she was a child, she’d been afraid her father would lock her in. Probably because he’d threatened to do so once, when she was only four years old and he’d caught her digging through the Christmas presents her mother had hidden there.
It wasn’t the fear of spiders or rats, or even the fear of being locked in, that bothered her at age twenty-eight, however. Ever since the police and the media had started following her father around, suspecting him of being involved in the terrible murders near the university only a few blocks away, she’d been terrified of what she might find if she ever really looked….
“Madison?” Her mother’s voice filtered down to her again.
“Give me a minute,” she called in annoyance as she opened the small door. “It’s a twenty-dollar punch bowl,” she grumbled to herself. “Why can’t she just let me buy her a new one?”
The smell of moist earth and rotting wood greeted her as she flipped on the dangling bulb overhead and peered inside. Years ago, her father had covered the bare, uneven ground with black plastic and made a path of wooden boards that snaked through the clutter. These makeshift improvements reminded her that this was his domain, one of the places he’d never liked her to go.
It didn’t make the thought of snooping around any more appealing. Her half brothers, Johnny and Tye, her father’s children by his first wife, stored things here occasionally, but she did her best to forget the dark yawning space even existed. She certainly didn’t want to spend any portion of what had started out as a relaxing Sunday afternoon scrounging around this creepy place.
She considered telling her mother the punch bowl wasn’t there. But ever since her father’s suicide, her mother seemed to fixate on the smallest details. If Madison couldn’t find it, she’d probably insist on looking herself, and Annette was getting too old to be crawling around on her hands and knees. Besides, Madison and her mother had stood by Ellis Purcell throughout the investigation that had ended with his death. Certainly Madison could have a little faith in him now. The police had searched the house about four years after the killings began and never found anything.
She wasn’t going to find anything, either. Because her father was innocent. Of course.
Taking a deep, calming breath, she resisted the fresh wave of anxiety that seemed to press her back toward the entrance, and crawled inside. The punch bowl couldn’t be far. It would only take a second to find it.
A row of boxes lined the wall closest to her. Some were labeled, others weren’t. Madison quickly opened the ones that weren’t labeled to discover some things her father had owned as a young man—old photo albums, school and college yearbooks, military stuff from his stint in Vietnam.
The photos and letters seemed so normal and far removed from the articles she’d read about Ellis in the newspapers that she finally began to relax. A lot of cobwebs hung overhead, almost iridescent in the ethereal glow of the dim lightbulb, but if there were spiders, they were off in the corners. Nothing jumped out to grab her. She saw no indication that anyone had been underneath the house since Johnny had come by to get his summer clothes out of storage two years ago.
Her father might have ended his life with one heck of a finale, but his death and the investigation, if not the suspicion, were behind them now. She could quit being afraid. She could move on and forget….
Shoving the memorabilia off to one side, she rummaged around some more and eventually came up with the punch bowl. She was about to drag it to the entrance when she remembered the box of Barbie dolls she’d packed up when she was twelve. They were probably down here, too, she realized. If she could find them, she could give them to her own daughter, Brianna, who’d just turned six.
Following the curve in the wooden path, Madison came across some leftover tiles from when they’d redone the bathroom, a dusty briefcase, an old ice-cream maker, and some of her baby things. Near the edge of the plastic, where bare dirt stretched into complete darkness, she found a few boxes that had belonged to her half brothers, along with the denim bedding her mother had bought when Johnny and Tye came to live with them.
As she pushed past Johnny’s old stereo, she promised herself she’d write him again this week, even though he never answered her letters. He’d been in and out of prison for years, always on drug charges. But he had to be lonely. Tye stayed in touch with him, but her mother pretended he didn’t exist. And he hated his own alcoholic mother who, last Madison had heard, was living somewhere in Pennsylvania in a halfway house.
She squinted in the dim light to make out the writing on several boxes: “Mother Rayma’s tablecloths…” “Mother Rayma’s dishes…” “Aunt Zelma’s paintings.”
No Barbies. Disappointed, Madison rocked back into a sitting position to save her knees from the hard planking, and hugged her legs to her chest, trying to figure out where that box might have gone. Brianna had had a difficult year, what with the divorce, their move to Whidbey Island thirty-five miles northwest of Seattle, her father’s remarriage, and the expectation of a half sibling in the near future. Madison would love to have fifteen or more vintage Barbie dolls waiting in her back seat when she collected her daughter from her ex-husband’s later today. Danny certainly lavished Brianna with enough toys.
Maybe she needed to dig deeper. Pushing several boxes out of the way, she slid the old mirror from the spare bedroom to the left, and the avocado bathroom accessories that had once decorated the upstairs bathroom to the right, to reach the stuff piled behind. She was pretty far from the light at the entrance, which made it difficult to see, but she was eventually rewarded for her efforts when she recognized her own childish writing on a large box tucked into the corner.
“There it is!” she murmured, wriggling the box out from behind an old Crock-Pot and some extra fabric that looked as if it was from the sixties and better off forgotten. “You’re gonna love me for this, Brianna.”
“Madison, what could possibly be taking so long?”
Madison jumped at the unexpected sound, knocking her head on a beam. “Ow.”
“Are you okay?” her mother asked. Annette stood at the mouth of the crawl space, but Madison couldn’t see her for all the junk between them.
“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
S TUNNED , M ADISON 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
