were soaking up the water from her friend’s nightgown. “You have to stop this, Ava. You have to.” Glancing up at the stranger, she added to Ava, “Come on, let’s get you into the house.” Then to Dern, “You too. Dear God, you’re both soaked to the bone!”
Khloe and Dern both tried to help her up the path, but she shook them both off, startling Virginia’s black cat, Mr. T, who had been hiding behind a withering rhododendron. With a hiss, the cat slid into a crawl space under the porch just as Ava’s cousin, Jacob, came running from his burrow of an apartment in the basement of the old house.
Some of her old pluck began returning. She was tired of playing the victim, bored with the pitying stares and the knowing glances shared between others as if to say, Poor, poor thing. So they thought she was crazy.
Big deal.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t questioned her sanity herself, just minutes ago, and yet everyone’s concern was really beginning to get under her skin.
“What happened?” Jacob demanded. His glasses were off-kilter and his reddish hair mussed, as if he’d been asleep.
Ignoring him and everyone else, Ava clambered up the stairs, dripping, her nightgown sucked tight to her body. She didn’t give a damn what they thought. She knew she’d seen Noah, and no matter what Khloe or her cowboyesque savior or even the damned shrink Ms. Evelyn McPherson thought, she wasn’t insane. Had never been. Wasn’t ready for the loony bin.
“Let me help you,” Khloe said, but Ava was having none of it.
“I’m fine.”
“You just jumped into the ocean, Ava! You are definitely not anywhere close to fine.”
“Just leave me alone, Khloe.”
Khloe glanced at Dern, then backed up, lifting her hands, palms out. “Ooookay.”
“No need to be melodramatic,” Ava muttered.
“Oh, yeah. I’m the drama queen!” Khloe sighed heavily. “Just for the record, who was it who flung herself into the bay a few minutes ago?”
“Okay, okay.” Ava was up the stairs and opening the screen door. “I get it.” Once inside, where the heat hit her like a wall and the tangy scent of tomatoes and clams swept through the hallways, she hurried past the wall of windows that overlooked the yard, taking another quick glance. Now, aside from a few security lights, the grounds were dark, the fog too dense to see the end of the pier. Her heart ached at the thought of her son, but she pushed her grief aside.
At least her mind had cleared somewhat; her headache, if not completely gone, at least had receded to somewhere far away from her frontal lobes. She heard the screen door open and close behind her and knew that her confrontation with Khloe, and possibly the man who had leaped in after her, wasn’t yet over.
Great. Just what she needed!
Teeth chattering so hard they rattled, she was heading toward the back stairs when she heard the clunk of the elevator from the shaft that ran along the east side of the stairs, then the whisper of the elevator doors slowly opening.
She prayed the occupant wasn’t Jewel-Anne. But, of course, she wasn’t so lucky, and within seconds her pudgy cousin emerged, her electric wheelchair carrying her into the hallway. Through thick glasses, she threw a look at Ava, taking in her soggy nightgown, plastered hair, and probably nearly blue skin.
“Swimming again?” she asked with that smug little smile Ava would have liked to wipe off her face. Jewel-Anne pulled out an earbud from her iPhone, and Ava heard the strains of Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds” sounding tinny at the distance.
“We’re caught in a trap,” he warbled, and Ava wondered why a woman who had been born long after the rock icon had died had become such a die-hard fan. Of course, she knew the pat answer, because she’d posed the question to Jewel-Anne just this past year. Over her oatmeal, with one earbud plugged in, Jewel-Anne had turned deadly serious. “We shared the same birthday, you know.” She’d added a second scoop of brown sugar to her cereal.
Somehow, Ava had managed to keep her sarcastic tongue in check and said only, “You weren’t even alive when—”
“He speaks to me, Ava!” Jewel-Anne’s lips had compressed with certainty. “He was such a tragic figure.” She paid attention to her breakfast, stirring her butter and brown sugar and swirling her hot cereal in her bowl. “Like me.”
Then she’d looked up at Ava with innocent eyes, and Ava had felt the deep jab of guilt