The Best Kind of People Read Online Free

cord behind him as he walked back into the hallway, then turned to survey her briefly before continuing down the stairs into the living room, the kitchen, pulsating with sweat. She gripped the banister. She stopped herself from kicking him in the back.
    She picked up the phone and called her sister Clara in the city. “I need you to come here. George has been arrested. Please call Andrew too. I can’t explain right now, the house is full of cops.” Clara’s alarmed voice came through the receiver, but Joan couldn’t accommodate her questions. She was being approached by a man in an expensive suit who had appeared at the door, which was now propped open with one of the decorative garden stones from the front yard. A ladybug. He was red-faced with hypertension, and sought her out from the crowd.
    “Joan! I am your husband’s lawyer, Bennie.” He reached out his hand to shake hers, and then took her arm and led her into the living room.
    “How did you know to come?”
    “George called me earlier this evening, said it was urgent.”
    “But it’s so late.” His grip was solid, paternal, and it made Joan want to fight him off. Something felt off, his arrival out of the blue. He motioned towards the couch, directing her to sit, before sitting himself on the edge of the coffee table across from her like a child.
    “What’s best right now is if you just let the police do their job and co-operate. We’re going to get everything sorted.”
    She watched as police continued to carry everything of value into their trucks, or throw it about the room like robbers in a cartoon. She slowly blinked the room back into focus.
    “Do you want to post bail?”
    “Of course,” she said. If your loved one is trapped somewhere, you do what you can to get them out. It was primal.
    “There has been a mistake,” she said.
    Bennie didn’t agree, he just stared at her briefly and looked down at his iPhone.
    “You should be at the station with my husband,” Joan said to Bennie.
    “My associate is there on my behalf. We have the whole firm working on this.”
    “This is a big deal? Why the fuss? This is a misunderstanding,” she said.
    “This is going to be very high-profile, Mrs. Woodbury. I need you to brace yourself.”
    AS GEORGE WAS being processed at the police station, it seemed to Joan that everyone in the town knew immediately. She was not certain how it happened, because she sure didn’t tell anyone, but everyone knew almost as soon as she did. They talked. It must have felt nearly involuntary — it was simply too beyond the realm of possibility to not talk about. Humans crave connection, after all, even when it’s about another’s misfortune. Perhaps especially then.

THREE
    JIMMY AND SADIE sat on the loveseat, their heads still wet with lake water. Jimmy held on to Sadie’s hand the way he had on the Cyclone in the summer. A female police officer in uniform sat across from them on the La-Z-Boy, right leg propped on her left knee like a table, and opened up a spiral-bound notebook. Sadie dug her nails into her bare legs, and then twisted her drying ponytail around her fist.
    “Was your father ever inappropriate with you?”
    “No.”
    “Did he ever talk about sex too frequently, or in an odd way?”
    “No.”
    “Did he walk in while you were changing?”
    “No.”
    “Did your friends ever mention feeling uncomfortable around him?”
    “No. This is totally insane.”
    “I get that this is confusing to you, but we have to follow procedure.”
    “It’s not confusing. You’re making it pretty clear what kind of person you think my father is, and you are wrong. There are real criminals in the world. My father is not one of them.”
    Sadie tried to stay alert, sit up straight, answer honestly, anything to get them out of the house, but this was too much. She twisted her ponytail around her fist for the twentieth time.
    The police officer didn’t offer any words of comfort or contradiction after her outburst,