“Sure, I’ll watch your guys,” Pat says amiably. “I’ve got some great tricks to teach them.”

  “Not that disgusting sound you used to make with your arm?” Brynn laughs.

  “That, and I’ve accumulated some new ones through the years.” He makes a beeline for the backseat.

  Brynn follows Ashley up the steps and watches her fish a key out of her bag.

  Ashley opens the door and holds it for Brynn.

  “Ladies first.”

  “You’re a lady too,” Brynn protests, grinning.

  “I’m a kid. You’re the lady.”

  Brynn is smiling as she crosses the threshold.

  It will be her last smile for a long, long time.

  Later—much later, when the shock waves and horror have stopped screaming through her brain and coherent thought has resumed—she’ll be thankful that it was she, and not Ashley, who walked into the house first.

  She’ll be thankful that it was she, and not Fiona’s own child, who laid eyes on the hideous tableau that awaited in the dining room, immediately visible through the archway from the front entrance.

  She takes it all in somehow in a stark, appalling moment that seems to last an eternity.

  The room is decorated for a birthday party: pink streamers, balloons, a cake. It has white frosting and pale pink icing that reads Happy Birthday and, clumsily spelled out in darker icing: DEAR FIONA.

  Someone appears to be sitting at the table.

  It can’t be…

  No, dear God.

  It isn’t…

  But, God help her, God help all of them, it must be.

  The evidence is a telltale swath of auburn hair falling from beneath a pointy paper party hat that appears to defy gravity, tilted so that it seems as though it’s going to topple off.

  Fiona’s face is gone. Where her features should be, there is only a sickening mass of blood-blackened flesh.

  Don’t scream,Brynn warns herself frantically as the gruesome sight washes over her like an icy wave.You’ll scare Ashley. You’ll scare the boys.

  Don’t scream…

  But she can’t help it.

  Her mouth opens and a piercing screech escapes as she backs away in horror from her best friend’s butchered carcass.

  Years from now, the memory will—with luck—be as deliciously vivid as it is right now.

  Something like that can sustain a person for life, long after other things have fallen away. Things like youth, good health, money…

  None of those things last.

  No, all you really have, in the end, is your memory…if that.

  I’ll sure as hell fight to keep mine intact.

  What a shame it would be to forget the pleasure of gauging out Fiona Fitzgerald’s green eyes with that ridiculously expensive knife she purchased herself.

  Then again…What a shame she didn’t know that it was put to good use. What a shame she didn’t see me, didn’t hear me sing to her.

  Oh, well.

  The important thing is that the penultimate task has been accomplished.

  She’s gone. She can’t hurt me, or anyone else, ever again.

  Now only Brynn Saddler is left.

  But it won’t be long until she, too, gets what she deserves.

  Then it will finally be over, after ten years.

  And for me, a new chapter can begin at last.

  CHAPTER 20

  Quincy Hiles spends most Sunday mornings with his mother and his youngest sister, Wanda, and her family, all of whom still live together in his childhood home.

  Today has begun as all the other Sundays do: first, a rousing church service, to be followed by a home-cooked meal in the kitchen. Mama has prepared all his favorites: fried chicken, mashed potatoes with cream gravy, greens with bacon, rolls and butter.

  He’ll pay for it later, he’s sure. With his stomach acting up the way it’s been lately, Quincy shouldn’t be eating any of this stuff. But as he sits at the table, watching his mother open the oven to swap the batch of piping hot rolls with a freshly assembled apple pie, his mouth is watering.

  Devorah tilts the cookie sheet and the rolls tumble into a waiting basket lined with a blue and white gingham cloth napkin. She sets it in the center of the table, where loaded platters wait to fill the circle of empty plates around the table.

  “Michelle, you say grace today,” she instructs the younger of Quincy’s two nieces, who, at fifteen, is taller than he is, and wants to be a model.

  “Lord, we thank you for—”

  Michelle breaks off as Quincy’s cell phone rings.

