Chapter One #2
It soothed her as nothing else could. With a camera in her hand and an image in her mind, she could forget everything else.
Her long feet splashed through chilly puddles as she experimented with angles.
With absent annoyance she flicked at her hair.
It wouldn’t be falling in her face if she’d had it trimmed.
But she’d had no time, so it swung heavily forward in a tousled wave and made her wish for an elastic band.
She took nearly a dozen shots before she was satisfied. When she turned, her gaze was drawn upward. She’d left the lights on, she mused. She hadn’t even been aware she’d turned on so many on the trip from bedroom to kitchen.
Lips pursed, she crossed the street and focused her camera again.
Calculating, she crouched, shot at an upward angle, and captured those lighted windows in the dark building.
Den of the Insomniac, she decided. Then with a half laugh that echoed eerily enough to make her shudder, she lowered the camera again.
God, maybe she was losing her mind. Would a sane woman be out at three in the morning, half dressed and shivering, while she took pictures of her own windows?
She pressed her fingers against her eyes and wished more than anything else for the single thing that had always seemed to elude her. Normality.
You needed sleep to be normal, she thought.
She hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in more than a month.
You needed regular meals. She’d lost ten pounds in the last few weeks and had watched her long, rangy frame go bony.
You needed peace of mind. She couldn’t remember if she had ever laid claim to that.
Friends? Certainly she had friends, but no one close enough to call in the middle of the night to console her.
Family. Well, she had family, of sorts. A brother and sister whose lives no longer marched with hers. A father who was almost a stranger. A mother she hadn’t seen or heard from in twenty years.
Not my fault, Jo reminded herself as she started back across the street. It was Annabelle’s fault. Everything had changed when Annabelle had run from Sanctuary and left her baffled family crushed and heartbroken. The trouble, as Jo saw it, was that the rest of them hadn’t gotten over it. She had.
She hadn’t stayed on the island guarding every grain of sand like her father did. She hadn’t dedicated her life to running and caring for Sanctuary like her brother, Brian. And she hadn’t escaped into foolish fantasies or the next thrill the way her sister, Lexy, had.
Instead she had studied, and she had worked, and she had made a life for herself.
If she was a little shaky just now, it was only because she’d overextended, was letting the pressure get to her.
She was a little run-down, that was all.
She’d just add some vitamins to her regimen and get back in shape.
She might even take a vacation, Jo mused as she dug her keys out of her pocket.
It had been three years—no, four—since she had last taken a trip without a specific assignment.
Maybe Mexico, the West Indies. Someplace where the pace was slow and the sun hot.
Slowing down and clearing her mind. That was the way to get past this little blip in her life.
As she stepped back into the apartment, she kicked a small, square manila envelope that lay on the floor. For a moment she simply stood, one hand on the door, the other holding her camera, and stared at it.
Had it been there when she left? Why was it there in the first place? The first one had come a month before, had been waiting in her stack of mail, with only her name carefully printed across it.
Her hands began to shake again as she ordered herself to close the door, to lock it. Her breath hitched, but she leaned over, picked it up. Carefully, she set the camera aside, then unsealed the flap.
When she tapped out the contents, the sound she made was a long, low moan.
The photograph was very professionally done, perfectly cropped.
Just as the other three had been. A woman’s eyes, heavy-lidded, almond-shaped, with thick lashes and delicately arched brows.
Jo knew their color would be blue, deep blue, because the eyes were her own. In them was stark terror.
When was it taken? How and why? She pressed a hand to her mouth, staring down at the photo, knowing her eyes mirrored the shot perfectly.
Terror swept through her, had her rushing through the apartment into the small second bedroom she’d converted to a darkroom.
Frantically she yanked open a drawer, pawed through the contents, and found the envelopes she’d buried there.
In each was another black-and-white photo, cropped to two by six inches.
Her heartbeat was thundering in her ears as she lined them up.
In the first the eyes were closed, as if she’d been photographed while sleeping.
