Author: Wendy Tyson
Publisher: Henery Press
Pages: 324
Language: English
Genre: Mystery/Psychological Thriller
Format: Paperback ($14.96) & eBook ($2.99)
Purchase at AMAZON
A
s Philadelphia
When
Allison’s latest Main Line client, the
fifteen-year-old Goth daughter of a White House hopeful, is accused of the
ritualistic murder of a local divorce attorney, Allison fights to prove her
client’s innocence when no one else will. But unraveling the truth brings
specters from her own past. And in a place where image is everything, the
ability to distinguish what’s real from the facade may be the only thing that
keeps Allison alive.
Book
Excerpt:
It
started to drizzle. Cold, steely drops that threatened to morph into sleet. The
rain hit Allison’s windshield, slithered in rivulets to the corners, and turned
to ice, so that she had to scrunch down and squint to see the road. She
fingered the envelope that sat on the seat next to her. Her head ached.
Home. She turned the word around on her tongue,
flipped it backward and forward, and swirled it around until the nausea passed.
At home lived a different Allison. Fat
ankles. Uneven bangs. A preference for peanut butter right from the jar.
“Self-reinvention
is the key to survival,” Mia had told her when she was first hired by her
mentor’s image-consulting firm. “In this line of work and in life.”
“Yeah,
right. There’s no escaping the past,” Allison had wanted to say in response.
But she’d been twenty-five, poor, and disillusioned. Funny how an empty bank
account can make one into a believer.
And
so she’d Jennifer Aniston-ed her hair and painted her lips and learned the
difference between Gucci and Prada, first for herself and then for her clients.
She traded her third-floor studio in Ardmore Wayne
At
times, she missed the old Allison. She missed the energy of idealism and the
ease with which someone who has nothing can move through the world. She knew
this new life was based on the perpetuation of a lie, of a million little daily
lies. But the lies, if told often enough and with enough enthusiasm, could
become truth.
Just
look at her.
Allison
kept one hand still on the steering wheel and used the other to peel back the
flap of the envelope. Wedged between the stiff edges of her mother’s official
documents sat the sickly yellow of an old newspaper clipping. She knew without
touching it, without reading the bold-lettered headline, what it said. Man Drives over Embankment in Apparent
Homicide/Suicide Attempt. Her father. Her mother. And over twenty years
later, the pain still blanketed her like a low-lying fog.
She
pushed the article back into the packet. Miraculously, her parents had lived
through the ordeal with few serious injuries, but the emotional wounds had
never really healed. Your mother has Alzheimer’s, Allison, her father had said
back then, as though that simple fact explained everything. It’ll be uphill
from here. So the years before that, the
mom-has-a-migraine-and-is-in-her-bedroom-make-us-some-dinner-watch-your-sister-Allison
years, were the easy ones?
Allison
shook her head. The contents of that envelope didn’t tell the full story any
more than a pile of individual timbers resembled a finished house. Where were
the court hearings, the social workers with their shopworn empathy and
mind-fuck questions, the belt beatings, the experimental drugs and doctors’
visits and furtive glances when the electricity went off because no one had
paid the bill?
The
rain stopped.
Allison
flicked off her wipers and made a left onto her parents’ street. Tiny ranch
house after tiny ranch house, all with tiny yards and chain-link fences. She
pulled up to their home, behind a grit-sprayed Ford. From the outside, nothing
much had changed. Same peach-colored stucco, same white stone-filled flower
beds, same crumbling walkway. Though it was nearly spring, a woven-wicker doe
and fawn, leftover Christmas decorations, remained in the front yard. The doe
lay on her side. The fawn stood over her, as though in mourning.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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