Read Online Minnie Chase Makes a Mistake by Helen MacArthur - Free Book Online Page B

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    Minnie had never had her heart broken before. It was worse than she could have possibly imagined. The inconsolable loss she felt inside seemed to make her bones hurt when she walked.
    On the upside she had been given room number 28. The last room available. There were no rooms with zero prefixing another number, a British tradition, apparently, to denote the ground floor. 
    This was the first time Minnie had ever travelled to somewhere that had such a significant time difference to the UK. The combination of travel exhaustion, time disorientation and heartbreak swirled around inside her, confusing her, mixing emptiness with nausea.
    She immediately went out to eat, only able to go as far as the diner across the road from the motel. She was too exhausted to explore further. It was bright and spotless with red booths and a black-and-white tiled floor. The waitress taking her order was attentive and seemed to sense that Minnie needed more than carbohydrates to revive her. She rested a hand lightly on Minnie’s shoulder as she put down the menu and asked if everything was okay. Her name tag read Sarah-Jane. Minnie nodded and forced a smile as she tried to focus on the menu but found that she couldn’t make a decision. The waitress quickly came to the rescue and ordered for her; the diner’s premium fruit shake and a Swiss cheese and jalapeno wrap. 
    Minnie ate, hoping food would fill up the cold, hollow space. The waitress checked on her a couple of times with fresh coffee and a selection of cookies that looked too tempting to ignore. Minnie forced herself to push through until after 10.35pm before returning to the motel.
    She quickly fell into an exhausted sleep but frequently surfaced to the top of her dreams in a frightened shout, tangled in the bed sheet. Minnie’s mind was chaos, a frenzied mixture of painful recall, bad dreams and surreal imagination.
    Amidst the many horrors, she saw her ex-boss, A.A Jones, swooping past the motel window on a bicycle. 
     
    She woke up at 8.33am local time with the San Francisco sunshine burning through the pea-green patterned curtains in the old motel. It cast a psychedelic swirl over one of the walls. Minnie stared up at an unfamiliar ceiling and counted the cracks in the plaster. She was in a strange room, thousands of miles from home and felt more exhausted than she had the night before. She had been betrayed by her husband-to-be, had lost her job and had destroyed Greene’s credibility in the business world. She hadn’t the slightest idea how to rectify any of these or even how to begin the man hunt ahead of her. 
    There were better ways to start the day. 
    She ran through a simplified checklist in her head: 1 to 9, no zeros.
     
    1 Find Greene. 
    2 Apologise, apologise, apologise. 
    3 Talk him through the natural gas deal. 
    4 Make him a fortune.
    5 Reverse the drop in Greene Inc stocks. 
    6 Reunite Greene with Bachmann.
    7 Go home to James George.
    8 Accept his grovelling apology.
    9 Get married! 
     
    The fog that had briefly threatened San Francisco overnight had now dried out to reveal a sharply tailored city with structured architecture and a great silhouette. There was a fresh breeze to help clear Minnie’s over-stressed mind. She dragged herself out of bed and stared out of the window onto an unfamiliar street. 
    As she watched the cars stop and start at the traffic lights, she briefly wondered where Jackson had gone to in his Dodge Ram. This thought was interrupted by someone else’s alarm go off through the wall. The repetitive beep beep beep beep went on and on as the person took forever to wake up.
    The noise had no effect on its intended person but it seemed to jolt Minnie into action. She needed to speak to James George. She had to talk to him. 
    She picked up her mobile, paused, and phoned Angie instead. 
     
    Angie was on a bus chugging through central London when Minnie called so they reverted to a quick conversation on Skype with a plan