No Safe Secret by Fern Michaels Page A

Maddy’s grandmother, had passed away. A life insurance policy had listed Lenore as the sole beneficiary to the tune of a measly five hundred dollars. Her mother had thrown a hellacious fit when she’d left her grandmother’s attorney’s office. She’d raised hell the entire ride back to Blossom City. Scared to utter a word, Maddy had focused on allotting herself one Chuckle every four hours. If she could keep this up, the jellied fake-fruit squares would ward off the hunger pains until they reached Blossom City. There, she knew she would get at least one meal a day at school.
    She didn’t care that she was on the free lunch program and that several of her classmates whispered behind her back when she held out the pale-green meal card for the lunch lady to punch. Everyone knew the pale-green cards were for the poor white trash. She’d been humiliated when she was old enough to realize her family life was very different from that of most of her classmates. But when your stomach kept you awake most of the night, and drinking well water from the bathroom sink didn’t cure your hunger, humiliation was a small price to pay for a full stomach, even if it was only one meal a day. Sometimes her friend Cassie, who got free lunches, too, would save a roll for her and slip it to her, wrapped in a napkin, beneath the table in the cafeteria. She’d always thanked her, and Cassie and she had been best of friends until Cassie’s family moved away when they were in sixth grade.
    After Cassie left Blossom City, there were no more yeast rolls to stave off the hunger at night. It wasn’t too bad, really. She hardly ever saw her mother, had no clue if she even had a job, or why she only occasionally made an appearance at home, but Marcus always had a pocketful of money, and he never complained about being hungry. She suspected he stole from various people, but if she were to tell this to their mother, again there would be hell to pay.
    By the time she was thirteen, Maddy had started offering babysitting services to a few families in the trailer park. Word got around. She was good to the kids, they all seemed to like her, and she could change a diaper like a pro and never complained when it was messy. With this job, she earned enough money to keep a few nonperishable food items hidden in her closet-size bedroom. If she had any cash left over, she would hide it, knowing the day would come when she would need it.
    That day came at the beginning of seventh grade. While the junior high school provided textbooks for all of her classes, three of those classes—English, math, and science—required the students to purchase the accompanying workbooks. These were sold in the school bookstore. Maddy knew she had enough money stashed from her babysitting to pay for the workbooks, so she didn’t think too much about it until the next morning when she pulled out the small jewelry box hidden inside a shoe box at the back of her tiny closet and saw that it had been emptied. She cried, and for the first time, she wished she were someone else, someone who belonged to a loving, kind family.
    She recalled the humiliation she’d felt when her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Swan, took out a supply of last year’s workbooks and gave a set to her after she had erased a former student’s answers. She’d been thankful but still wished for a real family. A mother and a father. Parents who paid for her school supplies. Parents who made sure she never went to bed hungry, and parents who loved her.
    More than anything, Maddy wished that her mother loved her. The other things really weren’t all that important, but she guessed that if she had a mother who truly loved her, having things she needed would be taken care of. She’d had neither, and she accepted her life, though as she grew older, she became more aware of her mother and her mother’s actions.
    Put simply, her mother was a whore and a drug