Last to Die: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

brown, with long lashes. He kept looking at her, as if trying to see what she was really thinking. All the things she was afraid to tell him.
    She shoved his hand aside and walked away. Kept walking until the trail ended at the edge of the lake. There she stopped and stared across rain-dappled waters. Hoping Will would follow her.
    And there he was, standing right beside her. A frigid wind blew off the lake, and she hugged herself, shivering. Will didn’t seem tonotice the cold, even though he wore only jeans and a damp T-shirt that clung to every unflattering bulge of his pillowy torso.
    “Did it hurt?” he asked. “Getting shot?”
    Automatically she reached up to touch the spot on her skull. The little indentation that marked the end of her life as a normal kid, a kid who slept through the night and got good grades. A kid who didn’t say all the wrong things at the wrong times. “I don’t know,” she said. “The last thing I remember is having dinner in a restaurant with my mom and dad. They wanted me to try something new, but I wanted spaghetti. I kept insisting on spaghetti, spaghetti, and my mom finally told the waiter just to get me what I wanted. That’s what I remember last. That my mom was annoyed with me. That I disappointed her.” She swiped a hand across her eyes, leaving a streak of warmth on her cheeks.
    On the pond a loon cried, a lonely, unearthly sound that made tears well up in her throat.
    “I woke up in the hospital,” she said. “And my mom and dad were dead.”
    His touch was so soft that she wasn’t sure if she imagined it. Just a featherlight stroke of his fingers on her face. She lifted her head to look into Will’s brown eyes.
    “I miss my mom and dad, too,” he said.
    “T HIS IS A CREEPY school with creepy kids,” said Jane. “Every single one of them is peculiar.”
    They sat in Maura’s room, their chairs pulled close to the hearth, where a fire was burning. Outside, rain lashed the windows and wind rattled the glass. Although she’d changed into dry clothes, the dampness had penetrated so deeply into Jane’s bones that even the heat of the flames failed to warm her. She pulled her sweater tighter and looked up at the oil painting that hung above the mantelpiece. It was a gentleman hunter, rifle propped over his shoulder as he posed proudly beside a fallen stag. Men and their trophies.
    “The word I would use,” said Maura, “is
haunted
.”
    “The children, you mean?”
    “Yes. They’re haunted by crime. By violence. No wonder they strike you as odd.”
    “You put a bunch of kids like that together, kids who have serious emotional issues, and all it does is reinforce their weirdness.”
    “Maybe,” said Maura. “But it’s also the one place where they find acceptance. With people who understand them.”
    This was not what Jane expected her to say. The Maura she saw now, sitting by the fire, seemed like a different woman. The wind and humidity had transformed her usually sculpted black hair into a tangled thatch. Her plaid flannel shirt was untucked, and the cuffs of her blue jeans were stained with dried mud. Only a few days in Maine, and she’d been transformed into someone Jane did not quite recognize.
    “You told me earlier that you wanted to pull Julian out of this school,” said Jane.
    “I did.”
    “So what changed your mind?”
    “You can see how happy he is here. And he refuses to leave. That’s what he told me. At sixteen, he already knows exactly what he wants.” Maura sipped from a cup of tea and regarded Jane through the curling steam. “Remember what he was like in Wyoming? A wild animal who always got into fights, whose only friend was that dog. But here, in Evensong, he’s found friends. This is where he belongs.”
    “Because here they’re
all
oddballs.”
    Maura smiled at the fire. “Maybe that’s why Julian and I bonded. Because I am, too.”
    “But in a good way,” Jane quickly added.
    “Which way would that be?”
    “Brilliant. Determined. Reliable.”
    “I’m starting to sound like a German shepherd.”
    “And honest.” Jane paused. “Even when it means losing friends because of it.”
    Maura stared into her teacup. “I’m going to pay for that sin forever. Aren’t I?”
    For a moment they didn’t speak; the only sound was the rain hitting the window and the hiss of the fire. Jane could not remember the last time they had sat together and quietly talked, just the two of them. Her bag was already packed