The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

tonight. You can sleep on the couch.”
    He shook his head. “Forget it. I need to be by myself.”
    “I think that’s a bad idea.”
    “I don’t want to be with anyone, okay? Just leave me alone.”
    She studied him, trying to gauge how hard she could push him on this point. And realized that if she were in his shoes, she, too, would want to crawl into a cave and talk to no one. “Are you sure?”
    “Yeah.” He straightened, as though steeling himself for the walk out of the building, past colleagues who’d see his face and wonder what had happened.
    “She’s not worth crying over,” said Jane. “That’s my opinion.”
    “Maybe,” he said softly. “But I love her.” He walked out of the room.
    She followed him to the stairwell and stood there on the third-floor landing, listening to his footsteps as he descended the stairs. And she wondered if she should have taken his gun.

TWENTY-FIVE
     
    The relentless pings of dripping water were like hammer blows to her aching head. Josephine groaned and her voice seemed to echo back, as though she were in some vast cave that smelled of mold and dank earth. Opening her eyes, she saw a blackness so solid that when she reached out, she half expected to feel it. Though her hand was right in front of her face, she could not see even a hint of movement, not the faintest silhouette. Just the effort to focus in the darkness made her stomach rebel.
    Fighting nausea, she closed her eyes and rolled onto her side, where she lay with her cheek pressed against damp fabric. She struggled to make sense of where she was. Little by little she registered the details. Dripping water. Cold. A mattress that smelled of mildew.
    Why can’t I remember how I got here?
    Her last memory was of Simon Crispin. The sound of his alarmed voice, his shouting in the darkness of the museum basement. But that was a different darkness, not this one.
    Her eyes shot open again, and this time it wasn’t nausea but fear that gripped her stomach. Fighting dizziness, she sat up. She heard her own heartbeat and the whoosh of blood in her ears. Reaching beyond the edge of the mattress, she felt a frigid concrete floor. Her hands swept the perimeter and she discovered, within reach, a jug of water. A waste bucket. And something soft, covered in crackling plastic. She squeezed it and smelled the yeasty fragrance of bread.
    Farther and farther she explored, her dark universe expanding as she gradually ventured off the safe island of the mattress. On hands and knees she crawled, her leg cast scraping across the floor. Leaving the mattress behind in the dark, she suddenly panicked that she would not be able to find it again, that she’d be eternally wandering on the cold floor in search of that pitiful bit of comfort. But the wilderness was not such a large place after all; after only a short crawl, she came up against a rough concrete wall.
    Propping herself against it, she rose to her feet. The effort left her unsteady and she leaned back, eyes closed, waiting for her head to clear. She became aware of other sounds now. The chirping of insects. The skittering of some unseen creature moving across the floor. And through it all, that relentless dripping of water.
    She limped alongside the wall, tracing the boundaries of her prison. A few paces took her to the first corner, and she found it oddly comforting to discover that this blackness was not infinite, that her blind wanderings would not lead her to drop off the edge of the universe. She hobbled on, her hand tracing the next wall. A dozen paces took her to a second corner.
    The features of her prison were slowly taking shape in her head.
    She moved along the third wall until she reached another corner. Twelve paces by eight paces, she thought. Twenty-four feet by thirty-six feet. Concrete walls and a floor.
A basement.
    She started along the next wall, and her foot bumped up against something that clattered away. Reaching down, her fingers closed around the object. She felt curved leather, the bumpy surface of rhinestones. A spike heel.
    A woman’s shoe.
    Another prisoner has been in this place, she thought. Another woman has slept on that mattress and gulped from that water jug. She cradled the shoe, her fingers exploring every curve, hungrily seeking clues to its owner.
My sister in despair.
It was a small shoe, size five or six, and with the rhinestones, surely it had been a party shoe, meant to be worn with a pretty dress and earrings, for an