Read Online Life Penalty by Joy Fielding - Free Book Online Page A

seeming concentration, and if pressed, could probably have repeated his sermon word for word, and yet she had no comprehension of anything he had said, just as the minister, for all his kind words, had no idea of anything she was feeling. How could he? she asked herself. She was feeling nothing.
    The church was filled with flowers. Gail spotted the arrangement from Nancy immediately. It was the biggest. Nancy had dropped by the house several days before to explain that she wouldn’t be able to attend the funeral because it would just be too painful for her, and she hoped, she
prayed
, that Gail would understand. Gail had tried to talk about Cindy, but Nancy had promptly burst into tears and begged Gail to talk about something else. Gail had grown silent and let Nancy do the talking.
    And now the minister was speaking about her child in the safe way one can talk about someone one never really knew, and Gail was unable to listen.
We’d like you to keep an eye out for any unfamiliar faces at the church … it’s not uncommon for a murderer to show up at his victim’s funeral.
Gail twisted her head around. Was he here?
    Gail’s eyes drifted purposefully over the rows of people, the degree of whose grief seemed to magnify the closer they got to the front. The church was crowded, and Gail was initially astonished to find that there were many faces she didn’t recognize at all. She spotted Cindy’s teacher, the young woman’s face a tear-streaked wall of pain, and Gail quickly turned away, feeling the sharp stab of the invisible knife at her chest. Gail also saw, even nodded at,several of her neighbors. When she caught sight of the slightest quiver of a lip or the first swallow at a throat, she turned immediately in another direction.
    She felt safer with the members of her family. The last week had numbed all of them somewhat. Waiting for the police to release the body for burial had been strain enough on everyone, and today, Gail recognized, was thought to be some sort of conclusion, as though the act of putting Cindy’s body in the ground was a signal for the rest of them to start picking up the threads of their own lives and begin carrying on again. In the next little while, she knew, probably in the next few days, Jack would be returning to work, Jennifer would be going back to school, her parents would be disappearing to Florida, and her sister would head back to New York. Routines would be reestablished.
    The public’s outrage would continue only until fresh headlines appeared. She would move from the status of human being to that of a statistic.
    Gail looked toward the end of the row at her father, his skin dark and leathery, his hair thinning and gray, his blue eyes, in the past rarely without a twinkle, now pale and watery. Her glance backtracked to her mother, her face drawn and pale despite its tan, her short strawberry-blond hair hidden beneath one of her many chiffon scarves, her fingers intertwined and trembling. She saw Carol, sitting to her mother’s right, reach over and cover her hands with her own. Carol’s hand was steadier, calmer, though her face was no less distraught. Always thin and fragile-looking despite her toughness, she appeared to have lost weight during the last week, and had resumed her two-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day habit, a habit she had supposedly kicked the year before. Carol hadn’t known Cindy that well. She was glamorous Aunt Carol from New York who visited several times a year with presents and a nice smile, and whom Cindy had seen last year in the chorus of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat;
but for the most part, niece and aunt had remained attractive mysteries to one another. Still, her eyes were puffy and her face drawn. Her other hand held tightly onto Jack’s. He stared straight ahead, as Gail had caught him doing often in the past week. He looked the same as he always did, and yet he looked completely different. Something had been stolen from him, she realized,