Read Online The Jewelry Case by Catherine McGreevy - Free Book Online Page A

interesting stories about that place."
    Paisley waved and hurried away. It was one thing to have people stare when one was onstage, in character, she thought; quite another in the middle of a small town like this one, with amused residents looking on. She was beginning to realize that her plan to spend the next few weeks wallowing in self-pity and hiding from the world was becoming more and more remote. She wondered if that was one of the reasons Esther had gone to such lengths to bring her to River Bend.
    The bag of groceries grew heavier with each step as she walked home. When a car swooshed at full speed down the hill by the bend in the river, Paisley hopped to the side of the road to avoid being hit. Pain stabbed her weak leg, and she wished she had accepted Shirley’s offer of a ride.
    Limping onward, she eyed a "Do not trespass" sign nailed prominently to a post. A shortcut across the pasture would save several minutes of walking, and besides, she rationalized, such signs were a mere formality. After all, it wasn’t as if she wouldn’t be harming anything, and the cow she had seen earlier was grazing peacefully in the far corner.
    She slipped through the barbed wire and had nearly reached the other side when she noticed the cow ambling in her direction. The animal was bigger than she had realized. So were its horns. And it was picking up its pace.
    As the animal began to trot toward her with surprising speed, she gave up any attempt at dignity and broke into a sprint, forgetting her weak leg. She made it only a few feet, however, before she tripped, the grocery bag flying out of her grasp, scattering a loaf of whole wheat bread, bagged lettuce, apples, a chocolate bar in the grass. It was too late to flee: the animal was on top of her, its flanks solid as the sides of a warship. Curling up in a ball, she waited for the sharp horns to carve into her side.
    "Miss Lizzie! Get out of there! Shoo!"
    A dirt clod bounced off the cow's massive flank, and the beast bellowed in protest. "Hey, lady, are you all right?" The voice was panting, as if its owner had been running.
    Paisley opened a cautious eye. The cow was gone. A not-too-clean hand was reaching down to offer help. Gratefully she clasped it and allowed its possessor to haul her to her unsteady feet. A boy about seventeen years old looked down at her from a face crowned by a spiky thatch of midnight-black hair. He wore jeans and checkered Vans sneakers and had a pair of a tiny silver hoops through his lower lip. Although she had never seen him before, something struck her as vaguely familiar, and without realizing it, she found herself staring at him.
    His coffee-brown eyes narrowed under thick straight eyebrows. "You okay? Don't worry. Miss Lizzie's not going to hurt you."
    She looked behind her. The cow was plodding away. At a distance, it paused to crop the grass again.
    She looked down at where her left leg emerged from her shorts, hospital-pale, still bearing the long red scar from the implanted titanium rod. A few beads of blood welled out of a faint network of new scratches, and suddenly everything seemed very far away. Blood all over the dashboard. Broken glass everywhere. And next to her, Jonathan's limp body, slumped over the steering wheel....
    "Hey! You'd better lean on me. You don't look so good." The teenager grabbed her arm, and she gratefully clung to him. "Come on, we've got some Band-aids in the house."
    When he was satisfied she could stand on her own, the boy released her and bent to scoop the scattered groceries back into the bag. "You weren't scared of Miss Lizzie, were you?" he asked as they started toward the house, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. There was a hint of humor in his voice.
    "Miss Lizz—oh, the cow? Of course not. I was just—"
    "—Worried about trespassing?"
    The boy's tone was carefully bland, but she felt herself blush. "Sorry. I should have known better."
    "It's okay. I don't know why my step-dad put the sign up