trying to regain control and finding that for the first time in four years, she just couldn’t. “Liz, it’s awful,” she gasped, trying desperately not to cry, not to lose it completely until she’d told her friend what she’d seen. “I can’t breathe.”
“I’m coming over.”
“No. I can’t go back there.” Focus. She had to focus. “God, Liz, I’m afraid to go back to my own home.” Pressing her palms against the steering wheel, she narrowed her focus to the space between her thumbs, inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. In. Out. In. Out. “It’s different this time,” she said, her voice regaining some of its former calm.
“It’s James.” Inhale. Detach, just like her first yoga master had taught her. Detach. What shows up must be accepted without upset. “It’s a picture of James. Someone took a picture of his body the day he…” Exhale. Accept. She glanced at the slip of paper and the tremors in her body worsened. “Liz, I think this was taken right when he died.”
Chapter Two
Adriana hugged her elbows, feeling cold and almost painfully brittle, as if someone had opened her up and exposed her insides to the world. “You don’t think it’s just a prank?” she said into the phone. To tell the truth, she didn’t think it was just a prank, but something in her was holding on to that idea all the same, with the desperation of a shipwreck victim clinging to a piece of driftwood.
“No, I don’t,” Liz replied softly. “I was there, remember?”
The day Addy had lost James wasn’t one she could easily forget. But while her experience had been confined to getting the long-dreaded visit from a cop who wasn’t her fiancé, Liz’s had been far more physically painful. James had been shot in the line of duty while pursuing a killer, and Liz had been right beside him when it had happened. James’s murderer had taken Liz hostage for several hours, an experience she never talked about, which had landed her in the hospital for over a week. If the rumors were true, her clothes concealed some nasty knife-wound scars.
Addy looked to her right, where the ocean was barely visible between two of her neighbors’ houses. She could just glimpse a tiny corner of the sharp rocks that lined their portion of the beach, around which the cold sea boiled and churned, filled with riptides ready to drag down anything that fell into it.
Elijah Carter, aka The Surgeon—the man who’d killed James, who’d nearly killed Liz—had fallen into that water, in his final confrontation with the FBI and Monterey PD. His body had never been found.
“He couldn’t have survived, could he?” she asked, not taking her eyes off that sliver of blue-gray. In all the years that she’d lived on Monterey’s Mermaid Point, she’d never heard of someone falling into that water, and living.
Liz didn’t answer, and Addy’s vision blurred, until all she could see was the mental image of James as he was in the photo lying beside her. His cheek pressed into the wood-chip-lined ground, his glasses half off his face, one lens cracked in a spiderweb pattern, the rumpled brown hair she’d loved to smooth off his forehead partially obscuring his unfocused stare. He’d been breathing just seconds before that picture had been taken. She knew it. He’d been alive, and somewhere across town she’d been coming home after a day at work, engaged and in love. She’d been happy.
“Why?” The word came out broken, and sounding so lonely and scared, she wanted to take it back as soon as she’d said it.
“I don’t know, Addy. I’m so sorry.”
Wanting to get as far from Mermaid Point as she could, Addy said goodbye to Liz, who promised to wrap up her work at whatever scene she was at to meet her at the studio. Calling ahead to ask her office manager to cancel her classes for the day, Addy didn’t stop driving until she reached the bustling street. She pulled into the little parking lot behind her studio and took the keys out of the ignition.
And then found herself unable to get out of the car.
If he survived the fall off those rocks…
The thought of leaving the Scion and walking out into the wide-open street where anyone could see her made her stomach clench. He could be anywhere. He could be watching her. She glanced at the piece of paper lying facedown on the passenger seat. Who else but the man who murdered James could have taken that photo?
The man who got off on torturing women. The man who’d stalked and nearly killed two of her friends.
She glanced at her reflection in the rearview mirror, all too aware of just how neatly she fit The Surgeon’s victim profile: unmarried students or working women in their twenties and thirties, with dark hair, who live alone.
All alone.
Someone tapped on the driver’s-side window, and she jerked backward in her seat. Her hand flew to her mouth to muffle her instinctive shout.
One of her students. Stan, an inexperienced yoga practitioner who’d just started coming to her beginner class a few weeks ago. Forcing a smile, which made her skin feel too tight and her jaw ache, she rolled down her window.
“Hey, Stan.”
He shoved his overly long hair out of his eyes and smiled shyly at her, revealing a slight gap between his two front teeth. One of them looked slightly gray and off-kilter, as if it had been knocked out in the past and then haphazardly glued back into his mouth. “Hi, Addy.”
She waited for him to let her know what he wanted, but when he remained silent—for far longer than was socially acceptable—she grabbed her bags and the stupid note and busied herself with getting out of the car. As his yoga instructor, she was probably supposed to be radiating Zenlike patience, but something about Stan had rankled from the first day he’d walked into her studio. For one thing, she’d never asked him to call her Addy—most of her students called her Adriana.
“Can I help you with something?”
“Oh, I just saw you coming, and I thought I’d wait for you.” He nervously fingered the hem of his gray T-shirt, which hung a little too high over his tight bicycle shorts to be flattering. “To walk to class together, you know.”
Deep breath. Maybe as Terri, the office manager, often pointed out, the more difficult students who came their way were secret bodhisattvas, put on earth to teach everyone patience. And really, Stan wasn’t the worst they’d ever had—just a little socially awkward.
Slamming the door shut, she pressed the button on her key fob to lock the doors. Twice, just in case. “I’m sorry, didn’t Terri put up a sign yet? I’m having to cancel classes today.”
“Ohhhh. Oh, yeah. Umm.”
His stuttered reply gave her the distinct feeling that Terri had put up a sign and he’d seen it. But she pushed the thought out of her mind—she was just being paranoid. She’d read about conditions like Asperger’s where people had trouble reading social cues—Stan probably deserved patience, not condemnation.
Slinging her bags over her shoulder, she started walking toward the studio, and he fell into step beside her.
“Well, um…”
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I have an emergency I’m having to deal with. We’ll add a free class to your prepaid schedule to make up for
