Secure Location - By Beverly Long Page 0,47
and she stayed in the house with her mother. When her opportunity to go to college came, she took the first bus out of town.
Chicago had been her fresh start. She was no longer Margaret Mae. She was Meg. And every bit as carefree and cool as any other eighteen-year-old girl. On the outside. She worked hard to hide that there were many nights she didn’t sleep. She would wake up to the soft snores of her roommate sleeping close in the crowded dorm room. She’d pull her quilt up to her neck. It couldn’t stop the shaking. Or the terror of reliving the night a two-year-old turned blue and died.
Her mother had gotten sick when she was a sophomore and had been dead by the middle of her senior year. Pancreatic cancer was a cruel beast. Her dad had come to the funeral and had wanted her to come live with him after graduation. She’d have done it but then, exactly thirty-three days later, he’d been killed when a semi crossed the middle line.
And she was truly alone.
She stayed in Chicago after graduation and was happy when The Montray, a wonderful hotel in the high-rent shopping district, offered her an internship.
She worked hard and the internship turned into a full-time job. The people in the big hotel became her family. She loved the complexity of the place, everything from making sure the huge flower arrangements for the lobby got delivered to ensuring that visiting royalty was happy with the thread count in their sheets. She worked in registration, at the front counter, in group sales, in marketing, in accounting and even suffered through a brief stint in the massive kitchen, where she mostly tried to stay out of the way.
She got promoted a couple times and was already a manager when she met Cruz. His mother had introduced them. When they were dating, she’d tell him stories of the crazy things that happened at work. He’d roll his eyes and say pithy things about people who had more money than common sense. During their marriage, she got promoted to director. Cruz had been proud of her. And she’d known that he bragged about her at work. After Cruz and Sam Vernelli became partners, Sam would tease her, tell her that he hoped she never fell off her pedestal.
She’d tried. But pedestals were not always steady and when Cruz started talking about babies, the ground started to shake. She’d been quiet at first, then tried to gently remind him of all the reasons that things were perfect just the way they were. But when he’d started talking about parochial schools, club soccer and advanced calculus, all the things their children would have and do, the shaking advanced to full-blown quaking and the pedestal became very unstable.
Missy had never done any of those things.
Because of her.
She couldn’t tell Cruz the truth. Didn’t want him to realize that he’d been a fool to put her on the pedestal. Instead, she’d let him think that the pedestal had bored her, that it either wasn’t high enough, low enough or some combination thereof. Left him confused, angry, and unable to sort through the mess.
And now she’d led him straight into another bit of craziness. He should run like hell because the pedestal was about to topple over and crush him.
She glanced away from the television that she was watching but not seeing. She got up and peeked in at Jana, who had gotten up shortly after Cruz had talked to Detective Myers, eaten a few bites of her macaroni, and then fallen asleep again in Meg’s bed just minutes after Greta had arrived. She was still sleeping soundly, her pretty little face all relaxed and peaceful.
Peace. Meg could hardly remember the feeling.
She partially closed the connecting door and turned to Greta, who was watching her. “Would you like some coffee or anything?”
The woman shook her head. “No, thank you. Harry and I just finished dinner when your husband, I mean ex-husband, called.”
It took Meg a moment to realize that Harry was Harold Myers. “You and Detective Myers?” she asked, before she could censor herself.
The woman’s face turned pink. “We’ve been living together for a year. There’s no reporting relationship between the two of us but we still try to be discreet.”
It seemed an unlikely pairing but then again, what room did she have to talk? Cruz had come from a sometimes loud, highly charged family. They talked rough, they hugged hard and they counted