Read Online Long Lost (Myron Bolitar) by Harlan Coben - Free Book Online Page A

the Pont Neuf. The water was muddy green. Bells from a church pealed. People stopped on the bridge midspan and took pictures. One man asked me to snap one of him and what I guessed was his girlfriend. They snuggled in close and I counted to three and took the picture and then they asked if I minded taking one more and I counted to three again and did and then they thanked me and moved on.
    Terese had not said a word.
    “Are you hungry?” I asked.
    “We need to talk.”
    “Okay.”
    She never broke stride across the Pont Neuf, onto the Rue Dauphine, through the hotel lobby. The concierge behind the desk offered up a very friendly “Welcome back!” but she blew past him with a quick smile.
    Once the elevator doors closed, she turned to me and said, “You wanted to know my secret—what brought me to that island, why I’ve been on the run all these years.”
    “If you want to tell me,” I said in a way that sounded patronizing even in my own ears. “If I can help.”
    “You can’t. But you need to know anyway.”
    We got off on the fourth floor. She opened the door to the room, let me pass, closed the door behind her. The room was average size, small by American standards, with a spiral stairway leading to what I assumed was the loft. It looked very much like what it was supposed to—a sixteenth-century Parisian home, albeit with a wide-screen TV and built-in DVD player.
    Terese moved toward the window so that she was as far away from me as possible.
    “I’m going to tell you something now, okay? But I want you to promise me something first.”
    “What?”
    “Promise me you won’t try to comfort me,” she said.
    “I’m not following.”
    “I know you. You’ll hear this story and you’ll want to reach out. You’ll want to hug me or hold me or say the right thing because that’s the way you are. Don’t. Whatever you do, it will be the wrong move.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Promise me.”
    “I promise.”
    She cringed even deeper into the corner. The heck with after—I wanted to hold her now.
    “You don’t have to do this,” I said.
    “Yeah, I do. I’m just not sure how.”
    I said nothing.
    “I met Rick during my freshman year at Wesleyan. I came in from Shady Hills, Indiana, and I was the perfect cliché—the prom queen dating the quarterback, most likely to succeed, sweet as sugar. I was that annoying, pretty girl who studied too hard and got all anxious she was going to fail and then she finishes the test early and starts putting those reinforcements in her notebook. You remember those little white things—looked like flat peppermint Life Savers?”
    I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes.”
    “I was also that pretty girl who wanted everyone to dig beneath the surface to see I was more than just pretty—but the only reason you’d want to dig was because I was pretty. You know the deal.”
    I did. To some this might sound immodest. It wasn’t. It was honest. Like Paris, Terese was not blind to her looks, nor would she pretend otherwise.
    “So I dyed my blond hair dark so I would look smarter and went to this small liberal arts college in the Northeast. I arrived, like so many girls, with my chastity belt firmly attached and only my high school quarterback had the key. He and I were going to be the exception—we were going to make a long-distance relationship last.”
    I remembered those girls from my Duke days too.
    “How long do you think that lasted?” she asked me.
    “Two months?”
    “More like one. I met Rick. He was just this whirlwind. So smart and funny and sexy in a way I had never seen before. He was the campus radical, complete with the curly hair, the piercing blue eyes, and the beard that scratched when I kissed him. . . .”
    Her voice drifted off.
    “I can’t believe he’s dead. This is going to sound corny, but Rick was such a special soul. He was genuinely kind. He believed in justice and humanity. And someone killed him. Someone intentionally ended his