Cold feet

"I'm fine." She batted away a few cobwebs to rub the sore spot on her forehead. "You can tell Mrs. Howell I found the punch bowl you said she could borrow."

"I use that punch bowl every Christmas. What's it doing all the way back there?"

"It wasn't back here. I've been looking for my old Barbies."

"Don't waste another minute on that," her mother said. "We gave them to Goodwill a long time ago."

"No, we didn't. They're right here."

"They are?"

"Sure." Madison pulled open the top flap of the box to prove it, and felt her heart suddenly slam against her chest. Her mother was right. There weren't any Barbies inside. Just a bunch of women's shoes and underwear, in various sizes. And a short coil of rope.

CHAPTER TWO

STUNNED, MADISON BLINKED at the jumble in the box as the pictures the police had shown her years earlier flashed through her mind--grotesque, heart-rending photos of women after the Sandpoint Strangler had finished with them. It made her dizzy and nauseous to even think about those poor women; it made her feel worse to believe her father might have--

No! Surely there was some mistake. The police had searched the crawl space. They would've found this stuff.

Steeling herself against overwhelming revulsion, Madison used a towel rod to poke through the box in hopes of finding some evidence that would refute the obvious.

In the bottom corner, she saw something that glittered, and forced herself to reach gingerly inside. It was a metal chain. When she pulled it out into the murky light, she could see it was a necklace with a gold locket on the end. But she was too terrified to open it. Her heart hammered against her ribs and her hands shook as she stared at it until, finally, she gathered the nerve to unhook the tiny clasp.

Inside, she saw an oval picture of Lisa and Joe McDonna. Lisa was victim number two. Madison knew because she'd memorized them all--by face and by name.

Closing her eyes, she put a hand to her stomach, attempting to override her body's reaction. But she retched anyway, several dry heaves that hurt her throat and her stomach. She'd hung on to her belief in Ellis's innocence for so long. She'd stood against the police, the media and popular opinion. She'd stayed in the same high school even after the kids had started taunting her and doing vengeful things, like throwing eggs and oranges at the house or writing "murderer" in the lawn with bleach. She'd held her head high and attended the University of Washington, just as she'd always planned. Through it all, she'd refused to consider the possibility of her father's culpability in the murders, even when the police produced an eyewitness who said she saw Ellis driving away from a neighbor's house the night that neighbor was murdered. The witness was old and could have been mistaken. There were a lot of blue Fords with white camper shells in Seattle. All the evidence was circumstantial.

But if he was innocent, how could such a personal item belonging to one of the victims have found its way inside the house?

"Ellis saved those Barbies, after all?" Annette said, her words suddenly sounding as though they had an echo. "I could've sworn we took them to Goodwill."

Madison couldn't breathe well enough to speak. After those hellish years in high school, she'd expected the scandal to die down, especially when the police couldn't find any DNA evidence. But the suspicion and hatred had gone on long after that, until it had destroyed her marriage. Her husband wanted to be seen as upwardly mobile and a man who had it all. Not the man who'd married the daughter of the Sandpoint Strangler.

"Madison?" her mother said, when she didn't respond.

She took a few bolstering breaths and managed an answer. "What?"

"Are you going to bring those Barbie dolls out or not? I'm sure Brianna will be thrilled to have them."

Madison wasn't about to let her mother see what the box really contained. Annette had been through enough already.

Wiping away the sweat beading on her upper lip, Madison struggled to distance herself from the whole tragic mess. She hadn't hurt those women. If her father had, she'd been as much a victim as anyone.

"It--it looks like there've been some rats in the box," she said. "I d-don't think we can give them to Brianna."

"That's too bad. Well, drag them out here anyway, and I'll get rid of them once and for all."

Madison breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, struggling to remain calm and rational. "If it's okay with you, I'll just leave them here. They...there's a sticky web all over and I'm afraid there might be a black widow someplace."

"Oh boy, we wouldn't want to drag that out. You're right, just leave them. I'll hire someone to come down here and clean this out when I move."

When she moved...Ever since her father had shot himself in the backyard, Madison had been trying to talk her mother into relocating. Madison had a difficult time even coming to the house, what with all the bad memories; she couldn't imagine how Annette still lived here.

But now she wasn't so sure she wanted her mother to go anywhere. If Annette sold the house, Madison would either have to come forward with what she'd found, which was unimaginable, or she'd have to destroy it--something she wasn't sure her conscience would allow.

God, she'd thought the nightmare was over. Now she knew it would never be....

HOLLY MET CALEB at the airport on Monday morning. With her long, curly blond hair, he noticed her in the crowd almost as soon as he entered the arrivals lounge, and steeled himself for the moment she'd come rushing to meet him. Two years his senior, she was taller than most women, thin, and had a heart-shaped, angelic face. She looked good. She always looked good. But looks didn't matter with a woman whose emotions swung as widely as Holly's did.

He saw her pushing through the crowd as she made her way toward him. And then she was there, smiling in obvious relief. "Caleb, I'm so glad you came." She reached up to hug him, and he allowed it but quickly moved on, following the flow of the other passengers toward the baggage claim.

"You haven't heard from Susan?" he asked, glad to finally stretch his legs. First class had been full. He was too big for the narrow, cramped space allotted him in economy, but without advance booking he'd had to take what he could get.

"Not a word. I check my answering machine every hour, just in case. But..." She blinked rapidly, and he hoped she wasn't going to cry again. He hadn't come to be her emotional support. He just wanted to find Susan and get back to San Francisco.

"Have the Seattle police assigned any detectives to the case?"

"Two. Lynch and Jones. Do you know them?"