Free Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) by Debra Gaskill Page B

Teenage girls screamed from their car, stopped after swerving to avoid us. I pushed my way out through the passenger door above my head as the gas tank caught fire and the vehicle, with Noah in it, burned.
    Firefighters found me, broken, bloody and sobbing, by the side of the road, screaming Noah’s name as the moonlight and the snow fell around me.
    Bitch Goddess blamed me, of course. In many ways, she was right. But in many other ways, we were both responsible. Drinking was the way we celebrated, the way we grieved and the way we coped. After his funeral, we welcomed friends into our home with a shot of their choice of liquor on the rocks. Instead of taking time off, we ended our workdays filling glasses with the contents of the crystal decanters that sat on the sideboard in our formal dining room.
    But this time, the liquor couldn’t mask our pain.
    The words between us got nastier. We were Philadelphia’s journalistic equivalent of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ In our grief, we said things to each other no couple should: bitter, drunken, eviscerating words that did nothing to alleviate our grief and everything to intensify the guilt. Our friends, embarrassed by our viciousness, fell away and the parties at our apartment slowed, then stopped completely.
    Through it all, Bitch Goddess kept running every morning and she kept drinking. I just kept drinking.
    By the time we hit bottom, I was sleeping on the couch and she was sleeping with her morning co-anchor. I came home early from work to find them having sex in the shower. She hadn’t climaxed like that with me in years.
    I grabbed Bitch Goddess by her curly wet hair and pulled her out of the shower. She screamed when I charged inside and with one punch, broke the bastard’s nose. The damage kept him off the air for six weeks.
    When he filed charges, it hit the local media with a vengeance. I lost my job, then my wife, and my house. Only then did I go to rehab and realized how powerless I was against alcohol.
    A buddy who taught at Fitzgerald University let me bunk at his place while I taught night classes in freshman composition and worked on the doctorate. When he became the communications department chair, I became the journalism professor. If any of my students knew Noah’s story, they never said anything and I never volunteered.
    Only a few ever asked about the camping photo of Noah and me on the bookshelf in my office.
    “Is that your son? You guys sure look a lot alike.”
    “Yes. That’s my son. What can I help you with?” Like Bitch Goddess, I lived by the adage “Never apologize, never explain” and as fast as I could, I would change the subject.
    As the memories cascaded around me, for a split second, I considered getting dressed and going downstairs to the hotel bar, then stopped. I’d worked too hard to get to this point. I had five bronze sobriety coins—one for each of the years I’d been sober—mixed in with my small change on the hotel room dresser.
    What I’d done was wrong, but you could say I’d come back, at least to a point.
    Why couldn’t Charisma?

 
     
     
    Chapter 11 Addison
     
    Earlene stared back in terror from the other side of the jail’s Plexiglas visitor’s station.
    She wasn’t the beauty I’d seen at the office. There were no blonde extensions in her hair, no industrial-strength drag queen false eyelashes framing her eyes and only holes in her ears where fancy diamond studs once were. Orange scrubs, white cotton socks and open-toed rubber sandals replaced the Lily Pulitzer summer dress and Jimmy Choo stilettos she’d worn to work.
    Without make up she looked like the fifty-something female she really was, wan, tired and terrified, nothing like the high-maintenance blonde that made my life hell.
    “I didn’t do this, Penny!” she hissed into the phone receiver that connected us. “I didn’t kill Eve Dahlgren! Yes, we argued but I wasn’t—”
    “Earlene, shush!” I said, sharply. “These