Читать книгу Restless - Tori Carrington, Tori Carrington - Страница 10

MERELY DRIVING UP to her parents’ house filled Lizzie with memories of the past, and bittersweet thoughts of the present. Her parents had been the family’s foundation, their rock. How could they even consider getting divorced now? After thirty years of marriage? It didn’t make sense.

Lizzie let herself in through the back door, much as she had for nearly the entire twenty-eight years of her life. The house was one of the first that her father had built after opening his own construction company before she was born. While he’d added on to it over the years to accommodate her mother’s wishes for a sunporch and her brother’s for a media room, much remained the same. Decor aside, of course. Her mother claimed that she’d been Martha Stewart before Martha even thought about making her first pinecone wreath. The house had undergone a complete makeover nearly every year, with a change in color schemes and throw rugs and artwork.

Now the living room walls were a soft, homey green, which went well with the upholstered furniture, a cream color festooned with tiny flowers of every color. The furniture had remained the same, chosen because it went with almost everything. Photos of the family, especially the three children, dotted the walls and mantel, documenting the various stages of their lives.

“Mom?” Lizzie called out, putting her purse on the kitchen table and shrugging out of her coat, much as she had countless times before. Only this time there was no answer.

She hadn’t checked the garage to see if either of their cars was there. It was usually a given at this time of night that her parents would both be home. It was just after dinner and right about now they normally would have been sitting at the kitchen table enjoying coffee and dessert or in the family room watching the news or reading.

The silence seemed to verify with deafening intensity that nothing was normal or usual anymore.

Lizzie sighed and looked around the kitchen. When she was growing up, there had always been something to eat. It was one of the many reasons neighborhood children had liked to hang out there. If there wasn’t a pot of something on the stove to sample, there were surely sandwich fixings and a bag of chips somewhere.

The sink was empty, the stove barren and not even the cookie jar held a crumb to lick off the pad of her finger. She opened the refrigerator. Bingo. She smiled as she popped the lid on a container of food and took out a slice of meat loaf.

She sputtered when an overdose of salt assaulted her taste buds.

She moved to the sink and coughed up the meat, running the water to wash it down the drain as she tripped the trash compactor.

“Damn,” she muttered under her breath, having forgotten the phone call of the night before.

She dumped the rest of the “poisoned” meat loaf into the garbage can and placed the container in the dishwasher.

She should have known the situation had deteriorated to this degree, but the absence of broken glass littering the floor had convinced her that things were as they always had been.

She opened the freezer and took out a fudge pop, visually verifying that no tampering had taken place. She hesitantly licked it, sighed with relief and then closed the freezer door. Do what you will with the meat loaf, she thought, but leave anything chocolate alone.

Of course, her father didn’t like chocolate.

Sucking on the sweet, she left the kitchen, walking through the hall toward the foyer. She immediately spotted her mother’s purse on the table near the door.

Huh?

“Dad?”

She stepped down the connecting hall toward the guest room that had once been a den and then a guest room again and rapped lightly on the closed door. No answer. She peeked inside to see the sofa bed open, the sheets and blanket unmade, and then closed the door again.

So her father wasn’t there. But her mother?

A sound from the second floor.

Maybe her mother was taking a bath with her headphones on and hadn’t heard her.

While the Gilbreds weren’t immodest, rare were the times when a bathroom door was locked. Lizzie had spent many a time sitting on the closed commode talking to her mother while Bonnie was immersed in a tub full of bubbles.

Of course, when those same bubbles started to dissipate, she was the first to give her mother privacy…and to spare herself from viewing something that might ruin her for life.

She climbed the stairs, licking her frozen treat as she went. She supposed she could grab a sandwich on the way home. Or see if the Chinese place on Oak Street was still open.

She looked first in the master bedroom to find everything perfectly in its place, the bed made, the connecting bath empty.

Okay…

Had her mother left her purse behind? Was she even now eating out somewhere and reaching for her wallet, only to find she’d left it at home on the foyer table? That was so unlike her mother as to be scary.

Scarier still was the fact that both her parents constantly requested that she act as their attorney. She was grateful she wasn’t a family attorney and was only too quick to point that out whenever the topic raised its ugly head. Which was much too often for her liking.

She checked out the main bathroom just to make sure her mother wasn’t in there, then shrugged and headed to her old room. Bonnie had kept all the kids’ bedrooms decorated the same way as when they’d lived at home, the wallpaper a little harder to change than the color of paint. Lizzie sometimes liked to go into her old room and lie across her white canopy bed, remembering happier times.

Another sound.

Lizzie’s footsteps slowed. If she wasn’t mistaken, it had come from her old room.

She slowly opened the door and then gasped, standing rooted to the spot. Lying across her old bed was her mother, naked, her hands tied above her head to the canopy posts. Her father was kneeling at the edge, an extra large feather held aloft as he swung his head to look at her.

And the sound? The headboard hitting the wall.

Lizzie screamed and ran from the room. So much for leaving a scene before it ruined her for life. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to go into her old bedroom again.

A COUPLE HOURS LATER, Lizzie sat on the leather couch in her family room, flipping through channels on the television, purposely ignoring her vibrating cell phone. Her mother had called no fewer than five times since Lizzie had bolted from the house as if the floor had been covered with burning coals. Much of what had happened since the moment she’d caught her parents playing Pin the Princess on her bed—her childhood bed in her childhood room—had passed in a blur. She couldn’t even remember what she’d done with the fudge pop.

And at this point, she didn’t care, either. She half hoped she’d dropped the melting chocolate on the white carpet of her old room so her mother would have to clean it up…among other things.

Ugh.

Well, she supposed there was one good thing to come out of the situation. Her parents appeared to have reconciled.

She stuck her chopsticks into the rice container and put both down on the coffee table, pulling the chenille throw across her lap up to her chin.

Her cell vibrated and she turned the display so she could read the caller ID. Her sister, Annie.

She answered.

“Okay, what’s up? Mom’s going out of her mind with worry because you aren’t taking her calls.” Leave it to Annie to cut straight to the chase.

Younger than Lizzie by a year, her sister usually managed to keep up the front that her life was all sunshine and roses. But Lizzie knew it was more like dirty diapers and teething rings. The last time she’d talked to Annie, her sister had been a scant inch removed from running away from her family altogether. Which didn’t make any sense to Lizzie, because so far as she could tell, her sister had gotten everything she’d ever wanted out of life. A great husband. A marvelous house. Two beautiful children and another on the way.

Not that little Jasmine and Mason were angels. Far from it. They were loud and smelly and needed constant supervision. And somewhere in there, Annie had to fit in love, as well. Which wasn’t always easy.

So Lizzie and Annie had spent a lot of time on the phone lately. The approach suited Lizzie fine. Since she worked such long hours, she wasn’t physically able to step in to help her sister out much. The issue of children in her own future still hung like a swaying question mark. Not because she’d had any bad experiences or her sister’s situation had turned her off kids. She’d simply been so busy she hadn’t had a chance to think about them.

That, and she had yet to meet a man she loved enough to consider sharing another human being with.

Even Jerry.

So Lizzie paid back her sister’s brevity with a concise rundown of the evening’s events.

A silent pause stretched after she finished. Then, finally, Annie’s laughter filled her ear.