Epilogue

_Thursday, June 25

10:49 P.M.

_

"You're really something," Stone declared, falling back onto the rumpled sheets. "What's come over you lately? Don't you ever get tired?"

"Maybe I'm just happy to be alive," Ally said, smiling as she ran a finger down his chest. "I'm catching up on all the living I've been missing out on."

Her heart was definitely on the mend, in several ways. She was beginning to think she was in love. After Steve went missing, she thought that love would never happen again, but maybe it had.

"Know what," he said, rising up, "I've really worked up an appet.i.te.

How about you? Think I'll make an omelet. Got any eggs left in the fridge?"

"Should be some," she said. "But I'll pa.s.s. Anything I eat after ten goes straight to places on my body that don't need further reinforcement."

It was so nice just to have someone to be near again. Her nervous system was still recovering from the harrowing experience down on the pier. In fact, she wasn't really sure

_what _actually had happened. The crashed McDonnell Douglas was retrieved from the water the next day, but there were no bodies aboard.

Had Winston Bartlett drowned and his body been swept out to sea by the tide? Also, there must have been a third person, a pilot. And what about Kenji Noda, who also was missing? Did he make it to sh.o.r.e? In any case, they all had disappeared. The case was closed. And since n.o.body had found a will, New York State was currently the executor of his fortune. Eileen Bartlett was sole heir. Her waiting game had paid off superbly. The price of her Gerex shares was doubling every two weeks.

She was about to become a very rich woman indeed.

But had Winston Bartlett really gone to a watery grave? Ally somehow doubted it. He had too much invested in life to cash in so easily.

As she watched Stone get up and swathe himself in a huge white towel before heading for the kitchen, she found herself replaying that harrowing scene at the pier. She kept trying to remember something Bartlett had said about forming some kind of society. Was she fantasizing or had he said he was going to do that and then offer the Beta procedure to its members? What was he going to call it? Try as she might, she couldn't remember. She had developed a mental block that her mind was using to s.h.i.+eld her psyche from the horror of that evening.

That night she'd first considered going to St. Vincent's Hospital emergency room for the gunshot wound but then she'd thought it over and decided there were too many things to explain that couldn't be explained Instead she just went home and washed the wound and filled it up with Neosporin. She didn't even tell Nina. The next morning, scar tissue was already forming. Now it was completely healed and even the scar had all but disappeared.

Had the Beta really worked? She wanted to tell Stone about that possibility, but she wasn't sure how he would take it. And she absolutely did not want to end up in the book.

She pulled on a terry cloth robe and slippers and padded her way into the kitchen. She wasn't hungry, but she felt like a gla.s.s of wine. She poked around in the wine rack in the kitchen closet and came up with a bottle of Bordeaux. Stone was cracking large white eggs into a stoneware bowl.