Jericho Point by Meg Gardiner Read Free Book Online

the grass like a marionette.
    I felt water soaking through my sweats. I heard Nikki saying, ‘‘Girl, oh, damn.’’ I smelled wet grass and jasmine so sweet it could have choked me.
    She gripped my shoulders. ‘‘No,’’ she was saying. ‘‘Evan, no.’’
    My mouth was gaping open and Nikki was fizzing in and out through the fog. The car, Jesus, tell me he didn’t wreck the car.
    ‘‘Carl’s on his way to the morgue with Jesse,’’ she said.
    She had a hand on my elbow. I slapped it away.
    ‘‘Don’t do that.’’ I heard myself. I was crying. ‘‘Don’t do that to me.’’
    She helped me to my feet. She looked disturbed at the force of my reaction. Drawing myself up straight, I climbed the porch steps.
    ‘‘Why are they going to the morgue?’’ I said. ‘‘Who’s dead?’’
    She opened the kitchen door. ‘‘You are.’’

6
    Nikki gripped the steering wheel. ‘‘It’s going to be all right.’’
    ‘‘We can catch them if you’ll go faster than twenty-five miles an hour.’’
    We were crawling along Hollister Avenue through Goleta. With Thea squirming in her car seat, Nikki refused to exceed the speed limit. But Jesse’s phone was off, and when I called the morgue I reached an automated message system.
    ‘‘Evan, chill down. You’re alive.’’
    ‘‘He doesn’t know that.’’
    At the roadside, eucalyptus trees moaned in the wind. Inside my head the white noise and air had dispersed into bright pebbles of confusion.
    ‘‘Explain it again. Maybe this time it’ll make sense,’’ I said.
    She exhaled. ‘‘Jesse got a call asking him to go to the morgue.’’
    ‘‘To identify my body.’’
    ‘‘Yes.’’
    ‘‘That’s stupid-ass crazy.’’
    ‘‘Hon, he was barely coherent.’’
    Traffic slowed for a red light. My knee jittered up and down. ‘‘Keep going.’’
    ‘‘He was at the bottom of the back steps, throwing rocks at the kitchen window to get our attention. Shouting, ‘Where the hell’s Evan?’ ’’ Her mouth crimped. ‘‘The look on his face. I never want to see it again.’’
    I felt colder than I could have imagined, and hollow. I dug my fists into the pockets of my sweatshirt. The light turned green, but the car in front of us didn’t move. I reached over and hit the horn.
    Nikki scowled at me. ‘‘Ease off. He’s going to be okay.’’
    ‘‘Just get there.’’
    I felt Nikki’s eyes on me. It seemed as though she were peering through my skin, down to the secret depths where I hid my worst thoughts. And she was seeing the fear I had swallowed: that, negligently or recklessly, Jesse might harm himself.
    ‘‘I know it’s somebody else. But I don’t want him to see it. I don’t want him even to set foot in the morgue. After all that’s happened, it’s too much to ask of him.’’
    Thea, seeming to sense our tension, rattled the car seat. ‘‘Out. Get out.’’
    ‘‘Has he been that depressed?’’ Nikki said.
    Not depressed; ragged with grief. His friend Isaac Sandoval had been killed when the hit-and-run driver ran them down. And only a few months ago Isaac’s brother, Adam, had died before Jesse’s eyes, trying to put the driver in prison. Against evidence and reason, Jesse thought their deaths were his fault. That guilt was what pulled him down beneath the surface of a black river he swam, upstream, in his own heart.
    I pointed at the cross street. ‘‘This is it.’’
    We turned the corner. The morgue was part of the county sheriff’s complex, a low building designed to be nondescript. Jesse’s black Mustang was parked outside. Nikki swung in next to it. I had the door open before the car finished rolling.
    I rushed inside and found Carl pacing back and forth in the lobby. He was his usual immaculate self, with creases ironed into his blue jeans, but behind round-rimmed glasses his face looked drawn.
    Seeing me, he stopped still. ‘‘My God.’’
    ‘‘Where’s Jesse?’’
    He pointed at a door. I