Cathy Cash Spellman

New York Times & International Best Selling Author

Bless the Child Excerpt

Bless the Child Excerpt

Chapter I

Maggie O’Connor set the burglar alarm with trembling hands and pounding heart. She turned the key in the lock of the little antiquities shop on 68th Street and Madison Avenue that provided her livelihood and tried to regain control. But the memory of the voice on the phone had undone her completely.

Jenna, her daughter, had called.  Jenna, rebellious, headstrong, hostile, and missing for the better part of two years. The urgent voice, not quite familiar…the pain of memory seared in it’s almost childlike cadence…the brutal question marks of where she’d been, a punishing enigma.

A fearsome kaleidoscope of visions had flooded Maggie at the sound. Jenna, the precious child she’d loved more than life – -Jenna, defiant and unforgiving at one futile drug rehab after another- -Jenna, the heroin addict, who’d cut your heart out for the price of her next fix. Maggie shook her head forcefully to clear it of unwanted images and flagged a taxi in the driving rain.

“I have to see you tonight, Mother,” Jenna had demanded, a disembodied voice from nowhere. Was it fury or frenzy or desperation in the tone?  ” I’ll meet you at the house. Six-thirty. For Christ sake’s be there!” Then only the hum of the dial tone for evidence that a call had ever happened.

Maggie paid the cab driver with trembling hands as the freezing rain pelted down.  God, but she needed the comfort of home tonight.  Could it be that Jenna was finally coming home?  Where had she been?  What could she say to her? She tried to force her heart to a bearable staccato,  and turned her collar up against the steady slate-gray downpour.

Jenna was slouched in the doorway with a bundle of ragged clothing in her arms.

Or that was what Maggie thought, until it cried.

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