bluntly. A forty-four-year-old grandmother, Joan