Deadly Grace. Taylor Smith

“Is Jillian Meade in any of these?”

      “I’m not sure. Let’s see…” Twomey moved beside him to scan the collection. “No…no…yes, there she is. This was taken during the Bicentennial two years ago. There was a Smithsonian ball on the Fourth of July, and we all ended up on the roof watching the fireworks. That’s Jillian right there, in the red dress.”

      Cruz leaned in to peer at the group Twomey indicated. He was a little surprised to find Jillian Meade not quite as homely as he’d been picturing her. She was one of a dozen men and women of various ages, the men in black tie, the women in gowns, caught by someone’s camera as the fireworks exploded in the air behind them. She appeared to be slim and fairly tall, with long, dark hair tucked behind her ears and a soft fringe of bangs. She wore a simple red dress that rose high on her neck but was sliced away at the shoulders, halter-style. Like several others in the picture, she was holding up a glass of wine in an apparent toast to the nation’s two hundredth birthday. But where other faces were laughing or animated, her expression was relatively sober as she stared, clear-eyed, at the camera, only a hint of a smile—superior? sardonic?—at the edge of her lips. Twomey was in the group, too, Cruz noted, holding his glass up distractedly to the camera, his gaze focused…where?

      On Jillian Meade.

      CHAPTER 3

      Montrose, Minnesota

      Wednesday, January 10, 1979

      Something clattered, faintly melodic, like wooden wind chimes or a handful of pencils dropped on a floor. The sound pulled her out of the drifting, soundless, seamless place in which she’d been floating. Jillian lay still, her senses on alert, afraid to open her eyes. She wanted to go back to that quiet place, but it was like trying to hold smoke in your hand. It slipped away on a wisp of air.

      Whatever sound had awoken her was gone, too, before she could identify it. She heard only a low murmuring, like voices whispering from the bottom of a well, subdued and just beyond the range of the audible. She let the hum carry her along, until at last she felt herself floating again, drifting, back into the comfort of the white void. Stay here, the murmuring voices seemed to say. Stay here with us where it’s safe.

      Fine with her. There was nothing for her outside that formless place. She was content to drift there forever, a shade without substance. Anything else was too hard.

      “Jillian?”

      She felt a hand at her shoulder, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through her, as if she’d been touched by a cattle prod. Her body contorted, folding in on itself. The hand closed over her shoulder, a squeeze of reassurance, and then a light shake.

      “It’s time to wake up. Open your eyes now.”

      She was terrified, but she had no will of her own. The dead are like that, aren’t they? Jillian thought.

      She opened her eyes on horizontal bands of silver. She was supposed to be dead, but those looked like guardrails made of brushed steel, just inches from her face. They seemed very real. So did the wall beyond, solid-looking, a flat, dull green not found in nature. Her fingers slid tentatively across a field of bleached cotton to test the rails. Sure enough, they were hard and cold to the touch.

      “How are you feeling, Jillian?” The voice came from behind her, a woman’s voice, vaguely familiar and yet not. “I’m Dr. Kandinsky. I’ve been in to see you before. Do you remember?”

      A doctor? And so…guardrails…a hospital bed. She was in a hospital bed. Was she sick? Or had she been in an accident? A car accident? When? How long had she been here? Obviously long enough, Jillian realized, for this doctor to have been to see her more than once. She stared at the wall, terrified to move. Terrified to breathe. If she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, she wouldn’t feel pain.

      But she was breathing and every inhalation hurt. She took a quick survey of the rest of her body. She could see, she could hear. She could smell—antiseptic, a plastic smell, and… smoke? She could feel air blowing gently into her nostrils. Could feel the soft mattress under the right side of her face, and a tiny, line-like hump along her cheekbone. A hose. She was hooked up to a thin plastic hose pumping air…no, oxygen, probably, into rasping lungs that hurt with every breath.

      All right, she calculated, she was lying on her right side in a hospital bed looking through guardrails at a green wall, breathing air that hurt. What was wrong with her? She didn’t feel particularly sick or feverish, though she was very groggy. Carefully, she flexed her muscles, group by group, without moving her limbs, an isometric test of a body that hadn’t even seemed corporeal until just moments ago. All she wanted was to go back to that soft, quiet, safe place, but the voice wouldn’t let her.

      “Jillian? Come on now, it’s time to wake up,” it said again, kindly but firmly.

      Arms, hands, legs, feet, neck, spine. Everything there, everything working. No pain, except for a dull headache and, when she inhaled, the sensation that her lungs were full of sand. She also had a sick, terrified feeling in the pit of her stomach that something was very, very wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be there. If she could only go back to the quiet place.

      Leave me alone!

      “Jillian, how about if you roll over and sit up? Can you do that?”

      The pressure increased on her shoulder, trying to force her onto her back, pulling her toward the voice.

      No!

      Jillian’s left hand shot out, and she gripped the steel rail tightly, fighting to slow the spinning of her body and her mind. She felt a stinging pain in her left arm. She looked at it and froze. There was a bandage just inside the elbow, a thick white square of gauze anchored in place with adhesive tape that pulled at her skin. A small, red stain showed in the center of the gauze where blood had seeped through.

      I thought I dreamt it….

      Was it possible it had really happened? She’d had a dream about sirens and an ambulance, about being in an emergency room under blinding lights with people hovering and holding her down while she cried and tried to get away from them. She’d fought them, hard, until someone had stuck something into her right arm. She’d cried out—or maybe she only thought she had, because then everything had faded and she’d fallen into the quiet place.

      Later, she dreamed she’d awakened and found herself lying on a gurney, only now there was no one around and the lights were dimmed. In the dream, she pulled herself groggily up to a sitting position, confused and frightened, because she knew there was somewhere else she needed to be. They’d taken her clothes, but she climbed off the gurney, anyway, naked except for the sheet she held around her, and started looking for something to put on so she could leave. That was when she found a drawer with paper-wrapped packages labeled Syringe. And suddenly, somehow, she’d known there was a faster way to get to where she needed to be.

      She’d ripped open one of the packages and withdrawn a syringe, pulled back the plunger and slipped the plastic cap off the needle. The tip was in her arm and her thumb was on the plunger when the room had erupted in shouting and blinding light. Someone had knocked her to the ground and ripped the needle out of her arm. She’d cried out in pain, her blood streaming onto the floor as she fought them again, until finally, they’d stuck yet another needle into her and she’d tumbled into the quiet place once more.

      She’d thought it was a dream, but that blood-stained bandage on her arm was only too real, and so she knew it was true. She had failed.

      CHAPTER 4

      Havenwood, Minnesota

      Thursday, January 11, 1979

      The billboard at the side of the highway was hand-painted with a lurid depiction of white-capped waves, a thick stand of towering evergreens, and some kind of huge fish devouring a lure.

      WELCOME TO HAVENWOOD,ANGLING CAPITAL OF MINNESOTA!YOUR 4-SEASON PLAYGROUND!

      What