Free Life Penalty by Joy Fielding

knew from all the publicity that no one would be home because of the funeral and selected his time accordingly. Break-in artists are no respecters of grief.”
    “Do you think whoever killed Cindy might have …” Gail began.
    “Unlikely,” Lieutenant Cole answered, cutting her off gently. “Very unlikely.”
    “But not impossible,” Gail stated.
    “No,” he agreed. “Not impossible.”
    “Animals,” Dave Harrington kept repeating to whoever was nearby. Gail stared blankly at her father and felt nothing. This further indignity was too far removed to touch her.
    After the police had left, and Jack was driving Jennifer over to Mark and Julie’s where it had been decided she would spend the night, Gail set about picking up the objects that had been carelessly thrown around the house. Drawers had been emptied onto the floor, coffee tables had been overturned, several little knickknacks lay broken or crushed into the carpet. The cutlery had been emptied onto the dining-room floor and discarded, silverplate not being a good enough substitute for the real thing. Gail leaned over and picked up one of the long knives, running it along the side of her finger, and was surprised a second later to see a small river of blood.
    “Gail, my God, what did you do?” Carol said urgently from somewhere beside her.
    Gail stared at her blankly, not sure how to respond.
    Ultimately, she said nothing, letting her sister and her mother lead her into the kitchen, where they washed her finger and wrapped it in a tissue.
    “I’ll put away the cutlery,” Carol said, abruptly stopping. Gail suddenly realized that the radio was missing. “Daddy’s right,” Carol continued, “people who do things like this are no better than animals. They don’t deserve to live. Somebody ought to round them up and shoot them.”
    “Carol, please,” her mother said quietly, “it doesn’t help to talk like that.”
    “It helps me,” Carol retorted sharply. “What’s the matter with some people? Don’t they have any feelings at all?”
    “Apparently not,” Gail answered in a voice so calm it surprised even her.
    “Are you all right?” Carol asked, moving very close to her. “You don’t look well. You look kind of funny. Gail, can you hear me?”
    Gail saw her sister’s lips moving and recognized the panic in her eyes, but the force of her sister’s breath against her face blocked out the words. Gail tried to get away from her sister’s concern, the touch of her hand, the feel of her eyes. Carol was taking away her air; she was giving her no room to breathe.
    Gail tried to speak, to tell Carol to please move over and give her some room, that there was notlhing wrong that a little distance wouldn’t cure, but when she opened her mouth, the same twitching that had overtaken her in the church resumed and her lips were unable to form anywords. Before she fainted, she remembered noticing that aside from the radio, the thieves had also stolen the kitchen clock right off the wall.
    “Are you okay?” her mother was asking her, sitting beside her on the bed and holding her the way she had when Gail was a little girl. Gail nodded speechlessly. “No,” her mother said, “that’s not good enough. This is your mother. Tell me what you’re feeling.”
    “I wish I could,” Gail told her honestly. “It’s like I’ve been run over by a big truck and every time I think I can stand up, it comes back and mows me down again. I feel numb from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet, but not quite numb enough. I wish I was dead,” she said simply, even objectively.
    Her mother nodded and said nothing for several minutes. “We have to go on,” she said finally. “That’s all we can do. There are other people who need you, are counting on you. Your husband. Your daughter.”
    “Jack’s a grown man,” Gail said analytically, “and Jennifer is almost a woman. They’d manage without me.”
    For the first time, Lila Harrington’s eyes grew