Read Mist upon the Marsh: The Story of Nessa and Cassie for Free Online Page B

with their flight from the diner; a process that could not be completed quickly enough, and the object of which was to gain between the diner and themselves just as much distance as it was possible to gain, without accidentally passing their own homes, and having to turn about in pursuit of them.
    Having gone on in the opposite direction as had her work-mates, Cassie MacAdam was heading North-bound on Junction Road. She took the West-fork, and drove along for perhaps twenty miles, before she turned into the short drive of her mother’s house: 245 LeMontagne Boulevard.
    Entering the house, Cassie was blessed by a rare escape from her mother’s drunken clutches, and was graciously pardoned from her stepfather’s identical inebriated ignorance. She went slowly up the stairs at the back of the house; crept into her bedroom without a sound; and closed the door silently against any future attempts upon her valuable but scant supplies of peace and sanity.
    It was Friday night. Fridays meant checks from old Wiley at noon, and a lunch-time visit to the bank, where she cashed the bit of paper for more bits of paper, which totalled four-hundred-and-eighty-dollars, all bits accounted for. The wiser thing to do, one would think, would be to deposit the check into an account, and draw upon it as needed. In reality, it would be so.
    But no, this was not reality. One way or another, no matter how Cassie strove to keep it from her, Birdie ever and again attained the number to her daughter’s checking account. Armed with such information, she had on several occasions bled Cassie’s funds dry. Cassie, of course, had spoken many times with the bank manager; but he only ever looked at her with rather an idiotic expression upon his face, not quite understanding why Cassie should want to withhold the contents of her account from her own mother. And so, whether because he had disapproved of Cassie’s instructions, or simply forgotten all about them, he allowed Birdie on each and every occasion to draw on her account – despite the fact that her name was not on it.
    After having been rendered destitute, more times than should have deemed excusable the murder of Birdie Post, Cassie came to a new conclusion. She bought a small lock-box (one which was, as the salesman did say, quite unbreakable) and began storing her money inside it. But only two months ago, the Pontiac’s transmission failed her, and she found her box nearly empty. What with additional expenses, which were not few (considering Birdie’s irresponsibility, and her husband’s laziness) her box was only just beginning to shake off its deathly pallor, and resume a look of health.
    Presently, she locked the bedroom door, and went to the closet – in the floor of which lay a board she had broken, and then replaced, to create a small and foolproof hiding place. She removed the board, and extracted the box, whose combination she quickly dialled in. With a small smile of anticipation (every time she opened the box, she removed all its contents, and counted them over and over, in rather a miserly fashion), she opened the lid, and peered into the tiny, dark cubbyhole.
    Initially, of course, she thought her lack of sight only a product of the lateness of the hour, and the darkness of the closet. So she refrained from panicking, and exited the closet calmly, so as to stand in the light which streamed in at the window. Here she held the box aloft once again, and looked for a long while inside it – though it took not very long at all to understand the state of her affairs.
    Five hundred dollars, the box had contained. Quite every penny of all the money she had in the world. She looked now into the box, and saw that it was empty. She patted the wad of money in her pocket, nearly all of which would be spent within the week.
    She would kill him. How had he done it? She would kill him.
    With a scream of anger, she thrust the box away. It went sailing across the room, and into the wall, where