Read (2002) Deception aka Sanctum for Free Online

one women’s magazine there is a particularly tasteless photo of her throwing a wedding bouquet backward at the wire fence around Sunnyfields State Mental Hospital. And some of the stuff she’s quoted as saying, honestly, the League for People with Shit for Brains could sue her for bringing their name into disrepute.
    I turn up the volume:
    “Yeah, it’s a recognized phenomenon, prison romances. They’re sad, sad women mostly. Often the men are in the course of serving their sentence when the women start writing to them. They meet them on a visit and start an affair. [The interviewer asks something that I can’t make out.] No, Donna hadn’t met him before. She saw him in the paper and fell in love with his picture.”
    Susie starts to laugh, and Morris’s pal laughs politely along with her. He doesn’t find it as funny as Susie. She gives such big, barking laughs that it ends up sounding forced, as though she doesn’t find it funny either.
    I have a picture of Gow from the bag under the desk. Susie has marked it “Donna’s 1st view of G.” This must be the picture Donna saw of him, the one that she fell in love with. In the picture Gow is looking over his shoulder at the photographer. His hands are cuffed together and he’s wearing a green prison jumpsuit. His head is shaved, but he has the elaborate facial-hair arrangement of a man who’s in no hurry to get out to work in the mornings: a pencil line along the jaw, a mufflike hair cap on his chin, a thin mustache. His eyes are small and beady. He’s about as attractive as an anal prolapse.
    chapter five
    I WAS EATING A SANDWICH IN THE KITCHEN JUST NOW AND I GOT SO freaked out that I had to come up here. This is not a joke. They’re really going to keep my Susie in a prison for years and years and years. It’s grotesque. My heart will starve.
    All the papers are in tidy piles now, some on the floor, some on the desk, waiting for me to work through them. Yeni is downstairs giving Margie a bath. Margie’s in a terrible temper this evening. She’s crying at everything. I keep turning around to talk to Susie about it and finding she isn’t there anymore.
    What happened to us? We shouldn’t be worrying about murder convictions and appeals. We should be buying bigger houses, moving up the career ladder, fighting about next summer’s holiday destination. The worst of it is that it wasn’t just a random bolt from the blue. Susie had been gathering clippings about Gow for nearly a year, she got the sack over him, she followed him up to Cape Wrath. Let those who have eyes see.
    * * *
    I rewound the Dictaphone tape and sat looking at the picture of Gow, and I suddenly understood what Susie was laughing about. I started laughing myself. I felt so much affection for her and her bizarre take on everything that I ended up crying and laughing at the same time. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t catch my breath or keep the noise down in case Yeni heard me. I was sobbing and laughing and coughing for about ten minutes.
    I managed to clean my face up before I went downstairs. Yeni had put Margie to bed, thank God, and she didn’t see the mess I was in. Margie hasn’t asked for her mummy once since the conviction. I don’t think Yeni has told her that Susie isn’t coming back, she just seems to know.
    Before we left for court on the morning of the verdict, Susie sat in the hall for ten minutes and just held Margie, smelling her hair and watching her move, as if she were trying to absorb her, memorize the sensation of her. Margie didn’t want to be on her lap. She squirmed and tried to get off, but Susie just held on, rubbing as much of her face as she could into her soft skin and hair, stroking her tiny ears with her lips. Sometimes, when she’s holding Margie, she gets this beatific look on her face as if nothing can hurt her because she has her baby. She never looks like that because I’m there.
    I finally phoned Mum. Her voice was high and panicked, and she said she