  “Turn that thing off,” his mother instructs him. “Michelle, go ahead.”

  As his niece resumes, he pulls his phone from his pocket, silences the ringer, and holds it on his lap to examine the caller ID window.

  Mike Connelly.

  Good thing Michelle’s prayer is short and sweet, as always.

  “Amen,” Quincy says hurriedly and excuses himself to answer the call, striding with his phone to the next room as he says, “Hiles here, what’s up?”

  “Either Allerson gets around, or we’ve got ourselves a genuine serial killer on our hands.”

  “What?”

  “One of Matilda Harrington’s sorority sisters just turned up dead in Cedar Crest…exactly the same MO.”

  “How ‘exactly the same’?”

  “Exactlyexactly the same. Somebody threw Fiona Fitzgerald a nice little party for her thirtieth birthday—which is today.”

  With a muttered curse that would inflame Devorah Hiles if she could hear it from the next room, Quincy is already grabbing his keys and jacket, his mother’s fried chicken and apple pie forgotten.

  “Here, honey, drink this.”

  Ashley looks up to see a female police officer holding out a plastic cup of water. She shakes her head, feeling her father’s protective arm tighten around her.

  Daddy is sitting in the chair beside hers; they’re in a small room at police headquarters, where they were taken in a squad car.

  Brynn, Caleb, and Jeremy were driven in a second car. Garth came to get the boys so he could take them over to a neighbor’s house, and then he’s supposed to come here.

  “Drink the water, Ash,” Daddy says gently, taking the cup from the police officer and closing Ashley’s fingers around it.

  She takes a sip.

  It’s warm and it tastes yucky,she thinks idly.

  Then, just as idly,Mom’s dead.

  But neither thought sinks in. It’s as though her brain has been injected with Novocain. She’s aware of potentially excruciating thoughts jabbing at her, but she feels nothing, just like in the dentist’s chair when she had her tooth drilled.

  Ashley sips more water, and she nods when her father asks her worriedly if she’s okay, and she wonders when her mother is going to come get her, and then she remembers that she isn’t.

  Ever.

  You should be crying,Ashley keeps telling herself. Her eyes are strangely dry.

  But Brynn, who just disappeared behind a closed door with two detectives, has been crying—sometimes hysterically—ever since she let out that blood-curdling scream back at home.

  Then she immediately shoved Ashley outside again through the open front door before she could glimpse whatever was in the house.

  At that point, Brynn was so incoherent that Daddy didn’t even understand what she was trying to say. He kept shouting,“What? What is it?” as he ran past Brynn and Ashley, and then he screamed, too.

  That was the most horrible sound Ashley has ever heard in her life. A man’s scream. The unnatural, violent sound sent chills through her. “She’s dead!” Brynn was shrieking, over and over.

  She’s talking about Mom,Ashley realized. Mom must be dead.

  Inside the house.

  “Did she have a heart attack?” she had asked Daddy and Brynn at one point. She was thinking of Meg’s father, who works hard at a stressful job, but not as hard as Mom does.

  Nobody works as hard as Mom does.

  Worked,she thought dully. And,did .

  Neither her father nor Brynn answered her question about the heart attack, but Ashley overheard two of the cops talking. At first she thought they had said “prince,” but then she realized it was “prints.” As in fingerprints.

  Even Ashley knows that you don’t look for fingerprints when someone dies unless you think somebody killed them.

  Who would want to kill her mother?

  “Was it a robber?” she asks her father now, then notices that her thigh is wet, a dark stain spreading across her jeans. Oh. Her hand is shaking so badly that she’s spilling water all over herself.

  “What, Ash?”

  “Did a robber break in and kill Mom?”

  Daddy blinks. “What?”

  She repeats the question.

  It takes him a second to answer, “I don’t know.”

  He’s upset about Mom. Maybe he’s thinking that they never should have gotten divorced. Maybe he thinks that if they were still married, this wouldn’t have happened, because he could have protected her.

