Cold Feet. Brenda Novak

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….

       H OLLY MET C ALEB 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?”

      “I know Lynch better than Jones.”

      “They’re driving me nuts,” she said. “They keep talking about searching for fiber evidence and what not, but it doesn’t seem like they’re doing much of anything.”

      “This isn’t television, Holly. Fiber evidence takes a long time. You have to track down all the people who visited Susan’s apartment, and collect samples before you can send them to the lab for comparison. And you generally don’t have a lab tech sitting there, twiddling his thumbs while waiting to help you. You have to take your place in line.”

      He dodged a woman who’d stopped right in front of him to dig through a bag. “Have you talked to your parents again?” he asked. Caleb knew relations between Holly and her adoptive parents were strained. They had been for most of her life. She hated her birth mother for giving her up, even though her birth mother had been barely sixteen. She hated her adoptive mother for not being her birth mother. And she was frequently jealous of Susan, who’d been born with the assistance of fertility drugs when Holly was seven.

      “I called them last night to tell them you were coming,” she said.

      “What did they have to say about Susan’s disappearance?”

      “At first they said the same thing you did—she’s done this before, she’ll turn up. Now that it’s been almost a week, they’re worried. They’re willing to hire a private investigator, if you think that’s the best way to go. They wanted me to talk to you about it.”

      “I think we should do whatever we can as soon as possible.”

      “Okay.” She scratched her arm through her sweater, looking uncertain. “You know how we were talking about the Sandpoint Strangler?”

      “Yes?”

      “There was something on the news earlier….”

      They’d reached the luggage carousel. He slipped through the crowd to grab the small bag he’d packed in San Francisco. Besides a few clothes, he’d brought only his cell phone, his day planner and his laptop, so he could work if he got the chance. “What?” he asked, when he had his bag slung over his shoulder.

      “Someone desecrated the grave of Ellis Purcell.”

      Caleb stiffened in surprise. “How? From what I remember, his widow and daughter went to great pains to keep its location a secret.”

      “I don’t know. I just caught a clip while I was eating breakfast.”

      Caleb rubbed the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t showered or shaved this morning. He’d had such an early flight, he’d simply rolled out of bed, pulled on a Fox Racing T-shirt, a pair of faded jeans and a Giants ball cap and headed south to the airport.

      “It’s probably just a coincidence,” he said. But he had to admit it was strange that a woman would go missing from the Sandpoint Strangler’s old hunting grounds a year after Ellis Purcell was dead. That she’d be related to Holly. And that Purcell’s grave would be desecrated in the same week.

       A LTHOUGH M ONDAY AFTERNOON was warm, with a rare amount of sun for Seattle in September, the mortuary was cool. Too cool. It smelled of carnations, furniture polish and formaldehyde, which dredged up memories of every funeral Madison had ever attended—Aunt Zelma’s, Grandma Rayma’s, the skeletal-looking man who’d lived next door when she was five. She couldn’t think of the old guy’s name, but she remembered staring at his waxy face as he lay in his coffin.

      Fortunately, she didn’t have to deal with any memories of her father’s funeral. They hadn’t given him one. She, her mother, Tye and Johnny had simply sent out notices of his death to the few friends and family who’d remained supportive, and buried him without any type of viewing or wake. Because of the ongoing investigation, and the damage he’d done with his old rifle, it seemed prudent to handle things as quickly and quietly as possible.

      Lawrence Howell, the manager of Sunset Lawn Funeral Home and Memorial Park, had helped make the arrangements. He sat across from Madison and her mother now, his short blond hair neatly combed, his face wearing the same somber expression he always wore.

      Fortunately, Madison had been able to reach Joanna Stapley, a senior at South Whidbey High School who often baby-sat for her, in time to have her pick up Brianna from school, so she didn’t have to cope with a wriggling six-year-old during such a difficult meeting.

      “How could this have happened?” she asked when Mr. Howell had finished explaining what he’d told her on the phone when he’d reached her at her office earlier—that someone had dug up her father’s coffin last night. “How could anyone have figured out where he was buried?”

      Howell rested his elbows on his mahogany desk and clasped long white fingers in front of him. “As I told the gentleman who called me this morning—”