Last Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

expression on her face—that was barely a face anymore. Beth’s skull, shattered like broken glass. Kate had stared into a hole in her sister’s head and seen pieces of white bone clumped in her blood.
    Sam was at camp, and she didn’t know. Stories like this made the news and spread fast. Kate had firsthand experience of that fact—nothing went viral faster than small-town crimes, murderedmothers. If she didn’t get to Sam fast, some kid would read about it on Facebook. So she called the camp and asked that Sam be kept away from the media, and then the camp manager reminded her that cell phones and laptops and iPads weren’t allowed, that Sam would hear nothing until Kate arrived.
    The last time Kate had visited Sam at camp was two years ago, and Beth had been with her. Sam had just been a camper then, but now she was a junior counselor. The sisters had driven north in Kate’s Porsche with the top down and the radio on. They’d traveled almost the whole way on back roads, through pine woods, past farms and wide-open meadows. Although they lived relatively near each other, they didn’t get enough time together—Kate’s flight schedule was intense, and Beth was so busy with Pete and Sam and running the gallery. The road trip had been just what they’d needed: nonstop stories and laughter.
    Kate couldn’t stop feeling the need to talk to Beth. She wanted to tell her about Detective Reid, how he’d tried to be circumspect but had been so clumsy that Kate had no doubt he knew every detail about what had happened to them. Probably every cop in Connecticut did. Sometimes Kate could still feel the ropes around her wrists, forearms, chest, and ankles. She flexed her right hand now. She could still smell the blood, all her mother’s body fluids pooling around them. She and Beth almost never spoke about those hours at the gallery—they had locked the experience in a vault, just to stay sane and move on.
    Camp Orion was in Down East Maine, on an island off Roque Bluffs. Kate had thought about driving today, but it was a seven-plus-hour drive, not counting the ferry ride. She needed to get to Sam right away. And the idea of retracing the route she’d driven with Beth, with the seat empty beside her, pierced her heart clear through.
    She drove to the Groton-New London Airport, where early that morning she had landed the Citation X chartered by the Higginsons. She and Tallulah Granville, her best friend since childhood, co-owned a single-engine Piper Saratoga and kept it there. Lulu was a captain onDelta, active in the pilots’ union. Normally Kate would check with her to make sure she didn’t have plans to fly. Last week Lulu had been in Atlanta training on a new aircraft. Kate wasn’t sure where her schedule was taking her today. The idea of having to tell her about Beth right now, when she hadn’t yet seen Sam, was too excruciating to think about.
    The Saratoga was high performance, an all-metal beauty with retractable landing gear and tapered wings. Kate removed the chocks from around the plane’s wheels and climbed into the cockpit. She ran through the preflight check, put her headphones on, and called the tower to request clearance for takeoff.
    The airplane taxied down the runway, took off like a dream, banked over Long Island Sound with a view of three states—Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York—and began to climb into the clear blue sky.
    Kate had caught a tailwind back from LA, landing less than five hours after taking off from hot Van Nuys Airport in the San Fernando Valley. Because there had been a second pilot in the cockpit, her max allowable hours today were nine instead of eight, and that would give her just about enough flying time to get to Maine and back. Rules were important in the air and everywhere. Her grandmother had taught her that.
    Her grandmother had also taught Kate to fly. Mathilda Harkness, even at eighty-two, had been the best pilot Kate had ever flown with. She had served in the