  “What is Brynn telling the police in there?” She gestures at the closed door.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do they think she knows who killed Mom?”

  Daddy just shakes his head without looking at her, and his mouth is a straight, tight line.

  I walked into the house. I turned my head…

  And I saw her.

  “Let’s go over this again, Mrs. Saddler.”

  Dazed, seated in the interrogation room, Brynn nods. She watches through tear-blurred eyes as one of the two Cedar Crest detectives glances over the pages of notes he just took.

  I saw her; I saw Fee…Oh, Fee…

  Oh, my God…

  “You say your friend told you she was going away for a few days,” says the more vocal detective, a balding, middle-aged man, “but that she never said where, or why…”

  Yes, she did say why, but I didn’t tell you.

  I have to tell you. You need to know the whole truth.

  Coherent thoughts are breaking through the haze of grief and shock more frequently now, trailing a fresh stream of guilt.

  Yes, they need to know. But not yet. Not without Garth. She has to tell her husband first, so that he can hear it from her privately.

  The brief contact with him, when he showed up here, was so comforting. She doesn’t even know who called him; she was too hysterical to do it herself.

  But suddenly, he was there, holding her tight, telling her he loved her, saying he’d get the boys.

  The boys. Poor boys.

  Why did I have to insist on bringing them over there with me?

  Because Fee had asked her to, so that Ashley would jump at the chance to go home with her.

  If only she hadn’t listened to Fee.

  If only she’d left them at home with Garth, as he had wanted her to do…

  The boys started crying when they heard her panicked screams, and she was in no condition to comfort them. She vaguely remembers one of the cops in the back of the car with them, talking to them until Garth arrived.

  He promised he’d drop Caleb and Jeremy at Maggie’s and come right down here.

  So where is he?

  Maybe he’s already back, waiting out there with Pat and Ashley, unaware that Brynn needs him desperately. Now. Right this second.

  “Do you know if—” She breaks off, realizing she just spoke right over the detective, still recapping his notes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “No, it’s all right. What did you want to know?”

  “Is my husband here?”

  The balding, middle-aged detective looks at the other balding, middle-aged detective, who promptly says, “I’ll go check,” and steps out of the room.

  The first detective resumes. “Ms. Fitzgerald asked you to pick up her daughter today when her ex-husband returned her after a weekend visit, but she didn’t tell him in advance that she was leaving town.”

  Brynn shakes her head, fishing in her pocket for another tissue. The clump in her hand is sodden.

  Oh, Fiona…

  An audible sob escapes her.

  The detective waits for it to subside, then goes on. “So you believe she didn’t tell him because they didn’t get along and she thought he would be upset with her.”

  She sniffles. “I didn’t say that exactly…but, yes. I guess that’s why.”

  As the detective continues recapping their conversation, Brynn wipes her streaming eyes and manages to comment appropriately, only half-listening.

  Her thoughts are on Fiona.

  On what happened to her.

  Brynn can’t stop reliving it.

  I walked into the house. I turned my head…

  And I saw her.

  And I screamed.

  As she screamed, she turned to flee, and there was Ashley.

  Brynn shoved her, hard, instinctively trying to protect her.

  Oh, God. Poor Ashley.

  Poor Fee…

  “So you were at the victim’s home to pick up her child…”

  “Yes.”

  I walked into the house. I turned my head…

  And I saw her.

  What was Fiona doing there, at home? She wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Did she lie to Brynn about going away? But why would she?

  Did she stay at home and throw herself a birthday party that was interrupted by the killer?

  How else to explain the cake, the hat, the wrapped gift in her hands, as though someone had just handed it to her in the instant before she was murdered.

  Unless the killer put it there…afterward.

  And maybe—she grips the arms of the chair to stay steady as a tide of terror washes over her—the killer also set up the “party.”

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Saddler?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m just…I feel a little bit…”

  “Faint?” The detective is standing over her chair, concerned. Kind.