The Last Widow

“Look, a guitar.” He picked up the instrument and adjusted the tension on the strings. A few strums later and he was making recognizable sounds. And then he turned it into a song.

Sara felt the quick thrill of surprise that always came with finding out something new about him.

Will hummed the opening lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”.

He stopped playing. “That’s kind of gross, right? ‘Hey little girl is your daddy home?’”

“How about ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’? Or ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’? Or the opening line to ‘Sara Smile’?”

“Damn.” He plucked at the guitar strings. “Hall and Oates, too?”

“Panic! At the Disco has a better version.” Sara watched his long fingers work the strings. She loved his hands. “When did you learn to play?”

“High school. Self-taught.” Will gave her a sheepish look. “Think of every stupid thing a sixteen-year-old boy would do to impress a sixteen-year-old girl and I know how to do it.”

She laughed, because it wasn’t hard to imagine. “Did you have a fade?”

“Duh.” He kept strumming the guitar. “I did the Pee-wee Herman voice. I could flip a skateboard. Knew all the words to ‘Thriller’. You should’ve seen me in my acid-washed jeans and Nember’s Only jacket.”

“Nember?”

“Dollar Store brand. I didn’t say I was a millionaire.” He looked up from the guitar, clearly enjoying her amusement. But then he nodded toward her head, asking, “What’s going on up there?”

Sara felt her earlier weepiness return. Love overwhelmed her. He was so tuned into her feelings. She so desperately wanted him to accept that it was natural for her to be tuned into his.

Will put down the guitar. He reached up to her face, used his thumb to rub the worry out of her brow. “That’s better.”

Sara kissed him. Really kissed him. This part was always easy. She ran her fingers through his sweaty hair. Will kissed her neck, then lower. Sara arched into him. She closed her eyes and let his mouth and hands smooth away all of her doubts.

They only stopped because the couch gave a sudden, violent shudder.

Sara asked, “What the hell was that?”

Will didn’t trot out the obvious joke about his ability to make the earth move. He looked under the couch. He stood up, checking the beams overhead, rapping his knuckles on the petrified wood. “Remember that earthquake in Alabama a few years back? That felt the same, but stronger.”

Sara straightened her clothes. “The country club does fireworks displays. Maybe they’re testing out a new show?”

“In broad daylight?” Will looked dubious. He found his phone on the workbench. “There aren’t any alerts.” He scrolled through his messages, then made a call. Then another. Then he tried a third number. Sara waited, expectant, but Will ended up shaking his head. He held up the phone so she could hear the recorded message saying that all circuits were busy.

She noted the time in the corner of the screen.

1:51 p.m.

She told Will, “Emory has an emergency siren. It goes off when there’s a natural disast—”

Boom!

The earth gave another violent shake. Sara had to steady herself against the couch before she could follow Will into the backyard.

He was looking up at the sky. A plume of dark smoke curled up behind the tree line. Sara was intimately familiar with the Emory University campus.

Fifteen thousand students.

Six thousand faculty and staff members.

Two ground-shaking explosions.

“Let’s go.” Will jogged toward the car. He was a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Sara was a doctor. There was no need to have a discussion about what they should do.

“Sara!” Cathy called from the back door. “Did you hear that?”

“It’s coming from Emory.” Sara ran into the house to find her car keys. She felt her thoughts spinning into dread. The urban campus sprawled over six hundred acres. The Emory University Hospital. Egleston Children’s Hospital. The Centers for Disease Control. The National Public Health Institute. The Yerkes National Primate Research Center. The Winship Cancer Institute. Government labs. Pathogens. Viruses. Terrorist attack? School shooter? Lone gunman?

“Could it be the bank?” Cathy asked. “There were those bank robbers who tried to blow up the jail.”

Martin Novak. Sara knew there was an important meeting taking place downtown, but the prisoner was stashed in a safe house well outside of the city.

Bella said, “Whatever it is, it’s not on the news yet.” She had turned on the kitchen television. “I’ve got Buddy’s old shotgun around here somewhere.”

Sara found her key fob in her purse. “Stay inside.” She grabbed her mother’s hand, squeezed it tight. “Call Daddy and Tessa and let them know you’re okay.”

She put her hair up as she walked toward the door. She froze before she reached it.

They had all frozen in place.

The deep, mournful wail of the emergency siren filled the air.

2 (#ulink_1de66287-b85c-5fe3-8ccd-6138c106d988)

Sunday, August 4, 1:33 p.m.

Will Trent took his hand off the lawn mower to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The task was not without complications. First, he had to shake the sweat off of his hand. Next, he had to rub his fingers on the inside of his shirt to get the grit off. Only then could he squeegee the liquid from his eyebrows with the side of his fist. He used the momentary reprieve from near-blindness to check his watch.

1:33 p.m.

What kind of idiot mowed three hilly acres in the middle of an August afternoon? He guessed the kind of idiot who’d spent the morning in bed with his girlfriend. As sweet as that had been, he really wished he could go back in time and explain to Past Will how fucking miserable Future Will was going to be.

He turned the corner, angling the mower through a dip in the rough terrain. His foot caught in a gopher hole. Gnats snarled in front of his face. The sun felt like the lash from a belt on the back of his neck. The only reason he hadn’t sweated his balls off was because a thick paste of dirt, clipped grass and sweat had glued them to his body.

Will glanced up at Bella’s house as he made another pass. He could not get over how massive it was. Money practically dripped from the gables. There was actually a book on the design that Bella had loaned him. The stained glass in the stairwell was made by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The plaster moldings had been shaped by craftsmen shipped over from Italy. Inlaid oak floors. Coffered ceilings. An indoor fountain. A mahogany-paneled library filled with ancient tomes. Cedar lining in every closet. Real gold on the gaudy chandeliers. A toilet in the basement for the help that dated back to Jim Crow. There was even a man-sized safe behind a hidden panel in the kitchen pantry that was meant to hold the family silver.

Will felt like Jethro Bodine every time he came up the driveway.

He grunted, putting his shoulder into bulldozing through a clump of cat’s claw that was bigger than an actual cat.

When Will had first met Sara, he’d figured out pretty quickly that she was well off. Not that she acted differently or spoke differently, but Will was a detective. He was a trained observer. Observation one: her apartment was the penthouse unit in a boutique building. Observation two: she drove a BMW. Three: she was a doctor, so his detective skills were not really needed to figure out that she had money in the bank.

Here’s where it got tricky: Sara had told him that her father was a plumber. Which was true. What she’d failed to add was that Eddie Linton was also a real estate investor. And that he’d brought Sara into the family business. And that she had made a lot of money renting out houses and selling houses and her medical school loans had been paid off, plus she’d sold her pediatrician’s practice in Grant County before moving to Atlanta, plus, she had money from her dead husband’s life insurance policy and his pension, and as the widow of a police officer she was exempt from state taxes, so financially speaking, Sara was Uncle Phil to his way less cool Fresh Prince.