Gone Too Far by Suzanne Brockmann Page A

silently invoking Ihbraham Rahman’s gentle spirit. Lord, she missed him so much there were times she doubled over from the pain.
    If she lost her temper and let on that foul words in front of Haley and Amanda were a serious problem, Whitney would use them more frequently, instead of less.
    The truth was, Amanda’s misbehaving had more to do with the fact that she had been unlucky enough to be born to a rich spoiled brat who was little more than a petulant infant herself.
    Whitney Turlington was the bane of Mary Lou’s existence—yet she was also her savior. In the past two years of Amanda’s life, more than two dozen au pairs had run screaming from the palatial Florida mansion where Amanda and Whitney lived with Whitney’s very wealthy father, Frank. They hadn’t run from Amanda, who wasn’t the terror everyone made her out to be, but rather from Whitney, who was barely seventeen and constantly at war with King Frank, Whitney Turlington was a bitch on wheels.
    But because of that, King Frank hadn’t called a single one of Connie Grant’s faked references when Mary Lou had applied for the position. He’d just been downright grateful some one had showed up for the job interview at all.
    Which meant that, at least for now, Mary Lou and Haley had found a safe place to hide in the Turlington’s private little compound just southwest of Sarasota—not twenty miles from the house where Janine lay dead in the kitchen.
    No one had found her yet.
    Mary Lou watched the local news every night, praying that someone would find her sister and give her a proper, decent Christian burial.
    She also prayed that the men who killed Janine wouldn’t find her and Haley.
    Her ex-husband, Sam, the Navy SEAL, had once told her that the smartest place to hide was back where everyone had already searched. So she’d maxed out her credit card in Jacksonville, making it look as if she were heading north, while at the same time buying everything she hadn’t been able to take from Janine’s house when she’d left town on that awful evening.
    One of her first stops had been at a beauty parlor where Haley’s golden curls had been cut boyishly short. Mary Lou had her own hair cut, too, and went blond, telling the beautician to match the shade with Haley’s.
    The next stop had been Sears, where, while Haley wasn’t looking, Mary Lou had bought a brand-new Pooh Bear. She’d given it to her daughter, pretending she’d found it at the bottom of her big purse. Haley had looked suspiciously at the new stuffed animal’s gleaming golden fur and clean red shirt, but Mary Lou had chattered on about how she’d taken Pooh to the beauty parlor, too, and had his fur “done” while they were there, same as Mama’s hair.
    She’d bought them clothes—Haley’s from the little boy’s section of the store—and luggage on little rollers. They’d headed to Gainesville, ditched the car, and boarded a bus back to Sarasota, where Mary Lou had seen Frank Turlington’s desperate ad for an au pair hanging on the community message board in the grocery store where she used to work. It had been there close to six months ago, when she’d first started as a cashier, and a month later, when she’d been about to take it down, her assistant manager had stopped her. Even though the store managers had a rule against signs hanging on the board for longer than a few weeks, the woman gave her the scoop on the Turlingtons, telling her that King Frank—as he was called by the locals—might as well put in a revolving door at the front of his house. Because a few days after a new au pair went in, she’d come shooting out again.
    Mary Lou had been here now for almost three weeks, which was breaking the official Turlington au pair stamina record by thirteen days.
    And then word had come down from Mrs. Downs, the housekeeper, that King Frank had requested Mary Lou’s—Connie’s—presence at breakfast today. At 7:00 A.M. He’d even given the royal order for Whitney