Mayhem Takes a Dare: The Second Marisa Adair Mystery Adventure (Marisa Adair Mysteries Book 2) by Jada Ryker Page A

room. “I am fifty-seven years old. My baby is a year old.”
    At the shocked gasps, she smiled slightly. “I’m sure those sounds are not because you think I look so much younger than my age.” The mouth, baby doll small in the center of the flabby cheeks, twisted. “My husband and I tried to have a baby for ten years. Two years ago, he said we were too old. Too old! After everything we’d been through…the painful procedures, the constant appointments...” She pushed some strands of lank hair out of her face. “I went on with the in-vitro fertilization without him! After he said he wanted to stop, after I had agreed we would stop, I went on without him! The clinic had his sperm stored. I didn’t need him to keep going with me! So, I got pregnant. That was the betrayal.”
    Fred shifted in his chair.
    Interpreting his fidget as censure, Janine laughed bitterly. “He wasn’t too happy about that, to say the least. I thought he’d be fine once the baby got here. We’d have what we’d wanted for the last ten years!” Her face crumpled. All trace of Janine’s laughter was wiped away. “She cried and fussed all of the time! I continued to work full-time as a nurse. My husband was angry with me all of the time. He never had one kind word for me! I was sick and tired of my life. I just didn’t want to feel anything. So I started stealing drugs at work. Instead of injecting painkillers into my patients, I injected them into myself!”
    A single tear worked its way down the creased line of Janine’s face. “I got away with it for months. You’d think the hospital’s anti-drug-theft controls would have caught me! But no! Do you know what it was that finally busted my ass?”
    Janine’s shoulders shook, with laughter or tears, or perhaps both. “One of the other nurses saw flecks of blood on my sleeve. That’s it. Flecks of blood on my sleeve. I told her a patient got his blood on me. She was stubborn. She was disbelieving. She flatly refused to buy my story of the patient accidentally smearing blood on me. Maybe she suspected from my behavior, I don’t know. I was marched into the nursing director’s office. The next thing I knew, I was fired and I lost my nursing license. I was at home, with a husband who despised me and a baby who wouldn’t stop crying. I didn’t have any painkillers to help me, so I ate to kill my pain. I ate and I ate and I ate !”
    Janine pulled herself to her feet. She jabbed a finger at her own mouth. “You see this insatiable maw? It eats everything in sight! I had to have an operation to slow down its sucking up of food!”
    As Marisa rose and put her arms around the trembling shoulders, the door creaked open. Marisa twisted her head to see who it was. As a group, they had to be careful. Since their meetings were held in one of the Sunday school rooms of the church, they didn’t want church members who were in the building after hours to accidentally wander into their group and overhear their discussions.
    The figure at the door hesitantly poked its head into the room. The face was covered by a dark ski mask. The torso and arms were covered by a baggy gray sweatshirt.
    Confused, Marisa thought, Ski mask and sweatshirt? Could it be Henry Worthington, head of the Church of the Eternal Devotion, who always attended meetings in disguise?
    The figure slipped into the room. Below the ratty shirt, he was naked.
    Definitely a “he,” thought Marisa, her fingers tightening on Janine’s shoulders. But definitely not Henry Worthington.
    He ran gracefully around the circle of frozen men and women.
    Like children playing duck, duck, goose , thought Marisa in shock as he skipped past her.
    The long, white legs were bony, the hips nearly fleshless. His manhood was jiggling as his legs pumped up and down.
    Marisa couldn’t seem to move. Her eyes involuntarily flicked to Fred. Since he had been the hero of the dramatic conclusion of the incident involving Marisa and a crazed murderer, Fred