Free Misery Loves Company by Rene Gutteridge Page B

sun glaring off the sand.
    She sat up. She was certain she’d closed the curtains last night. Then she noticed the door to her bedroom was open. She hurried over and shut it. There was no lock on her side of the door, but she leaned against it, breathing hard. She’d hoped as she wept herself to sleep last night that she’d wake up in the morning and be back home.
    Or maybe that she wouldn’t wake up at all.
    She walked as quietly as possible to the bathroom andshut the door. It didn’t have a lock either. She washed her face and brushed her teeth. In the closet, she picked an outfit   —a warm sweater and matching slacks. She slid on her shoes. The wrong style for what she was wearing, but that was the least of her concerns.
    Her heart pounded wildly as she geared herself up for walking out of the room. She’d thought last night about how she might get herself out of this predicament. She knew Jason would want her to think, to keep her wits, to stay strong and aware and astute. Every time he worked some tragedy, he’d come home with tips. A woman drove her car into the water, so Jason showed Jules how to escape a car if she were underwater. A teenager was kidnapped a few years back, so Jason gave her ideas of how she might handle the situation, pretending to go along until there was a moment she could get away. He’d even cautioned her about her Facebook page and her blog, not to tell everyone she was going out to the store or that they were leaving on vacation. He was such a cautious man, and she loved him for it. But the truth was, he’d always made her feel safe and she never feared anything when he was around. When he was gone, she began to fear everything. Yet even with all the irrational fears she dealt with, she could’ve never seen this coming.
    So, Jules, what are you going to do here?
    She heard his voice like they were practicing some safety maneuver. First, she decided, she had to understand the man she was dealing with as best as possible. Most of what she knew about him was from his books. And the question was,could anyone really know a writer from just his books? How much of himself did he put into his writings? Was it all just make-believe, or were there elements of truth hidden behind each passage, clues about what made the writer tick?
    She knew the answer to that. And he had actually come out and said it, with his quip about reading between the lines.
    It occurred to her that Patrick really liked the female characters he wrote. There was at least one strong female character in each book, witty and discerning, cleverly working her way in or out of a crime, deftly escaping even her wisest foe.
    So. Maybe she should be one of those characters. If she didn’t show her hand but wisely worked her way around and through and into him, then maybe she had a chance to, at the very least, talk some sense into him. Even to escape.
    Be a character. She tried to think through some of her favorites. Alise Domingo, the street-savvy detective who barely topped five feet but had a martial arts background. That wasn’t going to work. The most Jules knew to do was get out of a choke hold. “And if all else fails,” Jason had told her, “bite the living daylights out of them.”
    There was Sabrina Farmer, the burned-out detective from Queens who’d gotten hooked on meth. When her boyfriend, a firefighter, died on 9/11, she tried to clean up her act. But she’d inadvertently gotten tied to a Mexican drug cartel, and the only way to save herself and her young daughter was to go undercover . . . as a drug addict.
    Nancy Montgomery was a fun character. An ATF agentwhose only asset was the fact that she seemed to be able to read people’s minds. Other than that, she was a terrible agent. But when she started reading clues that one of her partners was contemplating murder, she had to get out of her comfort zone and figure out how to stop him without showing her hand.
    Yeah, maybe Nancy. She could do Nancy.
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