Read Online I'll Be Seeing You by Mary Higgins Clark - Free Book Online Page A

door of his study, a room that she and her mother had avoided since the night of the bridge accident. But you always knew he was coming back, and he was so much fun.
    She snapped on the desk lamp and sat in the swivel chair. This room was the smallest on the first floor. The fireplace was flanked by bookshelves. Her father’s favorite chair, maroon leather with a matching ottoman, had a standing lamp on one side and a piecrust table on the other.
    The table as well as the mantel held clusters of family pictures: her mother and father’s wedding portrait; Meghan as a baby; the three of them as she grew up; old Pat, bursting with pride in front of the Drumdoe Inn. The record of a happy family, Meghan thought, looking from one to another of a group of framed snapshots.
    She picked up the picture of her father’s mother, Aurelia. Taken in the early thirties when she was twenty-four, it showed clearly that she had been a beautiful woman. Thick wavy hair, large expressive eyes, oval face, slender neck, sable skins over her suit. Her expression was the dreamy posed look that photographers of that day preferred. “I had the prettiest mother in Pennsylvania,” her father would say, then add, “and now I have the prettiest daughter in Connecticut. You look like her.” His mother had died when he was a baby.
    Meghan did not remember ever having seen a picture of Richard Collins. “We never got along,” her father had told her tersely. “The less I saw of him, the better.”
    The phone rang. It was Virginia Murphy, her mother’sright-hand at the inn. “Catherine wanted me to see if you were home and if you wanted to come over for dinner.”
    â€œHow is she, Virginia?” Meghan asked.
    â€œShe’s always good when she’s here, and we have a lot of reservations tonight. Mr. Carter is coming at seven. He wants your mother to join him.”
    Hmm, Meghan thought. She’d always suspected that Phillip Carter was developing a warm spot in his heart for Catherine Collins. “Will you tell Mom that I have an interview in Kent tomorrow and need to do a lot of research for it? I’ll fix something here.”
    When she hung up, she resolutely got out her briefcase and pulled from it all the newspaper and magazine human interest stories on in vitro fertilization a researcher at the station had assembled for her. She frowned when she found several cases where a clinic was sued because tests showed the woman’s husband was not the biological father of the child. “That is a pretty serious mistake to make,” she said aloud, and decided that it was an angle that should be touched on in one segment of the feature.
    At eight o’clock she made a sandwich and a pot of tea and carried them back to the study. She ate while she tried to absorb the technical material Mac had given her. It was, she decided, a crash course in assisted reproductive procedures.
    The click of the lock a little after ten meant that her mother was home. She called, “Hi, I’m in here.”
    Catherine Collins hurried into the room. “Meggie, you’re all right?”
    â€œOf course. Why?”
    â€œJust now when I was coming up the driveway I got the queerest feeling about you, that something was wrong—almost like a premonition.”
    Meghan forced a chuckle, got up swiftly and hugged her mother. “There
was
something wrong,” she said. “I’ve been trying to absorb the mysteries of DNA, and believe me, it’s tough, I now know why Sister Elizabeth told me I had no head for science.”
    She was relieved to see the tension ease from her mother’s face.

    Helene Petrovic swallowed nervously as she packed the last of her suitcases at midnight. She left out only her toiletries and the clothes she would wear in the morning. She was frantic to be finished with it all. She had become so jumpy lately. The strain had become too much, she decided. It