Mia was on her knees on the path up ahead, staring into the void, her hands resting against her thighs. The rise and fall of her shoulders was erratic, but it was slowing even as Izzy came to a stop next to her.

Izzy bent over at the waist, embarrassed by her noisy gulps of air. “What the hell?”

She asked it quietly, despite the fact that Mia’s calm posture spoke of a threat unrealized.

“I thought I saw . . .” The words were dragged over gravel. “I’m sorry, that was stupid.”

Straightening, Izzy pressed the heel of her palm against the stitch that tugged at her side, a direct result of her erratic breathing. “Yeah, you think?”

She waited for more, but Mia was silent.

“Who?” Izzy finally prodded.

Mia glanced back at her, her chin touching her shoulder, her hair brushing against her cheeks. “It was no one. Just a shadow.”

Izzy met her eyes. “Who?”

It was Mia who looked away first, back toward the empty path ahead of her. The whisper, when it came, chilled Izzy beyond the snow, the ice, the wind.

“Asher.”

“It was the way he moved,” Mia said, the first words she’d spoken to Izzy since she’d pushed to her feet in the woods. They’d stopped by the doc’s place to get the address for the fishermen and then walked the empty streets toward the small shared house the men lived in.

In all that time Mia hadn’t met her eyes once.

“It was someone, then?” Izzy asked, because she was still off-balance, not even sure what had happened back there. Asher. Mia had whispered the name like a confession, a penance for the way she’d run off. She’d thought she’d seen her dead friend in the woods, or, at the very least, something that looked like him. Was it her imagination? It had to be. It had to be.

“No, I’m sure it was nothing. A shadow.” But Mia said it like she was convincing herself. “Just dredging up those memories . . .”

Why was Mia seeing her dead friends in the shadows, though? Christ. Too close, too close, too close. The mantra repeated. Mia shouldn’t be back on St. Lucy’s. She shouldn’t have taken this case.

If Izzy wanted answers, she knew better than to attack from the front, though. This required a more subtle approach. It was how they usually handled their suspects, their witnesses. “What was he like? Asher?”

Mia stuttered a bit, her boot catching in a footprint that had half filled up with more snow. Izzy was almost thankful for the sign of life, the proof that someone else had walked there, that they weren’t alone. There was a quiet that had settled into the island along with the storm, and it had Izzy swiveling to check her peripherals every few steps.