“That’s it! Show ’em, girlfriend!”
Lucy laughed. She danced faster and sang louder. Her chestnut hair flew.
“You’re crazy!” Lucy shouted at Brynn, but crazy was what she needed right now. Brynn was weird, wonderful, and keen, just like Bennie.
When the song finally ended, Lucy flopped her head onto the seat rest. She stared at the hypnotic lights over their heads as another, quieter song began on the radio, something by Carole King. She listened to the wind and felt the sway. For the first time, being trapped up here felt beautiful and not scary at all.
“Thanks,” she said. “That helped.”
When her friend didn’t answer, Lucy looked over at her. “Brynn?”
Brynn had both hands clamped like a vise around the wheel. Her knuckles were white. Beads of sweat formed like raindrops on her forehead, below the silk of her blond hair. Her mouth hung slack and open. Her blue eyes were huge. Something was wrong.
“Brynn, if this is a joke, it’s not funny,” Lucy said. “Cut it out.”
A scream bubbled up from Brynn’s chest between desperate breaths. She peeled her fingers off the wheel. Her hands shook like palm leaves. She clawed with long nails at her forearms, making scarlet streaks, and then she ripped at the skin of her face, scratching until blood smeared across her mouth and spattered her golden hair.
“Brynn!” Lucy cried.
The people in the other cars noticed what was happening. Some called out. Lucy heard car doors opening.
Brynn lurched up in the front seat of the convertible. Wind swirled her hair and tore at her purple dress. She scrambled over the windshield and rolled clumsily down the hood of the Camaro to the bridge deck. Other drivers were out of their cars now. Brynn kept screaming. She covered her face as if birds were picking at her eyes.
“Brynn, what is it?” Lucy shouted at her. “What’s wrong? Brynn, it’s me, it’s okay.”
Lucy unbuckled her seat belt. She pushed open the door, but when she tried to climb outside, she saw the blackness of the water beyond the railing. Her legs became lead. Spasms rippled through her, knocking her knees together. All she could think about was the height. The wind. The water. The fall. She couldn’t go out there.
Brynn bolted in her lavender high heels to the railing. No words dribbled from her mouth, only screams. She climbed the concrete barrier and clung with both arms to one of the ascending cables high above the bay. Her skimpy dress hugged her body. The wind threw her back and forth like a toy.
“Brynn! No!”
Lucy slid from the car, but she crumpled to the bridge deck. She couldn’t stand up. The sensation of being outside, on the bridge, vulnerable, overwhelmed her. The world spun. The concrete was ice-cold. She crawled, twitching, and stretched out a hand to Brynn, who wasn’t even ten feet away.
“Come here! Come down!”
Brynn climbed away from her in a weird, unsteady crawl, like a crab scuttling through the sand. She wrapped her legs around the cable, and her blood-slippery fingers clung to the steel. She pulled herself two feet above the railing. And then three feet. Four feet.
Lucy curled into a ball, staring at her. “Brynn, what are you doing?”
Brynn took a hand from the cable and slapped at the wind as if mayflies had swarmed around her face. One high heel came off her bare foot and spun away like a maple seed pod. Her foot scraped for traction. The rough wire bit her knees. Her fingers pawed, pulling herself higher inch by inch. She looked down and wailed, because whatever she saw was following her. Climbing after her. She kicked at an invisible enemy, and her leg dangled and twirled.
“Brynn!”
A man on the bridge deck thrust up his arms toward her, but she was too high for him to reach. He beckoned her. Smiled at her. “Hey, it’s okay, honey. Just slide down. I’ve got you.”
Brynn didn’t see him or hear him.
She didn’t see or hear Lucy shouting her name.
Brynn shut her eyes. Her bloody hand slipped from the wire. So did her legs. With nothing to hold her, she was free, flailing and falling. The roar of the air swallowed her screams. Lucy buried her face in her palms as Brynn dropped past her and disappeared to the bay far below.
2
Frost Easton of the San Francisco Police leaned between the cables of the Bay Bridge and stared down. In the water, Coast Guard searchlights crisscrossed the waves. They’d been there for an hour, but the body of Brynn Lansing remained hidden among the frothy whitecaps. Eventually, he knew, she would make landfall. Jumpers from the Golden Gate sometimes washed into the Pacific and were never found, but the more inland Bay Bridge usually returned its victims.
He knew hydrologists at the state college who analyzed the bay currents and made wagers on when and where the bodies would turn up. It was never smart to bet against them.
Frost got up on the tips of his shoes. The wind buffeted his body, making him unsteady. His short, slicked-back hair, which was a messy mix of gold and dark brown, loosened into tufts on his high forehead. He frowned as he thought about the young woman, falling, and the black water sucking her in. Five seconds was all it took to end a life.
“Could you not do that?”
He looked down at the voice below him. His lean, tall body was still halfway over the bay. The witness to the incident sat in Brynn Lansing’s Camaro convertible. She stared straight ahead, her body rigid with fear.
“What?” Frost asked.
“Could you please not do that? Lean over the edge like that? It makes me want to throw up.”
Frost climbed down to the bridge deck. He strolled to the passenger door of the Camaro ten feet away. His dark blazer flapped like a cape in the wind, and his tie blew over his shoulder. He knelt beside the door and balanced his bearded chin on his hands. The girl had a sweet face behind her tears and terror.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this must be terrible for you.”
“I thought she was teasing me.”
“What do you mean?” Frost asked.
“Brynn. I thought she was just making fun of me because I was so afraid to be stuck up here. I was freaking out.”
Frost nodded. “What is it that scares you? The height?”
“It’s the bridge, actually.”
“I’ve heard of that. Gephyrophobia, isn’t that what they call it? Fear of bridges?”
“Yes. You’re right.” She looked surprised that he knew what it was called.
“I guess everybody has something like that,” Frost told her. “With me, it’s frogs. Those slimy little things just scare the crap out of me.”
He smiled at her. He had a warm, slightly off-balance smile, and his blue eyes were lasers that never left her face. His thick blond-flecked eyebrows matched his trimmed beard. He stared at the girl until her head inched to the right, and she stared back with an empty expression. She was traumatized, like a robot with the power switched off.
“It’s Lucy, right?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Lucy what?”
“Lucy Hagen.”
“Okay, Lucy, I’m Frost. I’m with the police. And I’m going to get you off this bridge just as soon as I possibly can, but I have to ask you some questions about what happened.”
“Okay.”
Frost pointed at a black SFPD Chevy Suburban parked on an angle between a police squad car and an ambulance. “Would you mind if we talked in my car? I’ve got forensics people who need to get evidence in the Camaro, and we can’t really do that with you in it, see what I mean?”