Can't Let Go Read Online Free Page A

make the apparition disappear.
Sure, it was off-putting. Sometimes it was
downright frightening when he would suddenly spring up
in front of me. Sometimes, like I've said, he would presage
a migraine, but that was okay; that was just something I
had to live through. But no actual harm would come to me
from seeing Rivers Carillo. It was just a reminder of what
I once did.
    The second heading, the second thing I was afraid of,
was that someone knew what I had done and would come
and find me. That was a tougher fear to deal with, because
it was both more realistic and more amorphous. It had
been seventeen years and no one had yet tracked me
down. That didn't mean that they wouldn't at some point
in the future. On my list I had three subsections under that
heading; three ways of controlling that particular fear.
The first was information, the second was disguise, and
the third was the ability to run away.
    I had gathered as much information as I could about
Rivers Carillo. I had made a sub-list of anyone and
everyone who might have known about Rivers Carillo
and me; who might have known that we were seeing each
other and therefore might, somehow, for some reason,
unlikely as it seemed, associate me with his death. I had all
the newspaper clippings that I had ever been able to gather
on the subject. I had every single thing that I'd been able
to find anywhere on the internet that related in any way to
the subject: tidal patterns through and around the Golden
Gate, for example; the names of second-hand bookstores
in San Francisco's North Beach; a list of universities in the
state of Indiana. I kept all this information in a manila file,
stored between The Times Atlas of the World and the Collins Complete DIY Manual on the bottom shelf of my
bookcase. I knew that having the file in my possession
constituted a risk in itself, but I didn't think that anyone
would be able to put the information together to make any
sense of it. And besides, I hardly ever invited anyone into
my flat.
    The next tactic was disguise. The woman – the girl –
who killed Rivers Carillo had been a pretty, vivacious,
annoying whirligig called Lizzie Stephens. On the plane
back from San Francisco I killed her too. I supposed I
should have changed my whole identity. I should have
found a graveyard and a child who had died young, born
the same year as me. I had a vague idea that it was
possible: I'd seen it in a film or read it in a book. But I was
eighteen years old and very, very scared. I wanted to go
home to see my mother and father. I needed them. I
wanted to be at home. So I compromised. I killed Lizzie.
'I've decided I'd like to be called Beth from now on,' I told
my parents as they met me at the airport.
    'Oh, I am pleased,' said my mother, who'd never liked
the abbreviation Lizzie. 'I'd prefer Elizabeth, but at least
Beth sounds like a proper grown-up name.'
    Beth was altogether a different person. She looked
different. She seemed shorter, although she wasn't. Her
hair was straighter and her clothes were much more
discreet – jeans, a white shirt, a plain T-shirt, a simple
trouser suit for work. There was, I'd discovered, an art to
being unobtrusive, to slipping through life without
making so much as a ripple. There was great skill
involved in keeping your head down and not leaving
traces. And just occasionally I worried that I had taken the
art of unobtrusiveness too far, that I had become so
unobtrusive, so secretive and hidden as to be positively
noticeable, almost intriguing: a mystery to be solved.
That seemed to be the case with Danny. He was intrigued
by me, and that was dangerous for both of us.
    That was why my ability to run away was so precious
to me. That was why I had so few possessions. I
remembered Robert de Niro in the film Heat, playing a
master thief who kept nothing in his life that he couldn't
leave behind with just a few minutes' notice. That was the
way I tried to live. That was why I had a car, the height of
eccentricity for