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Jilly began counting. One, two, three—no curses, no whispers, no small child’s pleading, nothing, just her own breathing, the soft hum of her car. She threw back her head and closed her eyes a moment, relishing the silence. She began counting again. Four, five, six—still blessed silence.

Seven, eight—soft, very soft, like a faraway rustling of leaves, coming closer, closer. Not rustling, no, whispering. Laura was whispering again, begging not to die, begging and pleading and swearing she’d never meant to sleep with him, but it had just happened, he’d made it happen. But Jilly hadn’t believed her.

“Please, stop, stop, stop,” Jilly chanted over that feathery voice. Laura began screaming that Jilly was a pathetic bitch, a fool who couldn’t see what she was. Jilly stomped down on the gas pedal. The Porsche lurched forward, hitting seventy, eighty, eighty-five. The coast road swerved. She kept the car directly in the center of the road. She began singing. Laura screamed louder, and Jilly sang louder. Ninety. Ninety-five.

“Go away. Damn you, go away!” Jilly’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, her head low, her forehead nearly touching the rim. The engine’s vibrations made Laura’s screaming voice convulse with power.

One hundred.

Jilly saw the sharp turn, but Laura yelled that they would be together soon now, very soon. She couldn’t wait to get Jilly, and then they’d see who would win.

Jilly screamed, whether at Laura or at the sight of the cliff dropping some forty feet to the heaped and tumbled black rocks below. The Porsche plunged through the railing, thick wood and steel, picking up speed, and shot out to the vast empty blackness beyond.

One more scream rent the silence before the Porsche sliced nose first through the still, black water. There was scarcely a sound, just the fast downward plunge, the sharp, clean impact, then the quick shifting and closing over, the calm water returning to what it had been just a second before.

Then there was only the black night. And calm and silence.

CHAPTER ONE

Bethesda Naval Hospital

Maryland

I jerked upright in bed, clutched at my neck, and doubled over as a god-awful pain ripped through me. I’d heard a man yell, just beside me, nearly right in my ear. I couldn’t draw a breath, I was suffocating. And a guy who wasn’t even there was yelling at me and I was dying. I finally managed to heave inward and suck in a huge breath.

I’d felt a mountain of frigid water crash down on me like the whale had closed down over Jonah. But I wasn’t drowning. I knew what drowning was, remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. I was seven years old, swimming with my older brother, Kevin, who was flirting with some young girls. I’d gotten tangled up in some underwater branches. It had been Jilly who’d jerked me out, smacked my back hard as I’d gagged and choked, until water gushed out of my mouth.

The dream wasn’t like that. It was as if I’d been hit by that water just a moment before there was, quite simply, nothing. Nothing at all. Just stillness, no pain, no questions, no fear, just an utter blank.

I swung my legs over the bed and stamped them hard on the ancient linoleum, savoring the sluice of pain that rumbled through my shoulder, my ribs, my collarbone, my right thigh, and other parts of me that were healing well enough so that gradually I’d dropped them out of my inventory. That delicious sharp pain brought me fully into my favorite hospital room, planted me firmly in the here and now, out from under water in a nightmare that had left me being nothing at all.

Still, when my feet hit the linoleum, the shock of the impact punched me back, and I nearly fell. I grabbed the bed railing at the head of the bed, took a deep breath, and looked around. My feet were still on the floor, flat on off-white linoleum that I’d come to hate in the past two weeks as much as those pastel green and tan walls. Leave it to the military to pick those colors. But you couldn