Free Gone for Good by Harlan Coben Page A

word, like Cher or Fabio. The school, studio, whatever you want to call it, was located in a six-story walk-up on University Place off Union Square. The beginnings had been humble. The school had toiled in happy obscurity. Then a certain celebrity, a major pop star you know too well, "discovered" Squares. She told her friends. A few months later, Cosmo picked it up. Then Elle. Somewhere along the line, a big infomercial company asked Squares to do a video. Squares, a firm believer in selling out, delivered the goods. The Yoga Squared Workout the name is copyrighted took off. Hey, Squares even shaved on the day they taped.
    The rest was history.
    Suddenly, no Manhattan or Hamptons social event could deem itself "a happening" without everyone's favorite fitness guru. Squares turned down most invitations, but he quickly learned how to network. He rarely had time to teach anymore. If you want to take any of the classes, even ones taught by his most junior students, the wait list is at least two months. He charges twenty-five dollars per class. He has four studios. The smallest holds fifty students. The largest close to two hundred. He has twenty-four teachers who rotate in and out. As I approached the school now, it was eleven-thirty at night and three classes were still in session.
    Do the math.
    In the elevator I started hearing the painful strains of sitar music blending with the lapping of cascading water falls, a mingling of sounds I find about as soothing as a cat hit with a stun gun. The gift shop greets you first, filled with incense and books and lotions and tapes and videos and CD-ROMs and DVDs and crystals and beads and ponchos and tie-dye. Behind the counter were two anorexic twenty something-year-olds dressed in black, their entire personas reeking of granola. Forever young. Just wait. One male, one female, though it wasn't easy to tell which was which. Their voices were even and just this side of patronizing maitre d's at a trendy new restaurant. Their body piercings and there were lots of them were filled with silver and turquoise.
    "Hi," I said.
    "Please remove your shoes," Probably Male said.
    "Right."
    I slipped them off.
    "And you are?" Probably Female asked.
    "Here to see Squares. I'm Will Klein."
    The name meant nothing to them. Must be new. "Do you have an appointment with Yogi Squares?"
    "Yogi Squares?" I repeated.
    They stared at me.
    "Tell me," I said. "Is Yogi Squares smarter than the average Squares?"
    No laughter from the kiddies. Big surprise. She typed something into the computer terminal. They both frowned at the monitor. He picked up the phone and dialed. The sitar music blared. I felt a whopper headache brewing.
    "Will?"
    A wonderfully leotard-clad Wanda swept into the room, head high, clavicle prominent, eyes taking in everything. She was Squares's lead teacher and lover. They'd been together for three years now. Said leotard was lavender and oh-so-right. Wanda was a bold vision tall, long-limbed, and lithe, achingly beautiful, and black. Yes, black. The irony did not escape those of us who knew Squares's pardon the pun checkered past.
    She wrapped her arms around me, her embrace as warm as wood smoke. I wished it would last forever.
    "How are you, Will?" she said softly.
    "Better."
    She pulled back, those eyes searching for the lie. She'd been to my mother's funeral. She and Squares had no secrets. Squares and I had no secrets. Like an algebra proof using the communicative property, you could thus deduce that she and I had no secrets.
    "He's finishing up a class," she said. "Pranayama breathing."
    I nodded.
    She tilted her head as though she'd just thought of something. "Do you have a second before you go?" Her voice aimed for casual but couldn't quite get there.
    "Sure," I said.
    She padded Wanda was too graceful to merely walk down the corridor. I followed, my eyes level with her swanlike neck. We passed a fountain so large and ornate I wanted to toss a penny in it. I peeked in one of the