Page 41 of Take Your Breath Away

“Do you see the red car?” Albert said. “The sports car?”

“Yes, okay.”

“Okay, count over two to the left. That woman.”

Isabel squinted. Slowly, she said, “I see her.”

Very slowly, Albert said, “Don’t you think she looks …”

Neither of them said anything for several seconds. They both seemed to have stopped breathing. Isabel placed her palm on the glass.

The woman, dark-haired, slender, was leaning up against a black Volvo station wagon, arms crossed, as though waiting for someone.

“It’s just … it’s just someone who looks like her,” Isabel said.

“Her hair, the way she’s holding herself …”

“Let me see,” said Norman, squeezing in between them so he could look for himself. “Where?”

“There,” Albert said.

Norman squinted.

“Sometimes … I feel like I see her all the time,” Isabel said softly. “I’ll see someone walking ahead of me in the mall, something about the way the woman is walking, it reminds me of her, and I’ll run and catch up, just to make sure …”

“I know, I know. I do the same.”

Isabel and Albert were now talking to each other, less focused on the woman in the parking lot.

“Guys, look,” said Norman.

The woman, as though she could sense she was being observed from afar, turned and gazed up in their direction.

Looked directly at their window.

And waved.

Fourteen

Jayne Keeling, listening to Detective Hardy, had felt her world falling apart.

She’d sat across the table from her, hearing details about Andrew that she could hardly bring herself to believe.

“Why do you suppose Andrew hasn’t told you any of this?” Hardy asked.

Jayne did not know what to say.

“He was lucky, finding someone like you, someone from out of town who wouldn’t have been following the news at the time.”

“What do you want?” Jayne asked. “Why are you telling me all this?”

The detective smiled, leaned in. “I guess, if I were you, I’d want to know. I would feel I had a right to know.”

“But why now?”

Hardy offhandedly pointed at her phone, still on the table. A reference to the picture she had shown her moments earlier. “A development.”

“Is it a development? I mean, what do you make of this?”