Free Last to Die by Tess Gerritsen

eats meat, so that qualifies her as a barbarian, too. Boy, did that get her mad!”
    As Maura unpacked jeans and hiking boots, hung up blouses and a dress in the wardrobe, Julian chattered about his classmates and teachers, about the catapult they’d built in Ms. Saul’s class, about their wilderness trip when a black bear had sauntered into their camp.
    “And I’ll bet you were the one who chased that bear away,” she said with a smile.
    “No, Mr. Roman scared him off. No bear wants to tangle with
him
.”
    “Then he must be a seriously scary man.”
    “He’s the forester. You’ll meet him at dinner tonight. If he shows up.”
    “Doesn’t he have to eat?”
    “He’s avoiding Dr. Welliver, because of the argument I told you about.”
    Maura closed the dresser drawer. “And who’s this Dr. Welliver, who hates hunting so much?”
    “She’s our psychologist. I see her every other Thursday.”
    She turned and frowned at him. “Why?”
    “Because I have issues. Like everyone here.”
    “What issues are you talking about?”
    He looked at her in puzzlement. “I thought you knew. That’s the reason I’m here, the reason all the students were chosen for Evensong. Because we’re different from regular kids.”
    She thought of the class she’d just visited, the two dozen students gathered around Poison Pasky’s demonstration table. They’d seemed like any other cross section of American teenagers.
    “What, exactly, is different about you?” she asked.
    “The way I lost my mom. It’s the same thing that makes all the kids here different.”
    “The other students have lost parents as well?”
    “Some of them. Or they’ve lost sisters or brothers. Dr. Welliver helps us deal with the anger. The nightmares. And Evensong teaches us how to fight back.”
    She thought of how Julian’s mother had died. Thought of how violent crime ripples through families, through neighborhoods, through generations.
Evensong teaches us how to fight back
.
    “When you say the other kids have lost their parents or sisters or brothers,” said Maura. “Do you mean …”
    “Murder,” said Julian. “That’s what we all have in common.”

THERE WAS A new face in the dining hall tonight.
    For weeks Julian had been talking about this visitor Dr. Isles, and about her work in the Boston medical examiner’s office cutting up dead people. He’d never mentioned that she was also beautiful. Dark-haired and slender, with a quietly intense gaze, she looked so much like Julian that they could almost be mother and son. And Dr. Isles looked at Julian the way a mother would look at her own child, with obvious pride, attentive to every word he said.
    No one will ever look at me that way again, thought Claire Ward.
    Seated at her usual solitary spot in the corner, Claire kept her eye on Dr. Isles, noting how elegantly the woman used a knife and fork to cut her meat. From this table, Claire could see everything that went on in the dining hall. She did not mind sitting alone; it meant she didn’t have to engage in pointless conversations and could keep an eye on what everyone else was doing. And this corner was the only place she felt comfortable, with her back to the wall, where no one could creep up behind her.
    Tonight on the menu was consommé, a salad of baby lettuces, beef Wellington with roasted potatoes and asparagus, and a lemon tart for dessert. It meant juggling an array of forks and spoons and cutlery, something that had confused Claire when she first arrived at Evensong a month ago. In Bob and Barbara Buckley’s house in Ithaca, dinners had been far simpler, involving only a knife, a fork, and a paper towel or two.
    There’d never been any beef Wellington.
    She missed Bob and Barbara far more than she’d ever imagined she would. Missed them almost as much as she missed her parents, whose deaths two years ago had left her with distressingly foggy memories that were fading fast day by day. But the deaths of Bob and Barbara