The others followed the waking process. Lashes barely lifted, showing only a hint of iris.
In the third the eyes were open but unfocused and clouded with confusion.
They had disturbed her, yes, unsettled her, certainly, when she found them tucked in her mail. But they hadn’t frightened her.
Now the last shot, centered on her eyes, fully awake and bright with fear.
Stepping back, shivering, Jo struggled to be calm. Why only the eyes? she asked herself. How had someone gotten close enough to take these pictures without her being aware of it? Now, whoever it was had been as close as the other side of her front door.
Propelled by fresh panic, she ran into the living room, and frantically checked the locks. Her heart was battering against her ribs when she fell back against the door. Then the anger kicked in.
Bastard, she thought. He wanted her to be terrorized. He wanted her to hide inside those rooms, jumping at shadows, afraid to step outside for fear he’d be there watching. She who had always been fearless was playing right into his hands.
She had wandered alone through foreign cities, walked mean streets and empty ones, she’d climbed mountains and hacked through jungles. With the camera as her shield, she’d never given a thought to fear. And now, because of a handful of photos, her legs were jellied with it.
The fear had been building, she admitted now. Growing and spiking over the weeks, level by level. It made her feel helpless, so exposed, so brutally alone.
Jo pushed herself away from the door. She couldn’t and wouldn’t live this way. She would ignore it, put it aside. Bury it deep. God knew she was an expert at burying traumas, small and large. This was just one more.
She was going to drink her coffee and go to work.
* * *
BY eight she had come full circle—sliding through fatigue, arcing through nervous energy, creative calm, then back to fatigue.
She couldn’t work mechanically, not even on the most basic aspect of darkroom chores.
She insisted on giving every step her full attention.
To do so, she’d had to calm down, ditch both the anger and the fear.
Over her first cup of coffee, she’d convinced herself she had figured out the reasoning behind the photos she’d been receiving.
Someone admired her work and was trying to get her attention, engage her influence for their own.
That made sense.
Occasionally she lectured or gave workshops. In addition, she’d had three major shows in the last three years. It wasn’t that difficult or that extraordinary for someone to have taken her picture—several pictures, for that matter.
That was certainly reasonable.
Whoever it was had gotten creative, that was all.
They’d enlarged the eye area, cropped it, and were sending the photos to her in a kind of series.
Though the photos appeared to have been printed recently, there was no telling when or where they’d been taken.
The negatives might be a year old. Or two. Or five.
They had certainly gotten her attention, but she’d overreacted, taken it too personally.
Over the last couple of years, she had received samples of work from admirers of hers. Usually there was a letter attached, praising her own photographs before the sender went into a pitch about wanting her advice or her help, or in a few cases, suggesting that they collaborate on a project.
The success she was enjoying professionally was still relatively new. She wasn’t yet used to the pressures that went along with commercial success, or the expectations, which could become burdensome.
And, Jo admitted as she ignored her unsteady stomach and sipped coffee that had gone stone cold, she wasn’t handling that success as well as she might.
She would handle it better, she thought, rolling her aching head on her aching shoulders, if everyone would just leave her alone to do what she did best.
Completed prints hung drying on the wet side of her darkroom. Her last batch of negatives had been developed and, sitting on a stool at her work counter, she slid a contact sheet onto her light board, then studied it, frame by frame, through her loupe.
For a moment she felt a flash of panic and despair. Every print she looked at was out of focus, blurry. Goddamn it, goddamn it, how could that be? Was it the whole roll? She shifted, blinked, and watched the magnified image of rising dunes and oat grass pop clear.
With a sound somewhere between a grunt and a laugh she sat back, rolled her tensed shoulders. “It’s not the prints that are blurry and out of focus, you idiot,” she muttered aloud. “It’s you.”
She set the loupe aside and closed her eyes to rest them. She lacked the energy to get up and make more coffee. She knew she should go eat, get something solid into her system. And she knew she should sleep. Stretch out on the bed, close everything off and crash.
But she was afraid to. In sleep she would lose even this shaky control.