White Lies Read Online Free Page A

inspection, quickly snatching it up. Her little slice of nature, she’d thought then, and now.
    Katrina followed the stone pavers to the front porch, unlocked the door, and stepped inside the foyer, closing the door again behind her. As an afterthought, she peeked through the beveledglass in the door. The street was empty in both directions as far as she could see.
    She slid the deadbolt solidly into place.
    Unpacking.
    That’s how Katrina spent the remainder of the afternoon. Unpacking and making the house as comfortable as possible with the few belongings she’d managed to cram into the Honda. She placed her favorite African wood carvings around the living room and plugged her stereo system into a wall socket—leaving the stereo sitting on the floor, as there was no table to set it on. As she looked around at all the beige walls and empty floor space, she realized she was going to have to go on an even more extensive shopping spree than she’d originally planned. She greeted the prospect with a spark of excitement. Unlike many other small towns, whose main streets were lined with mom-and-pop diners and barbershops advertising ten-dollar haircuts, Leavenworth’s Front Street was a string of pearls boasting fashionable clothing shops, specialty cheese and wine boutiques, and chic galleries. Not to mention its exotic foreign vibe, thanks to the authentic European architecture and store names such as Das Meisterstruck and Haus Lichtenstein.
    After the Depression some eighty years ago, the Great Northern Railway Company had rerouted its railroad and the sawmill had subsequently closed, destroying the lumber industry and leaving Leavenworth little more than a ghost town. Thirty years onward, however, entrepreneuring—or desperate—community leaders concocted a plan to remodel their ailing hamlet into the form of a Bavarian village, complete with traditional festivals such as the Autumn Leaf Festival and the Christmas Lighting Ceremony. Consequently, Leavenworth was now a medieval-themed village that attracted over a million tourists a year. All that was missing were chubby men with dodgy facial hair dressed in lederhosen. And as far as Katrina was concerned, it was a refreshing contrast from the pollution and noise and general big cityness of Seattle. She did hope it had a good coffee shop though.
    By five o’clock she was getting ravenous. Who would havethought unpacking could work up such an appetite? She decided to open the last two boxes in front of her, then make something to eat for dinner, maybe the salmon she’d picked up today from Headwater Inn Grocery. Salmon with ginger sauce and steamed jasmine rice. Sounded good to her. She cut the masking tape that sealed the first box and extracted some paperbacks she hadn’t read yet, a folder that contained recent credit card receipts, more books, and a thick pile of cards bound by an elastic band. The sympathy cards she’d received after Shawn’s funeral. She’d donated all of Shawn’s personal belongings of value to the Salvation Army, then disposed of anything else related to him except those items of sentimental worth. These she’d given to his parents. But she hadn’t been able to let go of the cards. She needed to move on with her life, yes, understood. However, she also needed to keep at least one reminder of the man to whom she’d been engaged to marry. To erase him categorically was not therapy. It was cruelty— to the memory of the person and fiancé he’d been.
    The second box contained her MacBook, a black nylon case that held her CD collection—Chopin, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and the gang, as well as some acid jazz and early rock—a bunch of wires the purpose of which she wasn’t exactly sure, and her digital camera, a high-tech toy that had gotten very little use lately. Tucked down at the very bottom of the box were a number of framed photographs. She lifted them out. The top