Читать книгу If She Heard - Блейк Пирс - Страница 4

Sandra Peterson woke up fifteen minutes before her alarm was set to go off. She had been waking up to that same alarm, at 6:30 every morning, for the last two years or so. She’d always been a good sleeper, managing seven to nine hours every night and never waking before the alarm. But this morning, she was stirred awake by excitement. Kayla was home from college and they were going to spend the entire day together.

It would be the first time they’d spent more than half a day together since Kayla started college last year. She was home because one of her childhood friends was getting married. Kayla had been raised in Harper Hills, North Carolina, a small rural town about twenty miles outside of Charlotte, and had opted to enroll in an out-of-state college as early as she could. Going to school at Florida State meant their times together were few and far between. They’d last seen each other at Christmas, and that had been almost a year ago for only a period of ten hours before Kayla had left to visit her father in Tennessee.

Kayla had always handled the divorce well. Sandra and her husband had split when Kayla was eleven and she never really even seemed to care. Sandra supposed it was one of the reasons Kayla had never played favorites. When she visited one parent, she made a point to visit the other. And because of that torturous trip—from Tallahassee, to Harper Hills, to Nashville—Kayla didn’t visit very often.

Sandra shuffled out of the bedroom in her pajamas and bedroom slippers. She walked down the hallway toward the kitchen, passing by Kayla’s room. She didn’t expect her daughter to wake up any time before eight, and that was fine. Sandra figured she could put some coffee on and prepare a nice breakfast for when she was awake.

She did just that, scrambling up some eggs, frying some bacon, and making a dozen silver dollar pancakes. The kitchen was smelling amazing by seven o’clock, and Sandra was surprised the smells hadn’t stirred Kayla awake yet. It had worked when Kayla had been at home, especially when the high school years had come about. But now the smells of her home cooking apparently did not have the same effect on her daughter.

Anyway, Kayla had been out with friends last night—some friends she hadn’t seen since high school graduation. Sandra hadn’t felt right sticking with her daughter’s old curfew now that she was in college, so Sandra had simply left it at: Come home in one piece and preferably sober.

As the morning crept on toward eight and Kayla had still not come out of her room, Sandra started to worry. Rather than knock on the bedroom door and potentially wake her up, though, Sandra looked out the living room window. She saw Kayla’s car in the driveway, parked right behind her own car.

Relieved, Sandra went back to making breakfast. When all of the food was ready, it was 7:55. Sandra hated to wake her daughter (she was sure it would be seen as rude and uncool), but she simply couldn’t help it. Maybe after breakfast, Kayla would take a nap and rest up before they started their day of shopping and a late lunch in Charlotte. Besides…the eggs were going to get cold and Kayla had always made a point to mention how gross cold eggs were.

Sandra walked down the hall to Kayla’s room. It felt surreal and comforting at the same time. How many times had she knocked on this door in her adult life? Thousands, for sure. To be doing it again made her heart warm.

She knocked, paused a moment, and then added a sweet-sounding: “Kayla, honey? Breakfast is ready.”

There was no response from inside. Sandra frowned. She was not naïve enough to think that Kayla and her friends had not been drinking last night. She had never seen her daughter drunk or enduring a hangover and did not want to see it at all if she could help it. She wondered if Kayla was simply hungover and not ready to face her mother.

“There’s coffee,” Sandra added, hoping it might help.

Still no response. She knocked one more time, louder this time, and opened the door.

The bed was still perfectly made. There was no sign of Kayla.

But that makes no sense, Sandra thought. Her car is out front.

She then recalled a particularly ungraceful moment from her own teenage years where she had driven home drunk out of her mind. She’d managed to make it home but had passed out in her car, in the driveway. She found it hard to imagine Kayla behaving in such a way but there were only so many other possibilities to consider.

As Sandra closed Kayla’s bedroom door and walked back through the kitchen, a little ball of worry bounced around in her stomach. Maybe Kayla had been hiding some drinking or drug problems from her. Maybe they’d spend their day talking through such things rather than their planned day of fun.

Sandra steeled up her courage to have such a conversation as she opened the front door. Just as she stepped out onto the porch, she froze. Her left leg literally paused in the air, refusing to set down.

Because if she set her foot down, she was stepping into a new world—a world where what she saw on her front porch was going to have to be faced and accepted.

Kayla was lying on the porch. She was on her back and staring up with unblinking eyes. There were red abrasions around her throat. She was not moving.

Sandra finally brought that other foot down. When she did, the rest of her body followed it. She fell into a crumpled ball by her dead daughter, thoughts of breakfast and shopping completely forgotten.