The Retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #3)(20)

“There were cubbies labeled with our names. And his guitar was next to it.”

His guitar. He wouldn’t have left that behind. An ache rose in my throat, but I swallowed it back down.

“Did you look in the morgue?” Jamie asked Stella.

“Um . . . ” She shot me a nervous glance. I both did and didn’t want her to answer.

“No,” she finally said.

“One of us should.” Jamie’s voice was soft.

I shook my head. “Noah isn’t in there.”

“If you don’t want to go, I will,” Jamie said.

I thought of what he would find there if he went—the blood, Kells’s body. I thought I should go with him, to explain it.

Stella decided to come with us, and the two of them helped me up and let me use them as crutches as we opened the door and began the trek back down.

Despite our lack of shoes, our footsteps echoed loudly on the metal grates, and I knew I wasn’t the only one wondering if what we were doing was smart. If we weren’t alone down there, someone else would easily hear us. But we kept walking (in my case, limping) anyway. We had to see what was there . . . or wasn’t.

The door to the morgue was slightly ajar, and a bloody, smeared handprint wrapped around the edge, just beneath the handle. It was mine. Jamie and Stella just stared at it. I pushed the steel door open with my fingertips.

Dr. Kells was where I’d left her, her dead eyes fixed on nothing. Stella’s chin wobbled as she surveyed the scene. “What happened?” she whispered. But Jamie spoke before I could answer.

“I’ll look in the drawers,” he said, but made no move to enter the room. I urged both of them forward, breaking the spell. We stared at the rows of large metal cabinets, wanting and not wanting to know what was inside them.

In the end it was Stella who opened the first drawer. I leaned on Jamie as she unlocked it. We collectively held our breath as she slid out the tray, and collectively sighed when it turned out to be empty. Every nerve in my body felt raw and exposed as she unlocked drawer after drawer, each of them empty, until one wasn’t.

A sheet covered a shapeless mass. No, not shapeless. Body-shaped. Person-shaped.

Stella didn’t reach for it, so I broke away from Jamie, using the wall to support myself. I slid the sheet off and found Adam. Dick-Adam. Whom I could have saved, maybe, but had chosen not to. And now he was here, and dead, like Kells and Wayne and everyone else I’d hated.

But not Noah. Not Noah.





13


WE SLEPT BY THE WATER. The beach was half sand, half mud and was littered with jagged shells and tree roots, but I felt more dead than tired, so I stuffed Noah’s bag under my head and crashed anyway.

The feeling came back into my legs in a trickle, not a wave. When I woke up, my muscles ached with soreness, my mouth tasted spoiled, and my stomach hurt. I was itchy and filthy and miserable, but when the sun peeked through the trees and I realized that I could stare at it, bask in it, worship it if I wanted to, my mouth curved into a smile. I was free.

Jamie and Stella were still sleeping. Mist crept up from the gray ocean onto the beach, reaching for their feet, clinging to the tall sea grass. I stood quietly, weak-kneed but able to walk on my own. Seagulls picked over something on the shore. They scattered at my approach.

My papery hospital gown was crusted with blood and sand and dirt. I had no clothes, so I brought Noah’s bag with me, figuring I’d wash myself off in the ocean and change into something of his. But my hand froze on the zipper.

I didn’t know if I could keep it together if I opened his bag and smelled his scent and felt the fabric that had touched his skin. I knew he was alive—knew it—but he wasn’t here.

I walked back just as Jamie was waking up, stretching his arms up to touch the tree branch above him.

“I feel like ass,” he said.

Stella yawned loudly. “You look like it too.”

“So, what’s for breakfast?” Jamie asked.

Stella rolled her eyes. “Cute.”

“My gastric juices are dissolving my stomach lining,” Jamie said. Stella made a disgusted face. “My stomach is eating itself. And I’ve never been this sore in my life.”

Stella propped herself up on her elbows. “Maybe there are coconuts or something?”

“We’re not foraging for coconuts,” I said. “We have to get off the island.”

Stella agreed. “I grabbed some files from Kells’s office, but I didn’t really look at what I took. We could go back—she had to have a way of coming and going. Maybe we can find it.”

“Then what?” Jamie asked.

“There’s a resort on No Name Island,” I said. “If we go back, we might be able to find a phone . . .”

But my voice trailed off as I followed that train of thought. Who would we call?

“And what would we say?” Jamie added, seeing where I was going with it.

“Kells mentioned Phoebe and Tara before—” Before I killed her. “Said that it would look like I was the one who’d killed them.”

“But Jude did it,” Stella said.

“Right in front of us,” Jamie added.

“Dr. Kells—that was self-defense,” Stella said. “We’ll back you up.”