“Hey, they’re dancing! Quick, quick, turn the camera around.”
Jeff Barclay fumbled with his iPhone. The video went in and out of focus, and Frost saw a blur of Jeff’s black shoes. When the camera came up again, the picture jittered as Jeff tried and failed to hold it steady. Frost saw the Palm Room of the San Francisco Film Centre. Strings of orchids threaded around the white columns. Round tables dotted the glistening hardwood floor. Guests lingered over dessert and wine, and some, in suits and dresses, bobbed on the dance floor. He saw Michael Sloan in a gray tuxedo and, in his arms, Evelyn Archer-Sloan in an off-the-shoulder white wedding dress. They weren’t great dancers, but they swayed with the beat, beaming and leaning into each other. This was their big day.
Jeff Barclay zoomed in on the couple.
Frost’s mouth twitched. He knew what came next.
Off camera, he heard a woman scream. There were so many kinds of screams. Tittering, yelling, cheering, even laughing screams. This was a scream Frost had never heard before—a scream from inside a black hole, a scream where death was preferable to life. He watched Michael and Evelyn separate on the dance floor and look toward the source of the cry.
He could read Evelyn’s lips: “Who’s that?”
He heard Sandy Barclay: “Oh my God, what’s going on?”
The screaming rose like the wail of a banshee, but the music warbled on, gentle and unaffected. The DJ was too shocked to switch off the sound system. Crystal goblets and champagne flutes shattered as guests lurched away in surprise. Chairs tipped over and clattered. The camera swung, bouncing, off-kilter, to a young redhead in a low-cut emerald dress.
Monica Farr.
Frost froze the video and stared at her face. He’d seen other photos of Monica since that night—happy, smiling pictures. Vacations. Graduations. This was something completely different. Even out of focus, caught for a brief moment, her face was as primitive as a trapped animal. Her eyes were wide and wild. According to the groomsman who’d brought her to the party, she’d been completely normal up to that moment. Her breakdown came out of nowhere. In midsentence.
Just like Brynn Lansing.
Frost started the video again. Monica grabbed her purse from the table and dug inside it, and as she did, shouts of terror arose in the ballroom. He saw something dark in her hand, and then he heard:
“Gun!”
“She has a gun!”
People dove. The phone, still filming, fell to the floor, and all Frost saw was the ceiling and track lighting of the ballroom. He heard the soundtrack to the chaos—people stampeding, tables crashing—and then the explosion of a bullet and glass breaking in the bayside windows. He heard a voice wailing louder than everyone else—it was Monica Farr again—and then, horribly, one more gunshot cut off the scream as a bullet went from under Monica’s left ear, upward through the bone and brain of her skull, and exited and buried itself in the ceiling.
A body dropped with a sickening thud. He heard whispers. Crying. The devastated aftermath. The whole incident took less than thirty seconds to unfold.
Frost shut down the video and closed his laptop.
He’d talked to everyone in Monica Farr’s life since her death two months ago. It made no sense to anyone. He’d found no evidence of drugs. No evidence of depression. No history of strange behavior. Monica had been an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old woman living with her parents in a townhome near Lake Merced, working as a marketing manager for a downtown accounting firm. Her parents didn’t even know where or how she’d acquired a gun. The autopsy showed no abnormalities, no tumors pressing on the brain that could have caused hallucinations, no foreign substances in the blood work.
There was absolutely no explanation Frost could find for why Monica Farr had shot herself in the head at a wedding reception.
Just as there seemed to be no reason for Brynn Lansing to fall to her death from the Bay Bridge.
And yet he was convinced there was a connection.
Frost got up from the dining room table. He needed at least a couple of hours of sleep. He whistled a song idly to himself as he walked from the dining room and climbed the steps to the master bedroom. Undressing, he threw his clothes in the walk-in closet. When he turned on the bedroom light, he saw the pale-pink remnants of a bloodstain on the white carpet near the heavy walnut bedroom set. At first, he’d tried to clean it. That hadn’t worked. Then, for weeks, he’d walked around it, giving it a wide berth with his bare feet. Now he didn’t even care. He crossed the bloodstain like it was part of the decor.
He didn’t sleep in the king-sized bed. Instead, he went back downstairs to the living room with one of his pillows and stretched out on the tweed sofa near the bay window. It didn’t match the rest of the upscale decor, because it was the only piece of furniture in the house that belonged to him. His face sank into his pillow; his arm draped to the floor. Shack tiptoed up his back and curled up in the crook of his neck. Seconds later, they were both asleep.
4
Water.
Dr. Francesca Stein poured water into a glass and stared through the observation window at a patient alone in the therapy room. Her name was Jillian Clark. She was fourteen years old. She had long nut-brown hair, freckles, and a sweet smile. Her body had the gangly awkwardness of a growing teenager, but she could run like the wind on the soccer field. Jillian got straight As in school. She wanted to be an eye doctor, because her mother was an eye doctor, and Jillian idolized her mother.
Jillian lay on a white chaise in the middle of the therapy room. When Frankie pushed the intercom button, she could hear piano music playing softly inside. Jillian’s eyes were open, but she was already under hypnosis. The curved wall in front of her served as a movie screen, playing a slow-motion track of flowers and plants growing. Typically, Frankie used a video of ocean waves to relax her patients—but not for Jillian.
Water was Jillian’s problem.
When Frankie first met the girl a month earlier, they’d chatted in Frankie’s office, which adjoined the therapy room. They talked about boys. School. Music. The ordinary parts of a teenager’s life.
And then, with a glance at Jillian’s mother, Frankie poured a glass of water.
The reaction was even worse than she expected.
Jillian gasped for air. A choking noise belched from her open mouth, and redness rose in her face. Her chest seized. The episode continued until Frankie poured the water out in the sink, and once the water was gone, Jillian became her typical young self almost immediately. She laughed and joked about Taylor Swift. She talked about her last vacation with her parents to Disneyland. Neither her mind nor her body showed ill effects of the trauma.
It was the most extreme case of aquaphobia that Frankie had ever seen.
“Three months ago, I took Jillian kayaking in the bay near the San Mateo Bridge,” her mother had explained. “We ran into unstable currents, and her kayak flipped. She couldn’t right herself. I paddled like crazy to get to her, but it was nearly a minute before I could reach her and get her out of the water. She nearly died. The doctors said there was no physiological damage, but a few days later, I noticed that—well, I noticed that Jillian was starting to smell. And I realized she hadn’t showered since that trip to the bay.”
“I can’t stand to have water touching me,” Jillian added. “As soon as I get wet, I’m back there under the bay. The whole thing comes to life for me again. It’s not just that I remember it. I’m there.”
“Since then, it’s gotten worse,” her mother went on. “The very sight of water can trigger an episode. We’ve gone to doctors and therapists, and no one has been able to help. We’re desperate, Dr. Stein.”