A Hidden Past by Blake Pierce EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Blake Pierce
- Language: English
- Genre: Thriller / Suspense
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2.9 MB
- Price: Free
There are times when I think of my home as small but clean. Not much
but safe. Nothing special but still something to be grateful for.
I have all those platitudes to help me deal with a far more pressing and,
I suppose, more obvious truth. Where I live is nothing like Laurel Heights.
Damn, I wish the sign had been right and that the place really was called
Autumn Downs. It would be nice to have at least a decent reason to disdain
them now that I’m back home.
Laurel Heights is a plastic place filled with plastic people. The lawns
are all perfectly manicured and kept that way by unobtrusive landscapers. I
imagine they never run mowers or leaf blowers before nine-thirty in the
morning. The place is filled with pools, and they’re all pristine because they
all hire people like me. The driveways are filled with cars kept shiny and
new by detailers who come directly to the homes so the fine residents of
Laurel heights don’t have to go through the horrific inconvenience of
driving for five minutes or—perish the thought—waiting for an hour while
someone cleans their car at a shop.
But it’s all the same. Every single house on every single lot is the
damned same. Every car is the damned same, and everyone who lives in
those houses and drives those cars is the same damned person.
I sit on the recliner and sigh as I sip a beer. The beer, perpetually on sale
at the gas station down the street, costs me double because I have to pay the
next-door neighbor to buy it for me. Even paying double, it’s still cheap
beer.
Jake’s happy to buy beer for me. He’s been buying beer for me since
high school. Of course, by the time I was in high school, beer didn’t do
much for me. I’d already found drugs. What was beer when there were pills
available? Why bother with finding harder alcohol when a couple of pills
gave me a better high and no hangover?
Actually, there were a number of reasons for me to avoid drugs but, of
course, I didn’t know that at fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen. It wasn’t until I
finally got caught that I started to learn. The judge made sure I heard the
wake-up call before sealing my record.
I allow myself a moment of gratitude that all they caught me doing was
boosting cars. There were a host of other crimes that could have gotten me
more time if they had been able to pin them on me.
I wasn’t a bad kid. I didn’t do any of the thefts to get money for drugs. I
did it just to get away from this place.
Of course, there’s an old recliner in my room now. I would be sleeping
on the floor if I hadn’t driven by a mini-mall advertising twin mattresses for
sixty-nine dollars. The sad thing is that mattress on the floor is probably the
best bed I’ve ever had.
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